Awaken The Dawn

AWAKEN THE DAWN!

There is, in fact, an addiction to prayer that attends this morning habit. Once you experience it, you wonder how you ever survived without it! David Brainerd, the famous prayer warrior, exclaimed: “Oh! One hour with God infi- nitely exceeds all the pleasures and delights of this lower world.” It is not uncommon for those who have become accus- tomed to praying one hour each morning to testify that they now want to pray more than an hour! I am delight- ed that several of my pastoral friends in the city where I live have started praying with this same approach. Presently, there are thousands of people–both at home and abroad–participating in daily hour-long sessions of prayer. Most adopt a simple system such as Larry Lea’s format of The Lord’s Prayer, 4 Dick Eastman’s sixty- minute pace system, 5 or Glenn Sheppard’s Global Prayer Strategy that advocates early morning prayer for different sections of the world each day. 6 Having some structure to your approach is very helpful; it will keep you consistent and persistent. I have found great delight in a variety of approaches, including the use of a prayer map to pray for the nations of the world. 7 Perhaps the greatest examples of praying Christians and churches today can be found in Korea where prayer is practiced, not discussed. C. Peter Wagner shares this observation:

I think my deepest impression of Korea was the extraordinary pervasive sense of prayer I found in all the churches. Every church has a dawn prayer meet- ing at 4:30 or 5:00 A . M . every single day. It is so impor- tant that the senior pastor of most multiple-staff churches visits or leads that meeting every morning. When I asked why, several said simply, “That’s where

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