Prayer

“Satan dreads nothing but prayer. His one concern is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, he mocks our wisdom, but he trembles when we pray.”
― Samuel Chadwick

Prayer is one of the greatest gifts and privileges that God gives us. It is the ability to converse with God about anything.  But yet few believers remain consistent with it. It becomes something we use only when crisis shows up. Our enemy wants us to stay inconsistent. If the enemy works so hard to keep us from it, maybe he knows how valuable and powerful it is.

Bob Sorge has written an excellent book called ‘Unrelenting Prayer’. He identifies three tactics the enemy uses to keep from praying:

“Hell expends its best ammunition on trying to move you from before the throne. The enemy has three primary strategies for accomplishing this. He will try to distract you from the place of unrelenting prayer; or he will try to tempt you away from God’s presence; or he will seek to discourage you from standing before God.

Distraction. Temptation. Discouragement. Those three words summarize the struggle of every single reader. All three will eventually visit us in the seasons of life, but at any given moment our struggle will typically be strongest in one of those three areas. So one of the three is probably your “biggy” right now. Which is it for you? Do you find yourself easily distracted from your place before God—through the cares of life, the busyness of business, the demands of the calendar? Or does the enemy target you with temptation to compromise your moral standards? Or does he seek to overwhelm your soul with discouragement, despair, and aimlessness?

I’ve known all three, and you probably have too. Because all three will eventually take turns with us. The design of darkness is to do anything to move you from the most powerful posture that a human can employ. Anything—to get you to shut up! Anything—to get you to lose heart! Anything—to move you from your platform before God.”

Paul exhorts us to ‘stand praying’!

Acts 9 records the radical transformation of Saul to Paul. Most would have labeled Saul an impossibility. But God reached down in His grace and transformed Saul. God used three supernatural events to reach Saul. 1) On the way to damascus, a light brought him to his knees. 2) A voice confronted him. 3) God directed Ananias to visit Saul and instruct him what to do.

Everyone of us know those ‘impossible’ situations. A friend or relative or co-worker that would be impossible to reach. We need to use God’s pattern and pray those three supernatural events into their life. The light is an experience that is a ‘show stopper’. This is an experience that arrests a person’s attention. Ask God to do something that would grab their attention. Leave the means up to God.

Ask God to speak to the person thru the ‘voice’ of a person, book, sermon, impression, or even possibly God’s audible voice. The voice confronts the person with where they are, what they are doing, and what God wants to do in their life.

Finally, pray for a divine visitation. Pray that God would send a person to bring specific instructions.

Never give up on the person who has never come to the Lord. Never give up on the person who has fallen away from God! Use these three steps in prayer!