Prayer As Declaration

One of the things that has been dancing around the edge of my mind for a while is the role that prayer plays in the advance of the kingdom of God. It seems to me that prayer is as important as preaching. Preaching declares the will of God to sinners and saints and breaks forth the will of God into the unbelieving world around us. But it seems that prayer is also a form of declaring the will of God, though we declare it to the invisible world of the heavenlies and directly to God Himself. And yet, I think prayer is more like preaching than we think. God declares His will through preaching. God uses preaching as the conduit to proclaim His purpose in the earth. It seems to me, then, that prayer is very similar. It seems that God has chosen to use human speech as the medium for His will to be "prayed "through" and "prayed "into" existence." In what way does prayer speak forth the will of God into the earth? I tend to think that God has chosen to use believers as incarnational vessels to pour His will into the world, as human conduits to stream heaven into earth. God has poured out His Spirit into the world via the indwelling Spirit of Christ that enters into the heart of believers when we receive the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is distributed into the earth through the church, through the individual members of the body of Christ that are joined together incarnationally into one ecclesial body by the perichoretic indwelling of God in Christ in the church in all creation (John 17). In other words, the Spirit of God is present to the world through the church, and when we pray, God prays His will into existence through us. This means that, just as preaching releases the will of God into the earth by declaration, so prayer releases the will of God into the earth by declaration. And further, just as the will of God "cannot" be done apart from preaching, the will of God "cannot "be done apart from prayer, and this is all by God's sovereign design. If we do not preach, then the truth is not proclaimed, and the victory will not come. This is true as well of prayer. If we do not pray, then the declaration of the will of God is silent in the earth, and this declaration is the only means by which the will of God can come to pass. God has designed it so. We must speak the Word of God through preaching and the will of God through prayer. If we do not pray, then the purpose of God is not expressed and poured into the earth. Often, our problem is that we do not see the immediate results of prayer, so we do not pray. This is also true with preaching: we expect visible, immediate results, and if we do not see this we believe that our preaching has failed. We have learned to judge the success of preaching (falsely) through audience response. The applause of the crowd and the tears shed at the altar often are how we judge the success of a message, when long experience should tell us that immediate response is often fleeting. We must judge preaching by the long term results that come through the Word of God. Prayer is the same. We must judge our prayers in terms of long term results, not by immediate answers. Do we believe in the power of preaching? We do. So then, we must believe in the power of prayer. We must believe that we are declaring the will of God whether or not we see immediate results. We must believe that something very real is happening when we pray. The purpose of God depends upon our prayers. We must pray the will of God into existence.

Origin: witchcraftforall.blogspot.com