Danny ChaiI don’t typically love books about prayer because no matter how good they are they’re limited – prayer’s about doing, not reading so there’s only so much a book can help. This includes Richard Foster and Tim Keller. Good reads but utterly useless without doing.
For some reason this book has lingered with me for weeks even with the low expectations I had for it. It’s helpful in that it’s more a survey / bunch of case studies than anything else, and that ends up being pretty inspiring. The story that starts the book in particular has really stuck in my head. I’ll just quote it:
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“Oh no! I’ve lost Billy Graham!”
The security guard panicked. He had one job to do; watch the backstage of the auditorium to make sure Billy Graham was safe. He had walked out the door for a moment to check the alleyway, then returned back inside–and in that brief moment, he lost the world’s most famous preacher.
Searching backstage, he heard a desperate voice crying out from the catwalk, and when he climbed to the top, he found Billy Graham on his face, pleading in prayer, “God, I cannot do this without You! God, I need Your strength and power to speak today.”
That day Billy Graham was preparing to address a midsize group of leaders for only fifteen minutes.
If anyone could deliver a fifteen-minute talk in his own strength or gravitas, it would have been Billy Graham, an incredibly talented orator who literally spoke to millions of people, and met and talked with the most powerful leaders on earth.
But instead, Billy Graham prayed as if the exact opposite were true. He fell on his face, crying out desperately to God. Despite his experience, qualifications, and position as a global leader, Billy Graham lived with a heightened awareness of his reliance on God: an awareness evidenced in his prayer life.
Billy Graham seemed to take Jesus at His word when He said, “Apart from me you can do nothing.”
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Man, that’s challenging.
So the book makes many recommendations, but there’s one that’s also lingered with me. It says that churches and Christian organizations should pay people to pray. Sometimes that looks like allocating specific hours in a job for prayer. Sometimes it looks like hiring people for the specific role of prayer. They acknowledge that might make some people uncomfortable, but they think it’s no different than hiring someone for their teaching gifts. They believe that if prayer matters, organizations need to invest financially in it. That’s wild.
It reminded me of something Ted said to me years ago as my worship pastor. I think we were talking about prayer requests and he was saying how he saw prayer as his primary job role. I should not feel bad about asking for prayer because as he worded it, he got “paid to pray”. It was jarring to me at the time when he said it but it’s stuck in my mind ever since. Paid to pray.