On our Kingdom Offerings podcasts, we dig into various aspects of the gospel of the kingdom. You see, exploring and celebrating this good news of the kingdom of God is important to us. It’s the heart and soul of the umbrella ministries of One Hundred Fold. Right now we’re in the middle of a series called The Kingdom Disciplines.

My name is Dave Scherrer and I’m the founder of One Hundred Fold Ministries and the goal in this series is to take a hard look deep into our own lives and imagine what it would take to become even more effective kingdom citizens. We often talk about more, more here at the One Hundred Fold Ministries and why not? Everybody wants more. So the last couple of times that we were together, we’ve been examining the disciplines of generosity and contentedness.

That feels like the opposite of more. But we don’t want more of this world, we want more of the kingdom of God. You see, generosity and contentedness are two sides of the same coin, I suppose. If I’m attitudinally content on the inside, it will be easier for me to be generous on the outside, so to speak. We just spent the last couple of podcasts talking about that.

So now I want to go in a bit of a different direction and talk about a kingdom discipline of prayer. As a reminder, these kingdom disciplines that we’re talking about, they incline us towards God and His rule and reign. They are the habits and practices that keep our minds sharp, and they keep us tuned in to the voice of the Spirit as He leads us, we hope, moment by moment. I know He does.

These behaviors help us to drown out the fuzz of white noise in the world and let us focus on God’s truths and the kingdom benefits that come from living in those truths. So prayer, talking to God or maybe better framed listening to God, is crucial to believers in Jesus Christ in the path of kingdom living. We know this. This is not new information for you and me.

But in the case of the kingdom, it is impossible to have a vibrant, overflowing peace that passes understanding, to have streams of living water flowing from us, or to die to ourselves if we don’t have a robust habit of prayer.

C.S. Lewis, I quote him a lot, but he said, “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless.” He says, “I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.”

In Mere Christianity, that great work of C.S. Lewis, he takes this a little bit deeper. It’s a little longer quote. He says, “What I mean is this. An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian, he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God, God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God, and that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, even praying for him.” C.S. Lewis says, “You see what is happening? God is the thing to which he is praying. The goal he has is motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that whole threefold life of the three-person being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.”

He makes it sound very big and I think it is. And all this is great and true, but I’m about to confess something that I don’t particularly like about myself.

My ADHD undisciplined self is not great at prayer. I’d like to say that I am a great man of prayer, but the evidence doesn’t show it. I’m better than I once was, but I struggle to concentrate. I know from personal experience that the times in my past that are freeze-framed in my mind and my heart are those times of concerted, extended prayer. And those times are priceless. And yet, still, I find it difficult to get alone, to get quiet, to get with Jesus. I don’t know, I’m hoping you can relate a little bit.

Do you know this song?

Sweet hour of prayer! sweet hour of prayer!
That calls me from a world of care,
And bids me at my Father’s throne
Make all my wants and wishes known.
In seasons of distress and grief,
My soul has often found relief,
And oft escaped the tempter’s snare,
By thy return, sweet hour of prayer!

That was Casting Crowns, singing “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” an old hymn by a man named William Walford, who wrote it 80 years ago this year.

In the second verse, he writes, “I hasten to the place where God my Savior shows His face and gladly take my station there and wait for thee, sweet hour of prayer.”

So I long for that. I long to have a sweet, regular hour of prayer. And the fact is that the expansion of the kingdom is built on bedrock prayer, so I’m committed to it.

So we’re going to linger here for a couple of weeks, but I just want to make one point in closing as we spend some time talking about the kingdom discipline of prayer. Some of the things that God asks of us are simply not natural to the human frame. Picking up a cross daily does not come naturally. Neither does thinking of others as more important than ourselves or offering forgiveness to the ones who nail us to our own personal cross.

Now there are things that simply do not come natural for us and prayer is one of those. So the next time we meet here at Kingdom Offerings, I want to talk about what it might mean to abandon the practice of trying to do things in the natural and instead employ the supernatural. Our willingness to practice abiding in Him and our disciplined habit of praying go hand in hand.

So I’m going to ask you, please, do come back in a couple of weeks. Let’s not grow weary in doing good in prayer. For in due time, we will reap a harvest if we do not grow weary. So this is Dave Scherrer and this is Kingdom Offerings. We’re talking about kingdom disciplines and they change the world from the inside out.

I’ll be praying for you. I look forward to being with you next time. Peace.