Praying with Power

Also written as a small group lesson:

Last week we learned that God wants to be with us on Earth – that we’re advancing the Kingdom. For Michael, we’re Israel and desperately in need of some help, and today we’re going to be talking about how to get weapons from the US (God) to us. For Hannah, Shoes R Us is giving away all their shoes and today we’ll be talking about how to get them from the store to our house. For everyone else, we serve a God who loves us – we want to be loved. We serve a God who wants to bring the people around us into a relationship with Him – we want our friends to know Him too. We serve a God who wants to radically change us – we want to be radically changed! If you both want the same things, why’s it not happening? Today we’ll be talking about linking the two up.

What’s the number 1 mistake we make in reading the Bible? Not believing it, not acting on it, saying that it was only applicable 2000 years ago. We sweep all the fun stuff into the past or the far future. Honestly, it’s more comfortable this way. If God doesn’t do much in us or around us today, then we have no reason to expect that He would be intricately involved in our lives. Read Revelation 1:8 – the normal way for God to introduce Himself would be in order; who was, who is, and who is to come. He chooses to introduce Himself first and primarily as the God who is. God is mainly a God of today!

If you’ve never been to church a day in your life, how would the Christian life look according to these scriptures?
1 Cor 4:20 – Christians have the ability to do things about their situation. Christianity isn’t just a way to make you feel better about a situation – it’s got power to change the situation.
John 10:10 – The Christian life should be far more fun and more exciting and more fulfilling than its non-Christian counterpart. We usually see Christianity as full of misery and sacrifice; “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints – the sinners are much more fun” – Billy Joel. If you just took the Bible for its word, we should be having a blast!
Isaiah 61:1-3 (knowing it’s about Jesus) – People who follow Jesus will have their mourning turned to happiness and their sadness turned to joy.

If you’ve never been to church a day in your life, what would these verses mean?
Matthew 19:26 – With God, all things are possible
Luke 1:37 – Nothing is impossible with God

Do you see these things in your life right now? Do you see them in their fullness? No! So what choices do we have? We can either overlay our own experiences on the Bible and let our experiences dictate what the Bible says, or we can choose to believe the Bible over our own experiences. The first is safer and means we can keep on living life as we always have. If we choose to believe the Bible over our experiences, we have to grapple with the frustration that, honestly, we don’t see everything in the Bible. However, that’s what the Christian life is about! It’s about bringing God’s rule and reign down on Earth. Abraham, Mary, Joshua, Gideon, and Peter, among others, chose to live by what God had told them instead of what they knew to be true from their experiences.

Prayer: connecting God’s will and our life.
Most of the time, we pray prayers like “God, if it’s your will, ….” While those prayers sound good and everything, there are a couple things wrong with that. First of all, that’s not how Jesus taught us how to pray and that’s not how the apostles prayed. Their prayers scare us – they commanded things to leave or be healed in the name of Jesus. Those prayers leave an exit for us – if the prayer didn’t get answered, then we can go on with life without loosing any of our faith. But our faith isn’t grown when prayers are answered, either. Also, we’ve left out the step of listening to God, which is the most important part. Without asking God, we’re no doubt praying our will and hoping God wants it too instead of praying God’s will. From last time, God doesn’t want servants, He wants friends and friendship requires two-way communication. The apostles were confident of God’s will in the situation and confident of His power to move, because they were listening to God! See Ecclesiastes 5:2, John 16:13&14, and John 15:15.

So what does that look like? Prayer time shouldn’t be entirely spent talking to God. Effective prayer is finding out God’s will in a situation then praying expecting that to happen (expectation is a good synonym for faith). I remember the first time I prayed like this – I was in the Philippines with a Southern Baptist group who stressed the absolute importance of memorizing scripture. We had to memorize a scripture every two days, and I couldn’t do it at all. When I told my team leader, he said, “Pray about it. What could be more in God’s will than memorizing His word?” That second part was the key – I began praying for an ability to memorize scripture and totally expecting God to do it because I knew it was in His will. And it happened! To this day, I know a ton of scripture but can’t memorize anything else.

When asking God’s will, be prepared to do things if He asks. Sometimes His response will be to tell you to do something and you don’t just get to sit in your little prayer closet. Also, be prepared to believe His word over your circumstances. Yes, you may know that spitting on blind people does not heal them, but that’s what God said to do. It may look like God doesn’t want to do something because He didn’t answer your prayer the first time, but then again, what did He tell you? If you know it’s His will and He hasn’t given you other instructions, keep praying – you know He’s going to answer it (Luke 11:9-11)! This isn’t about bothering God until He gives you something, it is about accepting His word more than your circumstances. “Wait, are you sure you didn’t get healed? That can’t be right - let’s try that again”

Promises in the Bible:
Biblical promises are an awesome place to begin – they always reveal God’s heart in a situation. We need to stop ignoring them or believing God’s saying something else than what is written. However, the promises don’t always reveal God’s execution. For instance, the great commission reveals God’s heart to spread the gospel. However, in Acts 16:6-7, Paul and company were prevented by the Holy Spirit from going into Asia. God’s heart was to spread the gospel to all people, but He had a different plan to execute it. Listening to Christ is absolutely crucial.

What does applying this look like? When you find a promise in the Bible, ask God to show you how this will apply to your life, then pray about it / do it! By praying to get God’s will done instead of our own, our prayers become much more powerful. George Mueller, 19th century missionary, said not one of his prayers went unanswered. For additional reading on this topic, I’d highly recommend “Like a Mighty Wind” by Mel Tari.