Mountain Moving Prayers

⁸ Therefore I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and dissension.

When we pray we should examine our motives.  We should consider the attributes of God so that we pray according to His will, asking for what is righteous and just, merciful and good.  God already knows what we need. We don’t need to go on and on or say some secret expression over and over.  He wants to meet our needs.   When we begin as Jesus began this prayer, He is free to meet our needs in a way that is consistent with His character.  The prayer begins with acknowledgement of the holiness of the Father’s name, God’s kingdom coming, and God’s will first and foremost.  When you begin there, your heart is turned away from selfish vanity and turned toward God’s eternal purposes.  “Your name, God, Your kingdom and Your perfect will be done.” Prayer is willful submission to and in cooperation with the heart of God.  Since His ways are loving, gracious, just, but merciful, my desire is to yield my will to His in prayer.  Understanding our old selfish and destructive nature should give us the motivation to pray for God’s will instead of our own.  Even when it looks painful, if we submit to the truth that God knows best and loves us, we can pray for His will and we can expect His peace to fill us.   I remember asking God for things that I thought were in His will, and yet if God had given those things to me at that time it would have been contrary to God’s kingdom and His purposes. I thank God He withheld them.  After putting His kingdom and will first we can pray the rest of the prayer Jesus gave us. (Matt 6:11-13) ¹¹ ‘Give us this day our daily bread. ¹² ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. ¹³ ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.[For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’]

We have need of two kinds of bread.  We need physical bread, which is food for our physical bodies.  We can go without it for a time, but we need to take care of the temple of the Holy Spirit.  God has placed this vessel, my body, in my care, and as a good steward I should care for it.  So, I ask God to be the Provider of my food, one day at a time.  I don’t ask for a warehouse, because I would become self-dependent and not seek Him. That is human nature.  What a comfort we have when we know it is God that provides our daily bread.  The Psalmist said he had never seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread.  The God that feeds the birds all over the face of the world feeds us.  The other kind of bread is spiritual.  Jesus said He was the bread that came down from heaven. He is the Word made flesh.  He said, “This is my body which is broken for you, take, eat in remembrance of me.”  This bread is the spiritual food that we feast on when we open His word, when we hear from Him in prayer, or when a message is relayed by the Holy Spirit through human means.  We are feasting on Jesus, the heavenly bread.  How often do we need that?  Give us this day our daily bread.  When we pray, do we think only of the physical?  We need to pray our spiritual needs are met just as we pray for our physical needs.  We need an appetite, a spiritual hunger, to remind us we need the Bread of Life. We have the promise that our God will supply all our needs, according to His riches in glory, in Christ Jesus.   He will meet our physical needs and our spiritual needs, if we will just ask and have a will to receive.  Then we ask for forgiveness AS we forgive others. We’ve had our sins covered by His blood, but we still continue to sin.  You would think that since I became a new creature in Christ I would quit sinning.  But I’m still in this earthly body and still prone to error.  I ask the heart of the One with the hallowed name to forgive me. But, unforgiveness in my heart will block His forgiveness from flowing into my life.  If I won’t forgive those who owe me little, why should I expect God to forgive me when I owe Him so much?  Unforgiveness is a poison that restricts your communion with God.  Unforgiveness hinders prayer and our relationship with God.

Our last request in this prayer is to not be led into temptation.  I recognize how weak I am and how strong the Evil One is, so I ask to be kept from his attacks.  The Psalmist prayed to be led in a plain path, because of his enemy.  We should pray the same.  Lead us plainly, for the enemy of our soul desires to capture what territory he can.   Test and grow me, but keep me out of his clutches.  We start with His name, His kingdom, His will and move on to our needs physical and spiritual. Then we ask for forgiveness for our sins, and to be led away from the Enemy’s traps. The prayer is so simple a child can pray it but so rich it can encompass the deepest expressions of our spirit.  As we pray the will of God into our life and the lives of those with which we are in contact, our faith increases.  As we listen with our spirit, our spiritual senses become sharpened.  We increasingly become a vessel through which God intervenes in the world.  There is no higher calling or honorable work.  Look at a few of the glorious promises that are ours! (John 15:7) ⁷ If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. (John 15:16) ¹⁶ You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.  (John 14:13-14) ¹³ Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. ¹⁴ If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.    (1 John 5:14-15) ¹⁴ This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. ¹⁵ And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him.

“Whatever you wish”, “Whatever you ask”, “anything you ask”, these are very broad terms.  Then why do many of our prayers seem to go unanswered?  Let us look back at some of the conditions we skip over. “If you remain in me and my words remain in you…” What does it mean to remain in Christ?  NASB uses the word ‘abide’.  That is to live in.  I abide in my home.  I’m not always there but it is where I spend most of my time.  Do you spend most of your time in Christ?  If Christ is your home, you have a heart for His will and His untainted desires, you will ask for those good things that are His will, even when they would not be your first choice.  The second condition is asking in Jesus’ name.  We often add on our prayers, “In Jesus’ name.”  That means, at His direction and per His will and with His authority.  When you add to the end of your prayer, “in Jesus’ name”, you are saying, “I am speaking as an ambassador of Jesus and asking these things on His behalf.”  Jesus says that when you do that, the Father answers.  Now some of you might be thinking, “How disappointing! I thought I was going to find some formula to get what I want without surrendering to God!”  That would be neglecting the first principle of prayer, seeking God’s kingdom and will. Your Father only gives you what is good for you.  Even the difficult things can be in our best interest.  If you are disappointed because of God’s goodness in withholding things that would be detrimental to you, you only have a worldly perspective.  You need your heart transformed so that your desires become His. Your prayers are not answered because as James says, “…You ask amiss that you may consume it upon your lusts.” Or they may not be answered because you have stopped listening to God and His will and ways.  Listen to what the prophet Zechariah warned God’s people was happening. (Zech 7:13) says ¹³ "And just as He called and they would not listen, so they called and I would not listen," says the LORD of hosts…  They wouldn’t listen to God so He wouldn’t listen to them.  That is not some childish response but it is looking out for their own good. If we won’t listen to God’s perfect and holy desires, we plead our own selfish and destructive desires.

If the prospect of praying God’s will into your life and the lives of those you come in contact with excites you, it is because you realize His will is the answer to the evil in the world around us.  It is not our methods, and our ideas and programs, but a sovereign move of God doing what HE has planned. Jesus promised if you had the faith of a mustard seed you could say to a mountain, “be moved”, and it would happen. Listen to (Romans 8:26-27) ²⁶ In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; ²⁷ and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We are learning from Christ how to pray, but we don’t know what we ought to pray for.  We need the help of the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes we can’t even express it, so He does for us.  See how He prays?  He prays in accordance with God’s will.  God’s will is so much better than what you or I would pray for ourselves.  He sees your deepest need and knows every possible path you could choose. Sometimes we don’t consciously know what God is doing.  Remember Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?  They chose to obey God. The king said he would throw them in the furnace if they didn’t bow to his image, a huge golden idol.  They answered, “Our God is able to deliver us and rescue us from your hand, but even if He doesn’t, we want you to know we won’t worship or bow down to your idol.” (Daniel 3:17,18) They must not have known with certainty God’s will for their future.  They were prepared for either outcome because they believed God is God and they were men.  And God did deliver them.  Yet, for everyone God has miraculously healed or delivered there are as many that have not seen the answer in this life.  They were healed or delivered through death – our great graduation.  Why some and not others?  Only our Sovereign God knows and we must trust and believe He knows best how and when to answer our prayers. We say with righteous Job, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” (Job 13:15)  Sometimes, I would ask for some things to be different.  Sin wreaks havoc on this world.  The curse upon sin with disease and inequity is heart wrenching.  Man’s inhumanity to man never ceases to disappointment me.  What we are praying for is the culmination of this time of man reigning in the earth. We are praying against the evil that would harm the innocent.  The freedom to choose God also allows the freedom to choose evil, and that evil causes so much pain.  John looked into heaven and prayed, “Come quickly Lord Jesus!”  As an old man in his 90’s he had seen the horror of life in this world where man could so brutalize man.  He saw prayer open up heaven and the future before his eyes.  He had seen Jesus praying when the Spirit descended on Him like a dove.  He was there when they gathered in a room and prayed until the Church was born in the outpouring of the Spirit.   He saw prayer break Him out of prison and fill the disciples with boldness in the face of persecution. His prayer in response to seeing both the horror of the rebellion of man and the glory of the Kingdom of God was, “Come quickly Lord Jesus!”  (Rev 22:20) Pray His will as you are led by the Spirit and you will be praying in faith, believing.  Mountains moving will seem like nothing compared to the transformed lives and the redeemed situations that your prayers will bring about.  Pray God’s will into your life, your home, this church, and our nation!