NASHVILLE (BP) – Extraordinary prayer is experienced when you pray beyond your normal practice of prayer. If you ordinarily pray five minutes a day or an hour a day, anything beyond your ordinary becomes extraordinary.
Practicing ordinary prayer can become extraordinary in the following ways:
- Extraordinary in Time: This is in relationship to the length you pray.
- Extraordinary in Days: This is in relationship to the number of days you may desire to focus on a specific prayer need.
- Extraordinary in Commitment: This is in relationship to combining your prayers with fasting.
- Extraordinary in Focus: While extraordinary prayer can occur in your normal daily life, there are certain times in your life when you will need to focus on a specific burden in prayer. Therefore, perhaps a one-day prayer retreat may be helpful.
I am convinced that practicing extraordinary prayer in a specific way will elevate your prayer life in an extraordinary way. Jonathan Edwards believed that when God wants to accomplish something special in a church, extraordinary prayer usually precedes it.
We are living in a season in our generation where extraordinary prayer needs to be a consistent practice in our lives. We need it. Our pastors need it. Our churches need it. Our Southern Baptist family needs it. Our country needs it. Our world needs it.
The greater the burden we carry, the more desperation rises to practice extraordinary prayer.
Self-sufficiency leads to a prayerless life, a prayerless church, and a prayerless Convention. I believe it is time for all of us to practice extraordinary prayer.
Extraordinary prayer will lead you to believe God will do something extraordinary through your life, your church, and even through us, together, as we take the Gospel to the entire world.
Our missionaries in America and around the world need to know we are praying them through these difficult times. This requires from us extraordinary prayer.
Trusting God in these challenging days for the next Great Awakening in our time takes an extraordinary commitment from us to pray like it really matters, believing God is able to do what no one else can.
The skeptics doubt. The cynics mock.
But we believe God, because, “…with God, all things are possible.” Matthew 19:26.
Extraordinary prayer is needed in this hour.
Extraordinary prayer precedes any great movement of God.
Extraordinary prayer precedes any God-sized advance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Extraordinary prayer precedes any God-sized church-planting movement.
Extraordinary prayer precedes any God-sized sending of missionaries to the nations.
For the sake of the spiritually lost across America and the world, we need to practice extraordinary prayer. No great movement of God has ever occurred that does not begin with the extraordinary prayer of God’s people.
Without question, there is power in extraordinary prayer.
It is time for us to feel such a great burden about where we find ourselves today that we are led to do something about it.
One thing we can do: Practice Extraordinary Prayer.
Now is the time to lead.
