Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. There's a way in which you pray that really is the Holy Spirit taking in. He loves you more than you love yourself. He has better plans for your life than you could envision for yourself, and He is committed to praying through you more than you're committed to praying.
That's the amazing thing about our God. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear today's message in the series called Praying with Power as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.
As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org, or call 877-544-4860.
That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching in the series Praying with Power.
Here is Alan Wright. The Spirit who is from God that we may understand what God has freely given us. See, this is the thing that happened that's so incredible. You get the Spirit of God communing with your spirit. And you're like, wow, oh, that's what it means. I'm a child of God. And he begins to bear witness to your spirit that you're a child of God. And he'll bear witness to you about things that are wrong with your soul that need to be changed. And that's the conviction of the Holy Spirit, which is a wonderful gift.
And on and on, he begins to teach you. So he says, this is what we speak not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths and spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God for their foolishness to him. And he cannot understand that because they're spiritually discerned.
So here's what happened. You became a believer and your Spirit is made new. And you are now alive unto God. The soul, when a person becomes a Christian, the soul, the mind, the will, the emotions, it doesn't become instantly and totally new, does it? Because if you had some bad attitudes before you were born again, before you ever accepted Christ, they don't just automatically all go away.
Now, thankfully, some of them tend to change right away, because you've got a whole new revelation of truth going on in you. But after, you know, working with people and my own soul and other souls for all these years, we just I recognize that for sure, we are in a process of having healing for the wounds of our souls, the things, the lies that we this is where we devote a whole lot of our time, the big important thing to us as a church, the healing of souls, so that we can transform our thinking. So my mind is being made new, on an ongoing basis be transformed by the renewing of your mind. So my spirit is new, my mind is being made new, my body will one day be made new. It didn't become new when I became a Christian.
If you if you accept Christ, and you got a wart on your left hand, and you say I accept Jesus, you look down, unless he's done an unusual miracle, you got a wart on your left hand. Now he does miracles in our body. So but this body is growing older.
And you know, I'm just believing God for vigor and prospering and health for a very long life. But it's just, let's be real, it's getting older, and we can't pretend otherwise. And one day we're gonna slough it off, but we'll get a new body. So all things are gonna be made new. But right now the spirit inside a man or woman is new, the soul is being made new. And one day, the body will be made new.
Now here's just a little metaphor to understand it. And that is let's just start thinking about a young man who's got a new girlfriend, he's got a good job and just bought himself a convertible. And it's a 78 degree day, the the tops down in the convertible, he just had a nice meal, his girlfriend's in the car, they're riding up to the mountains, they're looking at the scenery, every nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina, he's just having the time of his life, he can't think anything that's going wrong. And so he is a happy individual. And what he's experienced is he holds her hand, as he just had the nice meal, his physical being, he's experienced pleasure, and his soul is happy. And so he has good circumstances. But anybody who's lived long enough knows that good meals don't last, that good weather doesn't last, and sometimes girlfriends don't last.
And it could be that something comes along very quickly that makes him unhappy. But Paul said to rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say rejoice, and the root of that is joy. And we know that Paul also said the kingdom of God consists of righteousness and joy and peace and the Holy Spirit, and that joy is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience. And so what the scripture shows us is that we can have joy regardless of our circumstances.
How could that be possible? It's because it is a spiritual thing. It is in the realm of the Spirit. When Paul talks about peace that passes understanding, he's talking about a spiritual peace. He's talking about something that bypasses the mind, that the Spirit of God communes with the spirit of a man or woman, and in that there is a freshness and a preciousness of revelation that brings peace. And you find yourself sometimes just going, I feel good.
Everything seems like it's falling apart around me, but I got peace about it. That's a spiritual thing. What Paul is saying is that if you want to have effective, victorious Christian living, cultivate spiritual prayer. Spiritual prayer is the product of my spirit communing with the Holy Spirit. Fleshly prayer, I think of as this, is like the Pharisees just standing there reciting prayers just so people can hear them say fancy things. It's a prayer that just originates in the unredeemed mind, a carnal nature, and just expresses its own purposes without any connection to God. Then there's a thing that is soulish prayer that is in the realm of the soul, and this is really the product of my emotions, my desires, and my language, and it originates in my redeemed mind and it flows towards God, but it is on the whole seeking God's blessing for my purposes.
Now this is tricky to understand, because it's taken me a long time to get this clear. God does care what I want. He cares what you want, just as much as I care. If I'm going to treat my children to ice cream, I'd like to know, do you want chocolate? Do you want chocolate chip? Do you want vanilla?
You know, or in our case, what kind of sprinkles and things do you want mixed in there? And so it matters to God what you want. So don't hear this as saying that you should never bring what you want to God. In fact, we're told to bring your desires, your wants to God. But what this is to say is that there is a basic ineffectiveness when we pray simply out of our own emotional life. Now let me just start by saying every one of us has probably prayed this kind of prayer and or experienced it at some level, and it goes kind of like this, you know, it's like somebody is praying and yet they're actually praying their desire over your life. What I'm saying is, husbands, you don't grab your wife's hand, you know, and say, Lord, just make her a better cook. And it means, wives, you don't grab your husband's hand and say, I just bless him and pray for him that he'll become a better spiritual leader in the household like I need him to be. That's a soulish prayer.
It might be that it's an okay desire that you want her to be a better cook. It might be an okay desire you want him to be a better spiritual leader, you know. But it's a soulish prayer that's really more intended for his or her ears than it was for God's ears, and it's basically ineffective.
And it's also just kind of slimy, you know. You ever had somebody praying for you like this, and it's just like, no, no, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it. All of a sudden, you can tell as soon as somebody starts praying a soulish prayer over you, it's like whatever connection you have with God, you just feel, it's not that we don't have noble desires sometimes in this, but it's like sometimes we're just praying out of our pain and out of our emotion.
And it's not that we can't bring that to God, it's just that in the end, it's not spiritual prayer. And this is good news, by the way, to men. I was talking to a man in between services and he was like, you know, this is exciting. He said, because I don't really know how to pray.
And he said, I feel like now maybe I could learn to pray. And this is good news for men because on the whole, on the whole, women are better at expressing their intimate emotional feelings towards, you know, with others and they can talk about it and have coffee and how you feeling and what you've been feeling about lately. And men get together and talk about, you know, the sports game and what are you going to do and what are we going to do together and what times our tea time. And it's not to say that the women have got it better and the men don't because if all we did was have coffee and talk about our feelings, we wouldn't get anything done.
So we got things to learn from each other. But this is good news to men because a lot of men think that what being a great prayer warrior is all about is being able to have flowery language and share very emotional intimate things. Don't be telling us, women, don't be telling us we're less spiritual than you because we're not, oh God, kiss me with the kisses of your lips and this. We're not going to do that. And Bubba is not going to come in and want to hold hands in a circle and pray some flowery things. You know why? Because we feel incompetent at that.
That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. As a Christian, you know it's important and you want to make it a priority. But if you're like most, your prayer life can slip so easily into routine, lacking fervor and passion. Maybe you're wondering what is the key to praying with real power?
In Ephesians chapter six, the apostle Paul has a clear answer. Pray in the spirit. But what does it mean to pray in the spirit?
Some would say that Paul is referring only to the spiritual gift of a supernatural prayer language. But in Alan Wright's unique series, Praying with Power, Pastor Alan reveals five different ways of praying in the spirit. Discover how praying God's word is praying in the spirit. Learn how to listen to the spirit as you pray. Come to see Jesus as your prayer partner. It's practical.
It's powerful. Get Pastor Alan Wright's Praying with Power and discover the power of praying in the spirit. Change your prayer life and you'll change the world. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.
When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.
That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. His teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. I wonder if you had to go to, you know, and everything was, okay, now we're all going to just get together in church and now we're all going to play basketball against each other, you know?
If you never played basketball and you feel incompetent at it. Now this is good news for men because spiritual prayer is not flowery, necessarily emotional prayer. I'm not saying that if it becomes beautiful and you got a gift with words that start to get expressed, and I love words, go for it. And if you've got emotion, it's okay to release that emotion in there, but the substance of prayer is not all that. So men, you can pray. Women, you can pray. We can all have spiritual prayer.
Here's the bottom line. Spiritual prayer connects me with God's mighty purposes because it's God's Spirit that is connected with me, flowing through me back towards God. So, and this is still developing in me. There could be more than four ways of understanding this, but here at least four ways of spiritual prayer. Praying under the anointing of God's presence, praying with a God-illumined mind, praying in an unknown spiritual language, or praying scripture. Now all of these are ways of praying in the Spirit or spiritual prayer.
Let me just say something briefly about each one of these. Praying under anointing of God's presence. There's one place where Paul says the same way the Spirit helps our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings that are too deep for words. Sometimes the most powerful prayer that you could ever have might be one of the most inarticulate prayers, because really, you have just yielded to God, and the Holy Spirit is praying through you, and you don't even understand what's going on. Now this is, as I look back over my life, I have come to the place of having to be so thankful, because I believe this has happened in me many different times. And I was talking to a young person last night at Virgin, she said, you know, I've heard you tell about when you were in college, and you were in your room, and the Holy Spirit came and you wept, and you knew you were called to the ministry. Does that happen to you a lot like that? You know, powerful things like that?
Life direction? I said, no, not really. But I do hear from God a lot, but not like whole life course things like that. But there was an example in my life in which I was not asking God, what should I do with my life?
Now how do you explain this? I just was praying, and suddenly I'm visited by God, and the Holy Spirit is obviously praying through my tears, all I could do was weep. But as I wept, I now understand the Holy Spirit was praying through me. It wasn't my emotion that was moving God, it's the Holy Spirit himself in the triune God, communicating with Father God, and interceding that God would show me my life's course, and then he speaks to me out of that and says, you're called to the ministry, and my life's course has been set. I can't take real credit for that in any way except to say, I had just put myself into a yielded position before God. This is a most glorious thing, because what it is just simply fostered by is intimacy with God, and is through the acknowledgement of your total need for God, and the total yielding to his presence. Peter just began to pray, and he said, I fell into a trance. The Holy Spirit began speaking and moving through him. So there's a way in which you pray that really is the Holy Spirit taking, he loves you more than you love yourself, he has better plans for your life than you can envision for yourself, and he is committed to praying through you more than you're committed to praying.
That's the amazing thing about our God. Now here's a second way, and that's praying in an unknown spiritual language. Paul says this of the gift of a prayer language or speaking in tongues, anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men, but to God.
Indeed, no one understands him. He utters mysteries with his spirit. What Paul is saying here, 1 Corinthians 14, where he's talking, you know, even in the first century, this became controversial, because we deem it as so different than other gifts. The reason we think it's so different than other gifts is because you've seen people teach before. So somebody can have a natural gift of teaching, and they stand up and teach, and you just see them teaching, and so then Paul talks about a spiritual gift of teaching, and you go, okay, well I know what that is. Well this is ecstatic and it's different, so it draws some attention unto itself like this, and it had in the church in Corinth. But what he's saying basically is this, is that if you have a gift of tongues, a prayer language, and this is not speaking about the prophetic message in tongues in which it's interpreted in the body and builds up the body, he's saying this is a gift that God gives that is for the purpose of communicating directly to God, bypassing the mind, so that your spirit can speak to God.
So here's what happens. The Holy Spirit communes with the spirit of a man or a woman, and the release is like a song that comes out, but it comes out as an unknown language that nobody understands. And therefore, Paul says, this is not, this, tongues is not for the corporate gathering, because it doesn't really edify other people.
You see, you can't, if somebody's praying in tongues in our unknown language, you can't be like, yes, amen, I agree with that. No, you're just kind of going, wow, that's kind of neat, or you know they're being edified. But it's a wonderful gift in this way, because not only does it help you when you don't know how to pray, because you just, how many people you know, there's a time you're just up against things, either it is too difficult and you don't know how to pray, or you got so much joy and so much to praise God about, you don't know how to tell him thank you.
For both those things, this is a wonderful gift. And what happens is that your mind is able to be bypassed, and this is a wonderful thing for a person like me who's been an intellect so much of my life. See, we are trained in physical things from the time we're little.
Here's how you hold a fork, here's how you run a lap, here's how you hold a ball, here's how you sew with thread, here's how you wash a dish, whatever, we're training about that. We train our minds, we go to school, and we go there for all these 12 years, and then many people go on to four more years, many people go to beyond that. We're schooling our minds, and we are not schooled at all in spiritual things.
And so we tend to think, because we're not schooled in it, that it's less real or something like that. So this is about a spiritual, about a spiritual language. Now people say, well, you know, I've been told that if I'm filled with the Spirit, then I've got to have this particular gift. And, you know, people believe different things about that, but I just tell you that I know for sure, I know people that are powerfully filled with the Holy Spirit, who have a gift of tongues, I know people who don't have a gift of tongues that are powerfully baptized and filled with the Holy Spirit, and that's the way that we view that.
The point is this, how does this foster? Well, you ask God for gifts. Eagerly desire spiritual gifts, Paul says. So you ask Him. If there are gifts that you want, ask Him.
Just ask Him. If you want to have a gift of generosity, ask Him. If you want to have compassion and mercy and feel towards people the way that God does, ask Him for that gift.
If you want to have a gift of a prayer language, ask Him for it. But what you don't do is get obsessed about it. If you don't get that particular gift is thinking, well, somehow I'm inferior or I'm second class. You know, listen, that we've had times where we've had the release of this gift afresh through Azusa Street, then in the 70s, and it's a wonderful gift. And if you want it, you ought to ask God for it.
But you certainly shouldn't obsess about it as if this is the particular gift that separates the haves and have nots. So please don't do that. But that's one of the ways of praying in the spirit. That's spiritual prayer.
Now here's a third way. Praying with a God illumined mind. Now this is important to understand because while our minds are being transformed, Paul says it's so that you may prove what the will of God is. Now if your mind gets transformed such that you having now been given the mind of Christ allow that to become the way you think and the way you see the world, then it'll be the way that you pray. And if the way that you pray is out of the mind that has been brought into accord with the Word of God, then I believe that is spiritual praying.
The other way that this can happen is it can happen prophetically. It can happen where you're praying for somebody and God illumines your mind while you're praying and you connect up to the anointing presence of God and He illumines you so that you know how to pray. I mean one time I remember the first time this ever happened to me and I was praying for a couple one time. They told me to pray for their marriage. I thought their marriage was excellent and I go into the prayer, just starting to pray for them. And somewhere in the middle of the prayer I begin to lose myself and I'm now not so much thinking as I am just giving utterance to the words that the Lord has directed me and I find myself praying for their strained marriage. And even as the words are coming out of my mouth, I'm thinking, why am I saying this? This is probably insulting them. Everybody in the church assumes they have a good marriage.
I thought they had a good marriage, but I just knew that it was not me that was doing that speaking. I continue to speak and they begin to weep. This is a most glorious thing because what it is just simply fostered by is intimacy with God and is through the acknowledgement of your total need for God and the total yielding to His presence. Peter just began to pray and he said, I fell into a trance.
The Holy Spirit began speaking and moving through him. So there's a way in which you pray that really is the Holy Spirit taking, He loves you more than you love yourself. He has better plans for your life than you can envision for yourself and He is committed to praying through you more than you're committed to praying.
That's the amazing thing about our God. Alan Wright and today's teaching on what it means to pray in the Spirit. Prayer. As a Christian, you know it's important and you want to make it a priority. But if you're like most, your prayer life can slip so easily into routine, lacking fervor and passion. Maybe you're wondering what is the key to praying with real power.
In Ephesians chapter six, the Apostle Paul has a clear answer. Pray in the Spirit. But what does it mean to pray in the Spirit?
Some would say that Paul is referring only to the spiritual gift of a supernatural prayer language. But in Alan Wright's unique series, Praying with Power, Pastor Alan reveals five different ways of praying in the Spirit. Discover how praying God's word is praying in the Spirit. Learn how to listen to the Spirit as you pray. Come to see Jesus as your prayer partner.
It's practical, it's powerful. Get Pastor Alan Wright's Praying with Power and discover the power of praying in the Spirit. Change your prayer life and you'll change the world. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.
When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.
That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. So if we've got someone who's nervous about this, they don't understand it, I think a big takeaway I hear is there's a lot of trust and very warranted trust that's involved here. You can trust the Holy Spirit. You can trust God. And here's good news for anybody who struggles in prayer or feels that prayer is not powerful or not exciting or find it hard to be disciplined. God is absolutely committed to you having a vibrant prayer life. He is the one who designed us for communication with him and ordained it that he would use our own prayer life. So what we're learning is a process of trusting that the Holy Spirit is at work within the believer to pray through you. And there are a number of ways that this happens Daniel, and that's what we're learning about. Praying in the Spirit means therefore praying with the very power of God. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
