Sometimes we pray without considering the implications or ramifications. When I pray that God will bless National Community Church, I am praying that God will make my life more complicated and less comfortable. It was much more comfortable when the church had twenty-five people. It was much less complicated when we had one service at one location. As God has blessed National Community Church, I’ve had to count the cost. On a very practical level, the answer to my prayers meant giving up more of my weekend to God. When we launched a Saturday night and Sunday night service, the cost was two more time slots every weekend that I gave back to God. Here’s the bottom line: Praying hard is asking God to make your life harder. The harder you pray, the harder you will have to work. And that is a blessing from God.
Praying hard is hard because you can’t just pray like it depends on God; you also have to work like it depends on you. You can’t just be willing to pray about it; you also have to be willing to do something about it. And this is where many of us get stuck spiritually. We’re willing to pray right up to the point of discomfort, but no further. We’re willing to pray right up to the point of inconvenience, but no further. Praying hard is uncomfortable and inconvenient, but that is when you know you’re getting close to a miracle!
The reason God doesn’t answer our prayers isn’t that we aren’t praying hard enough; the reason, more often than not, is that we aren’t willing to work hard enough. Praying hard is synonymous with working hard. Think of praying hard and working hard as concentric circles. It’s the way we double-circle our dreams and His promises. There comes a moment, after you have prayed through, when you have to start doing something about it. You have to take a step of faith, and that first step is always the hardest.
Woolly Socks
I recently spoke at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, for my friend Chris Hodges. I toured their Dream Center in downtown Birmingham because we want to do something similar in Washington, DC. They have an amazing outreach to pimps and prostitutes. They mentor kids. They feed the hungry. You name the need, and they are trying to meet it.
One of the women working there is a former journalist named Lisa. She had a good job with a good salary, but she quit because she knew God wanted her to work at the Dream Center. Lisa is one of those people who exude joy, life, energy.
During our tour, Lisa talked about their daily dependence on God to meet the overwhelming needs in their community. It takes hard work and hard prayer. Then she told me about one of the miracles she had experienced. One day, as she was circling the Dream Center in prayer, she felt the Holy Spirit prompting her to take her woolly socks with her to work. She thought she was losing her mind. It was one of the strangest promptings she’d ever had, but she couldn’t shake the impression. So she grabbed her woolly socks, put them in her purse, and headed downtown. When she got there, a prostitute was literally passed out on the doorstep. Lisa opened the door, carried her inside, and cradled her in her arms until she regained consciousness a few minutes later. She was so cold that she was shaking. That’s when Lisa asked her, “If you could have anything, what would it be?” Without hesitation, she said, “Woolly socks.” Lisa about lost it. As she told me the story, she started tearing up. Then I started tearing up. Lisa then told her, “Look what I have.” She pulled out the woolly socks, and the woman said, “They even match my outfit.”
God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him; God is great because nothing is too small for Him. A sparrow doesn’t fall without His noticing and caring, so it shouldn’t surprise us that He cares about a woman who wants woolly socks. God loves showing His all-encompassing compassion in little ways, and if we would learn to obey His promptings, as Lisa did, we would find ourselves in the middle of miracles a lot more often.
The reason many of us miss the miracles is that we aren’t looking and listening. The easy part of prayer is talking. It’s much harder listening to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s much harder looking for the answers. But two-thirds of praying hard is listening and looking.
Look toward the Sea
Do you remember what Elijah did while he prayed for rain? He sent his servant to look toward the sea. Why? Because he expected an answer. He didn’t just pray; he acted on his sanctified expectations by looking toward the sea.
Elijah is set up in the New Testament (James 5:17) as the standard of praying hard. It was his prayer for no rain that crippled Israel’s agricultural economy and brought the nation to its knees. And it was his Honi-like prayer for rain that ended a three-and-a-half-year drought.
Elijah was as human as we are, and yet when he prayed earnestly that no rain would fall, none fell for three and a half years! Then, when he prayed again, the sky sent down rain and the earth began to yield its crops.
Praying earnestly literally means “praying with a prayer.” It’s more than words. It means acting on your prayers because you expect an answer. Elijah didn’t just pray against the prophets of Baal; he challenged them to a sacrifice showdown. He didn’t tell the widow of Zarephath to pray; he told her to bake a loaf of bread with her last batch of dough. And in a remake miracle, Elijah didn’t pray for God to part the Jordan River; he struck it with his rolled-up cloak.
Each miracle was precipitated by a concrete step of faith: setting up a sacrifice on Mount Carmel, baking a loaf of bread, and striking the Jordan River. And God honored those steps of faith by sending fire to consume Elijah’s sacrifice, multiplying that last loaf of bread so it lasted until the drought ended, and parting the Jordan River so that Elijah and Elisha walked through on dry ground.
One reason many of us never get an answer to our prayers is that all we do is pray. You can’t just pray like Elijah; you have to act like Elijah. You can’t just get on your knees; you also have to look toward the sea.
I learned this lesson during our first year of church planting. We desperately needed a drummer because I was leading worship and I have no rhythm. We must have asked God for a drummer two hundred times. We just kept repeating the same request over and over again like a two-year-old toddler: Give us a drummer, give us a drummer, give us a drummer. Then one day, it was like God finally got tired of the broken record and said, If you want a drummer, why don’t you go get a drum set? We had never thought about actually taking a step of faith as if God was going to answer our prayer. Why? Because we want the answer before we exercise our faith! But if you want God to move, sometimes you have to make a move.
Those were the pre-Google days, so I searched the classifieds and found a used drum set for sale in Silver Spring, Maryland. By faith, I decided to buy it, but it took all the faith I had because it took all the money we had. Our monthly income was $2,000, and $1,600 was taken off the top to rent the DC Public School where we held services. That left $400 for our salary and all other expenses. The cost of the drum set? $400. God has a way of pushing us to our absolute limits, doesn’t He?
There was part of me that felt foolish. Why am I spending all of our cash on a drum set for a drummer who doesn’t even exist? But it was our “field of dreams” moment: “If you buy it, they will come.” I knew God was prompting me to take a step of faith, and I believed He would honor it. I bought that drum set on a Thursday, and our first drummer showed up that Sunday. And God sent us the best. When he wasn’t playing for us on Sundays, he was playing for political and military dignitaries as a member of the United States Marine Drum and Bugle Corps.
Wet Feet
When the Israelites were on the verge of entering the Promised Land, God commanded the priests to not just look toward the sea but to step into the river. It’s one of the most counterintuitive commands in Scripture.
“When you reach the banks of the Jordan River, take a few steps into the river.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly like getting my feet wet. I’d much rather have God part the river, and then I’ll step into the miracle. We want God to go first. That way we don’t get our feet wet. But it’s often
our unwillingness to take a step of faith and get our feet wet that keeps us from experiencing a miracle. Some people spend their entire lives on the eastern shore of the Jordan waiting for God to part the river while God waits for them to get their feet wet.
After you have prayed hard, you need to swallow hard and take a flying leap of faith. That’s how you circle the miracle.
A few years before we purchased the old crack house on Capitol Hill, Lora and I went to a live auction at our children’s school. One of the items up for auction was a three-inch-thick binder donated by the Capitol Hill Restoration Society. It contained all of the zoning codes and guidelines for new construction on Capitol Hill. I knew we’d need to know those zoning codes if we were going to build our coffeehouse on Capitol Hill, but we didn’t own the property yet. Shouldn’t I wait until we get a contract? But I felt the Holy Spirit’s elbow give me a little nudge, and I took an $85 step of faith. It was my way of getting my feet wet and stepping into the Jordan. After all, if you aren’t willing to risk $85 on your dream, then you’re probably not ready for a $2 million miracle. Not only did that binder help us during the zoning and design phases of our project; it still sits in a special place in my office as a reminder to step into the river, to step into the miracle.
At flood tide, the Jordan River was about a mile wide. That was all that separated the Israelites from their four-hundred-year-old promise. Their dream was a stone’s throw away. But what if the priests hadn’t stepped into the river? What if they had waited for God to part the Jordan River? They may well have spent the rest of their lives on the eastern banks of the Jordan River. And that’s where many of us spend our lives. We’re so close to the dream, so close to the promise, so close to the miracle. But we aren’t willing to get our feet wet.
Many people never see God part the Jordan River in their lives because their feet are firmly planted on dry ground. We’re waiting for God to make a move while God is waiting for us to make a move. We say to God, “Why don’t you part this river?” And God says to us, “Why don’t you get your feet wet?” But if you make a move, you’ll see God move. And He can move heaven and earth.
Prayer Promptings
Peter is the patron saint of wet feet. He may have failed the persistence test by falling asleep in Gethsemane, but he passed the wet-feet test by getting out of a boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee when Jesus uttered one of the craziest commands in Scripture: “Come.” Peter risked far more than wet feet. The Sea of Galilee was a 91-square-mile dunk tank, and he was in the middle of it in the middle of the night.
The key to getting out of the boat is hearing the voice of God. If you’re going to get out of the boat in the middle of a lake in the middle of the night, you better make sure that Jesus said, “Come.” But if Jesus says, “Come,” you better not stay in the boat.
Have you ever had a moment, as Lisa did, when the Holy Spirit prompted you during prayer to do something that seemed borderline crazy? Have you ever had a moment, as Peter did, when God called you to do something that seemed unsafe? Your response to those promptings will make you or break you. It may seem unsafe or insane, but if you stay in the boat, you’ll never walk on water.
A few years ago, a friend of mine shared one of his prayer promptings with me because it involved me. I was on a speaking trip, away from my family, when God woke Rick up in the middle of the night. He felt the Lord prompting him to pray for my family, and the prompting was so intense that he woke up his roommates. For the record, you better make sure the prompting is from God if you’re going to wake up your roommates! After praying, he felt like they needed to drive over to our house. So at four in the morning they drove across the Hill and parked in front of our home and prayed for my family. He said to me afterward, “This has never happened to me before. I don’t know why God got me up at four in the morning, but we knew we needed to pray for you.”
I honestly have no idea why God prompted him to pray that way, but some of God’s greatest answers to prayer won’t be revealed on this side of the space-time continuum because they are invisible answers. When God makes something happen, we can thank Him because we can see it. When God keeps something from happening, we don’t know how to thank Him because we don’t know what He did. But someday God will reveal the invisible answers, and we’ll praise Him for them.
Praying hard starts with listening to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. And if you are faithful in the small things and obey those little promptings, then God can use you to do big things.
Go Fish
Let me paint one more picture. It only seems appropriate, since praying is a lot like fishing. More than anything else, it takes a high persistence quotient.
After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?” “Yes, he does,” he replied.
When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes —from their own children or from others?”
“From others,” Peter answered.
“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”
This has to rank as one of the craziest commands in Scripture. Part of me wonders if Peter thought Jesus was joking. He was a little off balance because I’m sure Jesus had pulled more than one prank on Peter.
So why does Jesus do it this way? He could have provided the four-drachma coin in a more conventional manner, but He tells Peter to go fish for it. I think there are a few reasons. First of all, God loves doing different miracles in different ways because it reveals different dimensions of His power and personality. But I wonder if the biggest reason is that Jesus wanted to see if Peter would trust Him in the realm where Peter had the greatest professional proficiency and self-sufficiency. As a professional fisherman, fishing was the one area where Peter would have been most tempted to think he didn’t need Jesus. He thought he knew every trick of the fishing trade, but Jesus wanted to show him a new trick. We’ll call it “the coin in the mouth of the fish” trick.
We know how the story ends. Peter catches a fish and cashes in a smelly coin. But if you’ve caught hundreds of thousands of fish, none of which has ever had a coin in its mouth, how do you have the faith to believe that the next one will have a four-drachma coin? It seems impossible, doesn’t it? But there is only one way to find out if God will keep His promise: Obey the crazy prompting.
Now let me ask you a question: Where do you feel like you need God least? Where are you most proficient, most sufficient? Maybe that is precisely where God wants you to trust Him to do something beyond your ability. It’s just when you think you have God all figured out that He pulls the coin out of the fish’s mouth. And it is God’s strange and mysterious ways that renew our awe, our trust, and our dependence.
Let me spell it out: If you want to see crazy miracles, obey the crazy promptings of the Holy Spirit. Grab your pole, head to the lake, row the boat, cast the line, set the hook, and reel it in. As you obey the promptings by casting your line, you never know what kind of miracle you’ll catch on the other side.
Go fish.
Chapter 11
No Answer
For much of my life, basketball was my life. When I graduated from high school, I went to the University of Chicago on a full-ride scholarship and earned a starting position on the basketball team by the end of my freshman year. Then I transferred to Central Bible College, where I earned first-team all-American honors my senior season. Of course, it was the NCCAA, not the NCAA; the extra C stands for Christian. I was our leading scorer, averaging 21.3 points per game, and we were favorites to win the national championship, the NCCAA championship.
I was having my best
season ever, and I wasn’t just playing well; I was playing for God. I wanted to win a national championship because I thought it would be a great way to glorify God, but that dream died with one cut to the basket when my right knee buckled. Two weeks before the national tournament, my basketball career came to a painful end with a torn anterior cruciate ligament.
To be honest, the spiritual pain was worse than the physical pain. At first, I was angry. God, I was playing for you. How could you let this happen? Eventually, my anger turned to mourning, and then my mourning turned to begging. I remember weeping in prayer and begging God to heal my knee. I knew He could do it, but for reasons unknown to me, He chose not to. I was relegated to cheering for my teammates as we lost in the semifinals. In the grand scheme of things, I realize that a game is a game, but it was a bitter disappointment. And I still don’t know why.
Some of the hardest moments in life are when you’ve prayed hard but the answer is no and you don’t know why. And you may never know why. But that is the litmus test of trust. Do you trust that God is for you even when He doesn’t give you what you asked for? Do you trust that He has reasons beyond your reason? Do you trust that His plan is better than yours?
I have a Deuteronomy 29:29 file that is filled with unanswered questions. It simply states that there are some mysteries that won’t be revealed until we cross into eternity. I don’t understand why God wouldn’t heal my knee. I don’t understand why my father-in-law passed away in the prime of life. I don’t understand why loved ones have lost babies. I have a lot of unanswered questions, and many of them derive from unanswered prayers.
The Circle Maker_Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears Page 11