Page 56 - The Importance of Prayer Student Textbook

God wants you to be healthy. You just need to confess and believe for it.
God wants you to be wealthy. You just need to confess and believe for it.
God wants your life to be comfortable and easy. Your confession controls your outcomes.
God wants you to have everything you need. Your negativity is your problem.
God already sent Jesus to die for your abundant life. Your faith is your problem.

A second problem is that some people tell God what He must do. They declare something by faith and
obligate God to obey their commands. We must remember that God is God, and no man tells God what
to do. He is our sovereign master and we must obey Him. He certainly does not have to obey us! It is
the height of audacity to command God to do something that we declare.

Praying in The Spirit

There has been much discussion amongst Christian writers about the proper interpretation of what,
praying in the spirit means. Ephesians 6:18 Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit
and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. Jude 1:20 Beloved, building
yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit. I Corinthians 14:14-17For if I pray in

a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. So, what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I
will also pray with my understanding; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my understanding.
Otherwise when you are praising God in the Spirit, how can someone else, who is now put in the position
of an inquirer, say “Amen” to your thanksgiving, since they do not know what you are saying? You are
giving thanks well enough, but no one else is edified.

To pray in the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, and worship in the Spirit (In Spirit and truth, John 4:24) is to come
before the Lord according to His appointed means, that is through the One whom the Spirit magnifies,
the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 8:26-28), depending on His revealed Word and pleading as a lesser
creature to our glorious Creator. The Holy Spirit also takes our prayers and perfects them before the
Almighty (Romans 8:26). The Holy Spirit prays within us when we cannot utter a word (Again, Romans
8:26). To pray in the Holy Spirit is to also build unity in the body of Christ. When you are praying in
submission to the Lord God and His Christ, the Holy Spirit within you will testify to Himself in His Word,
in your prayers, and even in those other believers praying with you. These things and so much more are
ignited by the dynamite of praying in the Spirit J. Oswald Sanders wrote in Prayer Power Unlimited:
“Here is the secret of prevailing prayer, to pray under a direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, whose
petitions for us and through us are always according to the Divine purpose, and hence certain of
answer”. John Bunyan in How To Pray In The Spirit defined praying in the Spirit this way, “Prayer is a
sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God, through Christ, in the strength
and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God promised, or according to the word of God, for
the good of the church, with submission in faith to the will of God”.

In Wayne Grudem’s book on Systematic Theology he chose to write on this subject. This subject was
ignored in four other systematic theology books I have. In footnote 45 on page 1073 he wrote, “I am not
here to arguing that speaking in tongues in Acts 2 was a different phenomenon from the speaking in
tongues that Paul discusses in I Corinthians 14. I am simply saying that the phrase “speaking in tongues”
in Acts 2 and I Corinthians 14 refers to speech in syllables not understood by the speaker but
understood by God, to whom this speech is directed. In Acts 2 this happened to be speech in known
human languages that had not been learned by the speakers, whereas in I Corinthians 14 the speech
may have been in unknown human languages, or in angelic languages or in some specialized kind of

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