Applying Faith In Your Prayers
From our last discussions, we learned four key steps required to effectively apply our faith during prayers. These are:
1. We come to God in prayers believing that He is real and true, and the only All Mighty God, who unfailingly rewards anyone who diligently seek Him.
2. While in the prayer, we worship Him in the Holy Spirit, using a combination of word based praise, and thanksgiving , which should further boost our faith in Him.
3. We make our requests to Him faithfully, speaking our requests in such a way that our words reflect our full believe and full persuasion that He will answer us.
4. We become convinced that we are receiving what we requested.
Because God told us to believe that we are receiving what we asked for while still praying, then we have the assurance that He has already answered yes to our requests, and in due time, the answer will manifest to us.
What To Do After Prayers
In this issue, we consider what to do after the prayer: How to align our thinking, talking and actions to insure that His answers will manifest to us.
When God fulfills His answers to our prayers right away just like in the vast majority of the miracles that Jesus performed, then we don’t have to worry about what to do after the prayer: We simply receive the miracle with joy and thanksgiving. But when He does not do so, then there is a waiting period during which we must conduct ourselves in certain ways to ensure that God’s answers will manifest sooner rather than later. These ways of conduct are:
I. Remain Fully Persuaded That God Has Answered Our Prayers:
That is, we must not allow the great faith and the resulting persuasion that we reached in prayers to wane. Doing so invites premature disappointment leading to doubts and fear, which eventually kill our faith and thereby delay the fulfillment of God’s answers to our prayers. God will never withdraw His yes answer, but faithlessness on our part can delay the fulfillment of that answer.
2. Align Yourself With God:
That is, during the waiting period you must:
- Think like God
- Talk like God and
- Act like God.
Think, Talk And Act Like God:
Let me use the story of Abraham to help us grasp how God does His things. God called Abraham and promised that through a descendant of his, He will redeem all the nations of the world. For this reason, God one day said to Abraham: “I have made you a father of many nations.” (This being spoken) in the presence of Him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did (Rom. 4:17-24).
But Abraham and his wife (Sarah), being more than 75 and 65 years old, respectively, were advanced in age; way past child-bearing age. In human frame of thinking, how were they going to fulfill such a promise; being too old to start a lineage that would lead to a descendant who would fulfill God’s promise? But because God promised it, it had to be true, and they will surely have a child. But the child, Issac, did not come right away: it took 25 years; a very long time for a couple that was already too old to have a child naturally. So what was Abraham to do during these long years? He had to align Himself with the frame of God’s mind; thinking, talking and walking the way God does. In the Romans 4:17-24 scripture above, a universal statement about an attribute of God is made; God naturally “calls those things which do not exist as though they did.” In other words, God’s frame of mind is such that He calls things that do not exist in our world, as though they do. He said to Abraham “I have made you a father of many nations” even though it would take about 2000 years for the promise to be fulfilled.
In God’s world, Abraham was already a father of many nations in about 2000 BC, even though that did not start to happen in our world till about 33 AD. For when the scripture say; “…things that do not exist,” it means things that have not yet happened or manifested in our physical world. Nevertheless, these things exist in God’s world as soon as God speaks the answer to our prayers.
God is Spirit and lives in the realm of the Spirit. When He declares a thing or person to exist, that thing or person comes into being in His world; the Spirit realm. But in our physical world, the thing or person does not yet exist. Even so, we must by faith chose to disregard what our physical senses tell us; that it does not exist, and rather, believe and agree with God that it exists.
For we who are the new creation, redeemed and called children of God, and having the image and nature of God, have been endued with power to think, talk and act like God; thinking about, talking about and acting on those things that we pray for,
as though they exist. For by this, we speak in total agreement with God, who has the power to fulfill our request in the physical world.
When we agree with God, He applies His power to fulfill His answers to our prayers, but when we disagree with God through unbelief, fear and doubt, we delay God from doing fulfilling His answers to our prayers.
Abraham Thought, Talked And Acted Like God:
By stitching together excerpts from verses 18-21 of Romans 4, we can say the following about Abraham’s thinking, talking and actions: He, “Contrary to hope, in hope (he) believed … what was spoken …… With great faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead (at 100 years old), and the of Sarah’s died womb (at 90 years old). He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith” so that he became fully persuaded that what God had promised He was also
able to perform” (Rom. 4:18-24).
In other words, Abraham refused to believe the indication that he and Sarah were too old to have children for the upward fulfillment of God’s promise. Rather, he exercised great faith to believe God’s words; thinking, talking and acting like God until Sarah conceived and bore a son through whose descendant, Jesus Christ, that God later fulfilled his promise of making Abraham the Father of many nations. If we always emulate Abraham, none of our prayers will go unanswered.
3. Always Expect God’s Answer To Manifest:
The third way that we should conduct ourselves is that we always should be expecting God to manifest His answers to our prayers. The expectation is the outward expression of our faith that God will surely manifest what He promised. Psalm 5:3 declares: “My voice You shall hear in the morning, O Lord; In the morning I will direct it to You, And I will look up. Here the psalmist is saying to God that he will pray to Him every morning, and afterwards shall expect His answers.
Remain blessed!