God answers prayer. That excites me. It always will. But the best thing about prayer is that it brings us close to God. He always listens. He always loves. He always does what is good. He's always there.
Prayer is one of the most important activities of the believer. It is central to all that we are, and all that we are called to do.
Prayer is very simple. Yes, prayer has many facets. Yes, it always deals with things beyond our sight, and many times, things beyond our understanding. However, even with all this apparent mystery, prayer is still fundamentally very simple. For prayer has but one ingredient – Faith.
Without faith it's impossible to please God.
Hebrews 11:6 reads: And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Our relationship with the Lord is dependent on faith. Faith is what brings the things God has provided for us from the spiritual realm into the physical realm.
Hebrews 11:1 reads: Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Everything the Lord does for us is accessed through faith.
One of the areas about faith that used to give me the most trouble was the concept that I needed to acquire more faith and that some people have much faith, while others have virtually none. I spent a lot of effort, like a dog chasing its tail, trying to get something I already had. Every born-again Christian already has the same quality and quantity of faith that Jesus has. That's awesome!
In Ephesians 2:8, Paul says, "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:" It's God's grace that saves us, but not His grace alone. We have to put faith in God's grace, but the faith that we use isn't our own human faith. This verse says that faith is the gift of God.
Human faith can only believe what it can see, taste, hear, smell, or feel; it's limited to the five senses. Using natural human faith, we can sit in a chair we've never sat in and believe it will hold us up. We fly in airplanes when we don't fully understand how they work, and we don't know the pilot, but we trust that everything will be okay. That takes human faith, which God gave to every person.
Yet when it comes to God, we have to believe things that we cannot see. You haven't seen God or the devil. You haven't seen heaven or hell. You haven't seen sin; therefore, you wouldn't know what you would look like if your sins were taken away. However, you have to believe in all these things to be born again. How can you believe in things you can't see? The answer is that you can't believe in invisible things with human faith. You need God's supernatural faith.
Romans 4:17 says, "God ... calleth those things which be not as though they were." God's faith goes beyond sight. God's faith operates supernaturally, beyond the limitations of our natural faith.
Romans 10:17 says, "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." We access God's faith through His Word.
When we hear God's Word, the Holy Spirit empowers it, and if we receive the truth, God's supernatural faith enters us. We were so destitute that we couldn't even believe the good news on our own. God had to make His kind of faith available to us so that we could believe in Him and receive His salvation. We were saved by using God's supernatural faith to receive His grace. I know...it sounds like I am talking superhero as if Jesus wears a Superman costume. You probably have an image similar to this in your head right now:
But it is supernatural in a way. GOD is more powerful than we are. He is the ALPHA and the OMEGA...the beginning and the end. Our GOD is an amazing GOD!!!!
Once we receive God's supernatural faith at salvation, it doesn't leave us. Galatians 5:22-23 says, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, FAITH, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law" (emphasis mine). Faith becomes a permanent part of our born-again spirits. We sometimes use the God kind of faith that's present in our spirits and other times we don't.The truth is, it is always present. There is no lack of faith within any true Christian. There is just a lack of knowing and using what God has already given us.
The more you know about faith and how it works, the better it will work for you. If all you knew was that you have the same faith Jesus has, then that would remove hopelessness and motivate you. People would eventually see results if they just kept trying, but they give up easily because they believe they don't have what it takes. That is not true. The Lord has given us everything we need, including all the faith we need. We just need to acknowledge what we have and begin to learn the operation of God's faith. We just need to learn to TRUST Him and to BELIEVE in Him and to speak to Him in Prayer and to PRAISE him no matter what we are facing in our lives.
FAITH HOPE LOVE PRAYER AND YES MAYBE EVEN A SUPERHERO JESUS...AFTERALL HE SAVED ME!
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