Pray Like Jesus: Learn to Pray to
God as Father
Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase
Copyright © 2021 by Mark Driscoll
and Ashley Chase
Charisma House
ISBN 978-1-62999-926-5
ISBN 978-1-62999-927-2 (ebook)
Before I (Mark) married Grace, I
prayed a lot. She did the same. We also asked our Christian friends and family
to join us. Since we were young, we did not want simply to ask God to bless our
plan, but we wanted to ask God to give us His plan. Are you getting married?
Sort that out with God first. Whom you marry is the second-most important
decision you will ever make after whom you will worship. The same is true of
any major life decision. One of our pastors, who has taught us a lot, walked with
us through the biggest decision-making season of our life as a married couple.
We took months to pray and asked others to pray with us and for us. We wanted
God to tell us whether we should stay in a ministry, home, and city that we’d
been serving for a few decades or if we should transition into a completely
unknown future in faith.
After months of prayer God spoke
to us both audibly at the same time. Grace was in the kitchen, and I was in the
bed-room on the opposite end of our home. Grace came running in the bedroom to
tell me that God had spoken to her, and stunned, I told her that at the same
moment He spoke to her, he also spoke to me. He told us both we were “released”.
This word from the Lord led to
the biggest faith step of our lives as we did not know what was next but knew
that a season of our life had ended and we needed to step out together, in
faith. In submission to the pastoral authority over us, we asked our overseers
whether they agreed this was a word from God. They confirmed what God said.
Without months of praying
together and God supernaturally answering this prayer, we would have been
divided, and, as Jesus taught, our household would have fallen apart.
Thankfully, because of prayer, we were united and able to lead our five kids
through an incredibly painful and difficult time. We are now in the holiest,
happiest, and healthiest season of our lives, doing ministry together because God
heard and answered our prayers. Pages 50-51
In
this account Mark Driscoll mentioned that he and Grace prayed for months about
whether or not to leave the ministry they had been in. Because Mark Driscoll had not pastored a
church prior to Mars Hill there is basically no room for misunderstanding the “ministry”
identity. The Driscolls, Mark tells us, wanted God to tell them whether they
should stay at Mars Hill or transition into a new unknown future.
Mark
Driscoll, obviously recounted that after months of prayers by him and his wife,
God audibly spoke to both of them. They
were released. Now we’ll get back to other accounts of this moment before long
but the most significant element in this newer account is what Mark Driscoll
reports as having happened next—the Driscolls went to their overseers and asked
whether they agreed God released them.
This seems to be a reference to the former Mars Hill Board of Overseers,
a subset of the Board of Advisors and Accountability. Driscoll’s account was that the Board of
Overseers, apparently, concluded that God had, in fact, spoken to Mark and
Grace Driscoll and that would entail that the board accepted Mark Driscoll’s
resignation.
We're about to get detailed so if that's okay with you read on.
