Prayer

So Men Want a Challenge?

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Recently, I wrote about issues facing men in our churches (or not in them, as the statistics point out), so I thought I would go over to the Church for Men site to see what men are saying about why they aren’t in church or why they feel the Church is not providing what men need. I’ve popped in there from time to time, and while I’m trying to take part in the conversation, I leave scratching my head.

If one factor defines that conversation, it’s the endless chorus of male voices chanting: “Men want a challenge!” Now this confuses me to no end because the list of challenges facing the Church is exceedingly long and certainly daunting if taken at face value. But I want to be game about this need that men have for a challenge, so I’m offering a challenge to every man out there:

Pray more than an hour a day.

That’s it. Nothing fancy or earth-shattering. But also nothing more needed or more missing in the lives of churches and the men in (or not in) them.

Can’t find anything to pray about for an hour? Then start asking everyone you see on a regular basis what they would like prayer for. Don’t make distinctions between Christians and non-Christians; ask everyone. Ask what their greatest need is and start compiling a list that you pray over every day. Soldier prayingThere’s not a human being alive who doesn’t need prayer. What can be more challenging than meeting a need that goes largely unmet in the lives of every person on the face of the planet?

If you find that’s still not filling up more than sixty minutes of your day, then ask God to open your eyes to every issue confronting your own church. Statistics say that most Christian teens are sexually active. Are you praying for the purity of the teens in your church? Christians tend to divorce at a rate not much less than the general public. Are you praying for the marriages of every couple in your church? Satan would like nothing more than divide and sift everyone in your church. Are you praying against the dark forces that seek to destroy every spiritual leader, every family, and every individual within your church down to the tiniest child ?

Okay men, there’s the challenge. Get back with me in a month and tell me how it’s going.

Building Castles with Air

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In talking with folks all over, I have been struck by one inescapable reality: We Christians in America have become a prayerless people ignorant of the Bible.

Reasons for this I have outlined in previous entries. We are filling our time with everything but prayer and study. True, our lives are hectic—far too hectic—but if we think we are going to build the Kingdom of God and see ourselves transformed into men and women who would die for Jesus, we cannot do it on ten minutes of prayer dashed off daily as we hustle from place to place. We cannot do it with a lone verse taped to a dashboard. We cannot do it with empty souls.

I do not know why we fail to understand this. But even more, I do not understand why we don’t feel the impoverishment in every part of our lives. It is one thing to be a child of God, but quite another to be filled with the Spirit in such a way that everything we do has a holy sheen to it that others notice instinctively. That we know that this is where we should be, but still we do not care to get there, is a kind of sickness. We have become so used to the illness itself that we have learned to live in this sickly state and to make excuses for feeling rotten.

But this is not what the Lord desires. He wants all of us, not a tossed off token prayer, not a hope that one day we’ll get around to studying and knowing the Scriptures.

We can only get there if we want it. If we are sick and tired of being sick and tired in our souls, then maybe we can work to find ways to make it possible for us to spend the time before the Lord that we need to reach that place where He can truly use us to change the world.

But we have to want it. Do you?