Archive for the ‘Prayer’ Category

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What is a Prayer Vigil?

Wednesday, November 5th, 2014

what-is-a-prayer-vigilWhat is a prayer vigil?

A prayer vigil is a time that is set aside for prayer, where the people who are praying stay up all night for a specific cause. The fact that you give up sleep to commit yourself to pray causes the time spent in prayer to be more intense.

What happens to your body, mind, and spirit during a prayer vigil?

Your body begins to feel tired because you are used to sleeping. You have to fight distracting thoughts in your mind to focus yourself on continuous prayer throughout the night. You realize how undisciplined your mind is when you are fighting just to maintain mind alertness. But the spiritual benefits are worth it. Your spirit is more awake and more focused on the Lord.

How are prayer vigils different from fasting, and yet similar?

If you have ever fasted from food, you know that going without food causes you to feel physically weak and empty. That emptiness causes you to cry out to God and pray in a much more intense way. God says that when we seek Him with ALL our hearts, we will find Him. (Jeremiah 29:13) Often while fasting for a family member or friend going through a crisis, my pounding on the doors of heaven through fasting has caused me to find God in a deeper way.

The weakness I feel during a fast from food is physical, and the weakness I feel during a fast of sleep is also physical. The first is a physical weakness caused by hunger radiating out of the stomach and weakening the whole body. The second is a physical weakness caused by exhaustion and the fight against wanting to fall asleep. The mind then starts shutting down during the prayer vigil, making it harder to pray than during fasting. You are fighting against the flesh and the mind, rather than just the flesh.

The body doesn’t hurt physically during the prayer vigil if you are eating, whereas the body does hurt physically during fasting, however.

If you have gained discipline and mastery over your mind in different areas of mental sin, you will probably find the prayer vigil not as hard as fasting. If you have no mental discipline, a prayer vigil is harder than fasting.

Are prayer vigils Scriptural?

Jesus stayed up praying all night before He chose His disciples:

“It was at this time that He went off to the mountain to pray, and He spent the whole night in prayer to God. And when day came, He called His disciples to Him and chose twelve of them, whom He also named as apostles.” Luke 6:12-13 NASB

In the book of Acts, when the early church was devoted to prayer, they were conducting a prayer vigil for Peter, who was in prison. In the middle of the night, an angel let Peter out of prison, and Peter walked through the dark streets until he came to the house where the believers were praying. When he knocked on the door, Rhoda the servant girl couldn’t believe that Peter was standing there! Because of her joy, she didn’t open the door but ran back into the house, and no one believed her that Peter was at the door. Finally after knocking for a long time, the believers let Peter into the house, and they rejoiced. (Acts 12:5-16)

In the instance with Jesus, there was a specific reason for His prayer vigil: the choosing of the disciples. This was a crucial decision, and He wanted to make sure that He was fully submitted to the will of the Father in making this decision.

In the same way, when the early church was going though a crisis with Christians being killed and imprisoned, the church conducted a prayer vigil to pray for Peter to be saved from being put to death. Herod had already put James the brother of John to death with a sword a couple of verses before, and now he intended to deliver Peter to the angry mob. The early church was highly concerned about this situation, deciding to pray all night together, that God would somehow deliver Peter.

Stay tuned for part 2: My First Prayer Vigil

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Fight Depression with Truth

Friday, August 29th, 2014

fight-depression-with-truth

I’ve been reading a lot about depression over the past few weeks, and I have experienced it myself. When your hormones are out of control and you can’t think clearly, you must fight depression with truth. It is not easy because everything inside of you wants to give up. You want to go to bed and never get up again. But the words that are going through your mind are not based on truth. If you dwell on something that is not truth, it will become more and more distorted until your reality is warped.

Depression is based on overly-inflated emotions (hormones) that cause you to magnify anything negative in your life until it is unbearable. It is a spiral that you go down in your mind, allowing your mind to dwell on one thing. It’s incapacitating. Sometimes it makes you want to take your life. Taking your life is murdering yourself, so of course when these thoughts cross our minds, we are tempted to sin. Murdering anyone in a pre-meditated fashion (including the killing of ourselves) is wrong, and Scripture says that there is always a way out of temptation, and we are never forced to sin. (I Corinthians 10:13)

Scripture commands us to take every thought captive (II Corinthians 10:5). This means that when my hormones are out of control and I want to dwell on everything negative in my life, I can stop. At the very minimum, I can put my mind on something productive. Force yourself not to dwell on the negative, and you break the spiral down. You don’t have to bow down and worship your emotions and go down every rabbit trail in your mind until you’re debilitated. You have a will. You can choose your actions. You are fully responsible before God for every action, despite how you feel.

Many times depression is demonic. I feel a brain fog and a heaviness, and I can’t get anything done. When that happens, I call a fellow believer, and she prays over me. So many times the fog lifts, and I feel fully rested instantly. I have experienced this in my life so many times that I truly believe that Scripture is right: our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and the rulers of darkness (Ephesians 6:12). If you are serving the Lord in ministry in any capacity, this is especially true. You must fight through prayer. The prayer of others over me often breaks the grip of incapacitation through exaggerated hormones or brain fog.

We have two swords to overcome deception: the Word of God and prayer. They are REAL. They break down strongholds and transform lives.

I talk about my struggle with depression and thoughts of suicide in my spiritual warfare audio (which is free). I also talk about depression during pregnancy, and what I did to overcome it in another free audio: Controlling Your Mind. Please don’t feel helpless. Grab control of your life regardless of your hormones, and ask God to transform your mind so that you can still accomplish your life purpose here on earth.

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Faith and Prayer

Monday, June 9th, 2014

faith-and-prayer

Faith and prayer go hand-in-hand, since it’s impossible to please God without faith (Hebrews 11:6). You wouldn’t be praying if you didn’t believe God was listening. So maybe we should start this discussion by asking, “What is faith?”

What is faith?

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1 ESV

Faith is when you know for sure that God’s Word is true, and you act on it. You have a conviction that God can never lie, and that if He says something, it is true. The King James Version says that faith is the “evidence” of things not seen. I have plenty of tangible evidence of God in my own life, but that evidence became a reality because I trusted God in the first place.

How does faith start?

Your first prayer (the one for salvation) is done in faith. This faith is given to you by God as a gift, so you did not drum up any faith on your own. It is a present.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Ephesians 2:8 ESV

So the initial seed of faith is planted in your heart by God, and it grows from there.

Can you pray without faith?

Yes. Even though it is impossible to please God without faith (Hebrews 11:6), if you recognize that you have no faith, you can ask God to give you faith.

“…If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” Mark 9:22b-24 ESV

This man wanted his son to stop being tormented, and even though he was asking Jesus to heal his son, his words showed a lack of belief. Jesus healed the boy anyway, showing that people don’t have to have faith to be healed. Jesus never failed in being able to heal someone, because He is God.

But if you doubt God, why should He answer you?

If you understand who God is, why on earth would you ever doubt Him? I’m talking about God’s Word. You insult God by doubting Him, because you make Him out to be a liar. It’s a slap in His face. This is why, for example, if you ask God for wisdom, He will for sure give it to you. But if you don’t believe He can give you wisdom, you will not get wisdom from God.

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.  For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.” James 1:5-8 ESV

You see, this verse says that wisdom WILL be given to you if you ask God. That’s what God’s Word says, and God is not a liar. So I ask God, and He gives me wisdom. (More about that here: How to Pray for Wisdom.)

Can faith move mountains? How?

Faith is compared to a mustard seed, which is quite small. My sister gave me a pin with a vial of mustard seeds. If you click on the picture, you will see the size of the individual mustard seeds as compared with my hand:

faith-as-a-mustard-seed

Jesus says that if we have faith as small as a mustard seed, we can move mountains.

And He said to them, “Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. (Matthew 17:20 NASB)

I’ve pondered this passage for a long time, and I’m thrilled to tell you what I’ve learned. The reason faith only has to be a tiny seed is that God does the work. The Holy Spirit will bear witness that God’s Word is true, and you will be able to rely on God’s Word more and more as you purge sin from your life and yield to Him. The more you know God, the more faith you will have, because God is incredibly stable and reliable, and He reveals Himself to us as we spend time with Him.

God plants the seed of faith in us, and it grows as we learn to trust Him. Besides studying Scripture to get to know God and delight in Him, prayer has been the greatest vehicle through which I have grown in my faith. This is because the more I trust Him, the more He answers my prayers, and the more He answers my prayers, the more faith I have. The key is aligning my will to God’s heart, and then the impossible happens all the time because my will and God’s will are the same.

And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to His will He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of Him. I John 5:14-15

For more explanation about this passage, read Does Praying Boldly Imply Presumption?

I also have 17 free prayer audios here: Prayer Audios (Scroll down to the audio section to download the audios.)

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Does Praying Boldly Imply Presumption?

Friday, May 9th, 2014

praying-boldly

“And this is the boldness which we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us:  and if we know that He heareth us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the the petitions which we have asked of Him.” – 1 John 5:14,15 (ASV)

The Mightiest Prayer Warrior I Ever Met

The mightiest prayer warrior I ever met was a man from my church that prayed boldly. We were at a prayer meeting, and the first time I heard him pray, I was blown away. It was like a spiritual sonic boom. I opened my eyes and turned around and looked at who on earth had the audacity to pray so boldly that he knew that God would answer him.

Does Praying Boldly Imply Presumption?

I always thought that praying boldly was somewhat presumptuous, saying that God had to do what you were saying. How ridiculous to think that we could boss around the God of the universe. It was up to God whether He would answer us in the negative. Most people refer to answered prayer as those requests that get an affirmative answer. But God is God, and He can do whatever He wishes.

How Exactly Does a Person Pray Boldly?

After hearing this man pray, I was amazed at his Scriptural accuracy in how he knew the heart of God and prayed according to the heart of God. He knew certain commands in Scripture that were God’s will, and so he stated them matter-of-factly, and then asked God to do it. God, follow through on what You have said. That’s what he was saying.

Teach Me to Pray Boldly

A few weeks ago I was fasting in prayer for a woman’s marriage, and I called my best friend to help me get through the afternoon slump, which is the hardest time of fasting for me. She took up the challenge and prayed over the phone. She heard the prayer requests, and she prayed boldly that God would convict this man’s heart directly. “Rebuke him of his sin, Lord, because that is Your will. Help him to repent and turn and do what he ought to do in his marriage.”

Guess what? A miracle happened! It was like scales dropped from this man’s eyes, and he asked for forgiveness for how he treated his wife. This just happened suddenly as he was directly rebuked by the Lord in his spirit, just as my friend’s bold prayer had stated.

I wanted to cheer. My spirit cheered when my friend prayed with boldness for his repentance. And my heart cheered when God fulfilled my friend’s prayer the next day. I asked my friend how she learned to pray so boldly, and could she teach me?

She said that the person in charge of the prison ministry prayed like that, and she just loved it, so she started praying boldly, too! She and I laughed at the audacity to hold God to His Word and know that He will answer because it is according to His will.

What if the Prayer is Not God’s Will?

All of us want our own will to be done, and not until we understand the heart of God can we align our will to His to ask what He would want us to ask. And when we do, He always answers us. We have the conviction that God will answer because of who He is. So we can boldly state it as so. That’s what’s so liberating about this kind of prayer.

There are other kinds of prayer where we don’t know the will of God. God doesn’t want every sickness healed instantly, or He would do so. He allows sickness to draw us closer to Himself, and what if the presence of sickness in our lives is keeping us from sinning? What if eternal qualities are being forged that are worth more than any amount of money? I would rather pray that God would cause the sick person to cling to Christ and be strengthened by His presence, because for sure that’s the will of God. You see the difference?

And yes, we can ask that someone be healed in the same way Jesus asked if the cup could pass from Him. It was not sin for Jesus to pray something that wasn’t ultimately the will of God the Father, because Jesus was willing to endure the answer to prayer that was harder, to go to the cross and bear the sin of the world. In the same way, if we are willing for God to answer in His timing and in the way God wants to do it, we will experience joy in God’s presence in the midst of difficulty.

Here is the audio that explains how to pray boldly:

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