The Authentic Power of Prayer

Prayer - it’s something that every person on the face of the planet does many times during their life. It’s something that holds great importance to some, and is brushed off by others later in their lives. Some pray to rock and stone gods, some to the One and Only True God.

Many define prayer as talking to God. I totally disagree with that definition. I believe that prayer is talking with God. That’s totally different. Prayer is a conversation. When you talk with someone, you take turns talking and listening. That’s the same with prayer. When you pray, you take turns talking to God and listening to His voice. Many people don’t understand this concept; they don’t make any connection between conversations between two or more persons and prayer; they don’t grasp the fact that God speaks, and will speak to you if you just listen for His voice and obey.

The belief in the power of prayer in today’s society has been dulled all the way to the point that many people today don’t even believe that God listens, much less that He answers and cares. All the time, we hear “pray about it”, “I’m praying for you”, “prayer is powerful”, etc. But I think that most of the people who are saying these things are only saying them because that is the accepted terminology for “hope for it”,”I’m hoping for you”, “hope is powerful”. Everyone hopes to a certain extent, and you’ve got to be insane to deny the existence of hope in everyday life. We all hope many things. We hope we’ll get to go to such and such a place, we hope we’ll get married, we hope we’ll have kids, we hope we’ll have plenty of money, we hope, hope, hope. But does that matter?

Hope has replaced prayer.

When you encourage someone by telling them to pray about it, do they? If someone encourages you to pray, do you? If you tell someone you’ll pray for them, do you? When you tell someone that prayer is powerful, do you believe that yourself? Many people don’t. I believe that in modern society, most people use the word prayer just to encourage others. They use it as an encouraging word, not as an action, which is what it should be.

Now, you might be trying to deny that you have replaced prayer with hope. If you have not, great! But if you have, I encourage you to reexamine your prayer motives. When a lot people pray, you can tell it’s half hearted, you can tell that there’s no relationship there, there’s no conversation, it’s all an act, and it’s all a show.

That is prayer in the world we live in today.

How can we change this? By talking with God. Earlier in this issue, I wrote about seeking God. One of the main ways you seek Him is though talking with Him, through prayer. God loves you and wants to hear from you; He wants you to listen. He may speak through an idea or inspiration, through another Christian, or through His word. He may even speak in other ways – God doesn’t have any limits to how He can speak to you. The main part is listening. Don’t deceive yourself by trying to think really hard, trying to force ideas come, but be still and quiet, quote memorized scripture, read scripture, meditate on and study scripture, and be quiet. God can yell and God can whisper, but you must trust that He will do what’s best for you, He knows you better than you know yourself.

Thus far we’ve talked a whole lot about you listening and God speaking, but like I said, it’s a conversation – two people who must both listen and speak in turn. So, what about your speaking part? Many Christians dislike praying in public because they don’t want to make a fool of themselves by praying “wrong”. This is a lie. The only way you can pray wrong is by not truly praying at all. By just speaking, not caring to whom your speaking, because you are not truly speaking to anyone at all, just rambling and saying your speaking to God. That’s not prayer.

Prayer involves a relationship; it doesn’t necessarily have to be strong, it doesn’t have to be a BFF kind of thing, you just have to make the inward statement within your own heart that you do indeed believe that God is real and that He listens. That’s all it takes. To know that God is real, to believe that He is indeed the God of the universe takes faith - a blind faith, a faith whose roots come from an inward longing for someone greater than you, someone to worship, someone to rely on. That’s human nature, that’s how we were designed. It also takes the belief that God loves you and listens.

You can cry out to God. You can pour out your heart to Him. You can tell Him your innermost and greatest secrets. You can tell Him when you’re hurt, sad, happy, rejoicing, longing, satisfied, regretting, and excited. He cares. He listens. And best of all, He’s always there.

Therefore, seeing all we have thought out thus far, we can see that prayer is indeed powerful. Why? Because prayer is speaking with the all-powerful God! Prayer is powerful because He is powerful.