AUSTRALIA’S 40 DAYS OF PRAYER
SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS
including Daily Readings with full Biblical references ( N.I.V.), application to local issues, guest interviews and key articles.
In setting aside 40 days seeking God we need the Holy Spirit to lead us into something new, fresh revelation and real transformation. Invite God to break our automatic choices, old mindsets, limiting expectations, familiar emotional reactiveness and religious habits.
At our assembly on Australia Day a person saw Christ’s blood as poured out for us and yet our land and people are perishing so she asked the Lord why his blood was not reaching us and saw a veneer like a hard plastic shell over the city. The veneer was a sneer of self sufficiency and complacency preventing redemption from transforming the land and people. During this 40 days we, as the Church, need to rent open our coverings of pride and correctness so we receive the outpouring of God’s merciful grace of God and so God’s transformational love can saturate, heal and restore us.
Joel 2:13 Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.
The 40 day readings are a guide for reading and reflection, rather than a specific prayer guide. Let the Spirit lead you deeper into real relationship with your Lord. Open your heart to Him in honest and reflective ways. Let your prayer emerge as real communication with God. If it is a conversation and you expect dialogue you will allocate periods of listening and waiting within your prayer time. The Spirit can bring Word to us through our recall of a Scriptural text, song or memory, and as the Word of God, open the Scriptural readings to us in fresh perspective, living Truth and conviction of applications in our life.
These 40 days of conversational prayer can be more than 40 days of petitioning if we invite God to lead us into relational connection with Him in our prayer time. Jesus has taught us critical elements that balanced prayer times include.
Adoration: We gain God’s perspective of our circumstance when we spend time in adoring, marveling, praising, worshipping and celebrating Who God Is through prayer as well as music.
Confession: As God’s gifts of life and love flow in us we see ourselves and with relief release the accusations of the enemy, the dirty rages of our own performance, our small mindedness, judgments, criticisms, offenses and self comforts. In the light of God’s love and enablement we are able to confess our sin and inadequacy freely to God and each other and be healed. (James 5:16)
Thanksgiving: When we receive who we are before God – sons and daughter lavishly loved with the right to belong, we can rest in God without having to earn our place. We can boldly exercise our right to access to God’s person, time, resources, power and the fullness of our inheritance. Each time we remember our prayer and testimony will break into thanksgiving. This is in response to Who God Is! It is in response to what has already been done for us – in that God loved us so much that he made a Way through Jesus to reconcile us to himself. To do this God became human so that He could come to us! Isn’t it amazing!
Supplication: When we remain in God; when we are one with Jesus as He is one with the Father, our prayers of petition seek God’s will on earth and speak God’s will into being. Our prayer is no longer requesting our fantasies in our timing and in forms we devise. Our prayer and fast is not to pacify and convince a remote or angry power. We are God’s children who delight in being one with him and so obey and submit to his will. God’s plans for us are perfectly encapsulating, healing and fulfilling. When we know and pray the will of God it is easy to pray with belief, faith and expectation, speaking into being what God would do.
Our prayer is not merely words. It is in our doing, our working, play, exercise and spontaneous encounters. God’s presence can permeate it all, breaking down any distinction we might make between the ‘secular’ and the spiritual aspects of our lives. Our invitation to God’s presence is in our constant awareness so that we are, throughout our day, modifying our responses to be closer to him, to delight him and see his will done. Our prayer becomes as natural and unconscious as our breath.