Poorly Fathered Strike Force

Prayer Strategies

Strategy #1

Stop and watch a couple of minutes of this video.  You don’t need to go to the end.

Now, compare me to him.

I have brain damage.  I am so uncoordinated, I have not learned how to jump rope for my health.  A standard cardio exercise is beyond me.

He has worse body damage than I do, but has progressed much farther than I have in his journey to mobility.

I can walk, jog, and do a bunch of things he can’t.  But by far, he is the superior person, for having come from so far down.

That is the picture of you and your authority.

Because your original fathering was so crumpled, you have had to work hard and long to get the things that others take for granted.  And it hasn’t been elegant, but it is a source of significant spiritual authority.

I would like to start this strike force with a good dose of awe.

Would you spend the next couple of weeks just reviewing your journey from the perspective of all God did.  Make mental lists of all the different things, in different places and times that God put in motion to bring you far down the road from where you began life.

Celebrate the depth and breadth of His investment in your being reparented.

That will position you better to war for the hearts of those who are still pretty raw.

Strategy #2

I hope the weeks spent looking at your journey and savoring the work of God in growing you, was refreshing for you.  Now let’s put that awe to work.

I would like you to launch a jihad against the difference between a season and God’s design.

I have all my childhood report cards.  They are a thing of horror.  My worst topics were writing and speaking.  Horrible grades, year after year.

Hard core, undeniable facts in the eyes of my parents.  I was, genuinely, a grossly incompetent communicator.  FOR A LONG SEASON.

They projected that into the future and strongly leveraged me toward non-communicative careers.  With reason.

Now, I was, for sure, by any standard, a late bloomer.  I did not begin communicating with any level of competence until decades after I “finished” university.  My last class netted me a 60 which is a D- grade in any non-woke university.

BUT, design trumps journey, so often.

And eventually, who I was came to the front.  Today, I can, on occasion, turn a phrase, and I have hundreds of reasonably articulated teachings on the market.  In fact, I earn my living by my mouth and mind, not my hands and knees.

I am not the first, nor the last, to go through a season that looked awful, when in reality, design was different than the season.

I would like you to pour the faith and fury of your journey into three categories of people who have had a bad season and have been labeled and boxed in by that season.  Bust them out of Seasonal Jail and release them to start over again.

1)   Those who are builders by design, and who have failed in business, but are at the right place to get back in the game, somewhere.

2)   Those who failed in ministry and have rejected all facets of leadership but were made to lead, and have learned from their failure, and need to move into the place God has prepared for them.

3)   Those who failed in marriage or in parenting, who have massively failed forward learning many lessons, and just flat out need to take the labels off themselves and accept the end of a painful season as God sees it.

We need them free and AT THE EVENT to be catapulted into the next season.

Strategy #3

I was at a free-form event a number of years ago where there were four spiritual fathers.  There were also a handful of young people who desperately needed some remedial fathering.

I was on tip toe with expectation, eager to watch the fathers ply their trade.

Nothing happened.

As I deconstructed the event, it became evident that the kids were so wrapped up in their own petty pursuits of pleasure that they never even noticed the opportunity that was present.

And the fathers knew better than to try to share wisdom with kids who were absorbed with trivia.

I am still sad over that wasted opportunity, and the fact is that the same dynamic plays out endlessly day after day.

We have a minor variation of that at the Passionate Manhood event.  I am coming with tools and I will be speaking whether anyone is listening or not.

And a lot of people are coming at significant personal expense, because they DO want to receive something.

BUT, poor fathering will almost invariably cause them to set the bar low.  They have a vision that is most likely valid and viable, but not a full representation of their design and calling.

As such, even though the words will flow over them, they will not “hear” about some strategic assets I share, because their target is small.

But God is not limited to how the principles function.  He is sovereign and can get anyone’s attention.

Ask God to transcend all of the baggage that poor fathering contributes to people not being able to recognize the assets that are being offered them.  Let’s just flat out ask God to be invasive in order to move people along with HIS plan.

Saul was looking for donkeys.  There was not a scrap of monarchial focus in his head when he crossed paths with Samuel.  God invaded!

Ask the God of Samuel and Saul to invade the minds of people coming, so they will recognize the treasures they need, when they are articulated.

Strategy #4

This prayer focus will be for a month.  In two weeks, I will be involved with the Blessing Your Heart seminar and will not have the emotional bandwidth to update you in my desired cadence of every two weeks.

This request is simple.  There are builders who are strategic to the Kingdom who are not planning to come to the event, since they don’t see themselves as God sees them.

Please pray them in.

Look at Scripture for the different ways God moved people who were not making good choices, then create a parallel prayer.

Moses was an ex-offender.  God called him at the burning bush, and he declined.  God yelled at him because that is what you have to do with someone with a spirit of slavery, and it worked to move him down the road.

Ask God to yell at some ex-offender and get him or her there.

Nicodemus was (we think) trapped by his upper crust community of friends.  He could not bring himself to be an outcast from his entire social structure.  Until . . . the evil of his community became so undeniable, he parted ways and pursued right.

Ask God to hunt down the up and outer, who will be shamed and rejected for running hard after God, and cause that person to become revolted by the community he has been a part of for a long time.

Beyond Scripture, look at all the people you know who are full of excuses for why they are not stepping up.

_____________ doesn’t think he needs any more tools.  Everyone around him thinks his silver bullet is not working very well.  Ask God to hack the self-deception that no one else has been able to hack.

___________ has had a bad experience with religious leaders and doesn’t want to hear another.  Ask God to create a desire for this message that transcends their past pain.

Don’t just throw words at heaven asking for people to be sent.  Study the word and your culture and craft a new focus each week.

Strategy #5

In the 1900s, one of the wealthy men in California was Lyman Stewart.  He struck oil in the Mariposa sector of the San Joaquin Valley, and leveraged that into building Union Oil.

He only gave $100,000 each to his kids as an inheritance, along with a letter explaining that this was enough capital for them to go into business of some sort, and that they needed to do that, to grow personally.  He was of the opinion that a life of inherited wealth produced small people.

There is a statistic bandied about by the wealth management people that 70% of wealthy families will lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% will lose it by the third.

Why?

Because when money comes easily, people do not grow personally.

Lyman knew that having to build a business would grow his kids up farther and faster than being given millions.

Gotta love the wisdom of this Giver father.

In the Passionate Manhood 3 seminar, I will be focusing on all the assets God has already given us that need to be developed, before they can be used.  This is hard work, and I will be very clear about that.

Microwave Christianity touts a cheaper product – a quick dose of God’s power, instead of hard work.

You, who have grown up without the proverbial silver spoon in your mouth, know the value of hard work to BECOME, when you don’t have the resources that others around you have had.

From that position, pray into the concept of hard work, asking that the Holy Spirit will breathe on my words and cause the concept to become a beautiful thing, not a grim necessity.

Strategy #6

In the 6th level of fathering, a child learns how to fight and how to build. When a child has had two mothers, they arrive in their 20s without knowing how to fix a meal or how to shop for car insurance.

And Christians who have been raised in a mothering stream of the church, are the same – sitting around waiting for God to do the heavy lifting and then feeling abandoned when He does not.

Admittedly more of the people at an SLG seminar are already builders at some level than the general population, but still, you can know some basics of how to build, without having the skill to build in a specific area.

One of the fundamental principles is that as sons, we are asked to build with raw materials.  In principle, people understand, and agree, that time is a raw material and the grace on time is different each day.

In principle.

Few, however, can tailor 15 days out of 30 to the grace that is on each day.  It is a learned skill.  The resource of grace riding on time is there, but accessing it does not happen often.

So the idea that each person is surrounded by assets that are unused because they don’t know how to access that treasure will be a frustrating pill to swallow.

We accept that concept in terms of athletes, artists and musicians.  They are born with talent, but need to practice for a long time to get where they want to be.  We need to normalize that in our spiritual disciplines.

The core time for this paradigm to be spelled out and embraced (or rejected!) will be from 9:30 to noon.

Please ask for a miracle.  Jesus’ first four apostles were entrepreneurs because they already knew how to build.  Teaching a builder how to build in a new way, is a doable task in the natural.  Taking people who have little experience in building, and coaching them on building with things they have not considered to be resources, is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

But with the grace of God, it can be done.

Copyright by Arthur Burk