Saturday's Selections from Our Bookshelf: Wrestling Prayer

     

      "God, if it's Your will, would you please-?"
      How often I hear prayers begun this way. Not that we shouldn't desire to have God's will reign in our lives, but Jesus never prayed prayers like those. He said, "Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
      What is it like in heaven? There is no sickness. There is no suffering. There is no lack of any good thing. Jesus told us to ask His Father for perfection in every area of our lives.
      This is one of the many areas explored in Eric and Leslie Ludy's Wrestling Prayer. Wrestling Prayer isn't an easy read. Lindsey and I read and discussed one chapter every week for about four months, and even then I felt as if I had only really taken in a small fraction of all it holds. It isn't an easy read for all of the right reasons, and that is what makes it exciting.
      Eric knows exactly how to get your blood pumping, and I can say that from personal experience because I'm met him. (He even signed my copy of Wrestling Prayer!) After two days at a conference with him and his wife I knew that I would never be the same, and I had the exact same experience after reading Wrestling Prayer. Take this quote for example:

"You may acknowledge intellectually that your King has power over all His enemies, but the only way that you will know this truth intimately in the depths of your soul is if you follow Him into the camp of the enemy and witness this power for yourself."

      Eric and Leslie show us that God is so much more willing and so much more able to do above and beyond what we could ever ask and think than we give Him credit for. He is ready and waiting for us to come to Him at any moment of the day and ask great things of Him. And when we ask and believe that we will receive, He truly answers us beautiful ways.
      After Lindsey and I met Eric and Leslie, we decided to pray a very specific prayer: that God would provide us with 45 Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes and enough money to ship them all. (At $7 a box, this was no small request.)
      God gave us 46 boxes and plently of shipping money! We were so filled with a joy that words could never describe.
      I highly encourage you to read Wrestling Prayer. If you are open to Him, God will use it to shape you into a prayer warrior that will toss mountains into the sea that you never could've imagined budging an inch.