Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Believing the Spoken Power in Prayer


“When God lays a burden on our hearts and thus keeps us praying, He obviously intends to grant the answer.”


~J. Oswald Sanders


“Prayer moves the arm


That moves the world


To bring deliverance down.”


~Author unknown


Prayer is that spiritual art and practice that anybody who seriously wants something engages in. Not all prayers are subject to God, however. Some prayers are prayed to the god, luck; to the god, greed; to the god, idolatry, etc.


But prayers, rightly framed, out of a heart desiring God, are blessed, will be blessed, and are sure to meet with God’s will at the appropriate time. And that term—“appropriate time”—is the nexus replete of faith, for we will not grant requests-of-permission to give up something important if we fully believe God will answer and we fully believe God wants this thing for us.


Believing What God Has Said


One of the biggest challenges any praying person is faced with is to believe without doubt. There are always intermittent times of doubt. Faith wouldn’t be or require faith without it. But the prayer we can be sure is to be answered has been spoken deeply into our hearts—it has become our driving purpose.


Whether the prayer has been vocalised to us through a Word from the Bible, or by a prophet, or has been discerned by ourselves, personally, matters little. Only we can know ourselves that it has been spoken.


And when the Word has been spoken, and we can do nothing but believe it, we ought to believe it. Are we to treat God as a liar?


Never Undermine The Power In Prayer


What might be a subtitle is also an imperative statement and it’s basically a command. So many biblical references could be found, but why would we cite them when we know it’s the truth.


God has spoken into your life and mine; the Lord speaks, continually, fervently, and without relenting, until we sharpen up and listen to that which our lives are telling us.


What an enormous confidence it is to know that guilt for praying for something rooted deep in our hearts is a lie spoken by the devil—anything to dissuade us from enjoying the abundant life: an existence that is so centrally ‘us’ we are compelled by God to seek, to find, and to knock—beyond listening to the enemy’s voice; beyond doubting; beyond the flesh-weakness of giving up because it’s too hard.


***


Prayer agrees with God that he, alone, is the Giver of all good things. It believes that God feels we are worthy of these good things. It is the faith to travel beyond doubt, in continuing to pray, by believing the Word adhered to our hearts. Prayer merely aligns our own desires with God’s. Only prayer can move such living mountains.


© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

No comments: