Praying Powerful Prayers
By: Kia Stephens
After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly. - Acts 4:31
When it comes to our prayer life, sometimes we start off passionately praying only to end up with route lifeless prayers or nothing at all. I along with many others have experienced this. The reasons we may have dull prayer lives are vast.
Maintaining fervency in prayer is often difficult to do every day, especially during a challenging season. We may feel as though our words are insufficient and stop short of the ceiling: never making it to God’s ears. At times, we might even feel like our prayers are ineffective because life’s situations seem to remain the same.
Although this is sometimes our reality it doesn’t have to stay this way. Fervent prayer doesn’t rest on what we can do alone but it is impacted by the power of God. When our prayer life seems powerless, we can ask God to make them powerful through the intervention of the Holy Spirit.
We see this in Acts chapter 3 and 4. Peter healed a lame beggar and then he and John taught the people and proclaimed in Jesus the resurrection of the dead. This displeased the priest, captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees so they came up and seized Peter and John and put them in jail until the next day. They threatened them but ultimately let them go because of the crowd.
Once they were released the immediate and collective response of the believers was prayer to God. They acknowledged the sovereignty of God, the plots of mankind, and then asked the Lord to enable His servants to speak His word with great boldness. At a time when they could have been fearful of what might happen to them they boldly prayed to God.
They did not shrink back. These believers chose to pray all the more fervently in the midst of a dangerous time. In Acts, 4:30 they said, “Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” The believers moved forward courageously and in Acts 4:31 we see the whole place where they were meeting was shaken.
This illustrates the power of prayer in a physical way. Our prayers have the power to shake the ground of our heart and the circumstances of our lives. Just like the early believers we must trust in God and not doubt.
We must make a conscious decision to pray bold prayers. As we grow closer to God, He, by the power of His Holy Spirit, causes us to pray these types of prayers.
Our prayer life is not meant to solely focus on us and our problems. It is meant to be a global battleground where we lay the foundation for God to work in and through us. If our prayers have grown route and lifeless we can take our cues from the believers in Acts 4.
In doing so we will acknowledge the sovereignty of God, man’s failed plots, and ask the Lord to enable us to speak the word of the living God with great boldness. This will ensure that our faith and our prayer life is anything but dull and boring. Choosing to pray this way might cause us to have the same type of hang-on-by-the-seat-of-your-pants adventures that the early believers experienced.
Kia Stephens is a wife and homeschooling mama of two who is passionate about helping women know God as Father. For this reason, she created The Father Swap Blog to be a source of encouragement, healing, and practical wisdom for women dealing with the effects of a physically or emotionally absent father. Each week through practical and biblically sound teaching she encourages women to exchange father wounds for the love of God the Father. For more encouragement download Kia's free audio message, “Knowing God as Father.” Additionally, you can connect with Kia on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest.
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