Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. The first thing that happens when you're a Christian is the Holy Spirit starts speaking to your heart and saying, You're a child of God. And then as you grow up in the Lord, what happens is that He's continually explaining to you who you are as a child of God, giving you direction and instruction, and informing you and directing you and empowering how it is to pray when you don't know how to pray. Every Christian can hear from 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. I think that spiritual prayer takes several different forms, one of which might be the gift of prayer language or the gift of tongues, which we believe is a good gift. And Paul says that he would wish that everybody had the gift of tongues, so it's a good thing to ask for. It's one way of praying in the Spirit. But there are other ways of praying in the Spirit, which we've been speaking of. And I suggested to you that if you pray the Word of God, then God's Word is filled with God's Spirit. All Scripture is God-breathed. So as you could learn to pray the Scripture, you're learning to pray, in a sense, in the Spirit.
It's spiritual prayer. And last week had us in Luke chapter 1, where I want to return this week briefly to Mary's prayer. And here we are in Luke chapter 1. The angel Gabriel comes and announces incredible news to her.
Luke chapter 1. The angel said, Do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.
The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end. Now Mary's mind is perplexed by this, as our minds always are perplexed by supernatural occurrences. How will this be, Mary asked the angel, since I am a virgin? And the angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you, so the only one to be born will be called the Son of God.
Now note here that what we've said is that Mary's mind wanted a rational explanation, an understanding, so that her mind could make sense of this revelation that had been brought to her through the angel. But isn't it kind of funny that when the angel responds, not with a rebuke, but indeed with a response, the response is that, Well, I'll tell you how it will happen. The Holy Spirit will come upon you. Well, what does that mean? Well, the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Well, what in the world does that mean? And then to top it off, the only one to be born in you, just to clarify, is going to be the Son of God. Now do you think her mind was satisfied with that response?
It just brought a more supernatural, irrational, transcendent revelation to an already confused mind. And so there's something inside of Mary, probably part of the reason that God was drawn to her in the first place, that she very quickly, instead of saying, I'm going to try to figure this all out with my limited mortal understanding, instead she simply yields and says, I am the Lord's servant. The person who's going to really become effective in their prayer life is a person who's going to be yielded to the Holy Spirit. I am yours. And then this is the prayer that I think is a wonderful model you could build your prayer life on. May it be to me as you have said, the literal rendering, let it be unto me according to your word. In other words, you have said things that are so precious, so powerful, so transcendent and glorious, I could not have asked, imagined or thought them up on my own. But now that you've said it, I receive it, and I make it my own, and I ask you, Lord, to let it be just like you've said.
You are the God who's able to do abundantly above and beyond anything I could ask, think or imagine, but now that you have said it, even though I could not have conceived of it, I receive it in my spirit, and I lay claim to it, and I ask you to let it be just like you've said. Now that's a good way to pray. And what you can do is you can learn to pray all of the Scriptures that way.
And so we're learning about spiritual prayer in the form of praying God's Word. Now I want you just to notice something important in Mary's story here is that the bulk of this first encounter is the revelation that is spoken by the angel. And Mary's prayer is one phrase, let it be unto me according to your word.
It's one little sentence. In other words, the inclination in Mary was to listen to God. And that's what I want to speak to you about for these few moments is the listening side of prayer, that if you would connect yourself up to the listening to God, it will totally radically transform how you pray. Because now you are praying according to revelation, and the Spirit of God is informing you and illumining to you what it is that you're to pray about.
And it just changes everything. I remember in the earliest times of Ann and I in our courtship, and she was fresh into understanding more deep things of the Holy Spirit, and I was a sheer babe and starting to understand that, hey, God is still speaking at work today. And I remember an occasion where Ann had told me, I think we were dating at the time, honey, you said that you've been waking up in the middle of the night with the tremendous burden to pray for a neighbor that you barely knew, a man that was somewhere in the neighborhood, but not somebody you would have seen any time recently, and you just got up and prayed for him.
And I remember you mentioned that. And then we learned just not long after that that man died that night. What was God using this one young woman's prayer for? Was it to bring peace to Him as He was going home to be with His Lord? Was it that God was reaching His heart and He was getting born again before He went? Was it that He just needed strength in His body?
I don't know. But see, God would wake up a young woman and just put it on her heart. All that God really requires for something like that is somebody that's available. And you can just imagine, though, how much your prayer life would be changed if you're more hooked in to what God is saying to you. Here's a marvelous quote from one of the great prayer warriors of history.
Here we go, George Mueller. He's talking about his devotional life. And listen to this. He said, The first thing I do, after having asked in a few words the Lord's blessing upon His precious Word, is to begin to meditate on the Word of God, searching, as it were, into every verse to get blessing out of it, for the sake of obtaining food for my soul. The result, I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication, so that, though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, it had turned almost immediately more or less into prayer.
This is powerful. The link between the meditation of the revelation of God and prayer is inextricable. These are, this is two sides of a coin, you see, because you're going to pray out of what it is that God is doing in you and speaking in you. Now just notice this about Mary. Mary was a woman who heard God. Now people that hear from God are people who have learned not to rush past the moments in which God is speaking. Just look at a few instances of Mary.
She's already listened to the Lord and said, let it be according to your word. And then you remember when the shepherds come in chapter 2 now of Luke. And after they have found Mary and Joseph and they have shared what they had seen and experienced, we come to verse 19. And you get this sense of Mary being quite contemplative about this. And it says, Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. It literally means she took this revelation, she tossed it about in her heart.
That's what the word means. She locked it up as if in a treasure chest and then took it and tossed it about. This is really what you do with a revelation.
You see other instances of this. When Jesus begins to grow and He's at the temple for three days and Mary and Joseph are wondering where He is, now we're in chapter 2 at verse 46. And after three days they found Him in the temple court sitting among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard Him was amazed at His understanding and His answers. And look at verse 48. When His parents saw Him, they were astonished. His mother said to them, son, why have you treated? They were just marveling. Mary was there once again marveling. What is this?
That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. 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 6, 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. Today's teaching now continues.
Here once again is Alan Wright. You come down to verse 51 and it says, He went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But look at this again. His mother treasured all these things in her heart and Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and with men. What I'm saying is that the person who has a sensitivity to what the Spirit is saying is someone who is going to not rush past in daily life the moments of listening for God. And so prayer is not us coming and just barraging heaven with our many words. In fact, our prayer life would become altogether more powerful if it were less about God hearing our words and more about us hearing God's words.
Wouldn't that transform it? Because if you've ever had that experience and you feel like, well I'm just, I don't feel like these prayers are connecting, maybe it's because we have not been profoundly inspired by what it is that God has on His heart that He wants us to be praying about. Now this is imperative. Every Christian can hear from God. Every Christian can hear from God. This was told in so many prophetic instances. I love this from Isaiah 50. The sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue to know the word that sustains the weary.
This would be a good one to write on a postcard and claim every morning, wouldn't it? He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught. The sovereign Lord has opened my ears and I have not been rebellious.
I have not drawn back. It was always in God's heart to fully restore that part of us that had been shut off from God and to make us spiritually alive so that we could discern the things of God. Here's what Paul said to the Corinthians. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, for who among men knows the thoughts of a man except a man's spirit within him? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.
The man, and there's a typo, without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they're foolishness to him and he cannot understand them because they're spiritually discerned. In other words, when you become a Christian, your Spirit is born anew and you're alive unto God. I want you to understand you can therefore have communion and communication with the Holy Spirit. The first thing that happens when you're a Christian is the Holy Spirit starts speaking to your heart and saying you're a child of God.
And then as you grow up in the Lord, what happens is that he's continually explaining to you who you are as a child of God, giving you direction and instruction and informing you and directing you and empowering how it is to pray when you don't know how to pray. Every Christian can hear from God. This is the truth that Jesus said when he said the man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep. The watchman opens the gate for him and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he is brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they'll never follow a stranger.
In fact, they'll run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger's voice. Every Christian, every sheep in God's fold can hear and recognize the voice of the shepherd. In fact, Jesus promised this of the Holy Spirit. He said when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.
He'll not speak on his own. He will speak only what he hears and he will tell you what is yet to come. He'll bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That's why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known unto you. Every Christian can hear from God and so let's cultivate our ability to hear what God is saying to our heart so that our prayer life is linked up to what God is saying. Let me just tell you, you know what you'll get from this?
Let me just give you some of the benefits that you'll receive from this. You know the first thing that you'll get if you'll hook up to listening to God, the first thing that you'll get and it may be the most important thing is you'll get faith. Because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Faith doesn't come by you trying real hard to believe. A lot of people think that faith comes out of just like, I've got to get this mental certainty and I've got to just sit here and I've just got to get enough faith and I've just got to, you know, I mean it's just like, I've tried that, it doesn't work. You can stand over that sick person, that loved one or whatever you want to pray for and you're just like, I don't really believe but I'm going to try real hard to believe and it's not faith and it doesn't work. Faith comes by hearing and hearing comes by the Word of God. So here's what happens, here's where faith gets quickened inside of you. It's where you get convinced that there's something in the heart of God that He wants to do because of who He is.
And when you're convinced of that it changes everything, doesn't it? I was talking about my little Abby last week who, you know, wants a guinea pig and after I was asking for a guinea pig over and over and not getting a guinea pig and yet she saw I was willing to talk to her about a guinea pig over and over and so finally she said, Dad, do you want me to get a guinea pig? And I said, that's a great question to ask because if she knows that it's in my heart for a guinea pig then it's going to instruct the way that she keeps asking.
If she becomes convinced that it's not in my heart for her to ever get a guinea pig then she'll just quit asking. See, this is the way it works, isn't it? I mean, the only way I can understand some of the dilemmas that are in our mind about prayer, you know, we got all our theology, you know, and go to seminary and you get about the sovereignty of God and you get confused about this and how, why is it, why do we need to pray if God's already sovereign and why, you know, how does that all work and isn't He going to do what He wants to do anyway if, you know, and so forth and so on and blah, blah, blah. And your mind never figures it out. In the first place you're not going to figure out about prayer by thinking about it in terms of process or steps or linear things like that because really the only way you can understand the dynamics of prayer is to understand relationship. It's born out of a relationship and it's a father-child relationship. So I just was thinking a little bit about interacting with my children.
I'll just share another little silly illustration but it's helping me. It's actually bringing me breakthroughs in my own prayer life because of I've gained some understanding now as to things. And one of the things that I've always wondered about is, okay, well I know God wants us to pray but if it's already in God's heart, why do we keep on asking?
And you want to say, well you don't have to ask, you just ask that one time. But there's that parable that Jesus tells in which He talks about the persistent neighbor who's saying I really need some provisions to show hospitality to an unexpected guest. And the Bible says and Jesus said because of his bold persistence, He'll give him what he wants. And so the invitation is to keep on praying.
Well, I'm confused by that because I'm like, well if it's already in His heart to do, why don't we just sit around and wait on Him to do it? And you know, you see what I'm saying, all these kind of things, they can bog you down. Well I got to thinking about this silly thing that goes on in our house and it's almost one of those things that's too silly to actually admit but anything for the sake of a good sermon illustration to get the point across. It's one of those things which, you know, I'm like if I tell that then they realize He is not a sophisticated man of God.
I'm just a normal person but that's who I am. And in reality this goes on in our house every night. If I'm there at home, we've made it our custom that there's something that we do fun, you know, going to bed.
And we like to read, the kids like for me to read something to them. So we've read through all the whole series of Chronicles of Narnia. We, one of them we've done twice. Sometimes, you know, I want to say it was the Bible we're reading every night but sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's been Hank the cow dog and I don't know if there's any Hank the cow dog people in here.
Okay, I had one kid at the first service who had Hank the cow dog and we were swapping stories afterwards but anyway. Normally it's really spiritual, you know, but we're reading and so you're reading along and I always made it in my custom to have a little fun, you know, in reality they want to get about, you know, 15 or 20 pages read and I want them to think that I'm alive and alert and full of energy and want to read a lot. But in reality, most nights, you know, I'm just kind of thinking, you know, can we get by with two pages tonight? How about two pages?
So we'll wind up with maybe four pages and they're wanting more. And what I do is I always would like to play a little game where I'd end at a really suspenseful moment, you know, it's be like and Lucy drew back her bow and suddenly she heard a rustle in the darkness and outleaped what she never thought would be there. And I said that's a good place to stop, we'll pick up there tomorrow night. Well that drives them crazy right there, you know, but I want them to be, you know, looking forward to the next night. And sometime, I don't remember if this was, Abby was even born when this started, I can't, it's been going on so long, I don't even remember when it started but at some point maybe it was the two of them, they started begging and they said, please, please dad, please read, don't stop there, please, just one more page, please.
And so at some point I made the mistake of a trickle of mercy showing up in my heart. And I let, I read, I said that all right, if I read one more page, you promise you'll jump right into bed, fall right asleep, no more questions asked, they said yes, yes, yes. I said okay, and I read one more page and they seemed satisfied enough and they jumped from the bed. Well, the next night I came to the same thing, I'm reading along and you know, and then out of nowhere appeared, that's a good place to stop, and they're please, please, please, and tonight there's a little more force in that you know.
It's like, cause they're like you know, you can, you might, this might happen. And so now it was please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please. And I just kind of looked at them, just kind of gave them this look like that's not enough pleases, and so they got the message and was like please, please, please, please, please, please, please. And so finally when it was please, please, please, please, please, please, please, enough times I said okay, fall right if I read one more page, you know, and it's like, okay, so there. Well, this thing has evolved into where the please pleases were a regular part of what we're doing. And finally, I was having some fun with it, and so I would not only require the many pleases, but I also began to say, only if you'll sing please, please, please to the tune of jingle bells. And so there were please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please.
You know, and so you can just imagine now the scene is that when I come to that suspenseful moment and close it, they just look at me and say, what tune? Alan Wright and today's teaching, Hearing and Praying. 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. Today's teaching, Alan, is hearing and praying. Well, it's so important as we were just hearing there, every Christian can hear from God.
Right. And this is not just for a few Christians. It's not just for the super spiritual. It's not just for the prophetic people. All of us are in a relationship with God and we are on a daily basis, we're being led by God. So we can attune ourselves to recognize God's voice and this means that the more that we attune ourselves to hear God's voice, the more that our prayer life will be lining up with what God is already saying. And prayer becomes powerful and spirit filled when we are led by the Holy Spirit in our prayer life. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.
