Tapping into Passion and Desperation

Using Crises to Build Prayer Foundations

By Michael Catt

There are seasons in our lives we are never prepared for. No matter how spiritually in tune we are, something hits us like a gut punch. It knocks the wind out of us and may cause us to stumble, question, doubt, and fear.

It could be a doctor’s report, the loss of financial security, a prodigal child, a tragic accident—or even our nation suddenly torn apart by pain and strife. We don’t wake up in the morning expecting anything out of the norm, but it happens. It happens to all of us. Throughout my life, I’ve had to pray through many personal and church crises. Two particularly stand out for me, personally. When I was 39, I found out I was adopted—a family secret hidden from me until that point. Then, in 2018, I was diagnosed with cancer. Both of these situations required discernment in the middle of desperation. And in every situation, I’ve called on others to pray with me and for me.

Not an Afterthought

At the church I pastor, we have a 24-hour intercessory prayer ministry, a “House of Prayer” before the evening services, and designated times in the worship services to pray for specific areas or needs. We’ve adopted a phrase that drives our ministry: Prayer leads us to love God, grow together, serve others, and change the world.

That means prayer can’t be an add-on, an afterthought, or sporadic hit-or-miss. It must be at the forefront of our thinking and the core of all we do. In prayer, we discover the peace, power, and grace of God in uncertain moments. In far too many churches today, there is little or no praying. This means a form of religion but no power. Faith has become a formula. As is too often the case, the church doesn’t rally to pray until there is a crisis. But as soon as the crisis is over, it’s back to business as usual.

How much better it is to learn from our desperate times and raise the bar in our thinking and praying. Resolve not to go back to casual, rote prayers but rather change thought processes in order to change our praying. Desperation will show us whether our prayers are self-centered or Christ-centered. The days following the storm will show us if we learned anything in the storm.

Not the Last Resort

When I read the Gospels, I see story after story of desperate people trying to get to Jesus. We don’t have the physical presence of Jesus today, but we have access to Him in prayer. The Spirit inside us prays. Jesus is at the right hand of the Father, praying. When we join in with the Godhead in prayer, something supernatural happens in us and through us.

Scripture records 23 prayers of Jesus. In addition to His regular times, we find Him praying when He is baptized, praying when He selects the 12 disciples, praying at His transfiguration, praying when He feeds the 5,000, praying when He raises Lazarus, praying at Gethsemane, praying on the cross, and praying at His ascension.

Jesus prayed when He was alone or in a crowd. He prayed to His Father at the greatest heights of His ministry and the darkest moments of His earthly life. He prayed at the beginning of His earthly ministry and at the end of it. The Lord was passionate and disciplined about prayer. His response to doing the will of God was intentional and focused. Now He ever lives to make intercession.

The thought of Jesus praying for us and inviting us into His presence can build in us passionate praying. We don’t need to put prayer in a silo and pull it out only when we think we need it.

Andrew Murray wrote, “Most Churches . . . know not that God rules the world by the prayers of His saints.”1 Hit-or-miss praying will not bring about a fresh work of God.

In a used bookstore I found a book titled Ten Praying Churches, about ten churches in England who have taken prayer seriously. These words in the foreword by Terry Virgo struck me:

Prayer must always be the distinctive feature of the house of God. When we make prayer a priority we are telling God that we totally depend on him. We need his interventions and the manifestation of his presence and power. Without prayer we start trusting in our own ability and resourcefulness, and as we begin to trust in human skills and organising expertise we lose the glory of God.

By his own example, Jesus taught his disciples that prayer was crucial. They would have yielded to the demands of the crowds and to other people’s expectations, but Jesus refused every distraction. Later the apostles demonstrated that they had learned the lesson well by withdrawing from the clamour of the growing church and giving themselves to prayer.

The early church never regarded prayer meetings as dull routine—a duty to be performed and a proof of evangelical orthodoxy. In the Book of Acts the church at prayer was also the church in action. The Day of Pentecost started as a prayer meeting, but God broke in and they broke out. Who can tell from the narrative precisely when they moved from sitting in the house in prayer and came into the streets in power? The next recorded prayer meeting concludes not only with the building shaking but also with the disciples freshly filled with the Holy Spirit and power.

When Peter was taken to prison, the church’s natural reflex action was to once again gather to pray, resulting in his miraculous release. When the church at Antioch met to pray, the meeting resulted in a breakthrough of missionary activity as the people released their leaders to advance the gospel to other lands.

The boredom often associated with prayer meetings in the past has been caused by their predictability and lack of living purpose. But if churches are actively involved in works of faith that require the presence of God, prayer will become relevant and exciting.2

We have been offered the opportunity to approach the God of heaven boldly. Find people who will join you in building a prayer culture. Find the intercessors and ask them to help you learn to pray. Remind yourself and others that prayer is not a last resort, but the first option.

Capture the Moment

Desperation often leads to prayers that bring about a revival. Every revival in history has been birthed in prayer. When God’s people pray, God hears. The revival tends to wane when we forget what ushered us into the atmosphere of revival in the first place. I find these words by O. Hallesby convicting:

“The work of praying is prerequisite to all other work in the kingdom of God, for the simple reason that it is by prayer that we couple the powers of heaven to our helplessness, the powers which can turn water into wine and remove mountains in our own life and in the lives of others, the powers which can awaken those who sleep in sin and raise up the dead, the powers which can capture strongholds and make the impossible possible.”3

If you want to build a prayer culture, model it. When people ask you to pray for them, stop and pray for them right then. Host concerts of prayer in your church as reminders that prayer is not optional in the Christian life. Invite men and women who lead prayer ministries to come speak to your church. Learn from people who are further down the road than you are. Listen to people who stretch you to want to pray more. Read books on prayer.

Paul exhorts us in Philippians 4:6: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything [everything means everything] by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God” (nkjv, brackets added). The more we pray, the more we want to pray. None of us have ever met anyone who prayed too much!

1Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), 76.
2Donald English, Ten Praying Churches (MARK Monarch Publications, 1989), 7–8.
3O. Hallesby, Prayer (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994), 82.

MICHAEL CATT is senior pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church, Albany, GA. He is also the author of several books, including The Power of Persistence: Breakthroughs in Your Prayer Life, and the executive producer of several films with Sherwood Pictures (michaelcatt.com).