Jed Coppenger spoke on the power of prayer during a recent chapel service at the University of Mobile. He is the pastor of First Baptist Church Cumming, Georgia.
Coppenger also is the author of “21 Days to Childlike Prayer: Changing Your World One Specific Prayer at a Time” and “Fake Christianity: 10 Traps of an Inauthentic Faith (and How to Avoid Them).” Coppenger has worked in Christian publishing, church planting, served on mission trips around the world and preached for a wide range of camps, retreats and events.
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“I want to talk to you today about how to experience things that your hearts were made for and longs for,” Coppenger said during the March 18 chapel service. “I want to talk to you about how to experience the power of God in your life, how to experience the provision of God and the presence of God in your life.
“If you don’t experience His presence, you’re going to spend your life wasting it by looking for that kind of experience in a lot of other things. That’s why it’s so important to understand this is what your heart is made for.”
He noted there’s nothing more important than “experiencing God’s presence, power and provision in your problems and plans — learning how to access that power, learning how to experience and apply that in your daily life through prayer.”
With a message focusing on Jesus’ example of the model prayer in Matthew 6:9–13, Coppenger shared with students that he wished he had applied the practical principles of learning how to pray earlier in his life.
“Theologian John Calvin said in the 1500s, ‘By the benefit of prayer we reach those riches which are laid up for us with the heavenly father,” Coppenger noted. “Calvin also said, ‘We dig up by prayer the treasures that were pointed out by the Lord’s gospel, which our faith has gazed upon.’ Charles Spurgeon acknowledged he would rather teach one man to pray than 10 men to preach.
“Spurgeon understood that when you learn to pray, you can see things happen in your life, in your family, in your work, in your finances, in your health — that wouldn’t happen without those prayers. It doesn’t take great prayers to see great things happen in your life. It just takes a great God. We have a God who is available to us, and He can do more in a moment than we can do in a lifetime. God loves unleashing that power on behalf of His undeserving children. That’s the beauty of prayer.”
Even atheists pray
Coppenger told students he wasn’t surprised by a study that said 30% of atheists have admitted praying at some point in their life.
“There’s something about this idea of being able to think or speak words in a way that connects with some being that changes things,” Coppenger said. “All of you find yourselves in situations where you need things to change in your life, and you don’t have the power to bring it about on your own. A lot of people go to some dark places in those times, but when you learn to use your prayer life to step into those places courageously, you can see awesome things happen in your life.”
Details of life
Coppenger emphasized to students the importance of praying about their problems and plans while reminding them that God cares about every detail of their life.
“When you learn to pray your problems, you learn you can pray all day long because you’ve got problems all day long,” Coppenger said. “If it’s a problem, Jesus wants to hear about it. When you get specific with your prayer life, you give the invisible God an opportunity to become visible in your life, in your problems and in your plans, in a way He wouldn’t be able to without that specific prayer. When He does answer your prayer, His presence is better than whatever He provides for you.”
Becoming more childlike
He concluded, “You’ve got to trust Him because you’re going to go through painful things that will not make sense to you, and you’ve got to trust Him that there’s a good purpose like a surgeon uses a scalpel to make you more, not less. If you want to experience the power and the presence of God in your life, you don’t need to become super spiritual; you just need to become more childlike. Remember who you are and remember whose you are.”
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