Leadership Journal

Never would I have thought a life-changing purchase would only cost a quarter. I'm always looking for bargain books, but I didn't think the one that would change my life would be hidden at a garage sale.

It was the biography of George Müeller, and it wasn't so much the man's story that changed my life as it was the legacy of those who had formerly owned the book.

God put the book into my hands two days before I attended a prayer summit. I was desperate. I was just burned out and frustrated as I could be. Our church wasn't growing, I couldn't seem to manage all of our ministry activities, and I could just feel that something was missing.

I didn't read much of the book prior to the summit, but I did notice that someone had put a 5x7 card in the back with three columns. Each column had four names, names like missionaries David Brainerd and Rees Howells and great preachers such as Finney and Spurgeon. There were 12 names in all, and behind every one was the inscription "three hours."

On the bus ride home from the prayer summit, I pulled the book out and contemplated the inscription behind each of those names.

I knew I didn't want to go back to my church and have everything stay the same. So I wrote out seven goals and taped them in my Bible, promising myself to read them every day. The very first one I wrote down was that I was going to pray three hours a day. I'd been praying five minutes a day up until that point, so this was a radical shift for me.

But I did it. In the ten years since I made that commitment, my life has been changed. My church has been changed. And now pastors across the country are asking me to share how it happened.

Simply put, we made the commitment to pray.

"But," I can hear you say, "it's not that simple."

As a pastor I knew how important prayer was, but I didn't commit to it like I should have. I didn't even realize how much prayer I was missing until I bought that 25-cent book.

The Devil knows prayer is the only thing he has no defense against. I think he works overtime in trying to get us not to pray. He creates excuses for us, and they're always the same three:

"I'm too busy."

"I can do it tomorrow."

"I really don't need to pray for an hour (much less three)."

I hear the same reasons given wherever I go. I don't think there's anything that the Devil's going to resist and fight against as much as prayer.

What do we do? It is a major battle to get people to give much time to prayer. The answer can be found in 2 Corinthians 9:6: "Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously."

Prayer is the same. You sow little and reap little. Sow much, you reap much. And the missing ingredient in most churches and most Christian's lives is the volume of prayer.

The more I study prayer, the more obvious it becomes that volume is something God expects. Jesus prayed all night. The leaders of the early church prayed 10 days straight before the church began. The admonition ...