Designed for Drama: Discovering a fresh passion for prayer

By Marcus Tutt

All good stories point to God’s great story. In popular movies, authors use dramatic elements such as crisis, foreshadowing, and self-sacrifice to draw us in and capture us up into the onscreen action. The force behind their effectiveness is that we were designed to be gripped by the ultimate story. We are living in the middle of the most majestic and truly epic tale ever told, and there is a part for each one of us to play—a part for us to pray! I hope, therefore, that as we enjoy looking at some great movies, and the ways in which screenwriters create drama, your eyes will be opened to the very real drama taking place all around you, and that you will be stirred by a fresh passion for prayer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781471704048

Book preview

Dedication

To Malcolm. Thank you for your word of encouragement.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my wife Sarah for reading another one of my manuscripts and correcting so many of my mistakes. I am also grateful to my daughters for their helpful ideas and suggestions and for putting up with me commenting on dramatic techniques all through their favourite films.

The Drama All Around

A Beautiful Question

Have you ever been reading the Bible when a word leaps right off the page and hits you straight between the eyes? Well, that happened to me when I read Acts 12, and the projectile was the adjective earnestly. Peter is in prison but the church was earnestly praying to God for him.¹ Now, if I am honest, that word does not always describe my prayer life, but rather than being condemned, I felt like I had just been handed a large, lovingly-wrapped present: a present that promised to breathe new life into my petitions and give me a fresh passion to pray. God’s word is great like that. It’s packed with power to bring about positive change. But how to go about unwrapping it?

Shortly afterwards, I read Mike Betts’ excellent book Relational Mission. In it, he makes the following insightful observation which came out of a conversation with Terry Virgo:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I think prayer works best in a crisis. Prayer seems designed for drama.²

I thought, He’s right, prayer does seem designed for drama. The earnestness of the church’s prayer life was directly linked to their awareness of the drama taking place around them. Mike then went on to ask a key question:

How do we recover the sense of drama with prayer?³

There must be a particular word for that sort of question: the type that when you hear it, you know the answer is going to pay off big time. It’s like knocking on a wall and hearing the distinctive hollow sound that teases the presence of some secret chamber. As soon as you ask the question, you know you are on to something.

They have been called beautiful questions,⁴ and a classic example comes from a man called Edwin Land. Many years ago, while on holiday, he took a picture of his three-year-old daughter. She was really excited to see herself in the photograph and, unfamiliar with the lengthy development process of celluloid film, kept asking why they had to wait several days to see the picture. It was a beautiful question that led her father to develop the Polaroid Instant Camera.

Perhaps in our context, we might call these questions Spirit inspired or prophetic questions: questions that God puts in our mind and through which he leads us to some fresh revelation of himself and his kingdom. Anyway, Mike’s question immediately gripped me: how do we re-capture the drama of prayer? I was compelled to seek an answer and knew that doing so would propel me further down the path of a more earnest and effective prayer life.

The Greatest Story of All

When a book is really hard to put down we call it a real page turner. We reach for a sip of our drink or feel for a biscuit without letting our eyes leave the page. It’s the same with a gripping film. You don’t want to turn away from the screen for a moment. There is something about these stories and the way in which they are told that grabs our attention and draws us in.

Good stories, told well, stir our emotions and cause us to care. We grieve with a character’s loss or rejoice in their success. We feel the suspense, sitting on the edge of our seat wondering what will happen next, then pull back in sudden shock at the unexpected. We long for a happy ending and, if one comes, close the book or file out of the theatre with a deep sense of satisfaction. Everything is as it should be. A good story is like a massage for the mind, an invigorating stretch of the soul.

Glowing reviews use terms like epic to describe a story’s grand scale and scope, or majestic referring to its awesome power and beauty. Have you ever wondered, though, why they captivate us in the way they do? I want to suggest it’s because of the way they echo and illustrate the greatest story of all. It is my belief that all great stories, in one way or another, point us to the ultimate story of God redeeming a people and uniting himself with them through his Son, Jesus Christ.

This story is truly epic, spanning as it does the whole of history from eternity past to eternity future. It covers the entire created universe, visible and invisible, and involves a cast of billions, including you and me. What’s more, this story is true and told live, as it happens, right now. It’s gloriously majestic with action and suspense, mystery and intrigue, triumph and tragedy, all working together towards a grand and glorious completion.

This is a story that inspires not just awe but worship, as through it the beauty and majesty of the author is revealed. We connect with this story, and reflections of it in other lesser tales, because we have been designed for its drama. We have been made to get caught up in it and play our part—to pray our part!

Creating Drama

A drama is a situation or series of events having a vivid, emotional, conflicting, or striking interest or result.⁵ We sometimes refer to a TV drama where the story is made up, but they can also be very real. In fact, when I know a story is based on true events, it affects me more deeply as I cannot reach for the it didn’t really happen mental release valve.

The real-life, real-time story that is taking place all around us is full of drama, and if we could but see it, our prayer life would be characterised not only by an increased passion but by incredible power. As Charles Spurgeon, the 19th century preacher points out, one warm, hearty prayer is worth twenty of those packed in ice.⁶ It is vital, therefore, that we recover the sense of drama that draws us in, grips our heart, and causes us to pray in earnest.

As I looked at Acts 12, it was clear how the crisis of Peter’s imprisonment drew the church together in passionate prayer, but were there other dramatic elements of God’s story taking place around me that I might be missing? It was then that I had my own beautiful question: if a crisis created drama, were there other aspects of compelling stories that functioned in the same way?

After doing a quick bit of research I discovered that, as well as moments of crisis, writers and movie makers use techniques such as foreshadowing and dramatic irony to engage us with their stories. To my delight, as I considered each one in turn, I found my eyes opened to another exciting aspect of the unfolding drama taking place around me. In this book, we will explore a number of these dramatic elements in order to be drawn more deeply into the drama of God’s story and be led to pray more passionately.

Throughout the book, I use a number of illustrations from various movies. Although most have been out for a while, I guess I should issue some sort of general spoiler alert at this point. I trust, though, that any surprises I give away will be more than made up for by an increased wonder at God’s real-life drama.

My aim in giving several examples of each technique is not simply to illustrate the idea but to persuade you of its prevalence, point to its prototype,⁷ and provoke us to prayer.

There is nothing particularly unique about the set of films I discuss. They are simply those that I happened to be watching while writing. Hopefully, some will be familiar to you, but if not, I’m sure you will see similar illustrations in the stories you are currently enjoying.

I have added a short summary at the end of each chapter to remind you of the main points. There are then a few key questions for personal reflection or group discussion. The aim of these questions is to lead you into a time of earnest prayer, so I follow them with a few prayer points to get you started.

Short Summary

All good stories point to God’s great story.

We are living in, and living out, the greatest story of all.

As our eyes are opened to the drama all around us, we can discover a fresh passion for prayer.

Key Questions

What books or films have gripped you the most?

What was it about them that drew you into their drama?

What causes you to pray more earnestly?

Prayer Points

Pray that God would open your eyes to the real-life drama taking place around you.

Thank God for the privilege of having a part to play in his great story.

Ask him to give you a fresh passion to pray.

The Drama of Crisis

Peter in Prison

The news travelled quickly. Peter had been arrested. The soldiers had turned up at his house and taken him away. The church, still grieving over James’ brutal execution, quickly gathered together. No one needed to call a prayer meeting; they just happened right across the city. No one needed to exhort the people to pray; it would have been impossible to stop them.

After the Passover, Peter would be dragged out of some dark dungeon and put to death. Their only hope was for God to intervene, and so, in desperation, the church cried out to him in prayer: first one, then another, then all together. Their petitions were peppered with scriptures and the