The truth is: I love this book and have purchased dozens of copies for my friends and for those whom I thought would need to read it. The responses I have received have been positive. This book has caused my friends’ faith to grow, they’ve seen God work in their lives, and together we’ve rejoiced at prayers answered, and thanked God those he chose to answer in a different way.
The truth is: Time for confession, or to come out of the closet so to speak. I DIDN’T DO IT. That’s right. I DIDN’T DO IT. I bought books to give to others and kept one for me and I started to do it but then my friend in Phoenix was struggling with finding something she and her husband could do together to grow in their prayer life and devotional time together. So I gave her my book and it did help them–but not me—I’m a 100 Day drop out. Now you know the ugly truth.
But then I had a chance to change all that. So I’m going to quote from the book, which I will be doing a lot:
This book is a guide to lead you through a 100-day period of prayer as you face a crisis or problem of greater than normal difficulty…
We’ve found that it’s most effective when carried out by a group of people committed to praying together because, as most of us have discovered, it’s just hard to keep on praying by ourselves for something every day for any length of time. Even under normal circumstances, too many distractions and interruptions tend to take us away from our prayer times.
Exactly. And I feel like the author wrote that with me in mind.
The 100 Day Prayer is simply a way of bringing before God major issues, challenges, concerns, or transitions in our lives. There’s really nothing magic about a hundred days, it’s just that my family and I settled on that span of time as a solid period of concentrated prayer and intercession. It could have been ninety or one-hundred-and-twenty days. The intent is only that we bring before God the same issues each day for that period of time. This isn’t something overly involved or impossible to sustain—only a few minutes of prayer every day. It’s striving more for consistency than length of time in prayer.
Anyway, that should give you an idea about this prayer journey and since I’m going to be using the book, it’s best to let the author explain it.
I hope you can join the prayer journeys. What better way to begin anew than to bring our prayer requests to God?
Below is an excerpt from the book:
Day 12
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
–Psalm 23:1
This sentence has been repeated in our culture and in our churches so many times that it’s gone the way of all overly familiar words. If we hear something often enough, it tends to lose its force.
This is the Old Testament version of what Jesus expressed in the Lord’s Prayer: “Give us our daily bread.” Although said in dozens of different ways throughout the Bible, the point is the same: If we look to God for our needs, he’ll supply them. If God is our shepherd, we won’t get lost or end up in oblivion, or final desperation, or destitution.
Does this mean that we’ll never have hard times, or that we’ll never experience suffering, hunger, or material shortages? No, of course not. Human history thoroughly refutes this. Christians in every part of the world and in every generation have experienced all sorts of want and deprivation. Prison and labor camps, squalid refugee cities, persecution, and inner-city poverty are not the fate merely of unbelievers. It’s just bad theology (and gross dishonesty) to make people think that if you just “come to Jesus and accept him as your personal savior,” then from now on everything’s going to be perfect.
This has never been true before and it isn’t now.
So where’s the reason to be positive in our prayer and expectation? The passage here from David is a song. It was to express a relationship between God and us. He is the shepherd and we are the sheep. He’ll lead us in the right way so that our ultimate safety will be guaranteed. Nothing can harm us in any permanent way, and nothing can lead us so far off the path that we’ll never get back home to the fold. As a general rule, he’ll supply us with the practical needs of life even though we’ll pass through lean times. He’ll keep us in his hands even when danger is all around us.
We might even perish (eventually it will happen one way or another), but even in death he’s still our shepherd. We’ll never have to face the great black abyss alone. He’ll be by our side to lead us even there, for there is no place in this world or the next he’s unfamiliar with, or where we are beyond his leading and protection. One thing we can be sure of is this: even if God allows us to appear lost for a season, or short of food or housing for a time, or alone and without friends, it’s not even a remote possibility to be outside the realm of his loving care and guidance. In the end, we can’t really ever lose.
-From Your 100 Day Prayer: The Transforming Power of Waiting on God by Dr. John I. Snyder (Thomas Nelson, Publisher).
- God of the Last Minute - September 25, 2018
- Your 100 Day Prayer: Day 100 – A New Day - April 10, 2018
- Your 100 Day Prayer: Day 99 – The Final Chapter - April 9, 2018
I’d like to join. Is there a place I need to sign up?