The Power of Praying Together: Paul Miller

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Or do you want to go on the ride of your life, the adventure of your life, and learn how to love and believe and let Jesus possess you? Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott. Your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is Family Life Today. So when we first started speaking for Family Life's Weekend Remembers marriage getaways, what, 35 years ago?

Yeah. Was there a prayer team? Yeah, I think there were prayer teams in each city, but they were different than they are today. I mean, I just know that in the last 10 years, we come into a city, there's a team there that's leading the weekend and there's people in the ballroom because they've, you know, invited them and now there's the internet and they sign up. But everywhere we go now, there is a prayer room that we meet with them before and they pray over us as we go on the stage and speak.

But every second of that weekend, they're in that room praying. And the differences of what happens in that weekend compared to, I don't remember, you know, 30 years ago that happening, it's like night and day. Well, we can go into a city, give the exact same talk as another city, but in one city, there is almost like a revival in terms of marriages that are being saved and people coming to Christ. And we're thinking, what has made the difference? We're saying the same things.

What's made the difference in this city? And it's almost, we think it's prayer. They are praying fervently before, during, after, and we think that makes a huge difference.

It makes all the difference in the world. It's like we don't even have to walk up on stage and say anything. Those prayers, God is honoring and answering. And so we've got Paul Miller in the studio talking about A Praying Church, a book you've just recently finished. But welcome back, Paul. It's good to be here.

I mean, your subtitle is exactly what it's all about, Becoming a People of Hope in a Discouraging World. As you lead your ministry, seejesus.net, how many years? 24. 24 years. And you're mentoring all over the world, right?

Yeah, yeah. How did you decide, I got to write a book on this? Well, it goes back to really what I learned from my father and realizing that prayer ignites the work of the spirit of Jesus in a community, whether in any kind of Jesus community. I actually thought of titling the book A Praying Community, but it's all kinds of things. It's a praying family. It's praying with friends. What happens when we pray is the spirit inhabits things. It brings things to life. And it's the life of Jesus.

Jesus comes in. And it's resurrection life. One of the fascinating dynamics is that the whole point of prayer is that what happened on resurrection morning happens when we pray. So, the spirit inhabited the body of Jesus and brought him to life, a new kind of spiritual life, where it's capital S Spirit. And when we pray, that same activity, the same spirit, already begins to work again. And he does beyond all that we can ask or even imagine.

You just have to give him time. Now, is that sort of the prayer train? I've heard you talk about that.

Yeah, I call it the power train. And it's in Paul's writing where, like in Ephesians 3, Paul says, you know, I bow my knees before the father from whom every family in heaven on earth is named. And then this is a really botched translation, but that he will fill you with his spirit so that you will possess Christ. So, that's the super new living version translation. So, it's a prayer to the father that he would give you the spirit so that he would make Christ present in your life.

So, you'd overflow with the love of Christ. Like, that's the engine. That's why I call it the power train. It's the engine of the family.

It's the engine of my relationships. It's the engine of the church. What happens if we don't do that?

Because the majority of people don't do that. What happens to us as believers, do you think? Pretty much what you see happening now. Just chaos, you know, everything.

I mean, both in the wider culture. You know, just a little bit of church history. The church, the temple, was dedicated not as a house of sacrifices, but as a house of prayer. Solomon dedicates, he doesn't preach a sermon, he prays over the temple. And it's a long prayer. Yeah, and it's a really long prayer. And this theme of the temple as the house of prayer is all through the Old Testament.

Like, it's the uplink to heaven. And then you get to the New Testament, to the gospels, they are essentially prayerless, except for Jesus. So, Jesus has become the new house of prayer. I mean, there's one time Jesus tries to get a prayer meeting going, and it fails, is at Gethsemane, you know. When he's in the garden. Yeah, he asks people to pray with him, and they can't, they fall asleep.

You know what I mean? Which shows you why the Spirit has to come. Like, Jesus has to get inside them. And the difference between Luke and what the disciples are like and what they're like in Acts is Jesus getting inside of them.

So, the praying temple gets inside of it. So, a life of prayer is a life filled with Jesus. I mean, you hear that as a follower of Christ, and you're like, then why don't we pray?

Why is it there's such resistance? We talked in the early episode that the churches in America, and our church was the same way, don't really have a prayer. I mean, I'll tell you something. We had, our son came on our staff. He was just out of college and then out of the NFL.

So, he's in his early 20s. Yeah, and he's working with me at one of the campuses. Anyway, he says, Dad, we need to build a prayer room. And we have a closet in one of our buildings. Can we turn it into a prayer room? We go, and I'm like, that's a great idea. We go to the executive leadership team, and I start pitching this idea, because he can't pitch it. He's too young, and I'm one of the founders of the church.

And I thought it would be, yeah. It was like, you want to do what? We don't need a room. You know, people can pray anywhere, which is true.

You don't need a room. But there was pushback rather than, that's a great idea. We ended up doing it, and we even did it 24-7. But we had to raise our own money for it. And our son was fiery, man, fiery. Did he get that from his mom or his dad? He's not mine. And he, I mean, he starts putting this in our church, this passion of like, if we want to see Jesus do some things in our lives, in our church, in our families, in our hearts, in our kids, then we need to be a praying people.

Well, the question is, what's the resistance? Why is that? Because you mentioned in your book, you know, this guy from India, right, comes to India?

Share that story. I thought, did he come to our church? Because it sounded the same. It was an American megachurch where the pastor was well known in India. And the pastor announces the prayer meeting, the prayer service later on in the week. And the pastor even mentioned some things on his heart that, you know, he wants to pray for. And so he gets there on whatever night it is, Tuesday night, and no one's there. He gets there early to get a seat. And he's actually concerned because the place only owns, it's a chapel that only has room for 500 people in it. He's a, you know, so he wants to get there early, get a good seat and, and then, you know, seven o'clock, no one's there. And the guy who's actually leading it, you know, comes in like 7, 15, the people, about seven or eight people gather slowly. And, you know, about quarter to eight, they have a prayer time.

One person prays and they have a little devotional and they all go. Oh, he's probably so disappointed. He was probably so surprised. He was in shock. Yeah.

Like, he was like, whoa. Well, here's the thing, you know, that's not an anomaly. Yeah. Oh, I know. I wish we could say, oh, that's just one church. That is most of us. Well, in your book, you even say America's the first generation in 2000 years to have lost the vision of the church as a house of prayer.

Yeah. I mean, some, like, for instance, the Moravians in 1715, roughly, in Germany, they were fighting as a community. And Count Zinzendorf, their leader, said, let's have an all night of prayer. And he just, because they were just, they were just quarreling so many people.

There were refugees from all over on, on his estate. And they, they had an all night of prayer and God began to just work in their community through that. And they said, well, let's keep going. A hundred years they prayed. And, you know, it was the kind of the precursor to a whole prayer movement in, throughout, particularly in England, Germany and America, that actually kind of the spark for the great century of missions was this Haystack prayer meeting in Massachusetts, where these five college students gathered to pray for world missions. And I mean, missions isn't even a name like this, like saying the gathering to go to Mars, you know what I mean?

It wasn't even on people's radar. And they gathered to pray. And there was a lightning thunderstorm that went through and they hid in a haystack. And so it was called the Haystack prayer meeting. And they all became leaders in missions. So here we are, 1810, confessing Christians are 10 percent of the world's population. And the explosion that came out of that prayer movement of missions that a hundred years later, the church is now 30 percent. And again, it's confessing Christians, you know, but still, it's just the power that came out of that.

I mean, revival history is always preceded by prayer. You know, why I think, why we've been weak, I think pride, you know, we rely on good management. And good management is wonderful.

I mean, it's not a bad thing. You want to be organized, but it's not Jesus. Good management will only do what is humanly possible. There's too much to do for us to do it in our own strength. You know, it's got to be the Spirit. Even church planning is wonderful.

And there's a whole process to go through for church planning. Which is wise. It's good. It's very wise.

It's so good. And our son was starting, that same son decided to start his own church. But he said, I'm not going to start a church until I start a prayer house. Yeah. And so he hasn't started the church, but he's been doing the prayer house for how many years? About four years. Yeah.

And it's interesting. He said that he felt like when he was praying with God, he said he felt like God said, I didn't call you to start a church. I called you to start a prayer house. And his dad's like, dude, you need to start a church. And you need to go through the whole system.

Nobody's going to come to a prayer house. But every morning at 9 a.m. at this building, they meet for prayer for an hour. That's right. And there's some music there as well.

But I've gone several times and it's just this holy start of the day, you know, and out of that is going to birth a church. Yeah. But let me ask you this. I feel like sometimes, maybe it's a man thing.

It's pride that prevents us. But I think at other times, and I've talked to men who say to me, I don't know if prayer works. So I don't pray. I don't think it works.

I don't see results. I, you know, I pray for a few days and my wife doesn't change or my kids don't change. And so I just find myself losing the desire to pray. What do you say to a guy, and it could be a woman, but I'm talking to guys that say that to me.

What do you say to him? It's almost better to answer if I can by a story of, you know, we talked in our last episode about my prayer time with Jill. But then after breakfast, Kim and I had a prayer time.

And it's a really sweet prayer time. Tell our listeners about Kim a little bit. Yeah, she's disabled. She has a chromosome disorder, kind of like a severe case of downs. She can't speak. How old is she now?

She's 42. But let me just give you, so why do I pray? It's because when I pray and I'm thoughtful about it, God does beyond all I can ask or imagine. You have to be patient. You have to be persistent and you have to watch.

I would say those are the three characteristics, patient, persistent, and you have to watch. Maybe there's a P for the watching one. I can't think of one. So anyway, I was 96.

I had not written any books. Kim was still in high school, and she used sign language in high school. She had an interpreter.

She had a speech computer that we'd had for three years, but it had 128 keys. It was just so complicated. And Jill and I just, you just get worn out when you get six kids and a child with disabilities and in ministry, you know what I mean?

No money, no time, whatever, you know? And you can only just do so much. And so I wanted to write a book on Jesus and how he loved people. And when I went to pray this, I just wrote it out in my prayer journal as a prayer.

And this thought immediately came to my head from out of the blue is, how can you speak about me when Kim doesn't speak? In other words, it was a challenge. I really believe it was directly from the Spirit who brought me Jesus' voice. And it was, it was really, it was a challenge to my love.

I wanted to write a book about love, and it was an area of love that I had been weak at. And it was just such a mountain to climb. But it was so clear.

I was convicted by it. I mean, that's like when we pray, fire comes. That was a little bit of fire. It was the fire of repentance, you know? And so, you know, people are hunting for God's voice for direction. God's biggest voice to me is repent, you know? Become like, like his great burden for the church is to become like Jesus. So when you devote yourself, the fire is always fire of repentance, of things that aren't going well.

And you know, the way I'm doing life, I'm inhabiting life. So I was convicted, and I immediately set aside plans to write a book. And a couple weeks later, I began to pray that I'd know how to do this. A couple weeks later, a flyer came in the mail on a speech computer camp, a camp where you go to with families, with a child that can't speak.

And I signed up for it. And Kim and I went to, you know, completely secular camp. And I learned a ton about how to teach Kim, and she's pretty adept on the keyboard.

And then I reopened what we call the IEP, your educational plan with a school. And she would learn verbs for three months and then nouns and then prepositions. And she just slowly learned how to create sentences.

And now she's really fluent. And about a year later, God's grace is so amazing. A friend called me out of the blue and said, Paul, I know you want to write.

I have a friend who's an editor who wants to teach a course in writing. And for the next two years, things like that happened. I just like when I put my energy into what God had on his heart, he put his energy into what was on my heart. I mean, that's when Paul says in Ephesians 3, 20 or 21, you know, down to Him who's able to do beyond all that we can ask or imagine.

I mean, we're a crew. I mean, that was, look what God did that through Bill Bright. And he was a man very much led by the Spirit and a man of prayer. And who would have imagined that God would do that much?

And then the same thing with our Kim, with all her weakness and me and our weakness that God doing beyond all that I could ask or imagine. So I would just say to a guy, you want to live a boring life where you're just kind of getting crankier as you get older, or do you want to go on the ride of your life, the adventure of your life and learn how to love and believe and let Jesus possess you? You know, do you want to get ready for heaven or do you want to go the other direction?

You know? And I think for me as a woman, I tend to, when I get fearful with my kids, with our family, with our job, I tend to become more controlling when I become fearful because I feel like my life is out of control. And so I become more controlling and instead of becoming more controlling, I have learned as I've gotten older, the best thing I can do is not to control, but to give it to the Father, to allow him to have it, to pray over it and say, Lord, I can't carry this.

I'm becoming mean and irritable and I'm trying to control everybody and nobody wants that. And so I give it to you and I handing it to you. And then as we, as you said, it's repentance and as a result of repentance and of Jesus filling us, we bear the fruit of the Spirit, which the first ones, love, joy, peace and patience. If we could demonstrate that in our homes, that's what you were demonstrating, even to Kim. Like he's reminding you, this is your priority. She, your family, your wife, your kids, that comes before the other things. That's good.

Well, in some ways I'm hearing you Paul say, if I'm a guy, and again, it could be a woman that struggles to pray, whether it's pride or I don't know how it works or I don't believe in some ways it's like, just start. Yeah. Is that right? Like discipline your life. I mean, we do this all the time. Like I'm gonna start working out. I'm going to 6 a.m.

I'm going to get up and do an hour workout. What about getting up and saying, I'm going to spend time praying. Yeah, even if I don't know what's happening or if God's listening or if I believe in, I'm going to discipline my life and start, maybe even do a little journal or you start recording my prayers and just see, like you said, I'm going to then watch.

And what would I encourage? I was discipling my son and a friend of his with sexual temptation and several years into her disciple, I just discipled and I discovered they weren't praying. Well, wait, so go back a little bit. They came to you, right?

Your son came to you. Yeah. Which is pretty remarkable. Yeah. Well, it was really good. I said, oh, sure. Yeah. They just said we're struggling with sexual temptation. Yeah. They were holding one another accountable.

And they thought, you know, we're we're not really changing here much after 10 years. So maybe we need a little outside help. So they came to you. Yeah, they came to me. So let me tell you the larger story of that, because I because what we're talking about here is just like, I want Jesus by his Spirit to inhabit all my relationships. So in the Book of Praying Church, we look at all kinds of ways of and it's not like it's one way, you know what I mean? It's just like one of the so I made prayer central to my discipling them with overcoming sexual temptation.

And this is just kind of developed. But the first thing was praying after they had some kind of failure in their life. And which is that's what confession is.

It's a prayer of, you know, I messed up here, you know, would you forgive me and give me grace to go on? And because I knew that that confession, that humility was a door to the Spirit coming in. And they're crying for help would bring grace into their lives. And the the shame that you feel in confession, but particularly for a guy with other guys, was a conduit to the Spirit working. You know, a lot of people, I've read whole books on shame and how awful is I?

Well, I don't know, it sure can help a lot of people I know. You know, but I don't want them get stuck in shame. I want them to remove shame to real guilt and real forgiveness. Shame is, you know, how do I look? Guilt is, oh, wait a minute.

It's not how I look. It's I've sinned against a holy God. And that can be forgiven at the cross. So you are helping them see how prayer can help them get victory in this area. I wanted the Spirit to break into their lives.

So after they would have a failure, you would pray. Did they call you? In time, we learned to, so we would do it on our weekly call. So we had a weekly call together.

Okay. And then the next thing was when they were messing up, whatever it was, in the middle of that messing up, I said, now that's when you got to start praying. And they were like, why would I want to do that? That's the time I would least want to do it. It's like the middle of a fight with your spouse.

You don't want to pray. Yeah, right. Right.

Yeah. Probably worse than that, though, because you're just caught in this tailspin of the way sexual sin can just possess you. Then the really moving to maturity was to pray before. So developing a life of prayer.

So right at the early, before they begin, so beginning to text one another. So prayer texts, like, I'm really having a hard time now. I feel myself. I'm alone tonight.

Or, you know, Victoria's Secret catalog came in the mail and I threw it away, but it's in the trash can. Would you pray for me? But like praying in your, I call it the J curve, praying on the down J, you know, you got to pray in that down J. I mean, that's where you learn to pray.

You know, that's when it's most powerful. And part of that is just developing a life of prayer then. So now they're both mentoring other guys.

John's got like five groups going. Let me just stress this. It's not prayer. Prayer is the conduit. It's this power, what I like to call the power train. It's the spirit who makes, so prayer ignites the spirit, Jesus' power. And it's the power train. Like, so it's going from your, you know, your foot hits the gas pedal and, you know, there's power created in the cylinders that goes down into the transmission that goes out through the, out to the axle and the wheels. It's power and it's spirit power and it's spiritual power.

It's capital S. Isn't that exciting and confusing at the same time? The Holy Spirit's power is available to you right now. And He can change literally every area of your life. You might be like, what? That's so weird. What?

But it's true. I was just reading this morning in 2 Corinthians chapter 6. It says that we are the temple of the living God. God lives inside us and God is not incapable of working in your life. Will you ask Him to work? You can do that in prayer right now. I'm going to do it today, so let's do it together.

I'm Shelby Abbott and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Paul Miller on Family Life Today. Paul Miller's written a book called A Praying Church, becoming a people of hope in a discouraging world. And we live in a discouraging world right now.

We can all use a little hope. Well, Paul Miller's book is going to help you and it's going to be our gift to you when you partner with us financially. So you can go online to familylifetoday.com or give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329. Again, that number is 800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And feel free to drop us something in the mail if you'd like to.

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Now, encouragement to pray big is something all of us need, and we need to understand that prayer can foster transformative faith, even amidst the challenges in our life. And the cool thing is Paul Miller is going to be back again tomorrow with David Ann Wilson to talk about just that. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, and that's a crew ministry. We're helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.