Articles
The Power of Prayer
Many years ago, I was given a book written by a man named George Mueller. George was an evangelist and he ran an orphanage in the 1800’s in Bristol, England. George built his life around prayer and he prayed expecting that God would give an answer. He didn’t always expect that God would answer the way he wanted, but he prayed knowing God would answer. George prayed daily for the basic needs of himself and those of the orphans that he had in his care. He made it a habit to never make any ministry needs known to anyone except God. It is quite amazing that over his lifetime George recorded over fifty-thousand specific answers to prayers! Over the span of sixty years, God provided food, clothing, housing, heat and around a half billion dollars to George. All because George believed in praying to a mighty and powerful God and he had faith that he would always answer.
Sometimes prayer can be very difficult. We can find ourselves believing that we have to pray in just the right way in order for God to hear us. We often believe that our prayers should be of certain length, worded the correct way to be worth God’s time. Prayer was never meant to be a show of words for others to see or to showcase ourselves and our spirituality. God gave us the avenue of prayer so that we could express our heart to him. Through prayer, we can discuss and share with God all that is on our hearts and minds. He is never too busy and is always available to listen to the hearts of his children. We see throughout scripture, that people share with God just about everything that you can think of, from anger and disgust to fear and regret and everything in between. God is a god that desires for us to come to him with all things. The problem is, we can often pray and just be going through the motions, and not truly believe that God will answer our prayers. We pray without having the faith in the way God works. Why do we fall into this trap? God hears us! 1 John 5:14-15 says, “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us-whatever we ask-we know that we have what we asked of him.”
