![]() ![]() It was a cold, windy evening and the dust was swirling up around him. And, he told me years back he was in one of the slums of the big cities of the United States and it was late in the evening, it was getting dark. If I gave you his name it would be know to almost all of you-incidentally, he was recently here in New Zealand so I’m giving a lot away. I always think of a friend of mine, a well known Catholic Charismatic speaker. You see, the mechanistic view of the universe that it’s just a series of material explosions and causes leaves a person very lonely, lost in the vastness of the universe which he doesn’t understand and can’t control. We’re not praying to some remote unknown deity, some impersonal force but we’re praying to a person who has made Himself our Father through Jesus Christ. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”įirst of all, we address God as Father. I’m reading from the New King James Version. I hope I can put this key in your hands and you can walk out of this meeting with a key that will unlock the omnipotence of God. I believe they contain the key to effective praying. I only want to take the first two verses, verse 9 and verse 10. And typically, it’s very concise but very complete. I believe He set forth a pattern of the way we ought to pray. ![]() ![]() I don’t believe He means that we’ve always got to use precisely those words-although they’re beautiful words. Jesus says in Matthew 6:9: “In this manner therefore pray.” I want to take the first part of what is familiarly know to Christians around the earth as the Lord’s Prayer. Now, for the conditions that I want to speak about I want to turn to the sermon on the mount. I think God is going to call us to account if He’s committed that kind of authority to us and we don’t appreciate it and make use of it. I’d have to say, and I trust you’d agree with me, that if that amount of authority has been committed to us as believers in Jesus and in the Bible, we are really foolish if we don’t make use of it. I believe if you look for the real cause of the dramatic political changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, it’s not in the decision of politicians, it’s in the prayers of God’s people. In 1987 the church in Russian, which was looking forward to its one thousandth anniversary, set aside the month of January for prayer and fasting. I don’t know whether you’re aware, but in the light of recent events in Eastern Europe, the overthrow of the Iron Curtain, the release of political liberty inside the Soviet Union. So I want to deal in this message with what I consider to be the basic requirements for praying that kind of prayer, for making you a person who can change the course of history. And we know that when we’re praying according to God’s will we will get what we pray for. And they go together because God’s word reveals God’s will. But, the conditions are threefold: faith, according to God’s word and according to God’s will. So if you take those three passages together, you’ll find that the scope of prayer is unlimited. But again there’s a condition attached, it’s according to His will. ![]() And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of him.” In other words, if we pray according to God’s word.Īnd one final scripture in the first epistle of John, chapter 5, verses 14–15: “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. There’s no other restriction, but the condition is if my words abide in you. And again we have the words of Jesus to His disciples: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you will ask what you desire and it shall be done for you.”Īnother version says “ask what you desire and it shall be done for you.” Notice there what you desire. The condition there is faith.Īnd then we turn to John’s gospel, chapter 15 and verse 7. Notice, all things that you ask in prayer you will receive. Jesus Himself is speaking and He says: “And all things whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” But first of all, I just want to read to you three statements from the New Testament about what prayer can do. So, I want to speak to you in this message on certain requirements for getting our prayers answered. Because, they can release the omnipotence of God into situations which goes far beyond anything that the wisest or most powerful human being can do. As I understand it, the most influential people on earth today are those who know how to get their prayers answered. I look in a completely different direction. But I don’t believe that they are the really influential people. Probably your mind would turn to political leaders such as George Bush or Mikhail Gorbachev. If I were to ask you here whom do you consider the most influential kind of person on earth, I suppose you might think of various different answers. ![]()
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