CHAPTER 1
BLANK CHECKS
Extreme Prayer Accesses the "Whatever You Ask" Promises
At the start of our missionary career in West Africa, my wife and I moved into a dusty, tin-roofed shack in a small village, bringing only some basic supplies and two bicycles with us. We had visited the village with a more experienced colleague a few times before this to get to know the people; now we would live with the villagers as we began learning their language and culture.
Rather than house us in a grass-roofed hut, one of the church leaders sacrificially emptied his little square home for us. This house was like no dwelling we'd ever seen. I could reach up and touch the tin roof without stretching. The mice had burrowed through the floor and would pop up at night to eat anything not hanging from the ceiling. One night I heard a cataclysmic struggle in one corner. When I got up to investigate, I discovered a colossal spider wrestling a majestic roach. Rebecca and I cheered for the spider.
Outside, the drooping branches of a mango tree brushed up against the screenless window, providing convenient access into our home for green mamba snakes. Without a ceiling, our rafters were home to a host of bats roosting between the wood and the tin. Like some kind of bat cave, our little home had so many bat droppings on the floor that we could have supplied enough guano for the gunpowder used in the American Civil War.
In spite of our initial squeamish reaction, that house holds a special place in our hearts. The generous church leader who had allowed us to temporarily move into his home tried to help us adjust to the "openness" of our dwelling by explaining, "It's not only people who live in a house." His sacrificial loan enabled us to make our home among the people with whom we would work to translate the Bible into the Yalunka language.
When we first arrived in West Africa, we pulled our water out of a hand-dug well with a bucket. We cooked outside on a kerosene burner. I remember taking bucket showers out under the stars in a grass enclosure, thinking, This is probably not what the Centers for Disease Control means when they caution Americans to avoid night-biting mosquitoes. As I showered, I could look up to a night sky so stunningly bright that at first I mistook the Milky Way galaxy for a huge, wispy cloud stretching the width of the sky. One night about three months into our stay, I had an epiphany that I was gazing into a vast fog of distant stars. A long, awestruck "oooh" flowed unbidden from my chest as I gaped at the same stars that had been God's visual aid for Abraham. I love Africa.
Living like the local people helped us get to know our neighbors. Just down the hill from us was a clearing where vendors set up a market every Saturday. Early our first morning, I heard trucks roaring to a halt outside. I tentatively opened the door to discover that our front steps were part of the market. Since our house was so close to the clearing, vendors were in the habit of stacking piles of rice just outside our doorway. Hundreds of people were milling around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the foreigners.
Another morning, the chilling wails of a mother in distress woke us. We found someone who could explain the woman's situation: her three-year-old son was dying. I felt so sad for this mother that I asked, "Could we see the child?"
I could tell by the villagers' faces that they had never considered that we might be able to help them. I wasn't a doctor. I had a good book on tropical medicine, but that was the extent of my medical training. Even I didn't know what I was thinking when I offered to help the dying boy.
They answered, "The child is out in the bush being treated by a traditional healer, but we will go out and get him."
It took a while for them to bring him back to the village, and I took advantage of the time to ponder my next move.
When Rebecca and I were finally brought to the boy, he was lying on the earthen floor of a grass-roofed hut belonging to one of his relatives in the village. His breathing was labored, and his pupils, wide like inky wells, did not respond at all to my flashlight. The words "pupils fixed and dilated," which I'd heard countless times on TV hospital dramas, echoed in my memory. Hopelessness crept into me as I realized that his mother was right; her son might not live long.
In hushed tones, Rebecca and I talked with the local pastor about what medical procedure might save the boy. "It can't be meningitis because we don't have any medicine for that," I mused, applying dubious diagnostics. "It could be cerebral malaria, but I don't know how to get an unconscious child to take the malaria tablets."
At some point I suggested, "We should pray for the kid. After all, we are missionaries."
At the simple mention of prayer, I saw the boy blink, and his eyes began to wander around the room focusing here and there.
I thought to myself, We had better hurry up and pray, because I think God is healing him! By the time we had finished praying, the boy's breathing was normal, and we were able to give him a dose of malaria medicine. Later that night, the family laughed festively over their little boy, whom they had given up for dead just hours before. We tried to give him the second dose of medicine that night, but he fought us like a rabid bobcat. His strength in combat proved to everyone present that he was fully recovered. Today he's nearly a grown man, and he still attends the village church.
In that dark hut a permanent little light blinked on inside my soul: God is real, and he wants me to rely on him first, not as a last resort. That's when I began to learn not to pray about my strategies, but to make prayer the strategy.
I thought of that night twelve years later. My family was still living in that village, but by this time we had built a baked-brick home with solar power and a well with an electric pump that supplied running water. I was handed the receiver of our satellite telephone and heard the voice of the chairman of the board asking me to become the president of our mission, Pioneer Bible Translators.
When the euphoria of accepting this new challenge wore off, it occurred to me: I'm in trouble. I need a really clever strategy. Our ministry had a distinguished record in Bible translation; however, its growth had plateaued over the previous decade. As the new president of the mission, I couldn't show up without some kind of brilliant plan for success. People might figure out that I didn't know what I was doing! And the strategy had better be good, too, because if it didn't work, the failure of my leadership would be obvious to everyone.
Well, I was a Bible translator. So in desperation, I turned to the Bible and came across the "whatever" passages in the Gospels, the ones where Jesus says that when you pray a certain way he will give you "whatever you ask." I was stunned by Jesus' sweeping promises to answer our prayers, no matter how bold. Then I reflected on how God had answered so many prayers during our years serving in that village.
I thought, Well, it sounds unsophisticated, but what if this prayer thing would really work? I'm supposed to believe the Bible; what if I tried doing what it says? How crazy is that?
I decided to search Scripture to discover the kinds of prayers that God has promised to answer and then to focus our whole mission on praying those prayers. That's as clever an approach as I could come up with. Prayer became our strategy. I thought, What if we really could tap into the power of the reckless, blank-check promises Jesus makes? What if you could too?
Prayer is a challenge for most of us. Some of us have never been taught what to do. Others are not convinced of the power of prayer. I consider myself a man of action, and prayer doesn't look like action. Many of us would rather work to get something done than pray. Leaders are especially activity oriented and typically not known as prayer warriors. We might be tempted to look at long prayer times as navel gazing. We can pray for a little while, but then we get antsy. We feel like we need to get out there and make things happen.
While at a convention recently, I heard a man announce over the loudspeaker, "We have just made a miracle happen here." Any miracle we can make is not from God. However, I believe I have finally learned something about how to access the promises of Jesus to answer whatever I ask in prayer. The power unleashed by this approach has made me want to pray longer and more often. I've come to see prayer as the work.
So when I returned to the United States to lead our mission, I came with the strategy of prayer. I knew that several Bible-less people groups had been asking our mission to translate the Bible for a decade, but we'd never had enough people. Thinking about that, I was filled with a sense of dissatisfaction. It just wasn't good enough for a Bible translation mission to leave people without Scripture for a decade while they continued to hunger for it.
I decided we needed to roughly double in size to meet the needs we already had identified in the countries we served, as well as to begin work in four new fields. I knew that our tiny, packed modular building would not support the goal of doubling in size. So I announced new goals that were big enough to make me nervous:
> We would double in size over the next six years.
> We would construct a permanent headquarters facility.
> We would start projects to meet all the translation needs in our current fields.
> We would start translation work in four more countries.
How would we do that?
> We would pray the kinds of prayers Jesus promised he would answer with unlimited power.
The strategy would have been pretty lame except for one detail: God is real. He's more real and powerful than any forest fire, hurricane, or tsunami. He will release his incomparable power into your ministry for the purpose of his Kingdom if you learn to pray the prayers he promised to answer.
Our ministry team decided to stake everything on God's power and on trusting him. We decided to become people of faith. God has overwhelmingly blessed that approach. His timing hasn't always matched ours exactly, but he has doubled the size of our mission. He has given us twenty-two acres and a building. We can see him working to meet the translation needs in our original fields. We have started work in seven more countries instead of four.
Now we know that no other strategy will be good enough for us. We are becoming a people of faith, gradually increasing our commitment to prayer as we see God moving in increasing power.
So what do I mean when I say extreme prayer? I mean intentionally praying the kinds of prayers that tap into all of Jesus' open-ended promises about prayer in a way that achieves maximum Kingdom impact.
I base the idea of extreme prayer on a study and application of the scriptural promises of Jesus to do whatever we ask when we pray certain ways. The idea of extreme prayer is that Jesus sprinkled "whatever you ask" passages throughout the New Testament to coax us into trying them out. When we begin to experiment with them, God will build our faith in him through his mighty answers to prayer. He will teach us how to come to know him by learning what he is passionate about and working alongside him to accomplish his mission.
Extreme prayer is not the only way to pray; it's not a replacement for praying about your individual needs. I'm proposing an addition to the normal kinds of prayer that people usually pray. You may have learned the memory aid ACTS to help you remember how to pray. It's helpful to point out that your prayer times should start with adoration (A) and include confession (C). You should not forget thanksgiving (T). After covering those basics, you can go on to supplication (S) and make the kinds of requests Jesus modeled for your basic needs, such as "give us this day our daily bread." It's important to intercede for leaders in the world. It's crucial to pray for the sick people in your community. I'm not trying to replace all that. Rather I'm proposing you add an E on the end to include boldly praying the kinds of extreme prayers that Jesus commanded you and me to pray.
Since ACTSE doesn't spell anything, I think a better memory aid is to strive to have an ACTIVE prayer life.
Adoration—worshiping God for who he is
Confession—admitting and repenting of our sin
Thanksgiving—lifting up our gratitude for what God has done
Intercession/Supplication—praying for ourselves and others
Vanquishing Satan—practicing regular spiritual warfare
Extreme Prayer—maximizing all the prayer promises of Jesus
By the way, take note of the V for vanquishing Satan and his demons by practicing regular spiritual warfare. I learned this type of prayer in Africa, too, and Scripture explains why it is so critical. Revelation 12 teaches that demons were angels whom God kicked out of heaven after they rebelled against him. They are filled with bitter hatred, but since they can't harm God, they do the next best thing. They attack the people God loves, trying to wound him indirectly by hurting his children and persuading them to turn away from him.
If you're like most Americans, though, you have a hard time imagining that you are surrounded by unseen spiritual forces. You may believe that demons are real, but you may not think they impact you in any concrete way. That's similar to the response I got whenever I tried to explain bacteria to a Yalunka villager:
"This disease is caused by germs."
"Where are they?"
"They are too small to be seen."
"Well, how can they hurt me then?"
"There are millions of them. They are on every surface, and they can cause disease."
"Really?"
Even I could tell that I sounded like a lunatic. The Yalunka people would just shake their heads at the poor deluded Westerner.
And yet demons are very real to the people of West Africa. In the area where Rebecca and I worked, people have been sacrificing chickens and sheep to demons for hundreds of years. I remember a time when the Yalunka church prayed for a man who was so full of demons that it took four people to hold him down. The demons left and he became sane again. Demons are a real but unseen power in the same way bacteria are real, powerful, and unseen.
Paul teaches us to fight against our unseen enemy. He says,
Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. EPHESIANS 6:11-13
The word translated "stand your ground" means to stand in front of these powers. Paul is telling us to stand up to demons, to "resist" them.
The Bible uses the same word two other times: Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. JAMES 4:7
Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith. 1 PETER 5:8-9
The V reminds us to follow the example and command of Scripture to "resist" Satan and his demons. Follow the example of the Lord's Prayer, saying, "Lord, deliver us from evil: evil thoughts, evil people, evil accidental events, and evil spirits. Lord, post your angels around us and our house to keep out evil. God, we give up all evil in our lives." Praying for God's protection and verbally rebuking the evil one can help prevent temptations from leading into addictions, conflicts into bitter fights, and sickness into death.
While the V of ACTIVE is important, this book is centered on E, or extreme prayer—the discipline of maximizing Jesus' promises about prayer. Each of the following chapters unveils a different kind of prayer that Jesus backs with a blank-check promise. But watch out! Don't read this book to get your own wishes out of prayer. God wants something so much bigger than that. He longs to draw you to his side and to show you his dreams for your life and the lives of the people around you. Do you have the courage to let him?
Questions for Reflection
1. Which of your prayers has God seemed to answer with miraculous power?
2. When you pray, how much adoration, confession, and thanksgiving do you find yourself practicing before asking for what you want?
3. Why is it important to practice all the different aspects of prayer?
4. Do you spend time in spiritual warfare as you pray? If so, explain.
5. What does it mean to you that Jesus promises to do whatever you ask?
