Readers of this article need to know that the "IMAP" is a tool developed by the author and explained more fully in his book About My Father's Business from which this article comes. The IMAP is an intentionality map or diagram. It's a chart with five columns headed as follows: Column A = Apathetic;  Column B = Beginning;  Column C = Confessing or Christian;  Column D = Developing;  Column E = Excelling.  In whichever column is appropriate, a user inserts the names of everyone in his/her organization who is within his or her sphere of influence to be prayed for and encouraged towards Christ.

PRAYER LEADS YOU TO PURPOSE

Here are three overarching promises about prayer as it relates to the people in your workplace. These promises have revolutionized my day-to-day existence, and I believe they can do the same for you.

Promise Number 1 – Prayer changes your agenda.

Praying for the people on your IMAP grid will give you a kingdom focus each day. Before you start work, put your IMAP in front of you and pray for the people on your grid. You can pick them randomly, pray for the A’s one day and the B's the next, or however you choose to approach it. But praying for the people in your sphere of influence every day is a "must do."

Ask, "Lord, which of these people do I need to pray for today?" and then pay attention to the name or names He draws your eye to. Ask, "Father, which of these people do I need to touch today?" Be ready to jot down the name He draws your attention to. Ask, "Lord, what would You have me do for (whomever He has directed your attention to)?"

You see, there's a huge difference between coming up with some grandiose plan for leading someone to Christ and this daily approach. That's what being about my Father's business is all about – getting daily orders and following them. One person, one day, one step at a time.

Praying for the people in your sphere of influence every day is a "must do.”

Over the years of using the IMAP grid, I have yet to approach God this way and have Him not direct me to someone on my list. Sometimes it's just a name that He urges me to pray for. But usually He puts the idea of a phone call, a note, a book or CD to give, or a meal or a cup of coffee to schedule.

When it's all said and done, this is what evangelism and discipleship are about. Daily, relational, intentional, God-led loving on the people in our lives for the purpose of helping them move one step closer to the Savior. It's so simple, yet so true. We ask God for our daily assignment, He gives it to us, and we obey. And guess what? You can still get your work done, you can still excel at your job, and you can still be who you are, doing what you do every day. Only now, you are about your Father's business as you do your own business.

I believe that our faith gets built when we see God answer our prayers. When we ask God something and He answers, that's pretty affirming. After all, He is invisible. As we ask Him to direct us to names on our IMAP grid and He does, we start to see His involvement with our efforts. And when we follow through and do what He puts on our minds to do, we feel great about ourselves. We have received instructions from the God of the universe, and we obeyed. We are making progress.

But the creme de la creme comes when He lets us see the fruit of His work ... when He lets us be there when He does something in someone's life because of our obedience.

Early on the morning of March 8, 1999, I was praying for Craig Callaway. Craig seemed to be stuck as a lifelong Beginning to Search B, a skeptical seeker who was never going to get it. But on this morning, these words came to me: "He's just making deals with everyone in his life. He has this ‘deal' with you – as long as he keeps ‘pursuing truth' by meeting with you, then he can put off taking the ‘leap of faith' that is always required to become a believer." Wow!

I wrote down a couple of tough, confrontational questions to ask Craig and then headed off to meet him for our breakfast at the Sunrise Cafe.

As we waited for our food, Craig was talking about the weekend he had just spent with his parents. His dad, who spent much of his career working with lobbyists in state government, had been describing the ugly underbelly of politics – how everything was negotiated, how it wasn't about truth and commitment, just about making deals. Craig said, "There is no way that I want to live like that, a life defined by one deal after another."

There it was, teed up beautifully. Had to be a God thing.

I said, "But isn't that what you're doing? You've been making deal after deal – with me, with Kerry [his wife], and even with your kids. With me, we read books together; you meet me for breakfast after breakfast, but there is never a real reason for you to continue your ‘search.' You know the Truth; you're just afraid to accept it. Your deal with me is, ‘I'll keep being interested if you'll keep being interested.' Your deal with Kerry is that she knows the Truth and wants you to find it. So as long as you're ‘seeking,' then that trades off for her concern for your finding the Truth. Your girls keep asking ‘Our friend Chelsea is Catholic, Daddy. What are we?' Your deal with them is to give them trite answers and avoid taking a real stand. All of your deals allow you to keep treading water, but they aren't taking you anywhere. If you admire truth and commitment, then what holds you back from acknowledging the Truth that will make you a man of character and commitment?"

He paused, looked me straight in the eye, and said, "Nothing."

A few minutes later, we sat in my car and prayed a clumsy prayer together. That day, Craig Callaway crossed over from B to C, from seeker to saved, from deal maker to disciple.

And my faith? It got a huge boost. The idea of Craig making deals with me and the other people close to him had never occurred to me before that morning. For God to give me that concept and then to hear him verbalize his disdain for being a deal maker only forty-five minutes later had to be God. And the results – Craig praying to receive Jesus Christ after a twelve-year search – had to be God and God's timing as well. My faith was so strengthened! I had been about ready to give up. But watching what happened that day, I learned that I am never to give up. As long as the Lord keeps a person on my IMAP, and He keeps giving me occasional assignments to pray for or touch that person, then I will keep at it and know that I'm doing what He wants me to do. He is responsible for the outcome; I'm responsible for seeking orders and obeying them.

Promise Number 2 – Prayer changes your outlook.

Think back to your childhood. Remember when your dad would give you some assignment to do? Sometimes it would be really easy, but sometimes it would just seem overwhelming or

even impossible. But when you did it, when you came through, what a feeling! This man, whom you so wanted to please, gave you a job to do and you did it.

You felt great about yourself. You knew that you pleased him. And for some strange reason, you loved both yourself and him a little more. Maybe it was because he stretched you a little and you sensed his love in that assignment. Maybe it was because your success relieved a little doubt that you had about yourself. Or maybe it was that your success somehow made your dad a little more approachable, a little more connected to you than before.

All of these things come into play when we take daily assignments from our heavenly Father and carry them out successfully.

Our faith is built up when we pray and get answers to our prayers. Our self-confidence is strengthened and we gain a deep sense of fulfillment when we take on an assignment from God and we get it done. All this is made even sweeter by the fact that we aren't responsible for the results. God, in His own time and for His own purposes, will use our obedience to accomplish what He wants to accomplish in our lives and in the lives of those in our sphere of influence.

It's like being a soldier in a battle. We get our assignment and we carry it out. It's not our job to win the war. It's not even our job to win the battle. We are responsible only for doing what we are asked to do at a given moment. Those in authority over us are responsible for the outcomes.

But as we follow orders, as we participate in the battle, we experience a deep sense of belonging – a sense of camaraderie with our fellow soldiers and a deep sense of commitment and loyalty to our Commanding Officer.

Praying for the people in your sphere of influence will change you. You will become more "others" focused. You will start to care about other people's deals and not just your own. You will start to genuinely love people that before you didn't really care for. You won't exactly know how it happened, but you'll find yourself overlooking their bad habits and attributes. You'll start to see them as God saw you – sinful, undeserving, rebellious, ungrateful. Yet those labels won't matter because somehow you'll just love them anyway.

Praying for the people in your sphere of influence will change you.

Earlier I told you about Kevin, my golfing buddy. I hadn't talked to Kevin for a while, so the other day I called him and asked him to lunch. As we ate and talked, it hit me – I'm enjoying this. I've come to enjoy spending time with this guy who does all the things I hate: smokes, swears, and seems to care only about his work and his golf handicap. Prayer had changed me, and I didn't even know it was happening. God has done something in me: to soften me, to make me more patient, more loving, more accepting of Kevin – not just to make me a nicer guy, but to use me in Kevin's life.

Promise Number 3 – Prayer changes your environment.

Now this may seem a little out there, but don't blame me. I got it from Scripture and have experienced its truth. The enemy (Satan and his servants) surrounds people who don't yet know Jesus Christ. The unholy trinity of the world, the flesh, and the devil keeps them numbed to the truth of God and to His magnetism.

In Luke 10:5, Jesus instructs the disciples about how to first enter into someone's home. They are to say, "Peace to this house." The word Jesus used for "peace" here is the same word

that He used in John 14:27 when He said, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid."

Jesus is talking about peace that is a God-originated presence.

In his book Prayer Evangelism, Ed Silvoso explains that Satan's presence around those who don't know Christ is reinforced when Christians reject them and judge them. But when we pray for them, we replace the spirit of the evil one with the Spirit of God. They become seekers, curious and more open.

"When we speak blessings over those in our circle of influence," Silvoso writes, "sooner or later people who used to avoid us will begin to seek us out, opening the door to fellowship." *

Silvoso teaches that we are to speak peace to them, to fellowship with them, to take care of their needs, and to proclaim the Good News ... in that order.

Recently, my wife and I and some friends began a small group with several young couples. Two of the couples are not Christians, and one of the guys is an Apathetic A. He has said repeatedly that he isn't interested in God. But with a ton of people praying for him, he accepted the invitation to join the group.

What changed his mind? Why did he say yes to something that he has said no to over and over? I believe that those prayers replaced the demons of doubt that have surrounded him since his early teens with the presence of peace ... of God's peace. That freed him up to begin to fellowship with some folks he knows to be Christians. That's a next step, and that's what it's all about.

I believe that praying for people in your sphere of influence can change their environment, regardless of whether they're an Apathetic A or an Excelling E. God inhabits the prayers of His people. Where the Light is, the darkness can’t be. And when we pray God’s blessing on people that we care for, the enemy has more trouble causing them trouble than when we fail to pray.

* Ed Silvoso, Prayer Evangelism (Venture, CA: Regal Books, 2000), 42.

Excerpted from About My Father’s Business © 2005 by James R. Campbell.  Used by permission of WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.  Excerpt may not be reproduced without prior written consent.

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