Praying biblically saturated prayers takes work, concentration, and a keen attentiveness to what God has said. And let the obvious be stated: praying biblically saturated prayers means being someone who is himself saturated in the Bible. It means opening up and reading the Bible, daily meditating upon its life-giving and life-changing truths.

In First Kings 8 we see King Solomon lead in corporate prayer and what stands out about his prayer is that it is Solomon pleading for what the Lord has already promised. He uses language like “keep for your servant David my father what you have promised” (verse 25) and “let your word be confirmed, which you have spoken” (verse 26). This is what the Puritans referred to as “pleading the promises”, a way of praying which brought the person praying closest to the will of God.
To be sure, this ought to be the habit and heart of every Christian’s prayer life, pleading the promises of God and praying according to God’s will. 1 John 5:14-15 tells us, “that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” What does it mean to pray according to God’s will? It means to pray according to the intentions of God’s heart. Of course, there is God’s secret will of decree that we can’t always know. Nonetheless we do have God’s revealed will, his word – be it His promises, His character, His warnings, or His threats. Here then is a solid epistemological ground from which we can boldly approach the throne of grace.
Archibald Alexander (1772-1851) makes the staggering but obvious point that although God, “is everywhere present, yet he is invisible… the great Architect is concealed. As far as reason can lead us, we seem to be shut out from all intercourse with our Maker; and whether prayer is permitted would remain for ever doubtful, were it not for divine revelation.”[1] In other words, how foolish it would be to presume to know the will of God if he had never spoken and yet still offer up prayers with the expectation of divine approval! No wise man would dare come before a king and make a request unaware of whether or not the king was sympathetic to such a plea. “Righteous lips are the delight of a king, and he loves him who speaks what is right” (Proverbs 16:13).
And yet we do know that our God is ever attentive to his children’s requests, but we only know this because he has spoken; we only know this because of his word. Johannes G. Vos (1903-1983), in his excellent commentary on The Westminster Larger Catechism, says there is only one way to know how to pray in a God glorifying way, “and that is by studying the Bible, which is the revealed will of God.”
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God plans to rescue and redeem people from every culture: from Iran to China, from ancient Greece to ancient Rome, right down to people from the secular post-Christian West. And the beautiful thing is that rather than do it himself, which he has the power to, God chooses to work through us, despite our fears and our inadequacies. God delights in using the weak things of the world—because it’s when we realise we don’t have the ability, we’re forced to rely on him, as we’re supposed to.

Some of my favourite places to speak at are venues like coffee shops, workplaces, or universities. After one such university event, where the Christian Union had asked me to talk on “Why did Jesus have to die?” we had an amazing time of Q&A after which I felt the Spirit nudge me to end the event by leading people who wanted to in a prayer to commit their lives to Jesus. It was an incredible evening and God was very much at work. But I remember that one particular evening not for how powerfully the Lord moved, but for a conversation afterwards. As we were packing up to leave, a campus ministry leader came up us and asked: “How did you do what you did there?”
“What do you mean?”, I replied.
“You just preached the gospel very openly then prayed, very publicly, and invited people to respond to Jesus—and you did that in a university meeting room. I didn’t think evangelism like that was possible in this day and age. How did you and your colleague do that?”
That’s not the first time I’ve heard that sentiment expressed: that evangelism simply isn’t possible. That a workplace, campus, group of people, or even our culture is so secular and so post-Christian that evangelism just doesn’t work anymore.
I confess I’ve occasionally fallen into the same way of thinking myself. A few years ago I became friends with Peter, a Christian GP. And I remember being very surprised when one day he casually remarked “I love being a GP, it creates so many fantastic opportunities for evangelism”. Without thinking, I said words to the effect of “Really? I thought the health service was so secular and any expression of religious faith so frowned upon, that evangelism just isn’t possible?” Those three little words just slipped out: evangelism isn’t possible.[1]
Why did I instinctively respond with incredulity? Why was that campus minister baffled by seeing evangelism take place on campus? Why do many of us (if we are honest) worry or doubt that evangelism is really possible in “this day and age”? I think it’s because there is a massive temptation to buy into the myth that the secular UK (or the West in general) is simply too difficult ground for the gospel. But is this actually true? And if we’re in danger of thinking this, how can we overcome the Impossibility Gap?
Challenging the Myth of Impossibility
Because the Impossibility Gap is so deep rooted in many of us (we haven’t deliberately adopted it, but we’ve become quietly and subtly infected by it), I want to hit it and hit it hard—so here are six powerful pieces of counter-evidence that taken together will, I hope, form a powerful corrective.
First, however tough a context for evangelism the secular West may be, Christianity has grown (and grown rapidly) in equally tough (or even tougher) contexts in the past. For instance, look at the growth of the Church in the first century. The first century Greek and Roman world was not easy, far from it. Yes, it was very religious, but religiously pluralistic—the pagan world had little time for the idea there was one God and that every other god was a false one. Add to that the ever daily threat and problem of persecution, as the young Church was seen as an increasing threat to the authorities. Yet despite those challenges—a hostile culture and hostile rulers—the Church grew from 120 people in AD33 to 31 million by AD350; or to put it even more dramatically, from 0% to 52.9% of the Roman Empire in 300 years.[2] The early Church didn’t look at the culture and think “impossible”, they looked at it and thought “What a challenge! Let’s follow the Spirit’s lead and see what happens”.
From the past, we can also look to the present. For today, Christianity is growing like wildfire in far tougher contexts than the West. Look at China, where the Church is growing exponentially despite the best attempts of the Communist Party to stamp it out, that there are probably about 120 million Christians in China. Indeed, China is on track to become the world’s largest Christian nation by the 2030s.[3] That growth has all happened in the past few decades. Or consider Iran, where a totalitarian Islamic regime rules with the iron fist of Sharia Law and has made conversion from Islam illegal. But despite arrests and torture, the Iranian church now numbers over a million and is the fastest growing church in the world.[4] There are similar stories across the Middle East. Christians in these terrifically difficult settings could easily say “Evangelism is impossible; it can’t be done!” but they haven’t and God is at work in amazing ways. Let’s be encouraged by and learn from their courage, faith, and example.
Third, sometimes the Impossibility Gap grows because we have a tendency to romanticise our own past. We imagine that churches were full to bursting in Victorian times (and before) and we pine for the lost Golden Age of Christianity, when our country was so thoroughly Christian it was like living in heaven on earth.[5] But that is far from the reality. In Victorian times, surveys of religious attendance show a very mixed picture. For example, Horace Mann, commenting on the 1851 Religious Census remarked that ‘a sadly formidable proportion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion’.[6] One can read contemporary reports of ministers grumbling how ‘There were only a dozen people in church on Sunday, and three of them were drunk’.
A little earlier in time and Wilberforce, that famous Christian MP and reformer, was so upset by the spiritual state of the country that in 1787 he wrote in his journal that ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the Reformation of Manners’[7] (he meant by the latter the spiritual reformation of his country). A few decades earlier still, John Wesley was so concerned by the religious state of the UK that he threw himself into the re-evangelism of the UK, covering over 250,000 miles on on horseback and preaching over 40,000 sermons as he sought to share Jesus.
It is clear: the past was not a Christian utopia, but as tough then as it is now, yet that didn’t hold back Wesley and others from faithfully preaching the gospel. And I’m thankful that they did: it’s because of that Great Chain of Witnesses which stretches down through the centuries that you and I eventually heard the gospel ourselves.
Fourth, it’s helpful to remember that the West is highly unusual. The secularism that we see in places like the UK, Europe, and North America are a cultural blip both historically and geographical. In most parts of the world today, religion is growing—humanity is becoming more not less religious and worldwide, atheism is in decline. According to the latest research from the well-respected Pew Research Centre, by 2060 the number of people identifying as atheists or agnostics will have declined to 12% (from 16% today).[8] And those patterns are increasingly being reflected in the UK through factors like immigration. Many of the largest churches in cities like London are now immigrant churches—and there’s a beautiful sign of God’s long-term provision in the way that those immigrant churches are now helping to re-evangelise the nation that evangelised them through the missionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Fifth, remember that the UK and the West are not Christendom. Sometimes we can have such a myopic view of culture and history that we begin to assume that God’s plans and purposes for his Kingdom have the UK, or the US, or the West at their centre. And no wonder we then get distressed when those countries undergo seismic cultural shifts.
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Your friend shares about their special needs child? You are listening to a story of your friend who is a caregiver and the surgery the person they care for just had? Your friend just took their family to a special camp and had a great experience? Phil. 2:3-5, “do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for our own personal interests, but also for the interest of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus.” Let’s do this and care about others, their story, and give them “their moment!”

Impressed recently about this idea, I have realized that we don’t often give others a chance to share their “moment” without others (or myself) wanting to share a similar experience or story. Something that happened to us recently has us really reflecting and being much more observant of letting others share what is important to them without topping their story or telling our own unless they ask.
Upon being asked how we were, Joe shared that I (Cindi) had just gotten out of the hospital and shared in 2 sentences how critical I was in the ICU -going in for one reason and other things popping up. Without missing a beat, nor asking a question or showing any interest, they shared about a friend who went into the hospital for something and died of something unrelated. It helped us to realize some things we should be aware of when others share something with us:

Others (outside our closer circles) probably don’t really care and thus their own story will come to mind and trumps ours (we didn’t know this persons’ friend, so how was this story pertinent in the moment?)
Their story was obviously more important or they would have asked about ours (not a question asked nor a concern shown except, “get better soon”.)
Their “death” story of their friend didn’t encourage our journey!
The “can you top this” attitude can leave one feeling unheard and invisible. (It did us.)

So how did we handle it? We said not another word, listened to the story and commented on it, sharing our condolences on the loss, and went on our way.
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