By Nathaniel Burson
Tags: faith, kingdom of God, prayer
Prayer – the only verbal contact you have with God. And yet, most people totally destroy their prayers! They rob their prayers of the POWER they should have by ignoring the GRAVITY of the enormous responsibility they bear when praying! Prayer should MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. It should GET THINGS DONE. Sadly most prayers are more for show, and habit, or out of fear God will be mad, or most commonly, to be seen by other people as “Godly”. This is WRONG! ALL OF IT! Prayer is for a DEFINITE, CLEAR purpose – and it is NOT any of the reasons you’ve heard!
WHY PRAY
Did you ever ask this question? Did you ever wonder WHY prayer is in the Bible – and more importantly, why YOU should use it?
I’ve heard often, and I’ve said myself “Why should God listen to me? What do I know? What good is MY advice, my request to Him? Isn’t He in charge of the universe – doesn’t He know what is best to do?”
This is a good question! Typically, you hear answers like “Praying is to GET TO KNOW God”, or “Prayer is to get your mind off of yourself”, or other equally unsatisfactory, “CHURCH-SPEAK” answers. But that is NOT the purpose of prayer at all! Prayer is your chance to USE the very POWER and AUTHORITY of God Himself!
The reason you’re here – God’s very PURPOSE in creating YOU – Yes, YOU – is to groom you to RULE HIS UNIVERSE! This unimaginable calling is offered to YOU! But with great power will come GREAT responsibility. You will be a KING and a PRIEST in the world tomorrow. You will be making life-and-death judgments that affect the lives of thousands of people every single day. Do you feel qualified to do that right now, if God was to put you in that position? No?
WHEN are you planning to learn how to do this?
Imagine the mayhem of ten-thousands of people resurrected to be leaders in the kingdom – none of whom trust their own judgment, none of whom have ever made judgments that affect the lives of other people – resurrected, POOF, and given ALL POWER IN THE UNIVERSE. It simply can’t be done! Total chaos would take over immediately – and we know God doesn’t create chaos.
Think about it; in the kingdom, you’ll BE GOD. You’ll have the power to create and to destroy. How to properly use this power will take practice – as all things do. WHEN will you get this practice? The answer is NOW – every time you pray!
After the resurrection, The rulers of the millennium will be the “spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). Notice He makes the spirit of JUST men perfect. Not the spirit of Charles Manson “made perfect”.
Your spirit – YOU – must LEARN how to be JUST and use the power of God PROPERLY in THIS life, learn how to make good judgments NOW, while you’re here on earth, BEFORE God can make you into a King or a Priest in the next!
2 Samuel 23:3 The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.
Being “just” in your own life means you have learned what is good, and what is evil, and learned to choose the right course. You learned this a step at a time – by making dumb decisions, watching the fruits (Matthew 7:20), and then NOT DOING it again!
This is how you learn how to do EVERYTHING from walking, to reading, to driving, TO RULING THE UNIVERSE!
Isaiah 28:9-10 Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts. For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little:
You learn how to do things a step at a time. First you learn to crawl, then to walk. At first you make mistakes and fall down a lot. Eventually, through practice, you use the knowledge gained from these mistakes to learn to walk.
Learning to be like God is no different. First, you learn that you shouldn’t steal. Then you stop doing it. Then you learn something else. And each new concept you learn is a foundation for a future concept. And so after a little practice, you become “Just”.
Hebrews 5:14 But strong meat [the hard stuff!] belongeth to them that are of full age, even those WHO BY REASON OF USE have their senses exercised to DISCERN both good and evil.
When you make a judgment, you will watch how your decision worked out – and next time you have a similar case, you’ll remember how your last decision turned out. You’ll learn what was a good judgment or a bad one, by its FRUITS. By USE, by PRACTICE, by watching and remembering, you’ll learn to make good decisions and be USEFUL to God – both now, and in the kingdom.
1 Corinthians 6:1-3 Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters? Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?
You must PRACTICE these things NOW, to be good at them then! Learning how to make judgments – ANY judgments – takes practice!
Quite some time ago, I needed to teach my 7-year-old nephew to drive our farm tractor. We started by having him sit in my lap while I held the wheel tightly – to make sure we didn’t crash! After a little while, I would take my hands off the wheel for a few seconds. Naturally, as soon as I let go, the tractor would start to zig-zag wildly across the road – until soon I’d have to grab the wheel and get us back on the road again.
But as we did this over a period of a few months, he gradually began to stay more or less on the road – I still kept my hands close to the wheel, to make sure that if he DID steer towards a tree, I could get us back on the road before any real damage was done – but soon, even that was unnecessary. After a year or two, he was able to drive without my help – he made some mistakes, but nothing I couldn’t fix – just a few bent gates and broken fences.
The PURPOSE of this process is to ultimately teach him to drive as well as I can – if not better. He learns to do this by making CHOICES on his own – At first, mostly bad choices – but in time, better and better ones. Most importantly, he LEARNS which of those choices were wrong, and WHY, in a way that no one can just tell him! You can’t tell someone how to drive, they just have to do it! The more mistakes he makes (and learns to avoid!), the less he’ll need my watchful eye. Ultimately, I will be able to trust him to make decisions as good as I could.
THIS IS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE! THIS IS WHY YOU WERE BORN!!
God has given you ENORMOUS power HERE, and NOW!
Matthew 18:18-19 Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching ANY THING that they shall ask, IT SHALL BE DONE FOR THEM of my Father which is in heaven.
These scriptures have been badly abused in the church – beginning with Catholicism – but they apply to YOU! YOU have this power – if you’re righteous! God gave you this power so that you can LEARN to make judgments about other people! This is the TRUE PURPOSE of prayer!
Let me use an example of making a judgment about someone else. I think we’ve all talked to people whose minds were closed. They simply didn’t understand what we were saying, it was just nonsense to them.
1 Corinthians 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
I’m sure you can remember this happening. But God gave you power to open their mind! YES! This is the shocking truth, YOU have every bit of power that God has – because He gave it to you!
John 20:23 Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.
God gave you power to forgive sins – if you do it right! By this I mean, if you’ll only forgive sin that SHOULD be forgiven, and not forgive sin that SHOULDN’T be forgiven!
1 John 5:16 If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it.
God expects you to be able to know what a “sin unto death is” – and he expects you not to pray for it. He expects you to know when a sin should be forgiven – and when it shouldn’t be! And you’re going to learn how to do this through PRACTICE, a little at a time, by EXERCISING THE POWER OF GOD!
Among other things, God gave you the power to open someone’s mind! And so I asked him one day to open a certain person’s mind – to let them hear what I was saying. And I talked to them the next day and it made sense to them! This person was able to hear me with a clear, opened mind – they saw the truth!
I went back and talked to them the day after – but the mind was closed again – just like at the first. The things that had been said the night before were gone – they’d lost what they’d had only yesterday.
This is because God won’t “possess” you! He won’t force himself upon you! I had asked that God open this person’s mind, and He did – but that person didn’t want it! They rejected the knowledge, and if you reject knowledge, God rejects you! (Hosea 4:6)
Matthew 13:19 When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the way side. (See also Luke 8:12, Mark 4:15)
This person had a call – an opportunity to understand. They didn’t want it. Next time I’m in a similar situation, I’ll know what happened this time – and my judgment will be better, wiser, based on this experience.
YOU CAN DO THIS – God will let you take the steering wheel, and let you open a person’s mind, and see what happens. He won’t let you run into a tree and hurt this person forever – if it comes to that He’ll simply ignore you – but He WILL let you learn to make righteous judgments that affect the lives of others! And in time, you’ll make better and better ones – you’ll learn from your mistakes, and make less and less of them! In time, you can be trusted to rule a city – or a planet – or the universe – and do it right!
This is what God wants to Create in you! He wants a universe FILLED with beings who will make the SAME RIGHTEOUS JUDGMENTS HE DOES – and PRAYER is how you LEARN to do that.