Lent and the Discipline of Prayer

by Josh Martin, Resonate Pullman pastor

If you’re a believer in Jesus, then God’s goal for your life is total transformation.  

God’s strategy for this transformation is the gift of a new heart and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  This new heart that God gives us is filled with new desires, but it does not come pre-packaged with new disciplines.  

The way we participate is by creating new disciplines and allowing the Spirit to change us through these disciples, and none are more significant than bible reading, prayer, and fasting.  

Over the last 10 years our church has taken the 40 days leading up to Easter, commonly known as Lent, and leveraged this season to give up something and take on something.  

We engage this season with heightened discipline, fasting, praying, and repenting. Fasting is a temporary renunciation of a good thing, like food, television, social media, sleeping in, coffee, sugar, etc… in order to intensify our expression of need for something great, namely God’s power and presence in our life and our church.  

This year for Lent we want to corporately focus on the discipline of prayer.  

Here’s the plan: A church-wide commitment to pray for 1 hour a day for 40 days.

How you get involved is by downloading the Resonate app or going to lent.resonate.net to receive daily scripture reading, prayer requests for your site, and a music playlist.

Each day you can pray alone, ask your huddle to pick a time together, or join in the church-wide schedule that will be made available at each of your sites.  Each site will provide an opportunity to pray together for this hour Monday-Friday.  The weekends will have no corporate schedule.

The hour of prayer will follow the same daily rhythm and will be guided with an hour long soundtrack, scripture reading, and a prayer list, ensuring that you feel equipped to make it the full hour.

Here’s the rhythm: Each day you will follow this four section pattern.   

1. (15 min) READ:  We want to spend the first 15 minutes reading the daily scripture and asking God to speak to you.  As we read, we are hearing from the Lord and tuning our hearts in preparation for prayer.  The word convicts our hearts, renews our minds, and  informs our prayers.

2. (10 min) REPENT/BELIEVE:  For the next ten minutes we repent of anything going on in our heart that is not like Christ.  You ask God to search us and change us.  We confess our sinful thoughts and actions and believe again the good news that Jesus alone gives us right standing before God.

3. (25 min) ASK:  The next 25 minutes is petition prayer.  We’re asking God to move and provide breakthrough in ways only he can.  We’re praying for the lost, we’re praying for financial provision, we’re praying for leaders to be raised up, we’re praying for wisdom, and we’re asking for power.  Your site will provide a list of more specific prayer needs, and of course we can also pray for things we know about that are going on in our church.  This is a great time to pray with someone else or to write out your prayers on a tear sheet.  

4. (10 min) PRAISE: We want to end each time by worshiping God and giving Him glory for who He is.  We can sing to him or pray prayers of adoration, but all in all be reminded that God is good, He is in control, and He can be trusted to meet all of our needs in Christ.

We believe that during this season God is going to meet us in prayer and move in mighty ways in the life of our church.  We know the vision God has given Resonate can only be accomplished through extraordinary prayer.  May this season give us the breakthrough God wants for us, and may it give us the discipline to carry on a life saturated in prayer.  

“Prayer is not preparation for the battle, prayer is the battle.” -Leonard Ravenhill