What I’m Praying: Refreshing

Continuing my What I’m Praying series…

The past few weeks, TPR has been focussed on praying for a time of deep refreshing to come to our community. This has been our rapid fire topic at the end of every set.

To be honest, it’s been an exhausting year. Many people feel a bit dry and dull and just soul-weary. We need a good strong “time of refreshing” (Acts 3:20) from the Lord to revive our hearts. Living dry is no fun.

It’s true that most of life is lived in the mundane. Most of the time, we’re neither on the mountaintop nor in the depths of despair; rather, we’re sort of on the plateau of daily walking out life with God, trying to stay obedient and faithful no matter how we’re feeling.

But we don’t want to just be okay with not encountering God.

We’re asking God for a season of refreshing, that as individuals and as a community we would receive an increased touch of the Holy Spirit.

This past week, I believe we’ve started to see glimpses of that. On Saturday night, Brad was called last minute to attend a meeting, so instead of him continuing our teaching series, our weekly Encounter service became a prayer meeting with extended worship for exactly this topic of refreshing. We asked God to move in signs and wonders and to refresh us with an increased manifestation of His presence. The corporate nature of that prayer meeting, with all of us in the room joined with fervor and unity, and the worship team’s excellent prophetic leadership, definitely brought refreshing to our hearts. With the leanness of our 18/7 schedule right now, we’re not able to have those experiences together very often.

Also, on Sunday night a prayer group from a local Messianic congregation visited the prayer room. Almost 30 ladies joined us for an hour or so, and God really moved among them. Our worship leader felt a strong prophetic nudge to spontaneously lead a ministry time from the prayer mic (don’t worry, the usher took his seat so the stage wasn’t empty) and give a call for anyone who felt called to missions. The room was deeply touched and many responded. That kind of move of the Spirit is the kind of thing we’re praying to see more of.

Please join us in praying that God would refresh us with a fresh wave of His Spirit!
God, thank You for Your presence here – please increase our experience of Your presence. Open the heavens and send another wave of Your Spirit to refresh, awaken, and revive us. We’re crying out for fresh fire. Meet us in our hunger as You’ve promised.

What I’m Praying: We Need A/C!

Continuing my What I’m Praying series, here’s a very specific prayer request that The Prayer Room has been joining together for this week: we need a new upstairs air conditioner! Several air conditioning units upstairs are in severely lackluster shape, but the one in our Daniel Academy preschool room is our chief concern right now. When school starts again next month, our little kiddos are going to BAKE in the Texas heat if we don’t get that thing replaced ASAP.

We’ve spent the past week and a half so far praying our rapid fire topic at the end of every set for God’s provision for a new air conditioner. It’s kind of amazing to stand in the prayer room that we prayed so long for and God provided so abundantly for and ask again for yet another financial breakthrough. It gives me so much faith that He who has been faithful will continue to be faithful.

One of the perks of being in a small house of prayer and praying for such specific and un-spiritual-sounding things is the great rapid fire choruses that our worship leaders come up with to sing the prayers. Shout out to Luke for singing something about “make Texas feel less like Texas” our first Sunday morning at 5am when we started the topic. Later on, Lisa sang “You own the cattle on a thousand hills, surely You own some air conditioners.” There have definitely been some lovely “let the wind blow” puns sung and prayed as well. I had to try really hard not to crack up the first time I tried to make a serious chorus about air conditioners. (Pro tip: it’s safer, though less fun, to sing generic stuff about provision.)

This is how we live, though. Every time we need something, we bring it to God as a community by making it a rapid fire topic, so that throughout the week, across every single prayer set, we’re all praying for the same thing at the end of every two hours. It’s a great way to be unified as a community and stay focussed on contending for breakthrough for the need. We have years of history showing that God really responds to rapid fire prayer.

The verse I keep thinking of is Psalm 69:9, which says “For zeal for your house has consumed me,” which John 2:17 applies to Jesus. He’s so, so invested in the details of keeping the fire on the altar in His house. That includes functioning air conditioners!

I invite you to pray with us that God would break in and send someone to write us a check for the air conditioner unit in our Daniel Academy room, and that He would give wisdom and favour regarding the purchasing of that unit.

God, please provide for us to buy a new A/C for our Daniel Academy room. Bring dramatic financial donations again like You’ve done so many times before!

PS – If you’d like to be part of the answer to this prayer, go to theprayerroomdfw.com/donate and add a note to your gift designating it for the A/C.

The Miracle Internship That Almost Didn’t Happen

Ever since the conclusion of our spring Immerse internship, we’ve been hard at work laying plans for our summer Immerse internship. At last, it’s time and WE HAVE AN INTERNSHIP! That in and of itself is such a miracle. The past few weeks have been a figurative roller coaster…

Up to about three weeks ago, we were seriously questioning whether Immerse would even happen. At that time, we only had two interns, and were asking the question of what our minimum would have to be. The senior staff settled on five — if we didn’t get five interns, we would cancel Immerse.

Over the next few days we did get two different people signed up! So we had four… and we still had four the day before orientation, which would be Sunday, May 28. We had some generous partners help make two full scholarships available, and we were still actively personally recruiting as hard as we could, but no luck was to be had.

I was praying hard, and I still felt like I was supposed to keep working on preparing. So even while the internship was probably going to be cancelled, I was editing curriculum and finalising the schedule and assignments.

On Saturday afternoon, senior staff put their heads together and eventually decided to go ahead and do the internship even with four. I was at the base that night till 2:30am after Encounter service printing orientation papers and assembling intern binders.

The next morning, I got two texts about new interns who wanted to come to orientation! I quickly assembled binders for them, and at orientation, we had six Immerse interns!

The roller coaster wasn’t over, however. Since then, we’ve lost one, gained one, and gained-and-lost one. We had seven for a hot minute, but our total seems settled at six now.

We’re already in our second week of classes, and I will be teaching session two of Intro to the End Times tomorrow. Most of our classes are taught by a small band of staff on rotation, but the End Times class on Saturday is all mine to teach every week. I’m excited! Our interns are really great, and I’d so excited to get to know them better and watch them grow over the next 12 weeks.

New Rapid Fire Prayer Topic

At the end of every set, everyone in the room lines up at the mic to pray short “rapid fire” prayers on a certain topic, usually related to something happening within the ministry. Right now, our topic is:

For 100 new people to sign up for a weekly prayer meeting here at the base (we call this our Sacred Trust) in order to help us continue to contend for revival in DFW.

This is how we build and grow, by inviting people to commit to come pray with us at the same time each week for a two-hour prayer meeting. The name Sacred Trust reflects how seriously we take this time as priests before God. We’re especially asking for people who can serve in specific roles as worship leaders, prayer leaders, ushers and section leaders. Also, in order to properly grow, we REALLY need some more full- and part-time missionaries!

God, set watchmen on the walls here at The Prayer Room. Build Your house of prayer — bring us a hundred new people to join Sacred Trust!