Open Windows. Part 2: Daily Prayer Rhythms

Hi, welcome to the Vine Life Church podcast.

We're in Boulder, Colorado, and we're following Jesus by staying limited in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission so that hearts are awakened with his awesome love.

And if we can help you in any way, reach out to us at vinelife.com.

For now, here's a short sermon from last week in my life.

Again, thanks for joining us.

Have you with us?

And this morning, we are gonna open the Word of God.

He's ready to open the scriptures this morning.

Yeah, that's we're gonna I'm gonna pretend like that was much more rousing than it was.

We're gonna open the scriptures today.

And uh, if you were with us last week, we started off a new teaching series just called Open Windows, and we're kind of putting a uh a spotlight on the life of Daniel uh for the moment.

And we're gonna jump back into that.

So if you have your Bibles, you can open up to Daniel chapter 6, and uh and we're gonna start there this morning.

Daniel 6 · chapter mention

Daniel chapter 6, verse 10.

Daniel 6:10

And the context of this passage is uh Daniel had been taken captive into Babylon.

He was one of the young, good-looking men from Jerusalem.

He was smart, he was intelligent, he was wise, he could interpret dreams, which apparently that was a huge asset to the Babylonian rulers.

And uh, and so he was taken in and they started a process of making him Babylonian and actually bringing him into Babylonian culture.

Um, some of their plans were successful, other plans were not so much.

He he wouldn't defile his body with their food and the things that they asked him to put in his body.

And then again, later on in Daniel chapter 6, uh, they had passed a law saying, You cannot, uh we will not allow anybody to worship or pray to another God or another man.

Daniel 6 · chapter mention

And uh and Daniel promptly um uh makes a different kind of decision.

That's what we're picking up here.

Daniel 6, verse 10.

Daniel 6:10

It says, When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem.

He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God as he had previously, as he had done previously.

So, Daniel in this passage, he demonstrated a defiant devotion, a rebellious fidelity to Yahweh in a land that was not his own, with rulers who had no regard for his God.

And so one of the key questions we opened up last week that we'll just kind of leave open as a question for us is how can we cultivate a resilient faith where we can both resist the pressures or expectations oftentimes we find in our culture, but then also continue to be a blessing to the city and the neighborhoods to be to for our lives to be good news to the places He has placed us.

How do we maintain steady, unwavering fidelity to Jesus in a time of great disruption?

So those are really good questions.

And those are questions all of us have to enter into on some level.

And I believe, and I mentioned this last week, I believe one of the greatest battles we will fight in our generation is around the stewardship of our attention, learning how to index our lives toward the king and his kingdom.

So back in August of 2022, uh I had just started uh my sabbatical, our family had just started, and we uh we flew out to North Carolina to see some friends, and it was a brilliant time, and and we started in one part of North Carolina, made our way out to Atlantic Beach out in North Carolina, and uh and it was a beautiful time.

We strolled as we strolled the beach, we saw two walls of black tarp that ran like a V from the top of the beach all the way down to the water, almost just pretend like this is the ocean and just kind of like a wall of like black tarp on both sides.

And at the end, there was just kind of this structured off thing.

It was like all these wood pieces that were really protecting this one area.

We didn't really know what that was at first, um, but upon further investigation, found out um that at the origin of where these two walls came together was the location of a nest of sea turtles.

Yeah.

And so apparently, um, apparently there's a conversation uh conservation group that walks the beaches every morning, and they're looking for signs of a of a mother sea turtle and uh the signs that a nest would have been laid uh in the sand.

And so they found the location of what they believed to be a nest, and they put the structure around it, and then later on assembled this wall that would go straight to the ocean.

And we found out that each nest is about 80 to 120 sea turtle eggs, okay?

Under the under the sand.

And the incubation period for these eggs, I'll have you know, is 60 days.

See the things you learned in church, guys.

Just I hope you're taking notes.

You're gonna need this someday.

The incubation period is about 60 days that it takes the sea turtles' eggs to hatch.

Lucky for us, the Humbrecks stroll to Atlantic Beach at day 58.

I'm glad that you're excited about it.

I at first, I have to be completely honest with you, uh, I wasn't particularly thrilled to spend the beginning of my sabbatical waiting for sea turtles to hatch on the beach.

It wasn't what I had in mind.

Rearranging our vacation plans to just hang out by the beach in lawn chairs and, you know, uh waiting for tiny little turtles.

But alas, I'm married to an animal enthusiast.

I don't win those conversations.

And I'm grateful for that, by the way.

I'm grateful for that.

And my kids too.

They they love these moments.

And so my family and I received the joy of being here at the right around the time that these sea turtles were about to hatch.

Now, there is a lot that can go wrong for these little sea turtles, which is why only one in 10,000 survive.

One in 10,000.

And uh, I think we had some photos of these tiny little creatures.

So as we were waiting, we were educated at the point of the walls.

These black tarp walls are about waist high and went from the top of the beach all the way down to the ocean, is that when the sea turtles hatch, they naturally, they instinctively start moving towards the ocean and the light of the moon.

They oftentimes hatch at night.

But if there's any peripheral light coming down from other sides of the beach, the sea turtles forget where they are supposed to be headed and start heading down the beach.

So they're designed to emerge from the sand and look for the light and just start heading towards the light.

But if there's any peripheral light, any other street lamps or anything coming off from the distance, they say, Oh, that looks like where I'm supposed to be going.

And so they they begin heading the wrong way, which is problematic for them, specifically if they hatch during the day, because the birds of the air come down and swoop down and just carry them off.

One in 10,000 survive.

And so while we were there, we would go in and kind of check in on these sea turtles to see how they're doing.

Have they hatched yet?

Did we miss it?

Did we make it?

Should we stick around?

Those kinds of questions.

And uh and uh we we came, what we were told they were probably going to hatch at night when the weather got cooler, but um, alas we show up and they hatch about five o'clock in the afternoon.

And so rather than release them during the day, they put them in these buckets and are like, all right, come back around 8:30, 9 o'clock at night, and we're gonna release them.

So that's what we did.

We came back later, and uh around 9 o'clock at night, with only the light of the moon, um, they released these turtles between these tunnels of walls lined by a crowd of about 60 people on each side.

And they we don't have photos of this because number one, it was dark.

Number two, uh, they wouldn't allow us to take photos because again, the flash of the phone confuses the turtles.

They forget where they're supposed to go.

And so we were there when they decided, all right, we're gonna release these turtles.

They turn over these buckets, and and we get to see, just with the light of the moon, all these tiny little turtles just kind of just scrambling for their lives towards the ocean.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And they're they're they're making their way for the waves.

And in the in the middle of their excursion towards the ocean, just imagine this these walls of tarp surrounded by a crowd of people, like, woo! Get it, get it, blah blah blah, you know, just like just trying to usher them in with our cheers and our claps and our excitement and our celebration, just trying to encourage them, you're going the right way.

And it was it was a really awesome experience for a lot of different reasons.

My family got to watch Sea Turtles hatch, and I got a killer sermon illustration out of it.

That's how I experienced life, by the way.

But, you know, upon further reflection, I was thinking about it, um, and I felt like this story just kept re-emerging in my memory as I was thinking about my, you know, the highlights of the sabbatical time and even our trip to North Carolina.

I didn't see it at the time, it took a few weeks.

Oftentimes it does.

But I realized what we experience, what I experienced really is the work that we're called to in the church.

We are called together to form a pathway where we surround each other and our sons and daughters in a way that says, the ocean is this way.

The ocean is this way.

We are so prone in our journey towards the Lord, in our journey towards eternity with God, to see the peripheral light.

And we're trained to go towards light, which is why the enemy often comes to us as an angel dressed in light.

Because he knows that we are trained, we are instinctually go towards anything that masquerades as light.

But I believe that part of, you know, part of our life as we're looking at Daniel, as we're looking at a life of resiliency, is a life of faithfulness into the same direction, which is the direction of Jesus.

What it does is it requires as a community that we become the kind of people who, as young ones, are brought to us, as we're raising our young ones, as we come alongside each other, that we can be the kind of people who say, no, no, no, don't look over there.

The ocean is this way.

Keep your eyes focused, keep your attention there.

You're going the right way, just keep going.

You guys feel me this morning.

Because the reality is the stakes are high.

What's happening is oftentimes we are losing the plot.

We lose the sight of what we are doing and why it matters.

And it's no surprise when you look at often how we spend our time.

A study that came out even last week says that the average American spends about seven hours and 50 minutes a day on digital media, seven hours and 50 minutes a day on our screens consuming information.

Most of this is not coming necessarily from a biblical worldview or a worldview that acknowledges the goodness and the faithfulness of God, that acknowledges the deep identity that we are created with in love and belovedness on the inside, right?

And so that's that's for us, but I would say for Gen Z and Gen Y, uh, the average time is even a little bit different.

So for Gen Z and Gen Y, they spent about 16,000 hours between kindergarten and 12th grade in the school system.

32,000 hours during that same time period includes secular media exposure, basically media, that it's not inherently reinforcing a worldview that's steeped in the realities of the Father and the Son and the Spirit and the love of God.

So it's about 48,000 hours of formative time that our young ones are spending.

And then we try to offset that oftentimes with two hours of church a week or add maybe an extra two hours of youth group.

And we look at these kinds of things, we just have to acknowledge this is like trying to put out a blazing fire with a teaspoon of water, that we have to have a different way to consider our whole lives before God and the ordering of our lives towards the presence of God to offset the level of the level of consumption, the level of attention that our eyes are giving to other things.

And it's for this reason stats are showing that by 2070, a miracle will be largely converted, not to another religious system, but to a category category called the nuns, which is completely unaffiliated.

And what's happening at alarming rates right now is that that Christians are deconverting from any kind of orientation of their spirituality or faith, and just saying, I don't know what I believe, I'm going to be a nun.

I don't believe anything.

This is happening at such a rapid level.

A lot of this is due to the way that we steward our attention.

And it's and it affects us on uh on a large level, not just with the resilience of faith, but with just what we believe about ourselves and our own well-being.

That's why another pastor in town recently changed his entire ministry philosophy because he realized that in between the years 2020 and 2022, he buried more kids due to suicide than he did COVID-19.

So if you think I'm being an alarmist today, you're right.

But you need to know that no there's not a bone in my body that is afraid.

None of what I am saying, I'm saying with fear or to invoke fear, provoke fear in the hearts of God's people.

I have unbelievable hope in my heart for the day that we live in.

I don't look at what's happening in the world through the lens of the world going to the hell in a handbasket.

I see this as a ripe opportunity for the kingdom of God to make its landing in our time and in our day.

You know, so it's easy as parents sometimes to think about what our kids are facing, what they're going through, and and and to walk in fear and anxiety.

I I have none of that.

I, yes, I'm walking with a sober-mindedness in this day as I parent my kids because I want them, um, I want them to know Christ and Christ's crucified.

I want them to know the living presence of God.

I want every b fiber in their being to be loved by God and for them to wake every day and to go to sleep with that.

Um at the same time I'm sober-minded because I want them to know the time and the place that they live, but then the calling on their life.

And I'm excited that our challenge, the invitation before us, is to raise sons and daughters of righteousness.

Not piet, not pious spirituality, not a better than them disconnected, disembodied, bury your head in the same spirituality, but a resilience like the resilience of Daniel, who can walk in the fear of the Lord, but walk in the blessing of God, for the extension of the blessing of the kingdom of God over every nation of the earth.

That are that those are the stakes in which we are living right now.

And it's very important that we see both sides.

The stakes are very high, which is why I'm excited.

And listen, just to be clear, I'm not even proposing that we all delete all our social media accounts and news and Netflix.

I'm not doing that.

I like Netflix just as much as any of you, okay?

I'm just saying, I'm advocating that we're not always aware of how deeply formed we have become by what we give our attention to.

Nothing is neutral.

The things that we give our attention to are shaping the type of people we become and the way that we see the world, okay?

And again, the battle for our lives and for the generations to come will be won not by willpower or giftedness, it will be won by those who are willing to curate the focus of their attention towards God.

So as a church, we can't just come into a place for two hours on a Sunday morning, even with fantastic worship or fantastic teaching or ministry times or any of that kind of stuff and expect it's going to be enough to sustain us the other 166 hours of the week.

We have to develop a lifestyle before God and practices and rhythms before God that allow us to stay anchored and grounded in the King and His kingdom.

You guys with me?

It's funny, uh comedian Jim Gaffigan joked about this um in a different way.

He he was joking about how absurd it was that during the during the pandemic we gave our kids iPads in which to do their education.

He's like, Are you serious?

Like we're gonna we're gonna expect them to do school on the same device on which they play Minecraft.

He's like, that's like holding a Weight Watcher's meeting at a Wendy's.

And sometimes sometimes that looks, it feels as if we're charging a mountain.

Like, how are we gonna do this?

And so that's why it does require just kind of a different mindset, a paradigm shift to know the stakes of the time that we're living in.

But here's the good news through the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, this isn't just willpower, through the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, we must cultivate a way of life and hold rhythms together that allow us to nurture fidelity towards Jesus and direct our attention back to the bedrock of reality, which is Christ.

And this is exactly what Jesus' invitation was in John 15 when he would use the metaphor of vine and branches.

He said, I'm inviting you to remain in me as I remain in you, as if we knew what that meant.

But he said it as if we would know what that meant, and the Holy Spirit would show us, he said, Remain in me as I remain in you.

How do we remain in Jesus?

How do we remain?

It's a life of prayer, it's a life where our hearts are open in prayer.

Prayerfulness, a life of prayerfulness before God, a life of paying attention to the friendship of the Holy Spirit.

And so when we turn back to Daniel, he gives us some clues that I believe we can learn from today.

As we see in the text we even read together, Daniel had a habit of prayerfulness.

Daniel's habit was to return to his open window three times a day, both to get on his knees and to give thanks.

And it said that he had he had returned to his window three times a day as he had done previously, or you could say as he had done since his youth.

Even as a youth in Jerusalem before he was taken captive in Babylon in Babylon, he remembers likely he remembers his parents three times a day, no matter what they were doing.

They would stop what they're doing, they would pause, and they would turn their attention to their hearts to Yahweh.

He likely remembers those in his community doing the same way, the same way.

No matter what they were doing, three times a day, they would, something would shift and they would turn their attention back to God.

And this wasn't just Daniel, this is the way of life for the Jews.

They would twice a day, they would at least twice a day pray the Shema, which is an ancient Jewish prayer, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

And that probably sounds familiar because Jesus echoed the same words.

And Jesus prayed the Shema like every good Jew did, and like Jews still do today.

Um, and and Daniel, uh, aside from Daniel and Jesus, there were others who also ordered their lives around prayer rhythms.

King David did this.

Psalm 55, 16 through 17 says David's writing in a song form, he says, As for me, I will call upon God, and the Lord shall save me evening and morning, and at noon I will pray and will cry out loud, and he shall hear my voice.

Psalm 119, he ups the ante.

He says, Seven times a day I praise you because of your righteous judgments.

David had a rhythm about at least three times a day, probably even seven times a day.

There was something that he would bake into his schedule to orient his life back around the reality of God and the praises of God.

Um, and this pattern continued in the New Testament.

Again, for Jesus, um, we we Believe that he also gave himself into the rhythm of this life.

It's sometimes it's hard to see explicitly in the Gospels, but we see this in his dedication to moonlit hikes and all-nighters with the Father.

We know for him that prayer was a priority, that he was willing to leave what he was doing to go be in solitary places.

We see this practice in the early church, very early in Acts chapter 2, with the Apostle Peter, and even at the day of Pentecost, he addressed the crowds after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who were gathered at the third hour of the day at 9 a.m.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

for prayer.

In Acts 3, Peter and John went up together to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour, which was 3 p.m.

Acts chapter 10, Peter went up to the rooftop of his house to pray at the sixth hour of the day, which was noon.

Acts 10 · chapter mention

Acts 2.42, as all the believers were gathering together, and again, this is following the beautiful outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and we get a detail of the life of the early church.

Acts 2.42 says they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

Now, a lot of your translations say to prayer.

We just think that they would just pray as they would think about it, which is probably true, but they also gave themselves to the prayers, meaning set prayers at certain points of time in the day.

Have you guys ever wondered how they ever figured out when they were gathering in first century Israel without text message and email and phone calls and the printing press?

Because they had set times that they knew that they were gathering to pray.

Because they had ordered their lives around this is what we do together, and this is how we live into faithfulness and fidelity to Jesus.

And it wasn't just that, it wasn't just duty and ritual.

If you notice, all of these accounts that I that I mentioned in the book of Acts, they were not just devotion, but they were all followed by power.

So in Acts 2, it came as they were gathering at 9 a.m.

in the morning.

You know, they had been together for some time, and the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, comes and they they come out, and Peter addresses the crowds at 9 a.m.

that were gathered.

And several thousand came to the Lord in a single day.

In Acts 3, as Peter and John were going up together to the temple for the hour of prayer, they encounter a lame man at the gate called Beautiful.

And this is where Peter says, with just this stoic brilliance, he says, Silver and gold have I none, but I give to you what I do have.

In the name of Jesus, get up and walk.

And it was because he was in the right place at the right time.

And in Acts 10, when he would go out to the rooftop, and he went to the rooftop out of his house to pray at the sixth hour.

It was in the middle of this prayer rhythm that an open vision comes and he realizes in a single moment, because of one open vision to Peter, that the gospel wasn't just for the Jews, but it was for all of the Gentiles, and salvation was intended for till for the ends of the earth.

So we have a lot of reasons to be thankful that Peter had a prayer rhythm and he showed up at noon on his rooftop as he had always done.

That's why you and I are here.

Because he had a rhythm that opened himself up, it positioned him to receive the power of God.

And so in these these these rhythms, as they would continue through the early church, and we we get that this was often in the historic writings of the church documented in the Didicay, that these were this was just a common way of life.

And later on it just sputtered off.

And so you know there's not a lot of detail of what they were doing in these times of prayers, but oftentimes some would argue that in the morning they would pray the Lord's Prayer.

At midday, they would pray the Shema, and in the evening they would pray the Psalms.

And so this kind of fix-hour prayer was a way of life that would continue for centuries, and then it would fall off, and then the desert fathers reclaimed this as a way of life, a way of ordering their days around God.

So for us together, what can we learn from this?

What might this look like in 2023?

And all of this, I believe, is an invitation for us.

And as we were just thinking, as a body of believers, as we're praying into how we want to orient ourselves this year, this year, one of the ways we feel drawn to cultivate this loving fidelity and resilient faith is by adopting, like the early church, a similar daily prayer rhythm three times a day, wherever you are, taking time to turn your attention to Jesus.

And we see this as an opportunity to open windows in our day, wherever you are, to return and say, God, what are you doing and what are you saying?

And specifically, I want to walk you through a few invitations here.

Morning prayer, we say is a time to be with Jesus.

It's a time to look in.

And the invitation here is to start each day with Jesus, specifically in prayer and in scripture.

But the practice here, the the practice that we're inviting each other into can be summed up as scripture before screens.

What you focus on with the first thoughts of your day overflows into the rest of your day.

This is a time to come to Jesus in solitude and silence and surrender while letting your soul be steeped in the scriptures.

I don't know about you, but it's easy to count to form a habit in the first moments of the day, to pick up your phone and to let everybody else set the agenda for what you should be doing that day.

But what if as a people we started every day with God, what are you doing and what are you wanting to say?

Starting your day in the love of God and saying whatever today is about, it's going to start from the same launch point, which is the love and the mercy and the grace of God.

So starting our days being with Jesus, that doesn't need you be mean you mean you need to be a morning person, by the way.

Unless some of you guys are not morning persons.

It just means wake up 15 minutes earlier than you would normally wake up.

We're all starting the day a certain way, anyways.

Most of us with news and email.

But what if we started with the thoughts of God directing us?

And like a sail we put it up at the beginning of the day to catch the wind of the Spirit.

But it's not all about just introspection.

So one of the invitations, uh the midday prayer, is that we develop a habit together of praying for the lost.

And so if morning is about looking in, prayer midday would be about looking out.

Midday is is about turning our attention outward and specifically letting God lead us into prayers of intercession for those who are lost or estranged from God.

And one of the invitations this year is to the practice is to make a list of three people, at least three people that you're committing to pray for midday throughout the year.

And I know this is something for me personally, it hits a very deep spot.

I even during sabbatical, I was asking God, God, why aren't we seeing more salvations and baptisms?

Um and I was praying because I have a heart to see the harvest.

And I know you guys do too.

I want to see every person encounter the love of God.

But I just felt like he reminded me, you're not seeing the harvest because you're not asking for it.

You're not praying for it, you're not laboring for it.

Like, who are you laboring for?

And it was a deeply convicting for me because so many of my prayers are about, uh it can be about a lot of things, but I just feel like there's an invitation for us this year to be precise in our prayers.

And to start with the short lists of those that were already in our lives that need to encounter the depth of the love of God and the salvation of God, but then to hold open the space that we can move on from there.

We can start with the short list, but then let our lives move into our prayers move into intercession for whatever the Lord leads us to.

So midday prayer is an invitation to pray for the loss.

And then that leaves us with evening prayer, the end of our days, the days where we oftentimes uh come into the finish line running on fumes.

Um we we come into the finish line reeling from everything that was undone or untouched from the day.

And we're we're rehearsing those conversations as we're driving home from work and everything we wish we had done but didn't do.

And it's a ripe time in the evenings to develop a habit of gratitude, a habit of reflection over a day rather than letting our life happen to us, a time of rehearsing our day with the Holy Spirit of God and letting our lives overflow in thanksgiving for all the blessings we saw and we failed to see throughout the day, so that God can be in charge of the interpretation of our lives.

And listen to me, all three of these prayer rhythms, they're not just good ideas, they're actually an active resistance to the way of the world.

So when you start your morning with Jesus, you're actually actively resisting a culture of noise and a culture of distraction.

That's what you're actually doing.

In the midday, when we take a moment and we turn outwards, we're resisting a culture of escapism and me retreating into just my needs for the day and of individual focus.

We're actually learning to resist that and to let God turn our attention to what He's doing beyond us and what's happening in my life.

In the evenings, prayers of gratitude are an act of resistance and a culture of entitlement and discontent that leave us going to bed, thinking about everything that we lack and everything that we don't have versus the abundant blessings that have already been bestowed to us by the Father.

So, lest we think that prayer and prayer rhythms are just cute, good ideas, this is this is actually our spiritual warfare.

This is the way we put the stake in the ground and say, I'm not going to be drawn into a way of the world.

I'm going to orient my life towards the king than his kingdom.

Are you guys with me?

So if you didn't catch everything I said, that's okay because for the next three weeks, we're going to dive specifically into each of these times of the day because there's more for us to unpack and more for us to be invited into.

These three movements have much, have a lot of depth to it.

And um and the good news here too is a daily prayer rhythm, what we're talking about, is is highly individual.

It's very portable.

You can take it with you wherever you go, but it's also a rhythm is something that we can share with others, and we encourage everyone to share the rhythm with others or around a table with others at least once a week, or to be able to bring this rhythm into our brand new prayer room that we're going to be launching in February, and about once a month or however frequently you want to come to bring the rhythm there to catalyze your life into awareness of God.

But before we go any further, let me just answer some of the questions I know that you are asking right now.

Number one, okay, daily prayer rhythm.

That feels a little rigid.

Can I just pray all the time?

Whatever happened to just practicing the presence of God and just unceasing prayer.

And uh the question is, yes, you can pray all the time.

Absolutely.

Um, and that the goal is communion with God, friendship, unceasing relationship with the Father and the Son and the Spirit.

Absolutely.

That being said, I believe we have to be able to interrupt the previously scheduled programs of our lives to stop and call our attention back to Jesus.

There's something about building in regular times to actually turn towards the Lord, and what that does is it leaks into all of the in-between times.

It's part of an orientation to God.

And so some of these, sometimes spiritual practice can can feel legalistic, they can feel rigid.

Um even in the church, any sense of ordered, disciplined life is seen as legalism, but oftentimes that's because we can we mistake spontaneity with authenticity and rhythms with ritual.

In charismatic church, especially, we love it, we love being in the moment.

And I love being in the moment.

And I think God loves a spontaneous life with God as well.

And so we're not we're not arguing away from that.

But I believe for the time that we're living in, we have to remember that spontaneity is not the only way to orient our lives around God, that we can also enter into rhythms of being with God that allow our lives to turn back to Him and to not succumb to the pressures all around us.

So it's spontaneity and rhythm is what we're going for.

So am I expected to just stop what I'm doing in the middle of the day?

What if I'm on a work call?

Okay, so we're like all these logistical questions.

The end the answer is yes and no.

Um, there may be already, when you think about a midday prayer and how would you make space for that in the middle of a work life?

There's some easy ways to think about that.

Everybody here probably takes a lunch break.

If you took an extra five minutes during your lunch break and you let God just remind you of those He wants you to pray for.

Some of you who work from home, maybe you have the opportunity to stop what you're doing and go take a walk around your block, get out of your house and actually take a prayer walk around your block.

So those would be very easy ways to do it.

Um, but I would remind us already, though, um, it's likely that you already have a lot of interruptions in your day.

Um, every time you get a text message or a phone call or a notification on your watch or your s or your smartphone, which I bet every person in this room does, you're actually allowing, you're already allowing somebody else's agenda to interrupt your day.

So a daily prayer rhythm is simply you choosing to interrupt your own life with God's agenda.

Okay?

Instead of letting everybody else make that decision of what's most important for you to be paying attention to, a daily prayer rhythm is us choosing to interrupt our own lives to say, God, I want to be about what you're about right now.

Got it?

I can tell you guys are stoked about this.

I'm joking, I know you guys are with me.

Um are we expected to pray?

Listen, this isn't, we're not getting, this is about love, not about length of time.

It's about love.

Some days you might only have a minute, some days you might have 30 seconds to just say out loud the names of people you're praying for, or 30, you know, or at nighttime.

You know, maybe it's around a dinner table, and you and what we tend to do around our dinner table is we check in and we say, hey, what what was your day like?

And uh, what are you thankful for?

Where do you see where did you see God at work?

How can we be thankful together for our day?

Sometimes if we don't have time to do that, I'll do it when I'm tucking the kids at bed at night.

I'll I'll ask them about their day and we'll thank God together for what they experienced that day.

And what it does, night after night after night after night, it actually retrains the synapses of our brains to say God, to remember that God was more present than we thought he was, which is something we badly need.

It's called neuroplasticity.

We need to retrain our brains into the reality of a kingdom that is already here and already overflowing with blessing.

It's part of how we resist discontent and lack and poverty and entitlement.

All right?

So it's not about the length of time, it's about the posture of heart.

And then as we turn our lives to God, sometimes we'll notice there's a draw on our hearts, and I want to stay in this place, I want to stay either interceding, or I want to stay, I want to be with Jesus longer than I normally would, or I'm gonna overflow in Thanksgiving longer than I normally would.

And that's what happens.

It's a practice that allows us to be positioned to flow with what the Lord's doing.

So, tools to help.

How do you guys how do we remember?

How do we keep a daily prayer rhythm together?

Well, I just want to introduce you to a couple tools that I've been using that I think these are very helpful and actually doing this, living into this.

One of them is called the Inner Room App.

And if you have your phones, you can look for that even now.

One of them is called the Inner Room App.

And uh you can search for it on iPhone, Google, whatever you whatever you do.

And what it is, it's an app designed by 24-7 Prayer, which is, you know, a lot of these prayer rhythms are in conjunction with uh you know a larger movement called 24-7 prayer, just so you guys know, that churches all across are doing the same thing all across the world.

But inner room allows you to actually uh have be guided by some prayer prompts during the day and actually allows you to set a scheduled reminder for certain times of the day.

So you can set a reminder for morning prayer, for midday prayer, and for evening prayer.

I've been doing this for the last couple months using this app specifically, and it's fantastic.

Sometimes the notification comes up and uh I'm not able to stop right then, but it's a prompt that I know my next break I'm going to stop and uh and pause and be with the Lord and let him move me into prayerfulness, okay?

And there's other prayer prompts there that just help spark creativity.

The inner room app is a great place to start.

You can take notes on the things that you're praying for, and it's it's really fantastic.

The other one I would recommend is uh an app called Lectio 365, and it's also developed by 24-7 Prayer.

And what it is, it's it's um a daily, there's a morning uh devotional and an evening devotional.

The morning devotional is scripture, um, it's a Lectio Divina, so it's scripture that's read, usually by uh somebody with a global accent, so it's great.

And uh and they read the scripture and then they offer some reflections on the scripture and read the scripture again, and it's to this really ambient, beautiful music in the background.

And uh, and and it's about 10 minutes in the morning.

In the evening, they do one that's more gratitude focused and more reflection focused in the evening, which is again in alignment with their prayer rhythm.

And uh it's a fantastic way to do it.

Some of you already have your own rhythms with God, and that's fantastic.

Just keep going.

I'm offering tools that I think are gonna help catalyze us and spur us on.

So those are two things in particular if you're more digital, you know, if you're living in a digital world.

Um, and so the other thing I would also mention today is that, like I said earlier, on Saturday, February 4th, we're gonna be launching a brand new prayer room on the third floor of this building.

Yeah, it's gonna be great.

Um, Jeanette has been, Jeanette and and several others have been working very hard at curating the space, redesigning it.

Um, it's gonna be a safe a space set aside to catalyze prayer.

It's gonna have nearly 30 prayer stations, all with different focuses.

Many of the focuses have to do with missional prayers, prayers for um justice stuff that needs to be happening in our region, prayers that keep us focused on on government and and you know other things that that really deserve uh you know specific focus.

Others are more about catalyzing your own, you know, reflection on your own life.

And it's it's gonna be fantastic.

Um throughout the month, there will be open hours where you'll be able to come and use the space, okay?

And so it'll be different.

You know, some prayer rooms, you know, are you largely there's gonna there's a ton of people in there and you know, sets of worship and all that kind of stuff.

This prayer space is more of a sacred space with different stations that you'll be able to come and use.

And what it's gonna do is it's gonna fuel you from the inside out.

And we want it to be a sacred space where we can turn our attention to to God and what he's doing in our land.

And uh, and all of these things we believe, uh, we believe there's prayer, there's hope, there's faith in my heart, there's faith in our hearts as a leadership.

And I hope there's faith in your heart that as we actually begin to orient ourselves in a new way to Jesus, um, that he's going to infuse us with exactly what we need to live steady, faithful, focused lives before him in a way where we can be a blessing in our land.

And I think that's what you want.

And it's certainly what I want.

And I believe there's a huge invitation as we're still making our way into January.

This is just one building block of the year that we're focusing on for the next few weeks.

But I'm telling you guys, when if we as a people commit ourselves to a life of prayer, we allow ourselves to rise to heaven's perspective, to not enter into complaining and criticizing and diminishing any part of our world, but we enter into heaven's strategies to bring blessing and reconciliation and restoration wherever, wherever our feet tread.

That's the kind of people I want to be a part of.

That's the kind of people that God is calling us to be.

And I hope that you're feeling that.

Are you guys with me today?

So let's stand together today.

I'm gonna pray for us.

And again, the invitation here this morning is not to just have more things to do in your day.

You guys are busy enough.

But it's about becoming the kind of people who preserve, who preserve ourselves for the purposes of God in our time and in our day.

It's about becoming the kind of people who can create a tunnel that we're clued into what God's doing, and as we're journeying together towards them, we're cheering each other on and say, keep going.

Jesus, go towards Jesus, go towards the ocean.

He's that way.

So, God, across the room today, I thank you that we're here today because we want to live into your kingdom and your reality.

And I pray for my brothers and sisters here today as we respond to this invitation in whatever way, as we consider it, even, God, that you would speak to each of us.

You would speak to us about the ones that you want us to be praying for this year that don't yet know you or are far from you.

You would speak to us about how even in the evenings we can end our days overflowing with thanksgiving, even if not everything went what we uh exactly how we thought.

I thank you, God, for the proposition that we can begin every day with our eyes on you, letting you lead us and guide us to so we can do what the Father's doing.

I thank you, God, we don't do this in our own willpower, but we do this by the grace and the strength and the Spirit of God.

So I just pray an extra dose of joy and life and grace and the presence of God over each and every one of us, over our homes, over our parents, and over our kids, over every generation represented.

And God, together, we say we want to be about what you're doing in our time, in our day.

We love you together, and it's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.