MT: Hi Everyone! We are so excited to welcome you to our next, or, our current Online Bible
Study, starting today, “Dangerous Prayers.” My name is Melissa Taylor, I’m with Proverbs
31 Ministries and joining me today, the President of Proverbs 31 Ministries, Lysa TerKeurst.
LT: Thank you, Melissa. MT: And pastor and author of the study that
we’re starting, Craig Groeschel. It’s great to have you with us.
GC: Thank you Melissa and Lysa, and I just have to say I am the number one guy fan of
Proverbs 31 in the whole wide world. MT: Yay.
LT: Thank you. GC: Seriously, what you do is amazing and
on behalf of all the people that I love, the impact of what you do is incredibly important,
powerful, special, and I wanted to be with you guys.
LT: Thank you. MT: Thank you so much.
LT: I’ve loved being friends with you and Amy for a long time and you’ve got daughters
and so it always excites me when I hear a father encourage us that the ministry matters.
Because that is our prayer that we not only impact women, but we impact the families through
the daughters and the next generations and even help shape some perceptions in families,
so thank you, your encouragement is a gift. CG: Well, I want to be a leading voice, as
a man, to empower women in ministry and leadership and business and so, what you do is really
building people’s faith and I just want to come along and cheer you on, keep going.
Keep doing it. LT: Thank you.
MT: Thank you, that means a lot. LT: It really does. And we are celebrating
your book, what a gift that you have given all of us in this book, “Dangerous Prayers”
and I love the subtitle too, “because following Jesus was never meant to be safe”.
CG: Right. LT: That reminds me, hints of the C.S. Lewis
“Chronicles of Narnia” and Aslan and you know we’re not supposed to try to tame God.
CG: Yes. LT: But just to follow God and it’s just
a really quite a gift. So tell us about the cover. What’s the story, what’s the symbolism,
what’s the meaning behind the cover of “Dangerous Prayers”?
CG: Well, what we wanted to do was really try to help people see that prayer is not
just a safe, rote, ‘God bless me, Keep me safe, Bless my food’ type of thing. So on
the cover, of course you got the prayer hands, then we wanted to put flames around it to
kind of symbolize that flames can kind of represent the Holy Spirit, but also that these
are fiery, gutsy, raw, faith-filled prayers. And of course the dark is supposed to be showing
just a little bit that this is dangerous and mysterious, so hopefully it’s one that grabs
your interest. I know a lot of people feel sometimes insecure about their prayer life.
Even Christians will be like, “I don’t know if it matters, I don’t know if I’m
doing it right.” And so hopefully this is one that gets their attention so that they
can grow in their faith and really understand that ‘I do have the access to go before
the Throne of Grace and talk to God and listen to Him talk to me.’
LT: And I think most of us feel that we want to have a good prayer life, but there’s
some questions around prayer to the extent where I think that most of us, I think if
you were to grab the vast majority of people and say, “Do you have an amazing prayer
life?” they would be hesitant to answer that question, y’know.
CG: Right. LT: I love how you start so vulnerably at
the beginning of the book. You don’t come out swinging, saying, “I’ve had an amazing
prayer life for forty years!” y’know. You said, “Maybe you can relate. It’s
not that you don’t believe in prayer. You do. But you’re stuck in a rut. You pray
about the same struggles and the same requests. In the same way. At the same time. If you
even try to pray at all. You feel like your prayers just always stay safe. You really
aren’t sure how and your prayers are flat, dull, predictable, stale and boring”. And
that revelation came off of a friend saying something to you that it kinda shocked me
when I read it. It’s like, ‘Do you still believe in miracles?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Good.
Because your prayers are so lame.’ Right, y’know?
(Laughter) LT: It’s like, wow, that was the right way
to start this book because I think all of us kind of lean in and we feel that way about
our prayers, but I would say the number one question that I get about prayer and I would
love to ask you this question: Does prayer matter? Like, do we pray because we hope we
can change God’s mind to be more in alignment with what we really want, in situations that
we have. CG: You know, it’s interesting that you
ask that because even as a pastor, and I’ve been in ministry for a long time, there are
times when I ask myself that. Like, does this really matter? Because it seems like, whatever
is gonna happen tends to happen. God’s gonna do whatever He wants anyway, and I think it
matters for a lot of reasons. Meaning that our faith does touch the heart of God and
it honors God. Like if a little child, if one of my children asks me for something,
even if I’m going to say ‘No’ because I know it’s not in my child’s best interest,
their faith touches me and there’s also, if they’re not asking and I’m not responding
and we’re not communicating, we don’t really, we don’t have a relationship. And
so it’s not that prayer is just a transaction where I ask and God does or doesn’t do.
In the same way in a marriage, I might ask Amy to do something for me and she might say,
‘No, I’m not going to’ or she might say ‘Yes’ and the meaning might not be
in me getting my desired result, the meaning might be in the conversation.
LT: That’s a good example. CG: So, does prayer move God? Yes, it does.
It’s not the ‘rub the genie and get what you want’ or ‘put the quarters in the
machine, push the button and you always get the same thing.’ It’s not formulaic like
that. It is relational and let’s say you’re praying for somebody – you’ve had a lot
of prayers for people you care about. I would say your prayers for somebody may or may not
change them, but your prayers always change you. And that’s kind of the way I see it
with God is, He may hear my prayers and say ‘Yes’ and do what I’m asking. He may
hear my prayers and say, ‘No’, He may hear my prayers and say, ‘Wait.’ And whether
it changes what he does or doesn’t do, it always changes me to know that I’m surrendering
my will to Him and yet, going before Him very boldly and saying, “Here’s what I want,
God. I believe that You can, I’m asking You to do it and even if You don’t, I still
believe.” LT: I was praying about something recently
and part of what I have to wrestle through in making my heart tender enough to really
be able to hear from the Lord in praying is I feel so utterly confident sometimes. Not
all the time, but so utterly confident in some situations, what the best outcome would
be. CG: Right.
MT: Yes. LT: And what God’s will is. It just seems
so obvious. And so I was praying about something recently and it seemed like the more I prayed
about it, the more opposite of an answer started to be revealed. And so one day I sat down
before the Lord and I just said, “I am absolutely, absolutely aggravated and in a state where
I just don’t even want to talk to You about this anymore. Because I can so clearly see
what’s best and You seem to be, instead of shutting this down, You seem to be flinging
the doors open and I don’t understand.” And I can’t say it was an audible voice
– I don’t even want to say the words were directly from God, but this impression that
I got on my heart so strongly from the Lord is “This is my answer to your prayer. I’m
not ignoring you. I’m not absent from the situation. I’m answering your prayer, but
because it doesn’t look like you thought it was going to look, you think that I’m
not involved. I am involved and this is My answer.” And so it started me on this process
of, talk about dangerous prayers, trying to look at what is in front of me today and search
out, ‘This is an answer and this is an answer and this is an answer’. Because sometimes
I find with my prayers, I pray, then I forget to get up from my prayer and realize that
I just invited the presence of God to do life with me and I need to get up from my prayers
and I need to look specifically for evidence, both that looks like I thought it would but
especially when it’s evidence that I know it’s God, but it looks so opposite of what
I thought it would. MT: Right.
CG: That’s so good. That’s so good. LT: And to me, that kind of helps bring a
dangerous prayer full circle, so that it will feed my faith the next time that my answers
don’t have to look like I thought they would. I just have to recognize God’s activity
all around me. CG: To comment quickly on that, Amy got me
doing a five year journal five years ago and so if today would be February the 28th, I
might write my prayer request, what I’m going through here. A year later on the same
day of the journal, I can see what I had prayed for the year before.
MT: Wow. CG: And what I realized was, ‘Oh my gosh’.
Year over year over year there were answers to prayers and that I didn’t notice or were
different from what I would experience. And what I started to realize is that a year from
now, chances are pretty good that there will be an answer to the prayer I’m praying on
this very day, I just can’t sense it yet. And it may be incredibly different from what
I think, but it gave me a cycle of realizing that my prayers have been answered in ways
that I wouldn’t have realized had I not circled back years later to see.
MT: One of our Online Bible Studies volunteers just sent me a five-year journal. Like I haven’t
started it yet, but as I was looking through it, that was one of the things I thought ‘This
is really going to be’ . . .I can’t wait to see how it unfolds for that exact reason.
CG: What it’ll do, it’ll help you to realize that it’ll give you faith for what you’re
struggling with today, and that a year from now you will see some sort of resolution,
answer, direction. MT: Right.
CG: That’s what it did for me. LT: That’s so amazing. Yeah, I love that
suggestion. I think a lot of you know the situation I’ve been through in my marriage
and I know a lot of you are currently walking through really difficult circumstances and
maybe you think, ‘This really isn’t my season for me to pick up a book like “Dangerous
Prayers”. I think it’s the opposite of that. I think it’s going through something
hard, this is the exact season where this would be the perfect book to read and let
your words really give us permission to look at prayer maybe in a way that we’ve never
considered before and I will say, walking through the really difficult marriage situation
that I’ve walked through, I prayed so many prayers that were really suggestions of what
I wanted God to do. And probably the biggest lesson that God taught me is: spend less time
suggesting to God how He should work things out and more time asking Him to give you the
trust and the faith to walk through whatever it is that is before you. I will say my big
prayer, my suggestions that I was making were all the things that I wanted God to do to
bring my husband back to our family. And looking back, I can honestly say God didn’t listen
to any of my suggestions. Not one. And I thought they were really good. I kept setting the
scene for God to move because I wanted to be able to see the miracle and I guess there
was a part of me that almost wanted to hurry up the miracle.
CG: Right. LT: Right? But I also was so afraid that things
weren’t going to look like what I wanted them to look like in the end. And though,
eventually, Art did come home, things didn’t ever look like exactly like I thought they
should. They were not on my timing. And He definitely didn’t use my opportunities and
my suggestions to set the stage for Art to come home. Because the most my suggestions
would have ever done was to just change Art’s behavior and God was after rescuing his soul
and only God knew that. And it’s not wrong to make suggestions to God and certainly y’know,
when we pray, we do pray for instances, but I think a big lesson I’ve learned in “Dangerous
Prayers” is really make the focus of my prayer more about ‘God give me the courage
to face whatever it is that I’m going to face today with Your perspective and give
me eyes to see Your activity in the midst.’ MT: Right. You just used the word ‘courage’
and that’s what I want to encourage you with. It does take courage to pray dangerously,
but you can do it. And this is the perfect book to pick up, this is the perfect study
to join us with! We’re all going to be doing this together, so let me tell you a little
bit about what’s inside of the book, “Dangerous Prayers”. It’s broken up into three parts,
and we’re going to spend two weeks on each section of the book. There’s “Search Me”,
“Break Me”, I know, that’s the tough one-“Break Me”, and then “Send Me.”
And, um, so we are excited to take you through that and every week we’re going to have
a new video and I love what we’re doing this time. Because we have different staff
members from Proverbs 31, some different women who are sitting down with Pastor Craig each
week to share some heart-wrenching stories, some stories where there’s something in
their life that maybe isn’t going the way that they would want it to, kind of like what
you just described, but how God is moving in their lives through the dangerous prayers.
And so, um, we want you to come back each week and make sure you check out those videos.
Each week is going to be a little bit different. And so, Pastor Craig, I’m real interested
to hear what you’re going to have to say to the ladies who are going to be joining
us over the next few weeks. CG: Thank you. Well, I’m honored just to
be part of it. I know that this is a really intimate community. I’ve heard some of the
stories that we’re going to be talking about in the weeks to come and they’re quite emotional
and so I just want to say thank you for your transparency, thank you for opening up your
lives to other people. There’s healing on the other side of hurt. There’s strength
on the other side of our weakness and there’s joy on the other side of sorrow and I think
as we learn to pray a little more intimately, stretch our prayer lives, maybe break out
of what we thought prayer always was, I’m believing that spiritually you can see there’s
some real life and faith built up and so I’m hopeful to see great things in the weeks to
come. LT: And I think that’s it’s important
to encourage you, especially with that word, courage, that on the other side of dangerous
prayers is not danger. On the other side of dangerous prayers is the faith and the trust
in God that I think we all have always wanted and never quite knew the path to get there.
And so I think this book is going to surprise you the very most with what’s on the other
side of some of these prayers that you say are the opposite of lame and boring and so
we’ve labeled them “Dangerous Prayers”, but I think you’re going to find them so
life-giving and so invigorating and I can’t wait . . .
MT: I can’t either. LT: . . .to see what happens.
MT: Right. All right! So let’s get this started. And you guys, we’re teaching Pastor
Craig how we end all of our times together CG: I’m ready for this!
MT: Yes. It’s something we say around here . . .
CG: Can I help? Can I help? MT: You can definitely help!
LT: Let’s break it into three parts. MT: Yes, you can definitely help. You’re
gonna hear it every week, but we do believe the Word of God, the Bible is the Truth that
you can trust. All of it, every day, all day, for anything that you’re going through.
Even when you’re not going through anything, there is something in there for you. We believe
that it is the truth, the only place where you can really find the truth. And, here it
goes, are you ready? Know the truth. LT: Live the truth.
CG: And it changes everything! LT: That was excellent!
MT: Good job! LT: Let’s give him a hand!
MT: All right. Bye everybody. (Music)