Covenant Prayer

The Concept

A covenant is a two-way commitment. Christ made a covenant with you through his blood shed on the cross, and Covenant Prayer is your responding commitment to him. Jesus says in John: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.” Our response to his love is obedience.

This is not a legalistic, robot-soldier obedience. It is a duty in the sense of De Caussede who said “duty is the sacrament of the present moment.” This is obedience without reservation. Selfless, joyful obedience. An expression of love. A desire to please the God who has lavished the riches of his grace upon us.

Commitment is scary; most of us naturally veer away from it. We see it as confining, a sacrifice of freedom. (Yet freedom actually results from restraint. Only through discipline and commitment do we gain mastery of a skill or a relationship to the point that we can operate freely within it.) We see commitment as compulsory, a sacrifice of spontaneity. (But just because something is required does not mean it must lack joy or generosity.) We may fear commitment because we fear failure and the resulting self-condemnation. (But God knows the intention of your heart, and he will provide the desire and strength to take us to the heights as well as the grace and humility to catch our falls. A.W. Tozer writes, "We pursue God because and only because He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to that pursuit.' And here is the beautiful thing: finding God only deepens and heightens the pursuit.")

This Covenant is not a boring promise to obey but a redirection of the heart and mind to seek God at the center of you and at the center of everything, an expectant and relentless pursuit of God. When you seek him, spend time with him, when you know him, then you begin to know his will.

Prayer is a prerequisite of obedience. So Covenant Prayer is meant to be a quantifiable promise of a fixed habit of prayer, not merely an open-ended sentiment. It likely will involve a commitment of time (length and frequency) and of place (a location to anchor your focus). We must be careful of impossible burdens, but we must also be careful of complacency and stagnation.

This may all sound confining and uninspired, but John Dalrymple reminds us: “The truth is that we only learn to pray all the time everywhere after we have resolutely set about praying some of the time somewhere.” As soon as you set up a rule for yourself, you will be distracted. But you have a choice “you alone will decide whether you will hold steady in the inner sanctuary of the heart or rush out of the holy place, tyrannized by the urgent.”

Let this prayer and its commitment be a language of love, not a language of obligation.

The Experience

In praying about what kind of commitment I was going to make for at least this week, I turned open to Isaiah 2, and all over the page is the exaltation of the Lord alone. I was reminded not to give him just what is easiest, but to give him what is my best. I was reminded not to do this for this blog, for myself, for any personal agenda, but for him alone.

I committed to a quiet time with the Lord first thing, every morning, no excuses. Later that afternoon, a friend told me about the devotional website Pray As You Go. As soon as I checked it out, I knew that this would be a part of my Covenant Prayer.

As it turned out, this week was wonderful. The messages and quiet meditations from Pray As You Go were a respite for me, a renewal rather than a striving. It was something I looked forward to upon waking up, and I know this was a gift from God. A reward for my desire for commitment, a burden made light. A means to draw easily and comfortably closer to my Lord.

Authoritative Prayer

The Concept

Authoritative Prayer is not a personal prayer or a devotional prayer; it is neither petition or worship. It is a proclamation. Authoritative prayer is not asking God for something, but speaking his will into enemy territory. William Law says it is “not for getting man's will done in heaven,” but “for getting God's will done on earth.” It is kingdom advancement on a spiritual plane.

This type of prayer, directed at powers and principalities - not to God but from God - is biblical. God told Moses to stop praying and start exercising the authority he had given him (Ex. 14:15-16); Mark 11:23 instructs us to tell the mountain to move, not to pray that it will move. Throughout the gospel, Jesus prays/commands authoritatively. He directly addresses waves, demons, deaf ears, etc. and then gives that same authority to his disciples (Luke 9:1-2). In a personal story, Foster tells about a time that, after asking God repeatedly to remove his son's pain, he spoke directly to that pain and it was soothed.

Of course, this type of prayer can be dangerous. It is important to remember not wander away from God's sovereign, not to let pride and presumption pervert this God-given responsibility. We use his strength and his power, never our own. But there is also error in not exercising this authority at all, in making light of God's power and restraining it to a superficial, domesticated level. We are given the armor of God to fight spiritual battles (Eph. 6:12)!

We should actively seek and pray for discernment as a “guardrail” for Authoritative Prayer. “Discernment is the divine ability to see what is actually going on and to know what needs to be done in any given situation.” It is both wise and sensitive, seeking first and then obeying the will of God.

When we speak with authority from a transformed heart, there are beautiful results. Excesses in this type of prayer come from embracing the power of this prayer without embracing the compassion of it. In Jesus, we see power and compassion perfectly united, and in imitating him, we are in error when our power and compassion are out of balance - to either side.

The Experience

Authoritative Prayer is new territory for me. I have previously been suspicious when people pray directly to spirits. But I have also understood that prayer without activity is not God's will (Matt. 14:15-16). Surely we have been called to act - humbly, and through his power - in both the physical and the spiritual realms.... Remember, we are already seated with Christ in heavenly places! (Eph. 2:6)

Still, getting up one day and praying to "principalities" seemed beyond me. But I find Foster's chapter-closing prayer illuminating. We are not necessarily addressing demons or angels (though that is a real possibility), but we are free to directly address God's creation in his name. Foster prays:

In the strong name of Jesus Christ I stand against the world, the flesh, and the devil.... I oppose every attempt to keep me from knowing full fellowship with God. By the power of the Holy Spirit, I speak directly to the thoughts, emotions, and desires of my heart and command you to find your satisfaction in the infinite variety of God's love rather than the bland diet of sin. I call upon the good, the true, and the beautiful to rise up within me, and the evil to subside.....

There is power in our words. God desires us to step into the powerful gift he has given us, that we may be co-laborers with him, his ambassadors in this world. I am not standing comfortably in this authority today, but I do want to understand it better and to obey the Lord as he calls me further into the work of his kingdom.