Your Prayer Carries Strong Power

I still remember what happened as if it were yesterday. God put someone on my heart that I knew I needed to pray for. So, I committed to praying for this person every night before I went to sleep. Sometimes I’d spend 2 minutes praying (if I was particularly tired), and sometimes I’d spend up to a half an hour. 

For three weeks I did this, seemingly getting nowhere. But when walking by faith, I knew that my prayers were going to work in the spirit realm—where God, angels, and demons exist and do battle— even though I wasn’t seeing anything immediately. 

Three weeks later, everything changed. This person came to my dad privately saying that he needed God, and he needed change in his life. He repented of his lifestyle and was baptized within days. 

It really was a miracle. 

1 John 5:14–15 says, “This is the confidence which we have before 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 which we have asked from Him.”

I knew that it was God’s will for this person to come to Him, so prayed it expectantly, knowing that God always keeps His promises.

We are to pray that God’s will be done, which Jesus also told us to do in Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4. What is it saying then… that God’s will isn’t always done? 

2 Peter 3:9 says that it’s not God’s will that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But as we can see by simply living in this world that it doesn’t always happen. People perish every day without God. 

We wouldn’t be told to pray for God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven if our prayer didn’t affect the carrying out of God’s will. God’s will isn’t always done, but our prayers bring His will about. And we can only pray in faith for something that we know is what God wants. 

We need to be in the word of God so that we can know what His will is! When we know what His will is, we can pray powerfully and effectively, because we will have what we ask for, because the effective prayer of a righteous man (or woman!) accomplishes much and has great power (James 5:16). 

I want to remind you as well that if you’re a follower of Jesus, you are righteous— in Christ. 2 Corinthians 5:21 reminds us of that. Although we are considered righteous through the finished work of Jesus, that gives us no excuse to act unrighteously, but it doesn’t weigh us down with a continuous burden and self-condemnation every time we sin. When we sin, if we confess those sins to God, He will forgive us + cleanse us from all unrighteousness!

I want to encourage you this week to find at least one person who you know that needs God to do something big in their lives. If you’d like, drop a comment below about them, and I’ll agree with you in prayer! God’s got this, my friends < 3