The importance of listening

Someone I know told me that listening is one of the most important skills in prayer.

In fact, she took a course in how to listen well to the people she was praying for.

I have never taken a listening course, but I probably should.  As my wife can attest, much of what I hear flies through my mind without landing.

It's easy to make assumptions about people.  Perhaps you have known the person for years and you make a quick diagnosis of his or her need.  But, embarrassingly, you discover that's not what is on the person's heart.

Jesus did not make those assumptions.  When people came to him, he asked them what they wanted him to pray about, even when the illness was obvious.  He was seeking their commitment to seeking healing.

On the surface, that's what I do when I pray for people who come to me with problems.  But often I don't take the time to probe a little more deeply.

I am learning that listening well involves observing as well as hearing.  Is the individual evasive or direct?  Does it appear that the person is telling the whole story or holding something back?  Could that be important?

Of course, people involved in praying for others should be loving and understanding and never intrusive.  But a sensitive question can reveal more than the surface comment.

Jesus also listened with spiritual ears.  He was filled with the Holy Spirit from the moment he was baptized by John the Baptist and that gave him unusual knowledge about others.

For example, his conversation with a Samaritan woman at a well in John 4 led to an amazing discussion about himself as Messiah as a result of his insight into her past.  She came to the well a woman far from God and she left filled with excitement, convinced she had met the Messiah.

This kind of knowledge is often given today in pictures or thoughts to people praying for others, although I cannot claim that myself.  But I know of people who have had that experience.

In one case, a man I know had a picture of ice skates pop into his mind as he was praying for a woman.  He asked her whether the picture had any meaning to her and she reacted by bursting into tears as it brought back a painful childhood memory.  After prayer, she received emotional healing.

John Wimber, author of Power Healing, considered the interview of the person with the prayer need and the diagnosis of a prayer need to be keys to effective prayer.

I am learning that I can't be truly helpful in praying for others without listening actively.

The command of faith

God has given prayer warriors a great weapon - the command of faith.

But, like any weapon, we need to know when and how to use it.

Wesley Duewel gives us tips in his inspiring book Touch The World Through Prayer.

Duewel's book is all about praying powerfully for the broader world around us.  The command of faith is an important part of effective praying.

A former missionary to India and president of OMS International, Duewel had long experience in prayer and a heart for the billions of people in the world who do not know Jesus.  He died at 99 in March this year.

Duewel notes that Jesus said in Matthew 17:20: "I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain,  'Move from here to there' and it will move.  Nothing will be impossible for you."

Some mountains, writes Duewel, are put there by God to bless us in our growth as believers.  But others come from Satan in his attempts to put us down and prevent us from being effective followers of the Lord.

At some point, he says, we may need to stop praying about an issue and simply use the authority God has given us and tell the mountain to move.

Jesus and the apostles often used the command of faith in healing people and delivering them from demonic oppression.  So did Moses, obeying God's orders in commanding miracles by stretching out his staff.  Other prophets also used the authority gave them to command miracles.

But when is the right time to declare the command of faith?

Duewel says we should not use it just to make life easier for ourselves.  The command of faith is intended to give God glory.

"It is a very deliberate exercise of Christ's own authority and name in a situation where his glory is at stake, where his kingdom is being hindered, or where Christ calls you to demonstrate His power to prove He is the living God."

We don't have to be super-saints to use the command of faith.  But there are conditions:

• We must be children of God;
• There must be nothing in our lives that grieves the Holy Spirit; and
• The command must be in harmony with the will of God.

Once we know it is God's will, we should ask for the filling of the Spirit and remember that we are seated with Jesus in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 2:6), Duewel says.

"Don't look up at your mountain with fear.  Look down on it from your place beside Jesus!"

Then, we are to "go forward and speak boldly to the mountain; command Satan to take his forces and go".

Jesus has given us authority to do what he has called us to do.

It is up to us to act.

A gift to God

What gift can we give to God, the "giver of all good gifts"?

On the surface, it seems ridiculous that we could offer Almighty God anything worthwhile.  He is our creator and he sent his son Jesus to die for us - nothing we give could hope to match what he has already done for us.

Yet the writer of Hebrews suggests that praising God is a valuable gift we can give our Lord.  In Hebrews 13, he writes: "Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise - the fruit of lips that confess his name."

A sacrifice to God is a gift.  And praise is a sacrifice.  It is a sacrifice in the Old Testament sense of an offering to God; but, it is also a personal sacrifice in that it requires us to give something of ourselves.

It will cost us something if we do it with all our hearts "continually" as Hebrews says.

In her book Praise Works!, author Rali Macaulay writes: "Although praising God is very important, it is even more important to give him acceptable praise."

In other words, repeating words by rote is not a costly gift of praise.  It's giving something second-best.

Macaulay offers her own guidelines for "acceptable praise".  She calls on us to prepare for our time of praise by:

• Forgiving anyone who may have offended us (Mark 11:25);
• Asking God to fill us with his love for others (Luke 10:27);
• Coming before him with "sincerity of heart and reverence"; and
• Expecting him to receive our praise - not ignoring it, but responding to it.

We are to "worship him in spirit and in truth" (John 4:23-24).  In essence, that means we should mean what we say as we praise him.

Macaulay urges us to meditate on what the scriptures tell us about God.  As we learn more about him, we will know him better.  And gratefulness will flow out of us.

I have found that to be true in my own life as I have spent time in the Psalms reading the great descriptions of God - his qualities of awesome power and everlasting love.  I have found that meditating on passages in Psalms a great launching pad for praising the Lord.

Macaulay notes that praising God is not a one-way street.  As we give him a gift of praise, he gives back gifts of peace, joy, and hope.

God will never be out-given.

Waiting prayer

You can pray even when you're not praying.

Catherine Marshall calls this "waiting prayer".  What she means is that you can entrust something to God in faith and wait for him to answer - not losing heart or insisting on your way.

In her book Adventures in Prayer, Marshall talks about praying for a wife for her son Peter John when he was a child.

Prayerfully, she considered all the qualities - physical, mental, spiritual - she believed that a lifemate for her son should have.

She prayed about this and wrote these qualities down on pieces of paper, using them as bookmarks in her favourite Bible.  After doing this, she trusted God with finding the right woman for her son, even if he had to "correct any flaws in [the image she had] and bring it to fruition in Peter's life in His own time in His own way".

Over time, he did.  Marshall writes that she found it hard not to anxiously "dig up the seeds" she had planted and bombard God again and again.  But when Peter John finally proposed to the woman who would become his wife, she looked back at her pieces of paper and found that she fit exactly the image she had imagined.

On another occasion, a friend whose marriage was falling apart came to her for counsel.  Marshall saw the problem immediately but felt God tell her not to point it out to her friend.  Over a period of several hours talking and praying, her friend gradually realized what the issue was.

Her friend returned home, took charge of her life, changed her attitude and the marriage was restored.

Marshall notes that waiting on God is a frequent theme in the Bible.

Many outstanding Christians over the centuries have found the truth of Isaiah's famous words in Isaiah 40:31: "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint."

They have learned, as Jesus teaches in John 15, to "abide in the vine" - depend on entirely on God in faith.  As they abide, they are changed - they grow.

Believers who have waited on God through dark times often emerge with "qualities like more patience, more love for the Lord and those around us, more ability to hear his voice, greater willingness to obey," says Marshall.

I think of Joseph in the Old Testament, a dreamer who had a vision of his brothers all bowing down to him.  He was sold into slavery in Egypt, cast into prison by a vengeful woman, and sat there for years without outward hope.  But he clung to God throughout and, in God's timing, he emerged as the second most powerful man in Egypt.

When his astonished brothers came to this powerful man, begging for food in a famine, he revealed himself and told them that they intended evil against him, but God used it for good.

That can be true of us, too, as we wait upon God.

Spirit-led prayer

A vision of a vine with dry roots and withered branches radically changed the way the people at Kensington Temple prayed.

In his book Prayer Explosion, Colin Dye says he heard of the vision by a woman in his congregation at a time when the church "had begun to backtrack from our early prayer emphasis".

The church in London, England was growing rapidly but busyness was beginning to replace prayer.

Pastors were skipping the Wednesday prayer gathering to counsel people.  The Bible study which followed the prayer meeting was the main emphasis, so people arrived just before the study.

"The interruptions were just a symptom of how much our prayer life was sliding away; we were losing focus, direction, fervency and power."

Leadership of the prayer meeting was delegated to an elder and pastors focused on other important things.  The prayer gathering dwindled.

Then, Colin Dye heard about the woman's vision and it struck him to the heart.

"It is sometimes easy to disregard the word of God because of the abundance of it," Dye writes.  "But this is dangerous.  If God is speaking to us and we are living in him, the Spirit will witness his truth in our hearts."

The Holy Spirit spoke to Dye through the woman's vision and he knew it was a word intended for Kensington Temple.

"Our roots were dry and we were overextending beyond what we were able to sustain spiritually and organisationally as well.  We had to repent."

The senior leaders in the church responded by once again taking leadership of the prayer meeting.  But they went well beyond that, making prayer permeate everything the church did.

Here are some of their measures:

• The daily staff meetings began with prayer and Dye called on people to share what the church should pray about that day;
• He spent the entire afternoon coming before God in prayer over these items, sometimes calling staff members in to shed more light on what was going in their departments and the problems they faced; and
• The prayer meeting focus changed to "taking the city", inspired by the battle of Jericho in Joshua 6.  The idea was to pray about "the real issues God had given to us".

The prayer gathering was the "spearhead" for everything the church did.

"We felt engaged in a heavenly battle and had a real sense of moving forward in God's plans for us in the city," says Dye. "We allowed the Spirit to lead us in everything."

The prayer meeting no longer covered every aspect of church life.

"Instead, we used the meeting as a spearhead.  Just as soon as we began to break through in prayer, we would move on to the next topic," he says.  "We would push the prayer emphasis out into our smaller groups and our own devotional times."

People began coming to the prayer gathering to get the agenda for prayer to inspire them in their own prayer lives.

"Our prayers became specific, personal, powerful.  The numbers doubled and doubled and doubled again until the spearhead became the most dynamic meeting of the week."

As Dye says, "prayer is relationship and communication is as vital in our relationship with God as it is in any other relationship we may have".

And, without a close relationship with the Lord, we will not see fruit as Jesus tells us in John 15.

Dye's church has had a big impact on the community around it.

That can happen everywhere people are led by the Spirit in prayer and action.