My Prayer Partner [Part 2]

What I believe God's saying is that if there are two or three Christians that could agree on anything, I'd be so impressed, I'll show up myself. Because if you hook up to the power of the Most High, if you hook up to the intercessor, the Lord Jesus Christ, and your prayer life becomes His prayer life, and His prayer life becomes your prayer life, you watch in amazement.

You'll do above and beyond what you ever ask or imagine. Jesus, my prayer partner. 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 drama goes something like this, where it's like you have this enemy of your soul who is constantly trying to come before the God of the universe and say, look at Alan. Look at the mistakes he's made. Look at the things that he did wrong. Look at the failures he had last week.

Look at the things that happened in his childhood. Look at the shame. Look at this and that. And I've got Jesus there saying, oh, yeah, but I died for him and my blood was shed for him. And he has accepted that provision. So there's been an exchange.

That penalty has already been paid. That curse has already been broken. So I'm making an appeal, Father, instead of hearkening unto the request of the prosecutor over here is accusing. And instead of that, please pour out blessing that should have only come to me, but poured out upon Alan. And so there's this going on in the Father saying, OK, yeah, you're right about that, Jesus. OK, let's bless him instead of cursing.

I mean, that is what's going on. Now, the point of this to say is that what I'm realizing I want my prayer life to be is I want to get into such agreement with my intercessor. That in that communion with Jesus, my prayer life takes a whole different form because now it's rooted in the understanding and knowledge of everything I just described.

And the closer that I am to him, the more I know what's already in his heart. So Jesus said, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given unto you. See, a lot of people get disillusioned in their prayer life because they say, well, I asked him for a new boat and I didn't get it.

Well, he didn't say you just ask him for a new boat, you'll get a new boat. He said, abide in me and my word abide in you and then you ask whatever you wish and it'll be given unto you. I never knew anybody that perfectly abided in Christ, nor have I known anybody who had the Word of God perfectly abiding in them. But I believe with all my heart, if there is somebody that could abide perfectly in Christ and the Word of God abide perfectly in that individual, everything they ever spoke out of their mouth in prayer would be answered. That's what I believe.

So I want to get closer to him and have my spirit connected to the Spirit of God. See, Jesus said, it's better I go away because if I go away, then I will send another helper, a counselor, a paracletos. Para, like parallel, alongside of is what it means, parallel.

Paracletos. Kaleo means to call. The one who's called alongside. It's better, Jesus, that you're going to grieve for a little while that I'm going to be crucified. But it's better because the plan is my spirit of advocacy is going to come and dwell within you. You're going to have the Holy Spirit come alongside of you who is your advocate.

You're going to have a continuing defense attorney who is going to be God himself, my spirit poured out into you through which you can commune on a continual basis so that all of your prayer can abide in him and he in you so that you now come in partnership with him. All this is to say is that, you know, it's a good idea to get a prayer partner. And Anne and I and our family, we're so privileged because we have a lot of prayer partners in the church that pray for us daily.

And we have people that pray on Sunday mornings at 830. So if you ever had a good prayer partner, you find out that there's some powerful stuff that goes on in agreement. Now, this is one of those revelations, I'm still scratching at it, okay. But this is what I see in this text is a lot of times people say, you know, hear Jesus say, I tell you if two or three agree about, if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them.

Now, there's some mysteries in this. But again, I've seen some abuses of this where somebody, they said, I want a new boat and God didn't give a new boat. So they go find somebody else and say, hold my hand and say with me, I want a new boat.

And we had a prayer of agreement. And then they don't get the boat and they say, well, that prayer doesn't work. I don't know what else this is talking about, do y'all? I think, now listen, I'm not against new boats.

I mean, get you a new boat and invite me to come water skiing. But I'm just using it as a, okay. But if you look at this text, what you see is what he's saying is where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them. I like what Tony Evans said about this, a great preacher. And he said, what I believe God's saying is that if there are two or three Christians that could agree on anything, I'd be so impressed, I'll show up myself. But I think what he's saying is that if you get spiritual unity between believers, the promise is that God himself spiritually will be present in your midst. So where's the power coming from? The power's not coming from us saying a magic formula together and say, oh, we agreed, you know, yabba dabba doo, I want one, you want one too.

And so we just agreed on that's not where it's coming from. Instead, it's coming from the fact that if we have true unity together, the Holy Spirit himself, Jesus is present with us. So we're abiding with him, he's abiding with us and ask whatever you will when you're abiding in Christ. Because if you hook up to the power of the most high, if you hook up to the intercessor, the Lord Jesus Christ, and your prayer life becomes his prayer life, and his prayer life becomes your prayer life, you watch in amazement, he'll do above and beyond what you ever ask or imagine.

Glory to God. So I'd like to title the name of this message, Jesus, my prayer partner. Probably means probably me, Jesus's prayer partner is better. Make him your prayer partner. He lives interceding for you.

Now there's some incredible implications of this. In the first place, one of the things I've discovered about prayer is that it's very helpful if you can find somebody to be a prayer partner with you who's got more faith than you do about whatever it is you're praying about. That really helps a lot. I got sick, and then I got well. And I think God intervened because I was so sick that I was thinking, can you get well from this? But anyway, have you ever had one of those, you know, I was on Tuesday afternoon, I started feeling bad. And then, you know, by 3.30, I told Bennett, I said, we're gonna play some golf.

Well, then I felt too bad to even play. So I was saying, it's too cold, Bennett, you know, and then I was just play PlayStation, I'll do something else with you. So then I'm like, I'm gonna go lie on that couch over there. And then it's like, bring me that blanket. And then next thing you know, I'm just shivering, never had one of those feelings, you're just shivering. And you just, you know, and every and then about three hours later, every single thing in my body hurt.

It started when my stomach was hurting. And but then it started to my head was hurting, my toes were hurting, every muscle was hurting. It was just I was just hurting until finally, you know, you get that feeling and you're just like, is this what it feels like to die?

Is this is this, you know, and I'm like, No, no, you got to get improved in order to die from this stage. I mean, this is like I am, I am in a bad way right here. And I want to say, you know, that, you know, I'm lying there. And yet somehow, though, I just start claiming God's Word, and I just start, you know, but you know, the fact of the matter is, you know, it gets a little bit hard sometimes to be claiming the Word and everything when all you can do is just you can't even talk, you're just trying to find a position where you don't hurt too bad. And so the best I could do was, you know, Ann comes in to check on me again. And, and I just said, Can you pray for me? So, you know, she being the mighty woman of God that she is, she said, Sure, and sat down at the other end of the couch near my feet. And that's the way we do is like, I believe in faith, you're healed by the stripes of Jesus, you stand on that side of the room, I stand over here, and we'll pray. But anyway, so she prays, and she prayed wonderfully. And I said that thing called, called a prayer partner, send him an email, tell him to start praying. And because it was, it was, now it's Tuesday night, and I wanted to teach on Wednesday night, we were starting our thing on Wednesday night, and I wanted to be there.

And, and, you know, I felt like I was being attacked, it was awful. And praise God, you know, I just, the thing kind of lingered some through the night, and in the morning, I just felt so much better. And by the afternoon, I was like, I'm gonna be there.

I'm gonna be teaching that Wednesday night. And so I'm really thankful. But the point of this being is that sometimes you get to a place where you have to be honest about it. I, it wasn't that I didn't intellectually believe that God could heal me. It was just, I was in, I was in a weakened condition. And I needed somebody to walk into the room who knew I wasn't dying.

You know, I mean, I didn't really think I was dying. But you know, I'm saying who knew that I was gonna, you know, it's like you walk in, it's like, oh, that's a fever, people get over fevers, and you're gonna get over this one, and I'll pray for you, you got more faith. So what I do is I just attach my faith to, I got a little bit of faith, I attach it to your level of faith.

And now we got more faith together. If you want to go into school of prayer, and really learn, find somebody that got more faith in you about it. If there's something, I mean, really, if you're sick, find the best thing to do, find somebody that has been healed.

If you want to pray for something, find somebody who's been healed, who knows that they know that they know that through prayer, God heals people. I'd like to pray with somebody like that, you know, and you just attach your faith to that. And so there's a principle at work there. Well, here's the principle. If you make Jesus Christ, your prayer partner, the most high God interceding on behalf of the saints, you are hooking up your prayer life with the source of all faith in the universe.

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 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're in the final days of this special offer being made available to you. 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. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of God. And he is the Word of God. He is pure faith. He is pure Word. And so you are hooking yourself right into the whole source and substance of all faith.

You can be assured this. God is not sitting up on his throne and Jesus is not up there wringing his hands, worried about your circumstances or anybody else's. He's sovereign over all creation through him. All things were made apart from him.

Nothing was made that has been made. He said, let there be light. And there was light. So he has full confidence about your situation. Why don't we take whatever faith we do have and hook it up to the Lord Jesus Christ? And how about next time you're praying about a situation or a difficulty or something for which you can see no way, you just say, Lord, I take my faith and I just join it in with the Lord Jesus. That's what it means to come in the name of the Lord Jesus. And you just begin to see, I may not have this much faith, but Jesus, you got all the faith.

Minister right now in this situation. And you just start getting the revelation of God about how to pray. That's part of the thing that's incredible.

But the other thing that's so incredible about it is that if you get spiritually connected with God in your prayer life, what you've done is you connected to an advocate that has far more knowledge and power and influence than you do. That's what the legal term is about here. It's like getting a really good lawyer in a situation. Sometimes you got to get a really good lawyer. And I try not to make lawyer jokes because there are also a lot of preacher jokes. And, um, and I got an older brother who is a lawyer.

I love my older brother, David. He's, he, he is, he was always from the time he was a little kid, he had a sense of fairness. He was the kid on the playground.

If something wasn't fair, he wanted to get it right. And he's always been that way. And I especially loved him ever since the time that I was a little kid and we went to a haunted house. Don't ever go to a haunted house, but I went to a haunted house, didn't know any better. And Frankenstein chased me around until I started crying. And, uh, my big brother got in between me and Frankenstein and told him to leave me alone. And I'll always love him for that, uh, ever to this day.

So I love my brother. Dave is extremely fair. And, uh, David's a, uh, a lawyer down in Charlotte and he does mainly, uh, you know, corporate kind of stuff. And so, uh, he was, when, when a lady in his church came to him some years ago, a lady named Mary and asked him a legal question, you know, he is a little reluctant to get involved because that's not, not generally what he does. And, you know, he knew the limits on his time and so forth. And, uh, but, but Mary came to him and said that she had bought her first house. Mary had a, a job with one of the crisis ministries in town, had a very humble salary and she'd bought her first house for $50,000. And it was a huge endeavor for her to do that. She bought it and, and, um, it was excited, you know, how the early days and weeks are getting a house and setting the pictures on the walls and so forth. But what she also discovered was that there was a huge water problem in the backyard. Uh, it like flood in the backyard and, and she was dismayed. Further, she was dismayed when she got a letter from the city saying that they were going to come in and do some kind of, uh, a new drainage back there and the new pipes, uh, there was going to be an assessment of a thousand dollars, um, that she was gonna have to pay and she didn't have it.

And she said, this doesn't seem fair that the, I think the previous owner hid this fact from me and, um, was that right? And David said, no, that wasn't right. And he said, I'll tell you what, he said, um, I'll, you know, you, you, you were sold the house under some fraudulent, uh, circumstance. And he said, I'll just write a letter. And he said, how about this? He says, a thousand dollars. He said, I'll write the, the seller, the previous owner, a letter, and ask them to pay 300 of the thousand.

And you, can you come up with 700? He said, which is well, find a way. So David says, I'll write a letter. He wrote the letter, um, and, uh, the previous seller, instead of writing the check for 300 and saying, okay, be done with it, had a lawyer, uh, write David back and say, no. So David went, now he realized, you know, this is going, this, I'm getting some time involved in this now.

And he knew that Mary wasn't going to be able to pay him anything for doing this. And, uh, but he said, all right, you know, he tried to contact again. And finally he just, he was in it and he said, there's nothing I can do. So I got to file a lawsuit. So he filed a lawsuit, uh, for, uh, $3,000 and, um, tried to settle and they wouldn't settle.

I said, no way. So the, the, the doggone thing went to trial. So now here's David. He started out, I'm going to write you a letter and now it is, he's in the courtroom. Well, it went really well, uh, for him because, uh, it was kind of obvious, you know, that, that, that, that there was a letter that had, you know, he had some letters down at the city that the man had sent down there saying, you know, vehemently, you got to do something about the water problem and all these protests.

So it was totally clear that he knew about it all. Um, he had, um, an appraiser come in who's, who testified that the house was worth $12,000 less than what it had been appraised for because this had been hidden about the water problem. He had a neighbor come in who said the water was so bad one day that he saw his beagle swimming in it. And it didn't take long for the jury to come back and award Mary $12,000.

It gets better. The other side said they're going to appeal. Now David's got all this time in it. Now he's getting mad, you know, and he's like, so he researches it further. He finds out that the man, you know, that sold the house was a real estate agent himself. And so there's a law that if it's a business transaction, not merely a residential sale like this, there's something that is in addition to the original fraud, that's called a deceptive act of commerce. And under certain circumstances, if you're found guilty of a deceptive act of commerce, it allows the damages to be tripled and you can appeal to get attorney's fees paid. And David told the other attorney, he said, if you appeal this, I'm going to tell you right now that I'm going to seek to have this be tried as a deceptive act of commerce and it could bring tremendous damage against your client and, and so forth. And they said, that's it, we're going to appeal. They went to the appellate court, the judge very quickly found in favor of the earlier court's decision and said it is a deceptive act of commerce, awarded Mary $36,000 and David's law firm was awarded $45,000 in legal fees.

Everywhere that's totally 100% true, Mary, in the midst of it, got a letter from the city that said the city council had discussed it and decided that they were going to let a certain bond referendum pay for the pipes and so there was no more assessment. The point of this is that on a good day at a good time, a good lawyer here on earth who knows how to work the thing and has a little bit more knowledge than somebody else can get a really good result. It's a good thing to have an advocate, but wonder if you had an advocate who is the risen Lord Jesus.

You have an advocate who speaks in your defense and it so happens that he is the author and finisher of your faith and it so happens that all things were made through him and as it happens, he is the Lord of all creation. So no matter what the accuser brings against you, no matter what trifling, no matter what accusations come, you can be assured that there's an advocate who's already interceding for you. So now I'm seeing my prayer life like this. I'm like little Mary coming to the lawyer and saying, this doesn't seem right. Could you do something about this?

Don't know exactly what the legal terminology would be or exactly how to get it, but could I sign up with you, my attorney, and partner with you to see if we could get something done about this? And I'm kind of seeing my prayer life more like that now, that I just got an advocate in Christ and instead of pretending like, well, I can come up with my own mind, all the things that I ought to pray about, how about this? I'm going to let my focus be abiding in Christ, making my requests known unto him, but so abiding in him that my spirit connected with his, that we have a communion together. And so I'm hooked up with the advocate who is right next to the father, who already has died for me and has all things at his disposal. Now that's a prayer life and you have that advocate. So I guess the lesson is you want to get some power in your prayer life. Become a prayer partner with Jesus.

Alan Wright and today's teaching on my prayer partner. 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 we will send you today's special offer.

We're in the final days of this special offer being made available to you. 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 having an advocate sitting at the right hand of the Father.

This is incredibly good news and hopefully some very freeing news for a lot of people today. I think so often we think of prayer as us sitting before God and trying to think up all these things to say or you know or tagging on if it be your will at the end as if you know somehow it's covering our bases and it ends up just being a very kind of weak and impotent feeling sort of prayer life. But Daniel, it changes my prayer life to think of Jesus, our advocate, one who died for us, who is interceding for us. There's one mediator between God and humanity is Jesus and he's praying for us. And therefore, when we pray by the leading of the Holy Spirit, we are connected in some mysterious way with Christ in that prayer. And I love the vision of Jesus and his advocacy because it causes me to have a new confidence and boldness in coming to the throne room of grace. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.