Monthly Archives: November 2025

How God Uses Prayer

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To Show His Great Power

A survey of God’s Word reveals how God uses prayer in our lives in a number of ways. In this post, I want to ask you to consider how God will often answer your prayers with a display of power in order to strengthen your faith. In Acts chapter 12, we find the Apostle Peter imprisoned by King Herod. The text says that the church was earnestly praying for his release. With great power, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in the prison where Peter was being held and released him from his chains. The angel then escorted him out of the prison, safely passing two separate guard posts and out through an iron gate. From there, it says: “When he (Peter) realized this (that the angel had freed him), he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where many had assembled and were praying. He knocked at the door in the gateway, and a servant named Rhoda came to answer. She recognized Peter’s voice, and because of her joy, she did not open the gate but ran in and announced that Peter was standing at the gateway. ‘You’re crazy!’ they told her. But she kept insisting that it was true. Then they said, ‘It’s his angel!’ Peter, however, kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, they were astounded. Motioning to them with his hand to be silent, he explained to them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison.” (Acts 12:12–17)

To Astound You

They were astounded! I’ve often thought about Herod and his guards when reading this text. What a display of power was evidenced to release Peter from his chains and imprisonment! The same display of power God used to confront Herod and the Jews—revealing their helplessness to stop Him when He determines to act according to His sovereign plans—is the same display of power God uses to strengthen our faith. The same power that buckled and weakened the knees of unbelievers strengthened the faith of believers. When you study the Gospels, you see that Jesus kept growing the faith of His disciples. For three and a half years, He kept convincing them that the work of God can never be done in the power of the flesh or by the world’s methods, but only by the supernatural power of God alone. God wants to engage us in prayer so that we see His power.

To Build Your Faith

He also intends to build our faith and belief in Him as He answers our prayers. Why do we see the supernatural work of God in the book of Acts? Acts 2:42 says the believers:  “…devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.” The early church was birthed in prayer! It says they devoted themselves to prayer. James identified that prayer was a problem for some: “You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your evil desires.” (James 4:3) God doesn’t answer selfish prayers. He does, however, answer the prayers of helplessness and utter dependence on His power. Jesus taught His disciples that God answers prayers that are God-centered and God-focused. So, how might your prayers need to change?
 

How Pain Brings Us To Our Knees

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Does God Really Love Us?

We are tempted to ask how it is that God could truly love us if He allows us to suffer through painful experiences. In fact, it is because He loves us that He choreographs pain and suffering into our lives. Let me explain. It is not our natural tendency to seek closer fellowship with God when our lives are filled with blessings attached to this world. No — it is our tendency to stray from God when life is good! We become more comfortable leaning on this world’s blessings for our daily support. So God — in His love and sovereign grace — places a “wake-up call,” in the form of a painful experience, in front of us. He shakes us back to reality with something that refocuses our attention on Him, forcing us to our knees in prayer.

Our Greatest Satisfaction

He does this because He knows that nothing will ever offer us greater satisfaction than a Spirit-filled relationship with Him. All of this world’s goods and services are but cheap substitutes for a walk with God. If you follow the narrative from the first chapter in the book of Acts, you’ll see 120 disciples waiting in an upper room in Jerusalem for the promised Holy Spirit. Then, in chapter 2, the Spirit comes to indwell and fill the believers so they would have the supernatural power of the Spirit to obey Jesus’ commission to take the gospel to every people group and disciple them. Immediately, God begins to use them in His supernatural work as 3,000 were saved and became disciples that day — and then more and more were added!

Comfortable and Complacent

But as you read the next few chapters, it seems the church becomes complacent and comfortable with their success, and God’s work begins to slow down. So God, in His sovereignty, brought persecution. Stephen is stoned. Then James is killed, and Peter is imprisoned. It’s this crisis of faith that unsettled them, and they returned to their knees in prayer. They were humbled. They got back to biblical prayer. They expressed their helplessness and total dependence on God’s power to see Peter released from prison: “So Peter was kept in prison, but prayer was being made earnestly to God for him by the church.” — Acts 12:5. In the verses that follow, God sends an angel to spring Peter from prison (vv. 6–11).

The Lost Confronted By Answered Prayer

There’s another prayer principle that God reveals to us through His answered prayer to release Peter from incarceration: God will use a mighty display of His power to confront the lost with their sin. King Herod had imprisoned Peter and assumed he had more power than he actually had. But God says, “No, Herod — your plans to kill Peter won’t work!” Someone once said, “We make our plans, and God laughs.” I love that! Don’t lose heart, church. It may appear the world is out of control, but God hasn’t lost it. In His sovereign timing, He will display His power again and confront the lost with their need for repentance. So let’s get the bigger picture when we find ourselves in a painful place. Don’t pray that God will take it away — He may be doing a special work in your life or in the life of someone watching. Trust His plans!
 

How God Wants Us To Pray

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He Wants Us To Repent

So, let me tell you what I believe God wants us to do if our prayer life looks like that of the typical Christian! I believe He wants us to repent of our prayerlessness! I believe He wants us to denounce all our human efforts and admit our total helplessness when it comes to getting God’s work done in our own strength! And I believe that, in order to accomplish that, He wants us to change some habits in our lives—He wants us to add time to pray into our schedules! That means we might need to actually move some other things out of our schedule! And then, He wants us to pray with absolute dependence on Him!

Pray Over A Crisis of Faith

I believe all these things about prayer are based on the many and various texts of Scripture on the subject! Take Acts chapter 12, the first five verses, for instance. It begins: “About that time King Herod cruelly attacked some who belonged to the church, and he killed James, John’s brother, with the sword. When he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter too, during the days of Unleavened Bread. After the arrest, he put him in prison and assigned four squads of four soldiers each to guard him, intending to bring him out to the people after the Passover. So Peter was kept in prison, but prayer was being made earnestly to God for him by the church.” We can draw a prayer principle from that reading. When trouble comes our way, God uses our crisis of faith, in His sovereignty, to get us engaged with Him in prayer!

The Human Way We Pray

There’s something dreadfully human about the way we pray when life is great! When the job is secure, when the marriage is healthy, when there’s plenty of money, when life’s great… we don’t pray! That says, “We’ve got this,” doesn’t it? We have the false sense that the job’s secure, the marriage is healthy, and there’s plenty of money because, “We’ve got this!” Because we’re so good at living life! We credit ourselves for the good life. But God knows how self-deluded we are!  When Israel entered the Promised Land—after God had miraculously delivered them from slavery to Egypt; after God had dried up the Red Sea so they could safely cross; after God had fed them with manna and quail in the desert; after God had preserved their clothing and sandals for 40 years in the wilderness—He knew they would be tempted to take credit for their good life. He warned them!

Be Careful Not To Forget The Lord

God knew how Israel would respond to His going before them, dispossessing the land from wicked nations, and handing over to them homes, cities, and land they hadn’t earned. He warned them:  “When the Lord your God brings you into the land He swore to your fathers… a land with large and beautiful cities that you did not build, houses full of every good thing that you did not fill, wells dug that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and when you eat and are satisfied, be careful not to forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” — Deuteronomy 6:10-12. What do we have that God has not given us? But we get comfortable and forget, don’t we?

Supernatural Prayer

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Lots of Goofy Ideas About Prayer

The world — and even the church — has some pretty goofy ideas about prayer. For some, prayer is like magic: if your faith is strong enough, you can pray the sick back to health! You can pray the dead back to life! I’ve heard prayers — by some who claimed to be believers — that sounded more like witchcraft or New Age spirituality, where prayer is like “The Force” and the battle against the dark side. And if God is going to win, you have to support Him with your prayers! In other words, the fate of the world — and even of God — is in your hands, or in your prayers.

Blasphemous Prayer

Then there’s the blasphemous “Word of Faith” teaching on prayer, or the “Prosperity Gospel” that makes God out to be little more than your personal “Jeannie in a Bottle.” You want health, wealth, and prosperity? Just name it and claim it! God is helpless against the power of your words if you claim it in Jesus’ name. He has to give it to you! That’s a perversion of what Jesus taught His disciples to pray. It’s a perversion of what prayer looks like in the New Testament.

Why Is Real Prayer Supernatural?

Prayer in the New Testament was supernatural! I mean by that, prayer was an absolute reliance and dependence on God. These perversions of prayer are humanistic in nature — the power is inside us. Biblical prayer, instead, depends on the power of God that is outside us. We’re admitting to our weakness and to our inability to affect change. We’re trusting in a supernatural God to do what we cannot do. Biblical prayer is expressed helplessness and dependence on God’s power. Let me put it another way: whatever we don’t pray about, we’re basically telling God, “I got this,” right? “Don’t need You for this one, God.” Let me get personal. How many of you get up early enough Sunday mornings to pray that God would move powerfully in your worship service? How many of you have prayed specifically for a certain person who needs to be saved? Whatever ministry you might be part of in your church — do you pray regularly over it? For the people who are part of it? I doubt that most of you really believe you can do God’s work without His supernatural help. But if you’re not praying over it regularly, it kind of casts doubt.

What Are Your Expectations?

We need the Holy Spirit’s conviction — that if we’re not spending significant time appealing to God in passionate prayer, we shouldn’t expect Him to do any supernatural work in our midst, in our lives, or in our church. By our failure to pray, we’re telling God, “I got this. Don’t need Your help.” Listen, the Holy Spirit doesn’t need our self-centered know-how. He doesn’t need us at all. But it seems to be God’s M.O. to engage His people in deep, passionate, humble, helpless, and desperate prayer before He does His great supernatural work. He includes us, and He uses our prayer to grow in us a deeper dependence on His power rather than our own. Will you repent of your false views of prayer — or your prayerlessness? God help us!