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Building a Friendship with God Through Prayer
Message by Pastor Eric Chang at Kota Kinabalu, East Malaysia on July 29, 2001.
In all these years of serving the Lord I constantly experience, on the one hand, the mighty working of the Lord, and on the other hand, I see the activities of the Evil One. Wherever the Lord works, the Evil One also works. So it was not so simple for me to get here today. When Pastor Lee came to fetch us, just before that time I had a very painful attack in the hip. Thus I was delayed for a few minutes, and when we got into the car, of course you know what happens. The car would not start. So no matter what Pastor Lee tried to do, the car would not start. Apparently this does not happen to his car but only today. So he had to phone to another brother to come and bring us here. So here we see the constant attacks of the enemy. So far the amplifying system is still working because it is very usual that when I start preaching, the amplifying system packs up. So it is wonderful to see the Lord's work, and to see also the battle that is going on as the Evil One attacks. Now our time is short and so we must proceed with the Word of God.
Prayer: The Very Foundation of the Christian Life
Today, what the Lord leads me to share with you from my heart is
this most important matter of prayer. Prayer is the very foundation of
the Christian life, and I would like you to spend a moment to think
about your prayer life. How is it like? How do you enjoy it or do not
enjoy it? How many minutes a day would you say you spend in prayer? We
will not talk about hours; we will just talk about minutes. What exactly
is prayer? It seems strange that we need to ask a question like that
since most Christians surely think that they know what prayer is. Is it
some kind of religious practice? All too often it is an exercise in
talking to oneself, isn't it? Just as it is in the Parable of the
Publican or Tax Collector and the Pharisee, the Pharisee specialized in
talking to himself, and that he thought was prayer. What is your
understanding of prayer?
Prayer is Building a Friendship with God
I would like to define prayer in a different way, which I think is
what Scripture teaches us. I would say that prayer is the building of
our friendship with God. You build up a friendship with somebody by
talking to that person. Is there any other way to build a friendship?
Can you think of any other way to build friendship with God apart from
prayer? Is there another way? I do not know of any other. If we do not
pray, we will never know God as Friend. The importance of prayer then is
this: that through the process of prayer, through praying, we are
steadily building our friendship with God. Do you have friendship with
God? Not if you do not pray! So do not think of prayer as a religious
exercise. Get the biblical concept of prayer. It is a communion with
God, for what purpose? For the purpose of building up our friendship
with Him! You cannot build up friendship with anybody if you do not
spend time with that person. Presumably, the level of your friendship
with that person will largely be determined by the amount of time that
you are able to, or willing to, give to that person. Do you want to have
God as a Friend or not? That will be the question, isn't it? If you do,
then you will see immediately the importance of understanding prayer in
this way. I earnestly wish that there would be such a situation in the
church that everyone knows himself or herself to be a friend of God. Now
when you understand prayer in this way, you would love to pray. You want
to pray because you want to become a friend of God.
Could it happen that if somehow one day you meet with the Lord, will you see Him as a Friend or as a Judge? Unfortunately, if you have not spent any time talking to Him - any quality time - then you will not know Him as a Friend. Would He not then say to you, "I don't know you. You haven't been talking to Me. Who are you? I don't know you. Depart from Me!" Is that imagination? I think not! I think you will find on that Day that it will be precisely like that. "You haven't talked to Me!" Especially if all your prayer was merely a religious exercise of some psychological effect or some kind of talking to oneself into some kind of a mood. Our prayer is not something that has made contact with God. There is no relationship with Him. I can assure you on that Day you can tell Him, "Lord, Lord, I believe all the right doctrines. I am very orthodox. I'm a genuine Christian. Everybody in my church knows me." The Lord will say, "Maybe they know you, but I don't know you." I tell you, that Day will be unbearable for you.
So now, I hope you will see why it is so important for us to commune with Him. Through every prayer day by day, we are building up friendship with Him. Try to understand prayer. Maybe you could put a sticker on your wall which says, "Friendship with God - that is my goal!"
Guide Your Disciples into the Life of Communion with God
Now if you are a full-time worker for the Lord, you serve Him in the
church, this becomes even more important. At our conference, which ended
last night, we were talking about discipleship. You cannot pass on to
the disciple something that you do not have. If you do not have
friendship with God, what do you have to pass on to others except some
intellectual knowledge? And intellectual knowledge is not going to save
you. Please understand, I beg of you, the extreme importance of
practicing prayer as building friendship with God. I say again, there is
no other way to build friendship with God except through communing with
Him. So in the remaining time, I would like to take you by your hand, so
to speak, and walk with you together through the process of prayer step
by step.
One of the first things we ought to do, and often and usually fail to do, is when somebody comes to the Lord Jesus, who becomes a Christian, we never teach them how to pray. Then we realize that they are not growing. Even worse than that, we realize that they cannot even stand in the faith. Thus, before long, they fall down or fall away. I am sure you know many such cases already. We have not taught the people who come to the Lord, when they first come, i.e., right away, "Now, you start building your friendship with God." But to be fair, maybe you did not teach the person because you yourself did not know how to pray. Frankly I myself feel that I have failed to a great extent to more accurately and thoroughly teach people how to pray. That is why, as I meditated before the Lord yesterday evening, and seeing the importance of prayer, I was thinking how to put it to every person to guide them into the life of communing with God.
Prayerlessness is powerlessness! You will know how good is your prayer life by just seeing how much power there is in your life to overcome sin, for example. I hardly need to ask anyone about their prayer life because, just by looking at their life, I already know. I know there is not any prayer there. When Moses went up into the mountain and communed with God, what happened? One of the things that happened, of course, besides his receiving the tablets of the Law is, when he came down the mountain, his face was shining. When you talk to somebody who lives in prayer, you will see that there is some kind of a glory about that person that comes from God.
The Process of Prayer Step by Step
So let us take these steps into prayer.
1. Fix a Time to Meet with God Everyday
I will start with Amos 3:3 and concentrate simply on those words. If
you do not have your Bibles, just listen to what is being read here.
Amos 3:3, the main part of what I want to mention, is simply this. How
can two people, two men, walk together unless... they are what? Do you
remember the verse? "How can two walk together unless they have an
appointment?" This Hebrew word translated as 'appointment' has two
different but related meanings, and I would like to make use of both
those meanings because, since it has two meanings, I am sure the Lord
intended it to be like that. Of the two meanings one is 'appointment';
the other is 'agreement'. The meaning is quite close, of course. When
you agree on an appointment, you have already made your first agreement.
So the first thing about prayer is that you make an appointment with
God, that is, you fix a time during the day to meet with Him. Fixing the
time is absolutely necessary when you are a young Christian, in
particular, because you have not yet learned to constantly commune with
the Lord.
So I will not begin with some goal that is too high for anyone to reach at this stage, such as pray without ceasing. If you have a problem praying for 5 minutes, then forget about talking about praying without ceasing. So we will set our objective in the first stage very low, so that we can handle it when it is so small in its scope. Knowing the poverty of Christians in their spiritual life, I want to be very practical about this. I suggest that you begin with only 10 minutes - 10 minutes of prayer. It is very important what you do with those10 minutes. Of course, if you are going to sleep through 10 minutes, that will not get you anywhere. What matters is to pray with total focus. Please notice the words: total focus! Just 10 minutes! 10 minutes go by so fast. And although concentrating may be for you or for me a very tiring process, I think for 10 minutes we can exclude everything out of our thoughts and fix only on Jesus. Can you give 10 minutes to communing with the Lord? Can you? Is 10 minutes too costly for you? Is 10 minutes asking too much? It is pitiful, isn't it? Jesus gave His life for us, but we cannot give Him 10 minutes! But believe me, there are multitudes of Christians who do not pray for 10 minutes. What happens is the church is full of problems! Full of problems! If all the brothers and sisters would pray even for 10 minutes a day, you would see how different the life in the church would be. The church would be steadily transformed.
Of course, I am not saying that all your life, you are only going to pray for 10 minutes. As your friendship with God builds up, you will want to pray for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and you are finding it not very long. The point is not how long your time of prayer is. The point is not the quantity. What is important is the quality of your prayer. If you are not happy with your girlfriend - let us say you spend 10 minutes with her but you do not talk to one another - of what use is this 10 minutes? So the quality of those 10 minutes is determined by the focus we have on Jesus.
Without Friendship with God, You Will Not Even Be Saved
How important is friendship with God for you? I have already hinted
that without friendship with God, you will not even be saved! Because on
that Day, as I said, the Lord will say, "You've never talked to Me. You
might have spent a lot of time talking to yourself or doing religious
exercises. When did you talk to Me?" Dear brothers and sisters, did you
talk? Did you talk to Jesus today? Did you? I did not ask whether you
prayed today, whether you did your quiet time. That could be nothing
more than a religious exercise. I ask you again, did you talk to Jesus
today? What about yesterday? What about the day before that? When was
the last time you really, I said really, talked to Jesus? And
then when you do not talk to Him, you stand before Him on that Day, If I
were you I do not think I would like to stand in His presence on that
Day because He will say, "Who are you? When did you talk to Me?"
Do not imagine to yourself, "Well, I did talk to Jesus once about 10 years ago. Now that is quite enough. I talked with Him once. If you ask me, did I talk to Jesus? Yes, I did! 10 years ago!" When we say 'talk to Jesus', we are talking about constantly communing with Him day by day.
So the first step in prayer is fix an appointment. Fix that time to say, "These 10 minutes are for the Lord." I think I am almost ashamed to say that we can only give Him 10 minutes a day. All right, let us be modest. Let us start with a realizable goal. Now you have taken 10 minutes out of your timetable for the Lord. You have given about 3 hours to television, and 10 minutes for God. It sounds good, does it? It is almost pathetic, but I am willing to come down to this lowest level. You spend 2 or 3 hours on television. All right, I am not even going to say anything about that. But how about 10 minutes for God? Is it not tragic that I have to plead with you to give God 10 minutes? All right, but let us start with that.
2. Be Absolutely Quiet
You say, "All right! Now you have my 10 minutes. What do I do now?"
Of course you have got to launch into your usual exercise of "Bless
father and mother, grandfather and my family, and make sure my car runs
well today, and I do not get into a traffic accident." In 10 minutes you
have a lot to say. Now it is very good to ask that the Lord bless your
parents; I have nothing against that. If you do that everyday, you might
get a bit boring. So I wonder if you have nothing else to say to God
besides that? No! The first step, when you have set those 10 minutes
apart, is: be still. Do not say anything. Just come humbly into His
presence. Fix your gaze on Him. Now I would suggest that you use the
first 2 minutes out of your precious 10 minutes for being completely
quiet, absolutely quiet. As it is written in Ps. 46:10, "Be still,
and know that I am God." When you know that He is God, you will be
still. Do you rush into His presence talking non-stop? No, you come and
be quiet before Him, acknowledging Him as Sovereign Lord, to treat God
as God.
Learn by the Holy Spirit to Bring Our Body Under Control
You will notice when you start to pray that your whole body is going
to fight against you. And you will be wondering, "Why is it so difficult
for me to pray?" The answer is simple. It is because your flesh, the
fleshly side of you, is resisting what is from God. You can gauge the
level of your spirituality by just seeing how hard the flesh fights
against the spirit in you. If the flesh is so powerful in you that you
cannot bring it under control, then you had best ask whether you are
saved or not. So we must learn by the Spirit of God to bring our flesh,
our body under control. That is why prayer is so important. It hits at
the very foundation of the spiritual life. So in the first 2 minutes of
our 10 minutes, 'be still' means make every aspect of your person - your
mind, your heart, your emotions and all your desires - all have to be
still. You are going to discover that that is very, very difficult.
Through Slowing Down Our Breathing
One way that could help you to bring the body under control is to
slow down your breathing. Are you surprised? Paul said in 1 Cor. 9:27: "I
discipline my body". I bring it under control; I give myself black
eyes; I beat myself up; I must subdue the body because it wants to
prevent me from praying. What we often find is that we have to learn to
control the body both on our side as well as the Holy Spirit working
directly on us. But the body functions through breath, through
breathing. We all know that if we do not drink water for a day, as in a
desert, we will have difficulty surviving. You can survive without food
for a long time, maybe 30, 40 days, but you cannot survive without
breathing even for 2 minutes. You see, once you understand that God has
given us the breath of life, then we also learn how to control that
breath of life in us. Now I did not say that you hold your breath for 2
minutes. Otherwise, you will not continue praying for any more after
that. I only said, "Slow down your breathing." Consciously slowing it
down means I am telling my body, "Get out of my way. I want to talk to
God." I am telling my body, "You are not controlling me. I am
controlling you." Therefore, by controlling my breathing, I am
controlling my body. Of course, you are well aware that the world and
various people have discovered that long ago. The sons of this world
seem to be wiser than the sons of light. Once you understand this, you
are beginning to learn to do what Paul did: to bring his body under
subjection. That is why I told you I want to speak very practically to
you. I do not want to talk theories about prayer. I am talking about the
practice of prayer.
Through Kneeling Before the Lord
Another way of bringing the body under control during those 10
minutes is to kneel down before the Lord. To kneel down is to tell the
body, "You are in subordination to God. You obey Him." Now I am speaking
of this as applying to the 10-minute prayer. Gradually when you pray for
1 or 2 hours because you have the joy of praying, at that length of time
kneeling is no longer practical because the body will really start
distracting you after a while. Your back is aching; your knees are
hurting, so you cannot concentrate anymore. You will find it harder and
harder to control the body as discomfort and pain increases. At that
point in time, you can sit down and pray. But in the initial stage of
prayer, this short 10-minute time, I think anybody (unless you have some
physical handicap) can remain on their knees for 10 minutes.
Certainly, I do not mean that the 10 minutes per day is all that you will pray for that day. It would be better if you have 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening before you go to sleep. Sometimes in the day, unexpected things happen. A crisis arises! You cannot say, "Okay, I'll leave this problem to my 10-minute prayer when I go to bed." You would pray whenever something like that happens. Again in that situation, it is good to kneel before the Lord in prayer.
Through Bringing Our Hearts into Agreement with God:
Let His Will Be Done!
The next point I would like to get to from Amos 3:3 where the word,
as I said, can mean either 'appoint' or 'agree'. This second thing in
Amos is extremely important. It is "how can two walk together, unless
they are agreed?" This is vital for prayer as well. We must bring
our hearts into agreement with God. The strange thing is many Christians
want God to agree with 'us'. We want to do something and all we want
from God is His blessing. Dear brothers and sisters, you cannot pray
like that because God is not going to answer. Agreement means we agree
with Him. This is best expressed in that wonderful statement of the Lord
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, "...not My will, but Yours, be done."
[Lk. 22:42] So having fixed your time, having quieted down, brought your
body under control, the next step is bring your heart under control. I
cannot think of a better prayer than what the Lord Jesus Himself said,
"Not My will, Father, but Yours be done." Now we are in complete
agreement with God. Now we have reached the stage when we can walk
together.
When you come into agreement with God, and you want His will to be done in your life, what is going to happen? The first thing that is going to happen is: His will is your sanctification. That is, His will is that you be freed from sin. Brothers and sisters, do you know why your prayer is not going to be heard? Because there is sin hidden in your life! And sin is what is contrary to the will of God. Therefore if you are honest and serious about wanting to do His will, you start with the sins which are to be repented of. Your sin blocks off communion with God. There is no point praying because you cannot get through. My dear brothers and sisters, please understand that in prayer, there is nothing more important than repentance. You know, we are very kind to ourselves. We try to forget what sins we committed. As for other sins, we say, "Well, they are so minor; they are so small. God is not interested in such little sins." Let me tell you the size of your sin is not the point. It is the fact that it is sin - no matter if it is small or big.
I just mentioned at the conference yesterday about the case of John Sung who, in his diary, wrote at one point, saying, "I realized this evening that I have not returned 50¢ to this certain brother who had bought something for me." He felt so convicted that he had overlooked something like that and may have stumbled that brother. He goes on to say, "I could scarcely sleep all night." We learn from this great servant of God what is the secret of his power. For him, sin is sin whether it is 50¢ or $500,000; it does not matter. It is sin. The quantity does not matter. Often when I read the writings or diaries of these great servants of the Lord, I look for the secret - the secret of their spiritual life. What is his secret? He tells us all the time in his diary. He is constantly confessing his sins, his inadequacy, his unworthiness. He will not have one tiny stain consciously remaining in his life, not even 50¢ worth of sin. No wonder through him thousands of people came to the Lord when he preached the Word of God. The sick were healed, blind people had their eyes opened, and so on. And he was not really concerned about healing; he was not interested in healing. He wanted people to come into relationship with God. The healing was a side matter. If God was pleased to heal, he thanked the Lord for it. So remember that we cannot commune with God unless we are, like John Sung, so sensitive to sin as blocking off our communion with God.
3. Fix Your Attention on Jesus
The third point is, after being quiet, after letting God search our
hearts to reveal any hidden sin in us, now, at this point we fix our
attention on Jesus. This is the next step in prayer. Fix your attention
on Jesus. That seems so obvious. I mean when you talk to somebody, if he
is here, you do not talk [as if to someone] over there. I presume you
look at each other when you talk to one another. Yet, most Christians do
not look at Jesus when they talk to Him, or when they think they are
talking to Him. Heb. 12:2 says, "fix your gaze on Jesus". There is no
such thing as prayer if you are not even conscious of Him.
But how can we learn to fix our gaze on Jesus? Here comes another practical step I want to share with you because it is very easy for me to say, "Fix your eyes on Jesus", but you do not have a clue what you are supposed to do. Take the first elementary step in this direction. What is that? Turn to the gospels and look at the gospels. What were they written for? All the four gospels is a 4-dimensional view of Jesus. So you can look at Jesus through the message of Matthew or Mark or Luke or John; all different directions you can look at Him. So once you are there kneeling before the Lord, and you have repented truly of your sins, what you do now is you open the gospels and there look at Jesus. You will start reading the Bible in a very different way because now you will begin to realize why the gospels were written. You can read any passage you like. You can start from Matthew and read through to John, or you can start from John or start anywhere.
Just look! For example, if you were reading the passage about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. As you read that account, you see Jesus. You can see Him going into the Garden. You can see the heaviness in His heart. The hour of His death is at hand. And you see Him praying on His knees before the Father. Actually, if I read the account rightly, He is not just kneeling; He is lying flat on His face. Look at the way He prays. Can you see Jesus? There is the portrait painted for you to see. Can you see Him as He prays? The sweat is running down His face. Big drops are falling on the ground as He sweats. The sheer intensity of that prayer - we do not even understand how to pray like that. Then, you see the disciples - they are sleeping! We will not pay attention to them. And we see Jesus coming to the disciples. What does He find? They are sleeping. "I have taught you these three years, and now at the end of My ministry, could you not spend just one hour to pray with Me?" Three times He goes to pray by Himself because nobody is praying with Him.
Now you can look through all the gospels, do not look at all the other details, do not waste your time. Fix your eyes on Jesus as you read the gospels. Just look at Him, whatever He is doing. That is the first and simplest way to learn to fix your gaze on Jesus. As you advance in the spiritual life, you may not need this help anymore because you have already learned to fix your gaze on Jesus through constant practice, starting in this way. Let me tell you, too, that when you learn to fix your eyes on Jesus through reading the Scriptures, when you come to teach the Scriptures, there will be a different power.
4. Know that Jesus Loves You
The fourth thing is: you must learn and trust in the fact in what
Paul said in Gal. 2:20, "...the Son of God, who loved me and gave
Himself for me." In other words, you come into His presence to pray
knowing that - knowing that - He loves you! What is the point of praying
to somebody you are not sure that He even cares for you? I will not ask
you to raise your hands for a show of hands. But ask yourself, "Do I
really believe that Jesus loves me? I hear it all the time." Do you
believe it, in actual fact, right now, that He loves you, as to say, "I
know that He loves me"? Do you have that understanding?
In Ps. 56:9, even the psalmist was able to know this. "This I know, that God is for me." [RSV] God is for me, the psalmist says. No wonder the psalms are all psalms of prayer. He comes with confidence before God because "God is for me."
5. Know that He Always Listens to You
The next point I would like to mention, by now it is the fifth one,
is another point concerning certainty. You do not approach people, at
least with no real confidence, when you are not sure whether that person
likes you or not. Jesus not only likes you; He loves you! No matter how
difficult it is for us to understand, but that is the way. He loved you
and was crucified for you. The fifth point is closely related to this.
We have just seen in Ps. 56:9 that the psalmist is confident to come
before God because he knows God is for him, and therefore in this fifth
point, we come to the understanding that He always listens to me.
Ps. 65:2 reads, "Thou Who hears prayer, to You all men will come." You know, God listens to every person, all men. The problem is that all men do not talk to Him. He is willing to listen, but we do not have time. We have no time to talk to the King of kings. That is also the arrogance of sin.
6. God Wants Us to Come Right into the Holiest Place
The sixth point will be that God is so concerned for us to come to
Him that you know what happened when Jesus died? The veil in the Temple
between the Holy Place and the Holiest Place was torn. So these points
all concern the fact that if you come to prayer without any sense of
certainty that He even bothers to hear you, then why should you pray? I
think it is for this reason that most Christians (am I wrong?) do not
pray in the sense of communing with God. They are not confident that God
even listens to them. Prayer is about as meaningful as talking to the
wall. Do you have confidence that Jesus listens to you when you pray? If
not, then you do not have faith. Faith is then also the essence of
prayer. "I believe! I believe Jesus listens to me because I only want to
do His will. Anything I ask according to His will, He will grant it."
This I have experienced to be the case. When you experience it, your
faith gets stronger. God wants us to come to Him, right into the Holiest
Place.
The Israelites were not given that privilege. We are given the privilege, but we do not make any use of it. We do not even dare to come into His presence, mostly because of our sins. Make sure, especially at the end of the day, which I said would be good to do, to have another 10 minutes. The first thing to do, again, is to repent because during the day, you had done various things which may not be in line with God's will.
7.
Prayer Requires Perseverance
The seventh thing I would like to
mention is prayer requires perseverance. Most Christians do not get very
far in prayer because there is no determination to pray through even for
10 minutes. That is why the Lord Jesus has several parables about
persevering in prayer, such as in Lk. 18:1 about the widow who persisted
until the judge relented. The reason why we need endurance is, as I
mentioned earlier, when you start to pray, your body starts to protest.
It seems to us that the body belongs very much to the Protestant
tradition because it is always protesting. Your body is a strong
protestant; it all the time protests! "You've prayed already 11 minutes!
We are supposed to pray 10 minutes, and you make me kneel here for one
minute extra. All right, you beat me up at the beginning by slowing down
the breathing. I didn't find that very comfortable. And now you have
gone overtime as well." Oh, that is when you need perseverance to fight
your way through the flesh.
8. Commune with God and What You Ask of Him Will Be Done
The eighth point is this. Jn. 15:7 says, "If you abide in Me and I
abide in you, ask what you will and it will be done for you." Now we
come to the experiential aspect of prayer. You have little experience of
God. Most Christians have no experience at all of God to speak of. Why?
Think about this. "If you have that relationship with Me, you abide in
Me; I abide in you; we are talking to one another; we are communing with
one another. Now you can ask what you will. I will do it for you."
Nothing is too difficult for God. I have experienced this all the time.
He will do the things that are beyond understanding or expectation.
I still remember the time when Pastor Joe and I were driving back from Toronto to Montreal along the highway. When we were still halfway to Montreal, I began to see smoke coming out of the engine. I realized we had problems. It was quite late in the night and we were stuck with smoke pouring out of the engine. I then realized that the gearbox had burned up and that we were stuck on the highway. What were we going to do? Of course my beloved coworker, Pastor Joe, who is here today, said, "Let us pray." Do you know what he prayed? "Lord, please enable this car to move on to the next service station." I was thinking to myself, "Oh, I don't know how to say 'Amen' to that prayer! He has much greater faith than I do." I said to myself, "You can't be serious! Do you understand what has happened? The gearbox! Do you see the smoke? It's burned up! We have a burned-up gearbox. How can it move?"
And so my dear brother was praying on, "Lord, enable this car to move to that service station", which was about 1 km. away. You try to drive a car with a burned-out gearbox, a car which was not even able to move. Nothing moved! And it was going to move now for 1 km. to the service station. When he finished his prayer, I was struggling to be able to say "Amen". So I say this to my own shame because I know something about cars and the engine, and I knew, humanly speaking, there was absolutely no way that this car was going to move another inch. Like Pastor Lee's car, it was an automatic car; you cannot push it. So after my beloved coworker's prayer, then of course having said "Amen" - I did say "Amen" in the end - I put the car into gear. What gear was there left, I do not know. Amazingly, amazingly, the car began to move, and it got all the way to the station! I think any of you who are auto mechanics will know about this will say, "This is unbelievable!" The car got to the service area right in front of the motor mechanic service section, and the moment it got in front of that repair station, it would not move another inch. Isn't that wonderful?!
"You abide in Me, I abide in you, ask what you will and I will do it." I am quite certain that there was a number of angels behind the car pushing the car. It certainly had nothing to do with the gearbox. You see, when you experience the truth of this Word of God, you have confidence to pray.
9. Listen and See If God Is Saying Something to You
In the next point in your 10-minute prayer (that is, when you come
to any point in that prayer, but preferably at the end of that 10
minutes), be still again. I hope you are not looking at your watch every
second, thinking there are nine minutes to go, there is half a second to
go, and so on. I think this would ruin your entire prayer time. If you
are looking at your watch the whole time, you might as well not bother
to pray because your attention is on your watch, not on Jesus. If you
are so anxious that you do not want to pray for one minute beyond 10
minutes, then set your alarm clock. It has the further advantage that in
case you have fallen asleep, it will wake you up. So in that last 1 or 2
minutes, be still again; be quiet again. But this time, listen. Listen
and see whether God is saying something to you.
I have more than once experienced the Lord speaking to me what seemed to be in an audible voice that I could hear. But sometimes it is not any voice. I could feel the inner compulsion to what God wanted me to do. Have you ever spent a little bit of time to listen, to listen to that quiet little voice? Then you would begin to experience something. But you do not hear because you do not stop to listen.
But if you learn to start listening, one of these days God may call you out as one of His prophets. I am sure you have read the OT prophets. There is one phrase that comes again and again: "Thus says the Lord". The prophet speaks in the Name of the Lord. Now that would be blasphemy unless God truly spoke to him. If you have learned to listen to God, you will gradually know exactly what He is saying to you and through you to others. When you do that, and you advance in the Christian life, one of these days if you are preaching, you will preach with His power. That is prophetic power! You will be able, not necessarily to use the words "Thus says the Lord", but "I say confidently to you, this is what God is saying." What I mean is, we do not use the phrase. I did not come up here with the first thing to say as, "Thus says the Lord". You do not become a prophet simply by repeating those words, "Thus says the Lord". But I know that everything I say is, in fact, the Lord speaking. That is why that Word must speak to us, must speak to you, because it is His Word, not mine.
10. Always End with Thanksgiving!
Let us come to the last point. This tenth point, when you finally
close your 10-minute prayer, is to always, always end with thanksgiving.
Look at the psalms. At the end of the psalms, there is always praise and
thanksgiving. But most Christians are exceedingly lacking in
thanksgiving even to each other. If you learn to close your prayer with
praise and thanksgiving, you are going to see how God responds to that.
That is what is known as 'the power of praise'. Sometimes in church we
all praise God. We see everybody else is doing it, so we do it as well.
Just say, "Thank You! Thank You, Lord, from the depth of my heart!" And
thank Him for everything.
John Sung had only one son - his youngest child. He had three daughters, but the youngest child was a boy, the joy of the family. When he was in hospital up in what is now Beijing, suffering intense pain because of the 'thorn in his flesh' as he called it, he was physically in very poor condition, as though he had not yet suffered enough for the Lord. He received the news that his son was very, very ill, and one month later he died. His wife could not take it; that is, initially she could not take it. John Sung was shocked! But looking at his diary, one is deeply touched - he gave thanks to God! He gave thanks that God had taken his little boy into His presence. Other people would have said, "Look, I have served You, I've ruined my health, I'm broken apart physically, and now You allow this to happen to me. Is this the way to treat Your servants?" Not John Sung. He thanked God! "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord!" [Job 1:21] I know many people who, having lost a child, have turned away from the Lord. Not John Sung!
Now we understand another secret of his power, why God's power works through this man, because in every situation, he learned always to give thanks. That does not mean it was easy for him. He battled and struggled in his heart in pain. But he still gave thanks, right from the depth of his heart. He is far ahead of most of us spiritually, but the reason he was able to do this in the end, was because like what I said, he closed his time of prayer with thanksgiving. He did not write this in his diary, but I am sure this is what he did. His prayer was always filled with thanksgiving. He was a man for whom praying 2 or 3 hours a day was nothing at all. It was a joy to him. Most of us have not reached that stage of close intimate prayer for that length of time, but we can start with our 10 minutes. Our time is gone. We must close.
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Special Messages:
- Building a Friendship with God Through Prayer
- Death with Christ - The Path to Life
- He Is Not God of the Dead But of the Living
- How to Understand Prophecies Concerning End Times
- Jesus, the Sign Spoken Against
- Meet with the Everlasting God
- Steps in Preparation For His Coming
- The Lord's Coming and Events Preceding It
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