Over this past year God has been speaking to me a lot about prayer and just how important it is. Even at the start of the year, the words ‘prayer warrior’ and ‘intercessor’ always invoked for me the image of a group of elderly women gathered together in a room once a week or so and praying because that’s literally all they can offer God’s kingdom. So when God began to speak to me about wanting to grow me in the areas of prayer and intercession, I got really offended. I’m twenty seven years old, not eighty seven and I wanted God to use me in an area that would actually help the great commission.
If people ever commented that I seemed to have a strong prayer life and that I had a gift in that area, I honestly took it as an insult. I wanted a cooler gift like being able to lead a room in worship or give out amazing words of knowledge to others. Gifts that in my mind, actually helped bring people closer to God. There have been countless times when I have acknowledged the power of prayer, yet deep down in my heart I didn’t really think it could make much of a difference, particularly coming from someone who is soft spoken and more often than not, lacking in eloquence.
As many people have experienced, the year 2020 has been far from normal and I found myself with not only more time to spend in prayer, but a greater desire to do so. Then in September, an opportunity came up for me to do a one month course on prayer and intimacy with God and although I didn’t really know why, I felt so strongly that I needed to do it. Over that short month, I began to actually understand the importance of prayer in a way that I honestly believe impacted my life permanently. My view of prayer was limited and I think that we are always growing, but what I learned this year is that everything about my faith, my ministry, my ability to hear God, my ability to display the fruits of the Spirit, it all starts with intimacy with Jesus.
I had many revelatory moments over the course, but perhaps the biggest one was a picture that God gave me of what my prayer life looked like. It was a picture of me looking into His eyes but I was doing so in the reflection of a mirror. He was standing behind me which automatically put myself into the forefront of my own vision, causing my gaze to return frequently to myself. I realised that while I am really good at taking time with God each day, I was focusing more on myself in that context of prayer and not as much on what is on His heart.
Prayer is so much more than just sharing with God what is going on for you and seeking His guidance for your situations, although He does love that as well. But prayer is also about worshipping God for who He is and building a relationship with Him. It’s for listening to what He might want to say to those around you and interceding on behalf of those who can’t and partnering with the prayers of others. Our prayers have real power to change things as we come alongside Him. Those elderly women change atmospheres and bring the kingdom to earth as they pray, and we are all called to seek Him in prayer.
This year I learned that prayer is the doorway to cultivating intimacy with Jesus. Without that intimacy, everything else in my life will suffer. Sometimes sitting for hours on end in God’s presence might not feel productive to me, especially in a world that glorifies results and being busy. However, if I want my ministry life and the way I relate to others to reflect God, that can’t happen without spending time with Him. I once heard a sermon where one sentence that the pastor said has stayed in my mind for years and it was; “Are you the type of Christian that makes the enemy quake with fear when you get up in the morning because he knows that your prayers will actually change things?” That is how I hope each of us would approach our prayer lives. Not with the mindset of obligation, but with the excitement that no prayer is too big and that we can actually make a difference with the way that we pray.
I have been encouraged to pray for bigger things and turn away from that mirror that I was looking at God through in order to try to focus on myself less. I’ll end with a quote that really challenged me when I heard it - “If all of your prayers were answered today, would it change the world or would it just change your own life?”