After I had been pastor of Brooklyn Tabernacle for about a year, the church had grown to fifty people, but we were facing problems: little money, few people coming to faith in Christ. One Tuesday afternoon I sat in my cubbyhole office on Atlantic Avenue, depressed. I knew that later that day, fifteen people, at most, would come to church to pray. How could God call me and my wife to this city not to make a difference? I wondered.
I walked into our empty, little sanctuary and recited to God a list of my problems: “Look at this building, this neighborhood … Our offerings are laughable … I can’t trust So-and-so … There’s so little to work with.”
Then the Holy Spirit impressed upon me, “I will show you the biggest problem in the church. It’s you.”
In that moment I saw with excruciating clarity that I didn’t really love the people as God wanted me to. I prepared sermons just to get through another Sunday. I was basically prayerless. I was proud.
I fell on my face before God and began to weep. “God, whatever it takes, please change me. I would rather die than live out some useless ministry of catch phrases.”
That was a turning point for me and the church. In the weeks and months that followed, I continued to seek God, and my sermons began to have a sincere urgency.
“God wants to change us,” I said from the pulpit. “If we’ll let him work in us, all things are possible. We can be a church that makes a difference, that helps people find Christ.”
The Brooklyn Tabernacle began to turn around, and twenty years later, we are still learning about the tremendous power of prayer. Every Tuesday evening many hundreds of people come together simply to pray.
SENSING OUR NEED
That experience (and many others) taught me that when we don’t pray, it’s primarily because we don’t sense our need for God. Revivals have resulted not merely from a message of revival but from a dissatisfaction among Christian leaders. Revival won’t come until we come to the end of ourselves.
For me, that moment came when I sensed that despite the soundness of our doctrine, our congregation didn’t match up to the model given us in the Word. I would read in Acts that “The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord” (11:21). Then I would think, Our doctrine is sound, the people are sincere, so what’s wrong? Is it our hearts? We may have to scrap everything, go back to zero, and ask, “God, what do you want to do in this church?”
When Barnabas came to Antioch, he “saw the evidence of the grace of God” (Acts 11:23). I longed for a church where people would be struck not by how clever the sermon is or how big the facility is but by the grace of God.
The good news is, once a minister has been given this seeking spirit, that desire is contagious. Hunger for God is contagious. Our attitude will communicate to people.
Before we begin to teach, we need to realize our own need and cry out to God. That is the fountainhead from which the waters flow.
POINTING OUT THE DISPARITY
Preaching remains one of the key ways we can inspire people to pray. It’s possible, though, to preach in such a way that people leave more defeated and discouraged. I want to challenge listeners and give them confidence to draw near the throne of grace. To implant a positive motivation to pray involves two key steps, and it’s important not to stop after the first one.
The first step is to help people face reality. Preaching can become a searchlight to help people see the disparity between who they are and who God calls them to be. I might do that by reading Romans 12:11, which says, “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.” Then I might illustrate that kind of zeal in Acts 2: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. … And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 4:42-47).
To bring home the disparity between that zeal for prayer and many Christians’ lukewarmness, I might ask, “Isn’t something wrong when many church members spend countless hours watching television but struggle with going to church one hour a week?”
It’s crucial that all this be said in love, not anger. I know a pastor who burns with desire to see the church be all it should be. The more I heard him preach, however, the more I felt he was angry with his members, mad at them for what they weren’t doing.
D.L. Moody got it right when he said, “If love doesn’t prompt it, it isn’t worth anything.” But if the words are said with love, by this point in a sermon many will sense their need.
POINTING TO THE PROMISES
I can’t leave people there.
They would walk out of church disheartened. To stop at this point is legalistic preaching, for it tells people what they should do–“pray more”–but does not lead them to the promises of God. I want people to know that we all can humble ourselves and go to the throne of grace, where we’ll find strength to pray–that we’ll find grace and mercy to help us in our time of need.
After pointing out the disparity, we must point to God’s promises. This is the essential second step.
The great Puritan preachers like Thomas Hooker let the law savage people but then quickly brought the balm of the gospel. What lifts people are the redemptive promises of Christ.
God doesn’t call anybody to do anything without promising the grace to do it, and God’s grace flows through his promises. The new covenant is characterized by promises of what God will do. “I will wipe away their sins; I will put my law in their heart; I will put my Spirit within them.” Such promises draw us to God. They inspire us to trust him to do the work.
In one recent service, I had pointed out our need to pray through Isaiah 64, which begins, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.” That’s crying out to God for our need, which has accompanied all revivals.
I then pointed to the promises of God: “Later Isaiah says, ‘No ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.’ We have to wait for God. After we’ve given him the problem and still don’t know what to do, we need to spend time with him. When we do, we will find he acts on behalf of those who wait for him.”
Such a promise of God lifts people and motivates them in a positive way.
PROVIDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR RESPONSE
Even passionate preaching won’t achieve its purpose, though, if we don’t give people a chance to respond. It’s counterproductive to stir people with the Word of God and then say “Amen. Now, remember, tonight there’s a potluck dinner.” The difference between a lecture and a sermon is that the sermon calls for response. Allowing for that response is especially important in moving people to God in prayer.
At a convention, I heard a preacher deliver a powerful sermon, and when he finished, the congregation gave a prolonged standing ovation. He got embarrassed and kept nodding his head as the people continued to applaud. Finally the leader of the meeting returned to the microphone.
I felt bad for that leader and felt the Holy Spirit must have been grieved. Since when does someone preaching about Christ get a standing ovation? The kind of response I’d rather see is people expressing their need to God so that God can refill them with power. The sermon is not a centerpiece but an arrow pointing them to the living Christ.
How people will respond varies with each congregation. But somehow we’ve got to fight the temptation for everything to be strictly orderly and over on time. We have to find ways that allow people to respond, to pray, to repent, to ask, to wait. The mere presentation of truth is not going to change anyone. God is the one who makes the changes, so we must provide opportunities for people to “come boldly to the throne of grace.”
OPENING TO THE UNEXPECTED
God is a great God, and he often does the unexpected. As we see our need and begin to call on God in prayer, we never know what may happen. We have to learn to be open to the unexpected.
Once I was preaching on the love of God, and I ended with an appeal to nonchristians: “For those of you who don’t know the Lord,” I said, “what will condemn you is that you reject God’s love. He reached to you until the last breath you had, and he was saying, ‘Come to me.'”
As I made this appeal, I closed my eyes. A man in the back of the auditorium got up and started walking down the aisle toward me. What I didn’t see, because I had my eyes closed, was that he had drawn a .45 revolver and pointed it at me. My wife, Carol, was playing some background music, and she yelled, “Jim!” twice–but I didn’t hear her. It was too late for the ushers to stop him, and he walked up on the platform.
This man walked over and threw down his gun on the pulpit. Then he panicked and began to run off the platform. I sensed his inner cry, “Jesus help me,” so I ran after him down the steps. Right in front of everyone he fell, crying, and ushers came to get him under control and to pray with him.
I went back to the pulpit and held up this gun, which I didn’t know was loaded. Who knows what to do in a moment like that? There was pandemonium, yet also a sense of God’s presence.
Then I realized what had happened inside this man. He’d had this gun (and was planning to use it after the meeting, I learned later), but as he heard of God’s love, he thought, I’ve just got to get this gun off of me, and I might as well give it to the preacher. He had never wanted to hurt me.
I held up the gun and said, “Look what God’s love can make someone give up.” As I said that, people began getting up out of their chairs and coming forward to repent and pray. I didn’t even call them. They just came because God had unexpectedly shown his love. We baptized more than 20 people from that one meeting.
I never want to let fear of the unexpected cause me to institutionalize lukewarmness. Our God hasn’t run out of love and power. As we pray and cry out to him, and invite others to do so, he will move in our midst. If we will call on him, he will do what he has promised to do.
Copyright 1994 Jim Cymbala
Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
