I realize that the title to this chapter sounds a bit redundant. After all, if something is necessary then it is by definition not up for negotiation. So why did I choose it? To reinforce that there is little, if any, hope for the proper use of spiritual gifts apart from a focused and consistent commitment to praying. Notice that I did not say a focused and consistent commitment to “prayer” but to “praying.” There is a difference.
Many Christians will say they are committed to prayer. But how many actually pray? Believing in the value of prayer and writing it into the mission statement of your church is one thing. Actually praying is something else. If you want your life to experience divine power, it needs to be a praying life. If you want your church to operate in the full gifts of God’s Spirit, it needs to be a praying church.
From the first day that I was awakened to the importance of spiritual gifts in the life of the church, prayer has had an irreplaceable role. What I have in mind here is not praying for individual gifts for people but experiencing corporate prayer, everyone in the local church interceding on behalf of everyone else.
The year was 1989, and I had approached the elders of our church to ask that we conclude each Sunday service with an opportunity for people to receive prayer from trained intercessors. At the time, we were a typical Bible church. I would conclude my message with a closing benediction and then simply dismiss the congregation. But I had come to believe that if we ever hoped to see people healed physically or hear from the Spirit in words of knowledge and prophecy that we needed to provide opportunities for this to occur. Something needed to change.
The elders were initially reluctant, largely because their only experience with what I was asking was related to an extremely charismatic church in the community. Through its fanaticism, it had given a bad name to everything “spiritual” or remotely charismatic. The elders were understandably concerned that my suggestion might lead us down a slippery slope and open the door to excess.
I asked if they would grant me the freedom to handpick a half dozen or so couples whom I trusted to personally train in the practice of intercessory prayer. I asked for a year in which to do this, and after that time they could reconsider my proposal. So we went forward with that plan.
After training these couples for a year, the elders were happy to approve a time of prayer ministry at the close of each service. There wasn’t anything particularly fancy or unusual about what we did. I utilized a prayer model I had learned from John Wimber, founder of the Association of Vineyard Churches. I made some slight changes to it, but by and large it was the model that Wimber popularized. We invited anyone of any age to come to the front of the auditorium and receive prayer for physical healing, emotional encouragement, relational struggles, or whatever other issues they were facing at the time.
So did we experience radical healings and powerful moves of the Holy Spirit? Things didn’t change much at first. But change came; slowly and unmistakably we began to see things happen. At the heart of our ministry were the words of James chapter 4, verse 2: “You do not have, because you do not ask.” I understand this to mean that God loves to be pursued! God loves to be asked, repeatedly, over and over, without fear on our part that we are nagging him or laboring in unbelief. God is pleased to draw near and pour out his power and do wonderful, even miraculous, things when his people persevere in prayer, asking again and again that the Spirit work in people’s hearts, bodies, souls, and minds.
I’m not saying that you will never experience the supernatural operations of the Spirit unless you embrace and utilize the prayer model that I’m articulating in this chapter. But I don’t think it likely that you will. I believe that when people pause and pray, when they linger over one another with intercessory cries, the Spirit is more inclined to speak to them than if they simply pat each other on the back with the standard Christian cliché: “I’ll be praying for you.” Don’t promise to pray for people. Practice praying for them. Just do it!
Someone once said that all theological error begins with truth. We start out with something altogether biblical and then take it to such an extreme or fail to put proper parameters around it and end up in something false and misleading. This is certainly the case when it comes to prayer. We begin with the glorious truth that God is generous and abundant and loves to enrich his people spiritually with all the blessings secured for us in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (see Ephesians 1:3).
We then fall into the presumptuous error of thinking that God will bestow all those blessings irrespective of our asking for them. We assume, falsely, that God will give us apart from prayer what he has promised to give us only in response to prayer. We say to ourselves: “God is a good God. He is generous and kind and effusive with his blessings. He loves his children, and I’m one of them! So although I know I should pray and continually seek his face, if I don’t I can count on God to come through for me anyway. After all, that’s what being God is all about, isn’t it?”
Well, no, it isn’t. Although Isaiah here is speaking of God’s relationship to Israel, I believe the principle he articulates is true of God at any time in redemptive history:
Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you,
and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are those who wait for him.For a people shall dwell in Zion, in Jerusalem; you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as he hears it, he answers you. (Isaiah 30:18–19)
This is stunning, to say the least. If God is gracious and loves to show his mercy to his people, then why doesn’t he just do it? Why does he wait to be gracious? Why does he first require that he hear “the sound of your cry”? For heaven’s sake, Lord, or perhaps we should say, for our sake here on earth, just do it. Just give it. Just pour out your mercy and whatever other blessings or help or provision we need. Why do you insist that we first “wait” on you in prayer?
It’s important to God that we ask him for things he knows we need.
From a human perspective, it might seem quicker and far more efficient if God were simply to bypass prayer and get on with the giving! But that is not his way. He finds particular honor and glory in being the One to whom we must humbly come to receive that which we need.
But this doesn’t mean that we repeat our requests mindlessly before God. Just before Jesus gave us what has come to be known as the Lord’s Prayer, he said this to his disciples:
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (Matthew 6:7–8)
Here we are told that we should not babble on with meaningless and repetitious phrases, as if God were impressed by mindless verbosity. Never fall into the trap of thinking that God is impressed by the same things that impress us. You and I may be overwhelmed and duped by loquacious people whose verbal skills far exceed our own. But God isn’t.
The reason we should be succinct in prayer is that God knows what we need before we ask him. But if God knows all our problems and needs before we ask, why ask at all? We must remember that, generally speaking, God has determined not to fulfill our needs unless we ask him to. Our petitions are the means by which God has purposed to give us what he already knows we need.
In addition, the doctrine of divine omniscience compels us to be totally honest with God in prayer. When dealing with someone whose knowledge of you is limited, you can pretend, manipulate, deceive, and even lie to them. But omniscience demands honesty. You cannot pretend or playact with someone who can read your heart and mind, who knows your motivation. I believe it was Augustine who once said, “God does not ask us to tell him our needs that he may learn about them, but in order that we may be capable of receiving what he is preparing to give.”
Of course on occasion, God does bestow great and glorious gifts even in the absence of our asking for them. But it is sinfully presumptuous and downright disobedient on our part to assume that he will bestow those gifts and then neglect or refuse to pray based on that assumption. Again, we must never assume that God will give us apart from prayer what he has promised in Scripture to give us only in response to prayer. The reason God instituted prayer is so we have a predictable channel of communication with him through which we can express our desire. Just having the desire for something doesn’t mean you’ve asked God for it. God has given us prayer as a means through which we can earnestly seek him and his gifts.
Prayer is a skill that takes time and training to learn. Just like getting to know a person through communication, getting to know God through prayer takes time and learning. Jesus says, “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me” (John 6:45). The Spirit is a solid teacher, not just a spontaneous voice in the wind. I say “training” because the time you spend in prayer is not simply casual (although there’s a spirit of freedom in it). Prayer is hard work, like it is building any other relationship through consistent and healthy communication. Therefore the best way to think of growing in the power of the Spirit through prayer is training. Whether you start your training privately or you are ready to train your church as a whole, I offer a model that our church has used. We offer this content at our church no fewer than four times a year. If you are a leader or teacher thinking of teaching on prayer, I recommend making it your goal through the teaching to increase the level of expectancy in the hearts of your people when they pray for themselves or for others. That word—expectancy—is rather explosive.
Many in the church today will say they believe that God still heals, but rarely if ever do they actually lay hands on the sick and pray with any degree of expectancy that he will. One reason is that they often confuse praying expectantly with praying presumptuously. Prayer is presumptuous when the person claims healing without revelatory warrant or on the unbiblical assumption that God always wills to heal then and there. They then feel required to account for the absence of healing by appealing either to moral failure or deficiency of faith (usually in the one for whom prayer is offered). Sometimes they shift the blame for the lack of healing to a demon. But I digress.
I want nothing to do with the name-it-and-claim-it approach, which insists that you must believe in advance that what you ask will always be yours. Having said that, there is a place for believing that God will move powerfully and having hope that what we are asking is according to his will and something he is pleased to perform. But that happens on rare occasions and is itself a manifestation of the spiritual gift of faith.
Instead, we should pray expectantly, offering a humble petition to our merciful God for something we don’t deserve but that he delights to give (Luke 11:9–13; cf. Matthew 9:27–31; 20:29–34; Luke 17:12–14). Expectant prayer flows from the recognition that Jesus healed people because he loved them and felt compassion for them (Matthew 14:13–14; 20:34; Mark 1:41–42; Luke 7:11–17), a disposition in the heart of God that nothing in Scripture indicates has changed.
In our teaching, we need to try to demystify healing prayer. People often elevate prayer ministry to a level beyond what is accessible to the average believer. They mistakenly think that only ordained clergy can pray with power or that one must speak a certain spiritual lingo to sway God’s heart to say yes to our requests. Prayer, so they think, is for supersaints, not average lay folk. My goal in the teaching we do is to help them embrace their responsibility as believers to incorporate healing prayer as a regular, normal, aspect of what it is to be a Christian.
Finally, this teaching seeks to provide people with biblical principles to guide their thinking as they pray for the sick and wounded, as well as practical guidelines on how to actually pray for people in a way that honors God and blesses them. There are also two extremes that we must avoid here. One is a functional deism. Deists are those who believe in a Creator God but put little to no confidence in the possibility that he will intervene and act supernaturally in response to our prayers for him to do so. God is there, and he is good, but he prefers to let the world operate under those natural laws that he instituted when he first called the material creation into existence out of nothing. Many evangelicals act as if they believe this, living as if God won’t intervene in response to our prayers.
The other extreme I encounter is an odd combination of magic and manipulation. In this understanding of healing prayer, people believe that we can somehow coerce God to respond if we just speak the right words in just the right tone of voice. In this view, God is reduced to a genie in a bottle that pops out to perform magical tricks so long as we utter the right words at the right time.
Instead of being functional deists or magicians, we should strive to hold two biblical truths about God in tension: God’s goodness and his sovereignty. God is good and loves to give gifts to his children when they ask (Luke 11:11–13). But he is also sovereign and cannot be bullied to act in a way that is inconsistent with his eternal purposes (James 5:13–18). We must allow room in our theological framework for a redemptive purpose in suffering as well. Though some of the more extreme representatives of the charismatic world deny this, the truth is that God can and often does use our physical maladies to achieve our spiritual and moral refinement. My goal here is not to defend a theology of healing and suffering, so I won’t take time to unpack that truth. If you want to learn more about this, you can start by reading the chapter on healing in my book The Beginner’s Guide to Spiritual Gifts.1
Another persistent obstacle in motivating people to pray is the misconceptions people have about the role of faith and how it relates to prayer. Some believe that if they don’t pray with absolute and unyielding confidence that God will respond right then and there, they might as well not pray at all. They want to avoid the feelings of guilt and inadequacy they experience when they attempt to pray and discover that nothing happens. I’ve addressed the nature of faith in healing prayer elsewhere, so let me simply summarize the primary concepts here as they apply broadly to prayer for God’s miraculous works of mercy.2
When we talk about the sort of “faith” that God honors with healing or miracles, we do not mean the faith you exercised when you first trusted Christ for salvation, what might be called converting faith. This is the faith present in every born-again heart. Neither do I have in mind the faith that you are exercising right now as you read this book. This is a continuing faith, a daily confidence that God is present with us and will never leave us or forsake us, faith in his goodness and the surety of his promises that sustains us moment by moment through the difficulties and challenges of life.
There is also what we might call charismatic faith, which I believe is what Paul had in mind when he spoke of the spiritual gift of faith in 1 Corinthians 12:9. How is it different? While all faith is an expression of trust and humble dependence upon a person or promise, this is the experience of faith that arises somewhat spontaneously and unexpectedly in our hearts. It is that sudden, supernatural surge of confident assurance that God is going to do something right now, right here. Look closely at Mark 11:22–24 (cf. Matthew 17:20–21; 21:21–22); 1 Corinthians 13:2; and James 5:15 for some biblical examples of this. This expression of faith is a unique gift that is not universal for all believers, but given sovereignly by the Lord to specific individuals on particular occasions. Of course, any believer is a candidate for this experience, and on two or three occasions God has been pleased to bless me with this remarkable ability to believe what on any other occasion I likely would not be able to believe.
To summarize, I can believe God at any and all times that nothing will ever separate me from the love of God in Christ. I can believe God at any and all times that he is able to work all things, even painful and tragic things, for my good and his glory. But I cannot believe at will, that is to say, at my will, that God is going to heal someone for whom I pray or perform a miracle on the spot. This confident prayer is a prayer that I can only pray when God wills it and enables me to overcome all hesitation and doubt to believe it.
At this point people often bring up the words of Jesus in Mark 11:22–24. In response to a question Jesus asked his disciples about the withering of the fig tree (vv. 20–21), he answered the question for them with these words:
“Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:22–24)
The first thing I look for to understand a statement like this is some cultural background to help me understand the context. In the time of Jesus, phrases like “moving” or “casting” a mountain into the sea were proverbial references to the miraculous. Why would anyone want to literally make a mountain fall into the sea? The point of these expressions is to highlight the fact that otherwise humanly impossible feats, events that require supernatural and miraculous power, can occur when prayer is filled with faith.
The instantaneous and miraculous destruction of the fig tree (see Mark 11:12–14) served as an object lesson to the disciples of what can be achieved by faith in God’s power. It is as if Jesus was saying to Peter: “Pete, your comment tells me that you are amazed by the sudden and supernatural withering of the fig tree. But if you have faith in God, all things are possible through prayer.” So we must recognize that the belief or faith here is not a case of a Christian forcing himself to believe what he does not really believe. It is not a wrenching of one’s brain, a coercing of one’s will, a contorting of one’s expectations to embrace as real and true something that one’s heartfelt conviction says otherwise. Jesus is not telling us that when doubts start to creep in you should put your hands over your ears, close your eyes, and say to those doubts, over and over again: “Lalalalala, I can’t hear you. Lalalalala I can’t hear you!” That’s not faith. That’s make-believe. That’s spiritual pretending.
On the other hand, we are responsible to take steps that will facilitate the deepening of faith in our hearts. We can do things by God’s grace which will expand our confidence in God’s goodness and his greatness and help diminish, if not drive out, our doubts. As I read and study and meditate on the character of God, my confidence in what he can do increases. As I reflect and ponder the grace and kindness of God, my confidence in his goodness grows and intensifies.
Clearly there are other factors that have to be taken into consideration when we ask God for things in prayer. Faith is not the sole condition for answered prayer. We have to ask him with the right motives (James 4:1–3). I say to the men reading this book, we have to be treating our wives with gentleness and kindness and understanding (1 Peter 3:7). We have to clean the slate, so to speak, in our relationships with others. This is why Jesus continued in his explanation of faith and prayer, “And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses” (Mark 11:25).
His point is that if you harbor unforgiveness in your heart toward others, it isn’t likely that God will answer your prayer, no matter how much alleged faith you think you have (see Matthew 6:14–15).
And we have to ask in accordance with God’s will. It doesn’t matter if I am somehow able to banish all doubt from my mind and convince myself that I’ve already received what I asked for. If what I’m asking isn’t consistent with the will and character of God, the answer will be no.
No amount of faith will force God’s hand to do something that is contrary to our welfare. It doesn’t matter how persuaded you are or how much faith you have, you simply don’t want God to answer every prayer you pray! Look with the benefit of hindsight on some of the things you once believed you needed and were convinced that God would give you. Yikes! “Thank you, Lord, for saying no to many of these prayers. It would have been devastating had you said yes.” Sometimes God says no to prayers that are offered up in faith because he has something even better in store for us, something he plans on giving to us at a more appropriate time.
So it is irresponsible and insensitive to suggest on the basis of Mark 11 that if someone doesn’t receive from God what they asked for it is because they are at fault in failing to have enough faith. The absence of faith may be a factor, but it is not the only factor. There are other things that can also account for unanswered prayer.
The only way anyone can fulfill the condition set forth by Jesus is if God himself chooses to impart to us the faith he requires. Faith, ultimately, is a gift from God. When God wants to bless us with a miraculous answer to our prayer, he will take the initiative to cultivate and build into our hearts the fulfillment of the condition he requires. Therefore, each time as we pray, each time as we seek God for what only God can do, let us begin by asking God for an extraordinary, powerful faith. Let us ask God that he work in us to produce and sustain the confidence that he is pleased to bless.
1 The Beginner’s Guide to Spiritual Gifts, 55–79.
2 Ibid., 59–68.