Prayer Importance

And they worshiped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple praising and blessing God. (Luke 24:53). These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers (Acts 1:14). So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart (Acts 2:46). And when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness (Acts 4:31). Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God (Luke 6:12).

The foundation for all that God does in us and through us is in our prayer life. Jesus set the standard. Jesus’ days of ministry were preceded by nights of intense praying. The early church was formed after Jesus ascension in the incubator of prayer.

The kingdom of God functions on the prayers of the saints. The mighty forces that shape the world are not physical but spiritual. The answer to every challenge we face is first of all found in that place of solace with the Father. If Jesus heeded the importance of praying things out in His earth walk, should we not heed His example?

We’re facing pressures unheard of in previous generations. The climax of the ages is upon us. God has a grand and glorious strategy for the church in this hour. And it begins and ends on our knees! To neglect the place of prayer is to neglect the very purpose and plans of the Father for life.

Start today. Move yourself into a deeper place of prayer. Find a private place, and begin to tell the Father how wonderful He is to you. Ask Him to help you pour out your heart to Him. Then, take to Him every concern and problem. Give Him the details of what bothers you. Then ask Him to intervene and bring the solution. Remind Him of the promises of His Word to you. Spend time in thanksgiving for the answer.

While praying, take time to pray in tongues. This is the most effective form of prayer. Praying in the spirit enables you to pray the perfect will of God about the unknown future. It enables you to pray the will of God into manifestation in so many ways! Don’t neglect this secret weapon God has given to you! Use it regularly and watch the forces of the enemy back up!

The success of your day today begins in your prayer closet. Make it count!

The Private Room

But when you pray, go into your [most] private room, and, closing the door, pray to your Father, Who is in secret; and your Father, Who sees in secret, will reward you in the open (Matthew 6:6- Amplified).

This most private room Jesus mentioned here is a bedchamber. It’s a place of intimacy between husband and wife. It’s a place where no one else is invited. It’s a place that is secure from intrusion.

The Father wants to develop an intimate relationship with each one of His children. He wants each of us to find that private place of meeting with Him where we can bear our heart to Him and share our deepest secrets. He wants to develop a closeness with us that affects the whole of life.

Many believers find this private place with the Father intimidating. They’ve not been raised in an environment that allows them to really bear their heart. Relationships are casual and surface.

It takes time to become comfortable enough with someone to be able to share the intimate secrets of your heart with them. The father wants this kind of relationship with us. It’s a branch-vine relationship. It’s life-freeing and life-producing.

To begin this private room experience with the Father, find a place free from intrusion where no one will interrupt you. Then read Psalm 139. Realize that the Father loves you as much as He loves Jesus! He knows every thought, purpose, motive, intent, desire, need, and want in your life. He sees everything about you. He is absolute love and wants the best for you. He is longing for you to open your heart to Him.

Talk to Him about the things that bother you. Tell Him everything; the good, the bad, and the ugly. He already knows. But He wants you to submit your needs to Him in simple faith. When you do this, it gives Him permission to help you, and it will free you from life’s intense pressures that build up inside. It’s this acknowledging Him in all your ways (Proverbs 3: 4-5) that allows Him to move on your behalf.

Intimacy with the Father makes us care free and worry free, and keeps stress from building up inside. Most of our mental, emotional, and physical problems are stress related. Personal intimacy with the Father is His answer to human stress.

The Father has a longing to be close to you today. Go find Him in the private room.

The Presence!

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men, they marveled. And they realized that they had been with Jesus (Acts 4:13).

The presence of God separates the believer from the infectious influences of the world! And the Presence in us that manifests throughout our day has a drawing effect on those around us. They notice something different about us. No other religion can do to a human what Christianity can. Christians in fellowship with God are bearers of the Presence!

Moses cried out to God when he came down from the top of Mount Sinai after he saw that the Israelites had sinned. He asked God not to remove His presence from the people. And notice why Moses asked this: Then he said to Him, if Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here. For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in Your sight, except You go with us? So we shall be separate, Your people and I, from all the people who are upon the face of the earth.

The Presence is not a feeling or emotion. It produces feelings and emotions at times. But it’s much deeper than feeling. The Presence exudes from our human spirit and carefully guards us from the effects of the world and the enemy from without. And the Presence moves us away from the tendencies of the flesh and creates in us a hunger and drawing toward the Father.

Carefully guard the Presence! Don’t allow unconfessed sin to remain in your life. Sin dissipates the Presence! If you miss it in some way, immediately confess your sin and the Blood will cleanse you!

Be careful with your words, for strife filled words can grieve the Holy Spirit who bears this Presence within (see Ephesians 4:29-30).

Time spent daily in the Word, in praise and worship, and in prayer will increase the manifestations of His Presence in your life. I have found that praying in the spirit, because it builds up and edifies the human spirit, will increase the manifestation of the Presence. The tell-tale sign of the Presence in you is joy! In His Presence is fullness of joy, pleasures forevermore!

Walk in His Presence today! Court the Presence! Lift your voice in praise to the Holy One. Thank Him for all that He is. Worship Him. He inhabits praise with manifestations of His Presence. Create change in the atmosphere wherever you are today. Release the Presence!

The Power of Friendship

And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers (Acts 2:42).

The great strength of the early church is found in this verse. The Word was the center of their lifestyle. The believers prayed together and had close relationships with one another. This produced a unity that enabled the Holy Spirit to manifest in a very strong way among them.

Friendship is essential to unity in a group of believers. And in personal life, friendship can be a great strength. The Message Paraphrase of Proverbs 27:17 says it well: You use steel to sharpen steel, and one friend sharpens another.

Notice the strength of friendship mentioned in Ecclesiastes 4: 9-12: Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up. Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm; but how can one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Notice also that Jesus sent out teams of two to minister the power of the kingdom of God. There’s something about Christian fellowship that encourages and empowers us in a way that nothing else can.

When I began my walk with the Lord almost 34 years ago, it was the strength I found in friendship that kept me going. When I came to Jesus, I chose to separate myself from my buddies who wanted to “party.” God gave me new friends with godly ideals and values. We would get together weekly and talk about our walk with the Lord. We’d share our successes and failures. We would admit our weaknesses and talk about our challenges. And as one talked about his or her challenge, another brought a word of encouragement that helped.

That’s the strength found in friendship. That’s the sharpening that we all need! I am in the process of developing small groups that we will call friendship groups. These groups will meet at least every other week, and some groups may choose to meet more frequently. These groups are to be a vehicle for building strong friendship around the Word and around our relationship with the Lord.

If you’re a part of our church, I encourage you to become involved in these groups. You’ll find a great source for personal encouragement, and God may use you to be a blessing to others! The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him who is weary. He awakens me morning by morning, He awakens my ear to hear as the learned (Isaiah 50:4).

Spiritual Hunger

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled (Matthew 5:6).

Our hungers define us. Hunger motivates. What we desire shows us what we really are within. Spiritually, hunger is the indicator of our spirituality. Physically, hunger is one of the signs of health and prolonged lack of hunger is an indicator of illness.

If we lack spiritual hunger, something has gone wrong! When my children were young, they sometimes came to the dinner table with no appetite. I learned to go check their rooms, and I would find candy wrappers in the trash! They were filled with the wrong food for health!

Too much occupation in leisure time with entertainment at the expense of spending time with the Lord can quench spiritual appetite and leave a believer unfulfilled and vulnerable to Satan’s assaults. The candy of the world must be guarded against or we may lose our zeal and passion for God.

Life has become so compacted with things to occupy us in so many ways that we must make God our first priority if we’re to survive spiritually! In the parable of the sower Jesus spoke of the cares of this life entering in and choking the word in us, making it ineffective. To maintain our spiritual lives, we must stay hungry spiritually. That means we must have a desire for spiritual things that is so strong with us that it moves us to make time for Jesus throughout our day.

Desire follows attention. I must devote time and attention to whatever I want to create a hunger for in my life. That means I must find a way to make sure my spiritual life is nurtured. A regular devotional time at the beginning of your day will start this process.

Maybe you seem to have no hunger or desire for God right now and you know you need to change. Let me offer the following suggestions. If you’ve been involved in sin of some kind, confess it to the Father in repentance. Sin quenches spiritual desire. Sin hardens the heart. Tell the Father what you’ve been doing, and make a consecration with His help to cease! If you’re sincere, the Spirit of God will enable you.

Then, ask the Father to create in you a hunger for Him and for the Word and for spiritual things in general. Ask Him to deal with anything that is encroaching on Him in your life, and make a change.

Finally, set you clock back early enough to spend some time, 10 to 15 minutes reading the Word when you first get up. And then spend a few minutes in real prayer, pouring your heart our to the Father to begin your day. Three to four week of this will start a new habit of putting spiritual things first in your day!

I’ll end with these quotes from Smith Wigglesworth:

Spiritual hunger is when nothing satisfies us as much as being near to God.

I’d rather have a man on my platform who is not Spirit-filled but hungry, than a person who is Spirit-filled and satisfied!

Worldliness is that which cools my affection towards God.

I’m only satisfied with the dissatisfaction that must be satisfied over and over again.

Praise Power

Though the fig tree may not blossom, Nor fruit be on the vines; Though the labor of the olive may fail, And the fields yield no food; Though the flock may be cut off from the fold, And there be no herd in the stalls — Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength; He will make my feet like deer's feet, And He will make me walk on my high hills (Habakkuk 3:17-19).

Praise is the language of faith. When life turns sour, turn up the praise! James tells us to count it all joy when hard times arrive. Paul tells us to rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice!

Praise brings a manifestation of the presence of God that will give inward strength and that will attack the problem and bring a solution. Enemy armies had surrounded the people of God in 2 Chronicles 20. King Jehosophat and the people began to seek the Lord.

Through the prophet God told them that He would fight their battle for them. All they needed to do was to send the praisers to the front line of the battle and God would do t he fighting for them.

They obeyed and the praisers began to sing praise the Lord for His mercy endures forever. As they sang, the presence and power of God manifested and the enemy were slain before they could lift a sword!

God will undertake to bring you out of the hard place if you will choose to put on the garment of praise. There is no feeling in this, it’s a total act of faith! When your flesh is screaming at you and the problems pile up, the best thing to do is to praise. Paul and Silas were set free from prison because they chose to pray and to sing praises to God while sitting in a dungeon.

Stop the complaining and begin to praise God in the troubles of life. God is not partial. He helped His Old Covenant people and fought for them. He will do the same for you!

A New Strength

He gives power to the tired and worn out, and strength to the weak. Even the youths shall be exhausted, and the young men will all give up. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint (Isaiah 40:29-31-The Living Bible).

Here’s an interesting way to look at a familiar passage. In my Companion Study Bible there is a note by this verse that calls this a Katabasis, which is a going or marching down, a retreat, or a gradual descent.

Here in Isaiah, notice that as the believer waits on the Lord he moves from flying to running to walking. In our walk with God, at first we are doing what seems natural, which is relying on our own wits and strength. But as we grow in God, and learn what it means to be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might, we learn to relinquish the control of life and its circumstances into His hands. We learn to seek God and roll the care of every circumstance onto Him.

Instead of flying in our own strength, we learn to slow down and move into a strength that surpasses our own, and we begin to run. Little by little as we learn that Father knows best, we lesson our striving and begin to enter into the rest of God, the rest of faith. We then begin to walk.

The fast pace become an easy stroll with respect to energy expended. As we wait on the Lord and in prayer and faith place every circumstance of life in His hands, we begin to live in the power of His might! We don’t become as weary as we did before. We go farther with greater energy reserves. And it becomes with us as it did with John the Baptist, He must increase, but I must decrease.

Take time to build God’s strength in you today by waiting on the Lord. You’ll accomplish more, and you’ll walk in a state called rest as the Father works through you with His power. This is the way He created you to live!