Mobilizing Missionary Prayer (Part 2)
Plundering the strong man’s (Mk 3:27) territory does not come easily and without struggle. Our battle is not against humans … we are at war with forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world (Eph 6:12).
It is a fight every time we go in to rescue people from the grips of poverty, depression, anxiety, addiction, loneliness, consumerism, and the like.
Followers in the way of Jesus are in the rescue business, and the strongman doesn’t like it when we come into his house and share the good news that those enslaved and living there do not have to live there anymore. Here is what it requires … it takes action to accomplish the mission, and that action has to be covered in prayer.
In such moments we enter a war zone. “Prayer takes on an entirely new nature in the war zone from the prayers that were practiced in the safe zones.” Unfortunately, many people have never been taught how to pray when entering into the evangelism war zones of our enemy.
However, when we encounter a life being destroyed by our enemy, we quickly grow in how to contend for a person's life. In such a moment, as we love and care for them, we discover the inadequacy of the prayers we rely on. The result is we dig down a little deeper to fight this battle and our prayer changes.
When we find ourselves in that place we need to remember a couple of important things to help guide our prayers. It makes all the difference in evangelism prayer.
While Jesus is recognized as the Lamb of God, He is also known as the Lion of Judah.
Jesus is a lion with an incredible roar … so much so that when the men came to arrest Him in the garden, He simply responded with saying, “I am He,” and they all fell down to the ground. Such authority. And He shared that Lion authority with us. Translated, we need to roar a bit in the war zone. Fosner writes, “We must remember we are lions, pray like we are lions, act like we are lions, and stay in the fight like a lion would.”
When Jesus taught us to pray He gave us two powerful ingredients for our prayer life. Two pieces that are all the more important in evangelism prayer when we take on the prince of the air.
Jesus said to pray like this: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Incredible. First … we pray for His kingdom to reach further in our homes, neighborhoods, city, and workplace. The arrival of His kingdom means the arrival of the King, the Lion of Judah. It’s the prayer of the Gospel. But it doesn’t stop there.
He says, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What God wants trumps whatever the prince of the air wants. It is God’s will on earth superseding whatever else has been in charge. And the crazy thing is we have been given the job to release His will on this earth. All is not lost; there is hope; King Jesus has come and that changes everything.
What all of this means is: “The prince of the air can only exercise his authority if we are not exercising our authority; he can only withhold God’s plans so long as we are not insisting upon God’s plan. But once we pull out our keys and open up heaven's doors, then God’s will and God's interventions pour onto the earth unabated.”
No one will argue the truth that all prayer is beneficial. We need to spend time praying and offering different kinds of prayers for a variety of purposes. The problem for many followers of Jesus is they have not been taught the inequality of different forms of prayer in advancing the mission Jesus gave to us. There simply are some approaches in prayer which bring a higher yield when it comes to evangelism.
Today you can step into the authority Jesus gave to us, pray through the guides He provided, and open the way for the miraculous to happen. We can PRAY and GO!
