How do you eat an elephant? A bite at a time. Now, when Nick asked me to speak on Praying for the City that is a bit what it felt like. Cities are big places and prayer is a big subject, no just one elephant, but two! You’ll be glad to hear that I’m not planning to try and eat the whole elephant tonight, but I do hope that we can make a start and that we will have some time to chew over what we do bite off properly so we end up nourished rather than having indigestion. So, what I plan for us to do is to look at some examples of people praying for cities from the Bible and to draw out from those some ideas that might help shape our prayers for the city that we live in. Having done that we will look at some of the practical opportunities we have to pray for Telford and spend some time giving the Holy Spirit space to lead us deeper into prayer.
We’re going to begin by the side of a road. A road between Mamre and Sodom. God has been visiting with Abraham and has promised him that he will have son in his old age, much to Sarah’s amusement. Having shared a meal they set out on the road towards Sodom, as the Lord has determined to destroy the city for it is a place of evil. Here is the conversation the Abraham has with God, as recorded in Genesis 18:
“Then Abraham came near and said, ‘Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?’ And the Lord said, ‘If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.’ Abraham answered, ‘Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?’ And he said, ‘I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.’ Again he spoke to him, ‘Suppose forty are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of forty I will not do it.’ Then he said, ‘Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.’ He answered, ‘I will not do it, if I find thirty there.’ He said, ‘Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.’ Then he said, ‘Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.’ And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham; and Abraham returned to his place.”
Abraham is praying for the city. Abraham has been given a prophetic insight into the future of a city. His reaction to this insight is revealing. He doesn’t shy away from it and he doesn’t take a grim pleasure in declaring it, but he allows it to drive him to prayer. And this prayer takes the form of pleading for the place and the people who live there.
There are two things that struck me as I was looking at this account. The first is that Abraham prays for the city by focussing on individuals, on small numbers of people within it. We will come back to this later when we think about how we can practically pray for our city.
The second is that Abraham pleads on the basis of God’s character. “Shall not the Judge of the earth do what is just”. Abraham believes that God’s character is constant and bases his prayer on that faith.
I think what I’m trying to get at here is expressed in the word “Hosanna”.
Does anybody know what the meaning of the word “Hosanna” is? It comes from a Hebrew word that means, “Save us”. It is a word that was used to ask God to come to the help of God’s people. But it’s more than that, because it carries with it the idea that the person it is being called out to actually has the power, authority, and ability to rescue, to save. Hosanna is like a knife with an edge on both sides, it cuts both ways. It is a cry for help but also a shout of praise to the one that we know does save. It is a word of humble confidence.
Abraham pleads with God for rescue for the people of Sodom on the basis of his knowledge of the character of God – that God is just and can save. It is both pleading and praise. It is a Hosanna prayer.
In our prayer for Telford we plead in the same way – not to persuade a God who is unwilling to act but with the confidence of knowing that we are crying out to the God who is willing and able to change our city.
Now, we know that in the end God did not even find even ten innocent in Sodom, and God chose to save those who were innocent (Lot and his family) and to destroy the remainder of the city. We might be uncomfortable with the end of this story, it would certainly make this a neater preaching point if God had found ten innocent and spared the city as a result of Abraham’s prayer. But, to be honest, the way the story ends is closer to my experience of prayer. We don’t always see neat connections between the prayers we pray and what happens in the world. Nevertheless we are called to follow Abraham’s example and plead for the city with humble confidence in the one who created it, loves it, and wills to save it. Hosanna indeed.
We move on now to another city, some centuries later. The people of God are in exile in Babylon and God’s messenger, Jeremiah, is telling them what they should do, how they are to live, in that place.
“Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Jeremiah 29:4-7
Now, this was written to into a specific context, that of exiles who were far from home, far from the land that was their inheritance, promised to Abraham all those years ago. We have to be a little careful about just taking these verses straightforwardly as applying to us, but it seems to me that we are not in such a different context. We also are exiles in the world. Our primary identity is as children of God. Before we are British, or Polish, or Greek, or Indian, we are citizens of the Kingdom of God. That is a our nationality. We have been promised an eternal home, but we are not resident there yet. We live our lives amongst those who do not share our identity, our way of worship, our nationality. We live in exile, and so I believe that these instructions to the exiles of the people of God do apply to us. We are to work and to pray for the prosperity of the city we are living in.
Some of you will know the story of Ffald-y-Brenin, a Christian retreat centre in Wales. I don’t have time to tell it all now, so the part I want to focus on is the remarkable experience that they have had of blessing people and their community in God’s name. They are based in a rural context, so their prayers of blessing are different in their details to what we would pray in the city, but they are practical prayers of blessing for the prosperity of the community that they live in. They bless the flocks, the farmers, the schools, the families. The fruit of these blessings has been marvellously miraculous and has led people to come to faith, which is the greatest blessing of all.
Roy Godwin, the director of the ministry at Ffald-y-Brenin writes this in his book, “The Grace Outpouring”
“I’ve come to believe that God exists to bless. It is an impulse that is at the heart of his character. In the community of the Trinity the blessing flows from between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father loves and blesses the Son and the Son loves and blesses the Father, and the Holy Spirit loves and blesses both, and they love and bless him. In that relationship we see the unstoppable flow of love and mercy that is God. I once had a picture, a visual image in my imagination, which caused me to view God as a greyhound at the starting block, simply waiting for the word, for the gate to be lifted, and he’s off.
God is slow to anger and swift to bless, and he desires to bless the righteous and the unrighteous alike. Somehow we release something here on earth when we’re acting in unison with the cry of heaven. The kingdom is released when there’s an agreement between heaven and earth. His will can be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
We are called to bless Telford in God’s name. As the tagline for Ignite has it: Speak the Blessing.
For our third Biblical example of someone praying over a city we jump again in time and space to Jerusalem, and to Jesus. In Luke’s account of Jesus’ life we read this in chapter 19:
“As Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.”
At first glance this might seem a slightly odd example when we’re talking about prayer, because there is no spoken prayer recorded here, or any instruction to pray. In some senses it is a prophetic declaration rather than a prayer. However, it seems to me to be important because of what Jesus’ tears show us about the heart of God.
You see, prayer is more about us aligning our hearts and minds with God’s heart and mind than it is about getting God to do what we want. We sometimes sing, “break my heart for what breaks yours”. Here, in this account, we see something that breaks God’s heart, something that causes God to weep, to lament. It is the blindness of a city, its destruction, its missing of an opportunity, its lack of recognition of God at work. These things cause God’s heart to break, and so they should break our hearts too. Part of our prayer for Telford is to lament and to weep over the sin and the darkness that is here.
I wonder when you were last in a prayer meeting when somebody broke down in abject sorrow over the darkness that engulfs the people of Telford. How did you feel? To my shame, sometimes when that happens I feel embarrassed, it’s not very English is it? Is disrupts our orderly way of thinking and makes us uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating a false emotionalism or suggesting that we try and wind ourselves up into feeling things that aren’t springing from our hearts. What I am saying is that if lament is not part of our prayer over Telford then we are missing something that I am sure is in the heart of God.
So, as we pray for our city, we are to plead for Telford, we are to bless Telford, and we are to lament over Telford.
Holding those three things in mind, I’d now like to turn to think about the practical opportunities that we have to pray for Telford, and I’d like to suggest that these opportunities occur at three levels, city, neighbourhood, and street.
Before we do that, let’s pray: Holy Spirit, thank you for what you have been teaching us about praying for our city. Please open our hearts and minds and prompt us to respond to the opportunities that you are calling us to take, to put this learning into practice.
So let’s start off thinking about opportunities for praying for city wide issues.
Over the last couple of years, in parallel with One Bright Day and One Bright Week, six prayer themes have come to the fore across Shropshire that seem to me to be really helpful when it comes to praying for our city. These are:
- Family Life and Relationships
- Schools and Education
- National and Local Government
- Economy and Employment
- Law and Order
- Spiritual Renewal
These themes can be useful in our own personal times of prayer and intercession, but also for when we gather together. I know that we used them in Priorslee as the themes of our monthly worship and prayer meetings over the first half of 2014 and they helped give a focus to our prayers that sharpened them significantly.
As well as our own church prayer groups, there are also area-wide opportunities to get together and pray into themes like this.
There is the Shropshire Prayer Breakfast on October 17th – not just praying for Telford but for the whole of the county.
There is Prayer Central on the 4th Sunday of the month at 6:30pm at Meeting Point House, the next one is on the 27th of September.
Over recent years there have been 24-7 prayer weeks organised by the Loving Telford team and there is another one due to happen from November 21st. There is the 24-7 prayer initiative organised by Nick James, encouraging people to commit to pray for Telford for an hour a week.
In addition to these there are also groups focussed on particular areas:
This Tuesday lunch time at Meeting Point House there is a prayer lunch focussed on Schools and Education.
Street Pastors are recruiting currently for prayer supporters, people who like Moses can stand over the battle with arms aloft in intercession for the Street Pastors and for the people they meet and interact with.
Adopt a Cop supports our police officers and other staff in prayer.
I know this might be starting to feel like the notices section of most church services, and even then I’m sure I will have missed out some of the things that are happening. but I want to suggest to you that we are not short of opportunities to pray for our city. If we are not doing so then it is because we are prioritising something else. Now we can’t do everything, and God doesn’t call us all to do everything, but I do believe that there are people here tonight that God is challenging to step up to the plate in praying for our city, and that might mean stopping doing other things.
As well as praying for our city as a whole we can also pray for out city neighbourhood by neighbourhood, and I suggest that you start with the neighbourhood that you live in. In the lead up to Easter we used this book “Neighbours Transform Your Streets” in Priorslee to encourage us and to provide a structure for our prayers for our neighbourhood. I know that there is a prayer diary here at All Saints which is used for Morning Prayer every weekday morning, ensuring that every street in the parish is prayed for through the month.
On your seats as you came in you will have found a postcard. Twice a year we have walked and prayed in every street in Priorslee, as we’ve delivered one of these cards to every household. We have always had some kind of fruit from this, either people asking for prayer or wanting to meet for a chat or joining the church. Praying for our neighbourhood in this systematic, intentional way has been an effective way of bringing people closer to Jesus.
As well as praying for education and schools across the city we can pray for the specific schools in our own neighbourhoods. This week we’ve had a new school open in Priorslee, Holy Trinity Academy. As it is a faith academy we’ve had the privilege of having fairly open access to it. We prayer walked around the building site some months ago, commending the school to God. This week, we prayed around the building again the day before it opened to students and were encouraged that members of staff were inviting us in to their classrooms to pray for them and their students.
I know that with community schools, this kind of initiative isn’t always as straightforward to arrange, but even if we can’t pray on site, I don’t believe that anything can stop you praying for your local school if God calls you to do so. And as you pray, I believe that God will open the way for you to pray in a more informed way and to be able to pray walk the school.
We’re going to watch a short video produced by Prayer for Schools, a national initiative that provides resources and encouragement for this kind of activity. It is a couple of years old, but the sharp eyed among you might spot some familiar places.
I’ve chosen schools as an example, but the same principles apply to all the themes we talked about earlier. They could apply to your local GP surgery, your local policing team, local businesses, local council and politicians. What ever area of life your heart yearns to plead for, to bless, to lament over, across the city, there will be a local, neighbourhood part of that life that you can pray for.
City, neighbourhood and, now, street. Abraham pleaded for Sodom by focussing on the individuals within it. Jeremiah’s call to work and pray for the prosperity of the city was a call that had to be heeded in each personal interaction that took place between each exile and native of the city. Jesus looked over the city, and weeping over it, wept for each person within it. We pray for the city by praying for the individuals we know who live, work, go to college or school here.
I’ve called this “street”, but it might also be “office”, “class”, “school run”. This is the level of prayer at which we are praying by name for specific people with frequency and perseverance. On their behalf we are crying Hosanna, “save us” to the one that we know came to rescue every person from darkness and death. In God’s name we bless them in every aspect of their lives, in their health, their work, their family life, their faith. Sometimes that prayer will lead us to weep over them as we are caught up in God’s unrequited love for them, sometimes it will lead us to weep with them as they share their pain and confusion with us.
I don’t believe that we can pray these prayers from a distance, we need to spend time getting to know the people that we live among so that we know how to pray for them. This takes time and can be messy. For the exiles in Babylon, working and praying for the prosperity of the city would have meant getting to know and work with the people who had conquered them. It was not a comfortable or easy path. Jesus left heaven to come to live on earth, in all our mess and pain and poverty, so that he could lift us out of them. He now intercedes for us in the Father’s throne room with intercession that flows from his humanity. He didn’t keep his distance, and neither can we if we are to pray for our city by praying for the individuals that make it up.
We are called to plead for, to bless, and to lament over our city, neighbourhoods and streets. We’re going to do that now.
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