A Fresh Vision for Prayer
By DANA COLEMAN
Imagine for a moment that you’re in a workout class.
You probably know the feeling — a hot room, a big whiteboard listing every brutal exercise you’re about to endure, and maybe a group of people beside you, sweating it out on the same journey. The intensity is high. Your strength is fading with each passing rep. You feel like you’ve given it all you’ve got, and you’re ready to call it quits and head home for the day.
Right in that moment, your coach leans in and says, “You’ve got more in you. Don’t stop now. There’s more to gain from this, but you have to keep going!”
I’m sure some of you have been there. As someone who has both participated in and taught classes like this, I know this moment well!
A scenario like this is quite common in the fitness realm, but have you ever experienced this in the arena of prayer, too? I know I have.
So many times throughout my life, I have undermined the power of prayer and treated it as just a habit of the Christian life — an exercise that we “do” because Scripture tells us to. While it’s true that prayer is to be a part of our everyday life, I believe there is so much more that the Lord has in store for us in this realm. But far too often, we settle for a ten-minute lifeless routine and miss out on the greater work God is wanting to accomplish through our prayers.
The Schoolhouse of Prayer
I love going on prayer walks. I focus best when I’m outside pacing back and forth and processing life out loud with the Lord. (I’ve always wondered what kinds of “out-loud, processing-through-life” prayers my neighbors have heard, haha!) There are specific spots all around my house that have carried my endless footprints as I’ve walked in circles and circles, and there are paved parts of our driveway that have caught many tears as I’ve cried out to the Lord.
Those sacred prayer spots have held so many lessons for me. They have been my “schoolhouse of prayer.” As I have paced those familiar areas over and over and prayed for countless things, the Lord has been that heavenly coach who has continuously called me higher and asked me to press into deeper levels of prayer and intercession than I had previously known. He has reminded me time and again that He is Lord over the impossible and that, as His daughter, He desires for me to pray in a way that corresponds to His power.
So instead of praying for things that seemed within reach, that I could measure with my physical eyes, and that I could believe for because I had seen them happen in the natural realm, the Lord began to burden my heart to pray for the things that were larger than life, too difficult to be accomplished, or that I had never seen take place before. He challenged me to pray “impossible” prayers.
The Cry of Faith
To pray in that space requires a whole new level of strength and endurance that only the Lord can give us. It requires deep faith and a heart that believes that God can do what seems absolutely impossible in the physical realm. And those are exactly the types of prayers that honor Him. He hears and answers the cry of faith.
Our cry of faith gets louder as we grow in our understanding of His character and nature. Through my many mountains and valleys of prayer and intercession, I have learned that when we as God’s people have a correct view of His power, our prayers will radically change. And along this journey, I have discovered that our prayer lives tend to show us what we really believe about the Lord. If we see Him as a small God, we will pray small prayers. If we believe that He is God over what seems impossible, then we will pray impossible prayers. It’s as simple as that.
God does not need us. He is all powerful and completely self-sufficient. Yet He chooses to work through the prayers of His people. That has been His pattern all throughout His Word. He doesn’t just begrudgingly listen to our prayers — He actually tells us to present our requests before Him, to ask Him for things that we know are in accordance with His will, and to place our faith in His wonder-working ability before we’ve seen the breakthrough with our eyes yet.
The Power of Prayer
We have real power in the spiritual realm as His children. We’ve been given real spiritual authority through the Holy Spirit. And when God’s people pray, things shift.
For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 2 Corinthians 10:3–5
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12
Envision having access to an entire armory full of every defense and weapon imaginable and being thrown into battle, only to stand there watching passively. Then, as the intensity grows, instead of grasping the weapons available, you complain about the rage of the battle and start to cave into hopelessness, deep discouragement, and paralyzing fear.
We have literally been given weapons of warfare to operate in the spiritual realm, and, if we are filled with the Holy Spirit, then we carry the authority of Jesus to stand against powers of darkness and see radical change in the earthly realm. Yet we tend to just stand around and watch. We look at the situations in our lives and think that there’s no hope for change. We look at broken marriages and relationships, cycles of addiction, and the damaging effects of deception, and we think that those stories (or our own) are too far gone for breakthrough.
Have we forgotten Who it is that we are praying to?
“Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for Me?” Jeremiah 32:27
It is high time that we stop looking at the magnitude of the mountain in front of us and instead start looking at the astronomical power of our God who quite literally holds the entire universe in His very hands! He is more than capable of turning someone’s story completely around and bringing beauty where there was once nothing but ash.
“If My people who are called by My name humble themselves, and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14
The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. James 5:16
There is something so mighty that happens when we humble ourselves before the Lord, confess our sin, fix our eyes on Him, and believe that He is exactly who He says He is. Dressed in His righteousness and not our own, when we pray with a correct view of the Lord — remembering how mighty and all-powerful He truly is and that nothing is impossible for Him — something will begin to shift and change in our prayer life. Our prayers will have new life and fresh power because we are no longer praying from a place of fear and doubt, but from a place of faith.
Faith that stares straight at a mountain knowing that it is immovable in our strength, but that we are praying to the God who can overturn it by a word.
Faith that sings for joy before the breakthrough comes because no matter what outcome the Lord chooses, He will turn it for good in ways that we can’t even imagine.
Faith that doesn’t become discouraged when trials come, but knows that they have the ability to strengthen our lives more than anything else.
Faith that stares at death and believes for new life.
“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Isaiah 43:18–19
The Lord desires to do new things in this earth — more than we can even think or imagine. He longs to work through the prayers of His people, but so often we pray in miniature when the Lord is wanting to move mightily.
There is much, much more that He has in store! May we be people who are not discouraged by what we see with our eyes, but pray by faith for that which we haven’t seen yet. May we be people who pray for what seems impossible and take God at His Word. When He looks on the earth for someone to carry His burdens and pray forth His will and believe Him for great and mighty things, may we be those whom He finds available.
What a mighty God we serve! And what an astounding privilege we, as His children, have to enter the throne room and pray forth His heart in the earth.
This article was originally published in Issue 49.
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