What do you do in hard times – when you are faced with a major challenge, in your finances, your health, or even concerning a challenge in your marriage or your family? For some, the solution lies in seeking prayer from a pastor or other believers, and for others it might be simply to complain, as we see most people do so lately, with the increasingly high cost of living. But the Bible tells us clearly what we are to do in these circumstances. “Is any among you afflicted? let him pray…” (James 5:13a)
Prayer is the solution to your affliction, not complaining, because in prayer, you will access the wisdom of God to enable you to come out of whatever challenge confronts you. Talking about the problem more than praying only magnifies it.
Jesus said, “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19). As believers, we determine what Heaven does on the earth; it is not the other way around, where we are waiting on God for Him to move. The truth is, He has already moved, and is only waiting for our response. Since we have the keys of the Kingdom we are the ones with the authority to rule in the earth; so whether you will become successful or a failure; influential or mediocre; feed the hungry or beg for food; clothe the naked or seek to be clothed, it all depends on you. One sure way to exercise our dominion on earth is through prayer.
We can learn a lot from how Jesus conducted prayer. Do you know that in the Bible Jesus never prayed with His disciples? The Bible says, He would wake up and go to a solitary place and pray alone. Sometimes He would take along His disciples, but would leave them at a point, and go further to pray. He always prayed alone. In Luke 11, the Bible says, when Jesus had finished praying, the disciples came to Him and said, “Master teach us how to pray just like John taught his disciples.” Perhaps this was because they had seen that whenever He went to pray secretly He always came back to perform one miracle or other – blind eyes were opened, cripples began to walk, and many more.
Jesus had this to say about prayer: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly” (Matthew 6:6). In our fast paced world nowadays it is becoming more unpopular and unfashionable to spend time in private prayer; almost everybody wants to be popular. Yet God is more interested in your private prayer life, than He is in your public prayer life.
Now there is nothing wrong with corporate prayer; the Bible in fact enjoins us to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together (Hebrews 10:25). But corporate prayer ought to complement, not replace, what you do in your closet. Many prayer sessions these days are nothing more than public spectacles, with believers trying to outdo one another in varied body movements and repetitive cries, as though that is an indication of their faith or spirituality. People who engage in such prayers would do themselves a lot of good if they could be as intense in their closet as they are in the open. Moreover, reducing prayer to a public spectacle makes us lose the reverence with which our prayer meetings ought to be conducted, hence making us experience less and less of God’s manifest presence in these meetings. Such vain prayers do not move God.
Beloved, we have not been called to do the ordinary, but the extraordinary. Jesus said of the man that believes in Him, “greater works than these shall he do…” (John 14:12). These greater works result from deep intimacy with the Father in prayer. Jesus never prayed in public to heal the sick, and yet when confronted with a problem all it took was a command, and the instant results were there for all to see. For our confessions and declarations to come to pass, they need to be undergirded by heavy investment in prayer. Without the infrastructure of private prayer, those decrees would not amount to much. If you desire to see answers to prayer, or to walk in dominion as God commanded us to (Genesis 1:26), begin to increase the time you spend in private prayer, and before long your reward will be too obvious for others not to notice.
Rule for God!