Kingdom-Centered Prayer II

In this summary, Keller summarizes three principles or characteristics of effective kingdom-centered prayer. It is (1) extraordinary, (2) prevailing, and (3) repentant.

1. First Principle: EXTRAORDINARY PRAYER (Acts 1:14; 2:42)
It is interesting to see that revivals usually start with a very small group of people — sometimes just one person — who begin to pray for God’s glory in the community. Usually it is just a handful of people; always it is some kind of ”extraordinary” prayer beyond the normal services and patterns of prayer.
Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier was a layman in the North Dutch Reformed Church on Fulton Street in New York. He decided to hold a prayer meeting at noon on Wednesdays for businessmen who worked in the immediate neighborhood. The first meeting was held on September 23, 1857. The first person to join Lanphier was half an hour late; several others came even later. But the meeting quickly grew, and one month later they decided to meet daily. Within months, newspapers estimated that 10,000 were gathering every noon to pray. By May 1858, about 50,000 new people had joined the churches, out of a city population of roughly 800,000. It started with one man, and then a small group, who wanted to pray.

D. M. Lloyd-Jones says that revivals start when “We have to go out of our way. Now, this is the question that I want to impress upon your minds… Are you just content with coming to services… and doing some routine things?

2. Second principle – PREVAILING PRAYER (Luke 18:1/Eph. 6:18)
I have posted watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the LORD, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth. (Isaiah 62:6-7)

What is startling here is Isaiah’s call to “give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth.” The language seems too bold. As Lloyd-Jones so vividly says it, “Give him no rest, give yourself no rest. Keep on. Bombard God. Bombard heaven until the answers come.”
Consider Abraham praying for Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:16-33). These cities were incredibly wicked and violent, yet Abraham prays to God to spare them over and over and over. “Will you spare them for fifty righteous?” “All right,” says God. “How about forty? Thirty? Twenty?”

God, who obviously does not need us to pray in order to carry out his will, who does not need reminding and repetition, nonetheless wants us to pray in a sustained, prevailing way. Why?

It is not to press God repeatedly because we believe we deserve it. It is not to press God repeatedly because we are simply desperate out of inordinate desire. It is to press God in prayer because he calls on us to do it. This is the way he wants us to seek him and his good things. But why does want us to do it this way?

First, God wants us to do it this way so that our hearts lose their self-sufficiency. Only if we pray in a sustained way do we come to a deep recognition of our utter dependence on God. If God’s blessings came upon us without a lot of prayer, we would be hard-hearted and proud…
Second, God wants us to do it so that our hearts will be prepared to rejoice in God as the author of all blessings. If God’s blessings just came upon us without a lot of prayer, we would not perceive him as the source of everything we need. When the blessing comes, we will not be filled with gratitude — the only proper stance of the human heart toward God and life itself.

Third, when we do prevailing prayer corporately, then the attainment of blessings creates community, knitting our hearts together. When we pray together for our church, it unites us and makes us look to God instead of blaming others for any flaws in the church’s life.
In short, God calls us to do prevailing prayer because he knows that it is very dangerous to give us very many good things unless our hearts and spiritual vision are prepared through lots of prayer.

3. Third Principle – REPENTANT PRAYER (Rev. 2:5)
Kingdom-centered prayer also calls us to a corporate repentance and longing for God. It is characterized by repentance over our lack of love, joy, zeal for the lost, hunger for God and so on. Renewal begins always with a deeper conviction of sin and proceeds to a concomitant (associated, simultaneous) wonder and enjoyment of grace and love. The deeper one feels his or her sin-debt, the more highly he feels the wonder of the payment.
A repentance that is gospel-based is essential. Without an orientation to the gospel, our hearts will repent out of fear of the consequences and God’s rejection. But the gospel leads us to repent because Jesus died for our sins so we would not be rejected. Legalistic remorse says, “I broke God’s rules,” while real repentance says, “I broke God’s heart.” The gospel creates the only kind of grief over sin that is clean and does not crush.
The grace of God creates the only motivation that leads you to hate the sin without hating yourself. It is the only motivation that will cause sin to lose its attractive power over you.
A gospel-based repentance also enables individuals and churches to face their self-righteousness, those forms of the flesh that are the roots of sinful behavior. We come to understand that we should not only repent of our sins, but also of our “righteousness.”
These forms of righteousness” may include good works, spiritual disciplines, and orthodox theology along with things like power, success, and the approval of others. Thus gospel repentance is a repentance that turns from self-sufficiency, self-confidence, self-righteousness and the fears and insecurities that result. Repentance sees them for what they are — a proud refusal to accept the Father’s love, which is free through Christ.

"The broken heart is the healed heart,
the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
and the repenting soul is the victorious soul."
(The Valley of Vision)