ONLY BY PRAYER

What It’s About

Is there an area of your life where you’re longing for a breakthrough but it’s just not happening? It could be that there’s a barrier of some kind between you and God that’s preventing it. Or it could be that you just need to ask him. James 4:2 says: “You have not, because you ask not.” Our all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving heavenly Father may simply be waiting for you to come before His throne of grace and ask for His help with something you can’t do on your own strength.

But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Our strength. Our ingenuity. Our independence. We’ve chased it our whole life. It’s what we were told and encouraged by our parents. It’s what we want for our kids and what we teach our kids: to be responsible, independent, hardworking, successful adults. While all of those are good things for life in this world, God wants us to understand and to experience that dependence on Him is what He desires from us. It’s actually what we need as His children. He wants us to see that we can’t live life on our own. We weren’t created to. As we grow into independent adults, God wants us to grow in our dependence upon Him: to come to him in prayer, again and again, and seek His help, wisdom, peace, provision, plans, power, and more.

This lesson isn’t easily learned, especially in our self-sufficient “I can do it” world. Even Jesus’ disciples learned this lesson the hard way: after failure. While they started out depending on God’s power to break through (and they saw amazing things happen!), as time passed they grew more confident in themselves and forgot that it was God alone who could do the impossible (Mark 9:29).

Prayer is God inviting us to ask Him. But simply asking is not enough. Neither is simply coming to God and saying: “I need you to fix this.” How we ask is important too. What’s going on in our hearts and minds and lives matters. God is not a vending machine or a genie waiting to grant our wishes and whims if we push the right buttons or say the magic words. He loves us too deeply to give us what we think we want or need most. 

Our hope for this series and study is that over the next 6 weeks (forty days) you will engage with God, His Word, and His works in ways that will infuse your prayer life with new power and passion, and in doing so help you to see God at work and experience His ‘break through’ in ways you didn’t expect or imagine.