Last week I had the privilege of meeting Mark Batterson, author of The Circle Maker, and hearing him speak. Mark’s main message right now is about the power of prayer. Through prayer he’s seen some pretty incredible things happen and if you haven’t read his book yet I would encourage you to check it out.
One thing he said really stood out as he was talking about dreams.
If you pray hard you’ll dream big, and when you dream big you’ll have to pray hard.
Last week I talked about dreaming like Joseph and as I’ve been challenged to dream more, I’ve also been realizing that means praying more. When I was in college a couple of my friends and I started getting together weekly to pray for our campus. It started spontaneously at first and then became a regular thing.
Many of the people in those first meetings would become leaders in our BASIC group as time went on. They started small with only a handful of us, but before long we had about 15-20 (sometimes more) attending. As we committed ourselves to prayer we saw more things happen that year than at any other time when I was in school.
Every week we were hearing reports of people having spiritual conversations with friends, new people were coming to BASIC regularly, and we saw a number of people turn away from their old lives and commit themselves to Christ. It was a powerful time and from my freshman to senior year we saw our BASIC group grow from 15 students to over 60.
I’m convinced that prayer is the most powerful weapon we have and we don’t use it enough. That’s why I want to issue a challenge to you and your student leaders. Set aside time to pray for your campus and ministry every day this summer. It doesn’t have to be much time. It could be 10-15 minutes. But I believe God will take that investment and pour it out in the form of blessings this fall.
The best way to stay faithful to a challenge like this is to pick a time that works for you every day. Maybe the best time is over a lunch break. Maybe it’s right before you go to bed or first wake up. Just think, if you pray for 10 minutes every day for the months of June, July and August that adds up to 920 minutes or 15 hours and 20 minutes. That 10 minutes a day could make a huge eternal impact!
I’ll leave you with this quote from Corrie ten Boom, “Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.” Do you want to be burdened for the lives of those on your campus?