Pray Bold III

by Matt Bullen January 26, 2017

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Pray, Record, Rejoice, Pray Bolder

Psalms 116:1-2 (NLT) I love the lord because he hears my voice and my prayer for mercy. Because he bends down to listen, I will pray as long as I have breath!

David says quite tenderly that his love for the Lord and his commitment to pray is significantly bolstered by the fact that God hears and answers his prayers. I know exactly what he means. One of the most encouraging things you can do and one that will become an impetus for bolder praying is keeping a prayer list and marking down the dates when those prayers are answered. Oh my goodness! I can’t count the times I have gone back and looked at my old prayer lists and realized that God had answered some HUGE prayer request but in my frail humanity I had already forgotten that I prayed for it or at least that I had written it down. And oh! the joy and the upbuilding of my faith when I go back and read those old prayer lists and see all that God has done. It makes me want to pray all the more and it makes me want to PRAY BOLD because I know He hears me and He answers.

When our children were young we had a spiral notebook in which we wrote our family prayer requests. We would sit down periodically, review the former prayer requests, write down the answers that had come, pray over the ones not answered yet, and write in the new requests on a fresh page with that day’s date. It was stunning how specifically and supernaturally God would answer those prayers. Eventually it was many pages long and we would go back and just rejoice in seeing the crazy answers God had given. Our children didn’t have to be convinced that God answers prayer. They witnessed it firsthand! And talk about life impact! Many of the dreams/prayers we wrote in that spiral notebook we are living today.

On January 1, 2013 I wrote out 6 items in my Evernote App that for the most part seemed totally impossible to me at the time but were heart desires that I wanted to ask God for in 2013. I wrote them, closed the app and frankly forgot all about that note. I didn’t see it again until December of 2013 and I’ll never forget the way my heart leapt into my throat when I ran across it again because God had stupendously and miraculously answered each one and I had forgotten that I even wrote them down. My oldest son Luke and I did have a miraculous mission trip to Colombia together that forever changed both of our lives. On that trip was born the idea for our current Global Evangelism ministry. Also on that trip we cemented our relationship with a young man by the name of Oscar Useche who is now my son-in-law and our director of Mission Critical Colombia. And Rebekah did go to Zambia 2 months later and lived there for 2 years and was instrumental in establishing an orphanage that is changing the lives of children every day and gave us the idea for Mercy’s Houses all over Africa. I love the Lord because He hears my voice…

Well, you can bet I have made a similar list at the beginning of each new year since and you can bet that they have gotten larger and bolder… much BOLDER. And you can bet that God has and is answering them in stupendous ways. On January 7, 2014 I wrote a list of 21 things I desperately wanted from God. Not all of them have been answered yet but some of the most outlandish ones have been answered in vastly more outlandish ways than I even asked for. There were names of some of my children on that list who at the time were VERY far from God with only one word “Awakening” written next to their name. Praise our blessed Savior!!! They are all on fire for God and working with us in the ministry today. MIRACLE!!! OUTLANDISH CRAZY MIRACLE!!! I can hardly type right now for the tears in my eyes. I love the Lord because He hears my prayer for mercy… In 2015 I named the list “My Crazy Prayers 2015” (See Photo). You can see the answers in bold type next to the prayer request (PTL is Praise The Lord). The requests with nothing after them are as yet unanswered… I love the Lord… He bends down to listen to me…

I have 4 Evernote prayer lists going right now called “Personal Prayer List”, “2017 Prayer Budget”, “Crazy Prayers”, and “BIG HARRY AUDACIOUS PRAYERS” (BHAP)… You don’t get to see the last three. Those are for our (superlatives fail me) God’s eyes only! I can tell you that the BHAP prayer list starts out like this, “Written on October 15, 2015 on the porch in Liberia looking out at the sea…” I can tell you the Crazy Prayers list starts out, “Written on the balcony of Dian Fossey Hotel, Rubavu, Rwanda July 20, 2016.” I can tell you that the 2017 Prayer Budget is over a half million dollars and that $36K has already come in this month for projects in South America and Africa solely by prayer alone. The answers are not all about money either.

The miraculous money answers are just easy to cite but He has healed people, saved people, dramatically called and sent people into the mission field, literally saved lives that were about to perish, paid the rent at the last moment straight out of the blue on numerous occasions, and on and on solely by prayer. And He has done it in ridiculous ways that can’t be explained apart from answered prayer. So even having 4 prayer lists with each one escalating in ridiculousness, God gave my wife and me a wonderful gift this year that was so crazy it didn’t even dawn on me to ask for it or to put it on any of those lists. That gift was our entire family, minus one daughter and one daughter-in-law, ministering together on the same mission trip in Colombia in June. He even answers prayers we haven’t thought of or don’t have the faith to pray.

I hope you know I am only sharing these things because I want YOU to PRAY BOLD. We’re dumbfounded and humbled by what God is doing in our ministry and family and we never ask for money except from the Lord. No one has ever seen these prayer lists until now, not even my wife. But I knew when I started this blog series that I would have to show some of them because He deserves the glory!!!! We also have a journal that we sit down as a family and just like back in the day review previous requests, marvel and rejoice at the answers, write down our new requests, pray over them (sometimes this gets pretty wild, lots of tears, agonizing, and lasts a long time), and then we charge ahead trusting Him to carry our burdens. I have prayer notifications on my phone that go off everyday at 7:00 a.m., noon, and 9:00 p.m. that remind me to pray for certain people or things on other lists. And at the end of every day I wish I had prayed more. I plead with God to make me a mighty man of prayer because I know that the greatest need of the thousands of people I love is more of Jesus.

Many a night as I fall asleep, I can see my wife’s candle flickering under the prayer closet door and I know she is shaking heaven’s door off the hinges. Many a morning when I awake, I can see her candle flickering under the door and hear her cries for God to move on our behalf and I know craziness is about to ensue. I’ve watched God answer so many HUGE prayers for my daughter Rebekah that I tease her, “Please, just don’t ever pray against me about anything!” In January 2016 our son Luke stood up at a Mission Critical meeting and said, “We just need to write down every crazy thing we want to do for God this year and pray and believe it.” And we did and God heard and gave us the best year of our lives. When my daughter Misti decides God wants her to pray a little boy out of foster care in Florida and into her home in Texas, better get a room ready. Sometimes the answers to my son Levi’s prayers are so sudden and showy they scare me a little and I look over at him like, “Dude! That was you wasn’t it?” When my daughter Brooke starts beating the floor and marching around and singing while she’s praying for someone, get ready! You had better get ready!! When my son Oscar says he is praying about a preaching tour with me through Colombia, you better get some sermons ready and pack your bags! When my daughter Mercy tells you she asked God for a school for Liberian orphans, watch out! When our daughter Beverly writes down big crazy prayers on yellow poster board and hangs them on your living room drapes, get ready for your ministry to go to whole new levels! When your son Travis says he is praying about going on a mission trip with you, get ready for the whole family to get in on he idea. When your son Juan David that you adopted out of the streets of Bogota, Colombia tells you he’s praying for you, your heart just melts and runs out onto the floor… BOLD Prayer is REAL, POWERFUL, and REQUIRED. He hears us and He acts. He alone has done these things and is doing these things in answer to the feeble prayers of a little family from Texas… and He will do it for you. We will PRAY as long as we have breath…

[quote] “So take Jesus at his word. Ask him. Tell him what you want… Write out your prayer requests; don’t mindlessly drift through life on the American narcotic of busyness. If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don’t let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.” ― Paul E. Miller[/quote]

[quote]“If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But, if like Jesus you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray.” ― Paul E. Miller[/quote]