Just some of the stuff from the book that made me pause and write it down in my notebook.
You talk to God like a friend. You vent. You ask. You laugh. You listen. You unload. You just talk.
- Remember who God is.
- Remember who you are
- Remember who we are to each other.
A maturing community is a confessing community, not a church without sin, but a church without secrets. Spiritual maturity means more confession.
On August 13, 1727, they gathered for another ordinary church meeting. Nikolaus Ludwig Von Zinzendorf preached a powerful sermon on the cross, and as he did, the Holy Spirit fell in such an overwhelming way that in that very moment, in that very meeting room, they began to confess their wrongs and forgive one another – no buts, no explanations, no holding back – just naming the wrongs and wiping the slate clean. The Spirit fell so heavily that they stayed for hours in confession and actually stumbled out of the church service dizzy with supernatural experience, like drunk out of a pub at last call.
Two weeks after that night, they decided to start a prayer meeting. That prayer meeting lasted a hundred years.
So how did the Moravian revival happen? Most historians say, “Prayer — the whole thing was fueled by prayer.” And there’s a lot of truth to that. But according to the forty-eight refugees in the room — the eyewitnesses who lived and experienced it — they would have said, “No, no, no. One hundred years of prayer was just an overflow of one night of unfiltered, healing confession.”
Revival did not happen because everyone agreed it was a good idea; it happened because everyone stripped off their fig leaves in front of one another.
The motive behind all true intercessory prayer is love for the other.
We dream of a God who brings heaven to earth; God dreams of praying people to share heaven with.
God is a relational being to know, not a formula to master.
Tsedaqah: To be righteous is to care for the poor, and to care for the poor is to be righteous.
Our lives are about intimacy. Fruitfulness is the collateral gain of that intimacy.
God does not dream of the church on fire; God dreams of the city reborn. God dreams about pouring his Spirit out on the whole city.
“Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of Himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive Him and keep Him as your own.” — Mother Teresa
We come for gifts, and we get the giver. And we find ourselves seated at the table, welcomed, accepted, and loved, being fed, being listened to, relaxing in the warm presence of the loving God.
Pray with the heart of a lover and the discipline of a monk. That’s how you choose fidelity, and when you do, it quenches your desires in such a satisfying way that everything else becomes the boring part.
The picture I shared is a painting of Andrie Rblev.