I lead a Home Team (Small Group) and we were talking about prayer and how we can pray more sincerely.  Many of the people were concerned about HOW they were praying and MAKING SURE that they weren’t asking for stuff all the time and not allowing God to speak to them.  When you pray, you do not have to pray EXACTLY this pattern.  Prayer should never be a formula or system, but this provides a simple guideline for how to pray.

So, I unpacked the Pray Through ACTS Concept.

It basically goes like this:

A - Adoration, which is a really fancy way of acknowledging who God is.  He created the universe and all of creation, yet He STILL desires to be close to you and cares for you.

C - Confession, this is where you let God know, that YOU know, where you have fallen a little short in the obedience department.  We all mess up, and we must all confess our mess ups to God.

T - Thanksgiving, after you confess your sins, you need to let God know how thankful you are.  God blesses you in BIG and SMALL ways, every day and we need to LOOK for those blessings and tell God we aappreciate all that he does for us.

S - Supplication, in other words, this is the GIVE ME part of prayer.  You know, Give Me this, Give Me that…

If you earnestly try to pray through ACTS, you will find something amazing will happen…You will find that you will discover blessings from God that you might not have seen otherwise, and the “GIVE ME” part of your prayers will be less about YOU and MORE about OTHERS.

Is there any pattern or system that YOU use when you pray?

• It was THE DAY FROM HELL
• God ruled and was in control, it was just a roller coaster of a day.
• SID and I got to the theater a little after 7:00am and got right to it…
• And found out that one of the KEY band members was AWOL and showed up about 15 minutes INTO the service
• We got all the Cafe and Resource Table ready
• THEN we attacked the Kids areas…all by ourselves
• We had a few extra hands and it all worked out, I can’t wait to see what happens NEXT Sunday
• Kids Areas = CHECK / Cafe & Resources= CHECK / Sound System = CHECK / Video & Projector…..
• “What do you mean, ‘we need to change 3 of the songs?’”
• Little did everyone know that we shifted over to Media Shout, and we don’t HAVE any of those songs loaded in….
• We’ll just go (as in drive back to the office and pick up) the other computer and video switcher, and run it like we used to….
• “Oh, you didn’t need the extra computer…NO PROBLEM!
• Video = CHECK / Words (PowerPoint) = CHECK / Backgrounds (VidVox)………………
• ……………………………………………………………
• ……………………………………………………………
• =CHECK - Damn, finally!  Thank you God, we need that blessing!
• Services start and everything is OK…..
• Scott knocked it out of the park.  The band rocked hard (as a quartet) and God moved in an awesome way.
• And then we tore it all down, and everybody lived happily ever after.
• Or, in other words, we got the trailer back and then hit Taco Bell and I tried to nap
• I got about 1/2 hour and then it was off to Dad’s for a little dinner
• Got back to the house around 8:00 and started trying to update my Blog site
• It will come soon.  I am stealing, borrowing, I mean, using some code from another amazing site in the hopes that I can get mine up to speed
• It will take time, as all things do
• It promises to be a wild week, but…
• I have some awesome friends coming to visit this weekend, and it’s only 5 days away until they get here!!
• I’ll be trying to post a little more regularly this week - I hope.