Eric Youngblood: Keystone Habits, Sexting, And Prayer

  • Tuesday, July 19, 2016
  • Eric Youngblood

Charles Duhigg has identified the power of keystone habits which could be summarized as “small changes or habits that people introduce into their routines that unintentionally carry over into other aspects of their lives.”

Working with God to Form the Future
Prayer is one such keystone habit that carries over into other aspects of your life, but also, stunningly and inexplicably sometimes, cascades solid and lovely alteration into the lives of the beneficiaries of your prayer.

It is of course the mechanism that God has invented, utilizing the simple power of request, to permit us to collaborate with him in determining the future. Your plea on Monday morning, may just alter the life, perceptions, and occurrences of folks next Thursday.

Do you ever think of it that way? Determining the future? Really? But how else would you describe it, if of course, you think that prayer is anything. You are asking in your prayers, as CS Lewis has sagely identified, “God to bring about a state of affairs that does not presently exist.” In other words, God has, according to Blaise Pascal, given you the “dignity of causality” with the petitions you bring to his notice. 

Your pleas to Christ cause alterations in history to be. You ask Him for things, and he says, “yes, or no, or hold on a minute, or wait for a while.” But you are helping to pray tomorrow and all the tomorrows afterward into existence. 

Epaphras, the ancient MMA-Fighter with the Divine, had a vocation to wrestle with God. It’s hard to imagine garnering such a reputation without some strain, ardor, and intensity. And of course the persistence and fire for God-wrestling spring, largely, from believing that what you are doing, well, matters. Maybe even a lot.

Pleading as if it Matters
The congregation I am privileged to serve has entered into our own ring with the Almighty to engage in a daily keystone habit on behalf of students in our community. 

It’s an inter-generational initiative called the Pray for Me campaign, home-grown here in Chattanooga by Tony Souder at the Chattanooga Youth Network. It aspires to help churches all over to pray with ardent affection and nurturing connection for the students and little ones entrusted to our care. 
 
Students who are being educated every minute internally and by many confused cultural teachers that their every desire is to be obeyed; students who are coming to think it normal to “sext” with one another, cavalierly begging for and swapping nude photos of themselves. 

And if not to that extreme, students who are in a restless pursuit of self-branding through social media, hankering for approvals, likes, and social applause that proves flimsy in the creation and sustenance of worth and affection they were made to crave.

Students who are surrounded by intelligent voices and powerful personalities that make the life of faith seem anemic and irrelevant for them.

Students swirling in a haze of confusion, despair, crumbling foundations for religious belief, and a widespread clamoring that what God calls evil is actually good, and that God’s good is decisively restrictive, and most likely, evil. 

Students who are distracted, over-booked, over-scheduled, under-equipped in the ways of apprenticing with Jesus.

But They Belong to Him and to Us
But these students are in our community. Entrusted to us. Some have been baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Breathing deeply mercy air. Dwelling in a congregation, like yours, that aspires to be a circulatory system of nourishing grace. They are the recipients of promises. They have had oaths pledged to them by Him who put the blue in their eyes, the soft in their skin, and the curls in their hair. And He has given them us! To plead for them, as if it mattered. Because it does.

Prayer’s Spill-Over
I’ll venture a wager that most of us who endeavor to make some serious praying part of our daily regimen, will find a number of “spill-over” features in in the moments and movements of our days too. Few things will heighten your expectancy than beginning to pray for the Savior’s movement in the moments ahead of you. 

Pleading for God’s intervention tends to make you start looking for it, just as not pleading tends to make you look for little. And because it isn’t merely a psychological exercise, a “wrestling” sort of prayer, will undoubtedly yield tremors, energies, and movements. You might actually start to believe God exists. 

No, I mean, really believe it. 

And more than that, that he does things. Particular things. Stunning things. Everywhere things. 

You’ll Not Do This Alone
Perhaps your congregation would like to give it a whirl?  Everything you need to find out more is here. And I should I say, the folks at Pray for Me don’t even know I am writing this! I am doing so only because I have found it an invaluable goal and precious aspiration in my life to be able “to wrestle” for the teenagers that have been assigned to me for prayer. And I know that many adults and adolescents alike could repeat the sentiment in our midst.

Whether you participate formally or not, let’s break out our “Pray for Me” prayerbook, and/or our Bibles and ask our patient Lord to teach us how to honor the baptismal commitments we made to our congregation’s young when we stood to flank parents holding these cooing beauties and promised we’d not leave them to parent by their sole lonesomes. 

Let’s ask him to teach us how wrestle with him in prayer for teenagers, both in and outside of the church, and their formation, and for others that “they may be mature and fully assured, standing firm in all the will of God.” Let’s ask that he’d nourish our own confidence in this keystone habit and that he’d creatively use our consistent and fervent prayers as a way to stand with him in opposition to the ruin of the world!

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Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org or follow him on Twitter @GEricYoungblood.

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