Lord, Teach Us To Pray
Go with me to Luke 11 and 1. We understand that the “Our Father” prayer you know and I know, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take” -- this and others are just formulas. And they are good ways to introduce people to prayer, especially your children and young people, where it starts them to begin to receive or talk to God.
How do we pray effectively, as Jesus taught His disciples?
Now, when we look over here in Luke eleven and one, it says that it came to pass that as He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, “Lord, teach us to pray as John also taught his disciples.” Now, we understand disciple is a word that means disciplined one, or student of. So, here we see the disciples and I always like to translate it as saying that they said it like this, “Lord, teach us to get the results that You get.”
I want to pray, and when I pray, I want to see the same things happen for me that happen for You when You pray. This also alludes to the fact that we need to be taught how to pray, especially in a society where we are now. One of the first things I told you is that you must come to recognize Satan as the deceiver. See, just as Satan never wanted Jesus to go to the cross, he never wanted you to begin to operate in prayer and talking to God because the more you talk to God, the more real God becomes. Even though you can't see Him; sometimes you can't feel Him, but you know He is there.
Then we move from there and we begin to talk about how the first principle that I taught you was that the principles of the Word of God must be employed. You must come to the realization that the master key to your release is in your mouth.
The Bible says that the power of life and death are in the tongue. He says we can speak blessing or cursings out of our mouths. Therefore, we have to understand that the mouth is the governor of the influx of the manifestation of the power and the will of God in the believer's life.
Now, let me explain to you what I mean by governor. On many different types of automobiles, like on a school bus, per se, it may have a 400 engine in it. A 400 engine is a very powerful engine. If you took that same engine, took it out of that big bus, and put it in a small Chevelle or Nova body or Corvette body … ‘Man, you stomp the gas, you'll fly!' Well, on that school bus, that motor still has the same propensity to rev up these RPMs and produce this type of power, even for this larger vehicle. So, what they do in turn, is they put a governor on the motor, around the carburator, that controls the flow of the fuel that comes into the motor that initiates and causes the motor to have the power that it can accelerate at.
So, the mouth is the governor by which the manifestation of the influx of the power – influx meaning those things that God intends to funnel down from heaven – is made.
According to Ephesians, chapter one, we already have all spiritual blessings, wherein heavenly places. So, what God wants to do is transfer them from heaven into your life. And so your mouth is the master key, or the governor, by which you're going to control this flow.
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