Praying Answered Prayer

Linda Rock
Jul 8, 2023
3 min read

Recently I have been receiving, as never before, zoom requests soliciting prayers for people with various conditions, most of which are life threatening. These have been different for me, not in terms of the asking for prayer or the number of prayer requests or any such. It has been different in terms of the nature of the prayer gathering – we are gathering on zoom and not face to face – and this is something that I have to learn. I’m sure that there are others as I, who have become so accustomed to meeting others face to face, in prayer meetings, prayer groups, prayer clusters and suchlike that were held for a bit by the, ‘cage and not the bird’, as it were. O how we can be held by traditions and what we are accustomed to. Only God the Holy Ghost can save us from such imprisonments.

We therefore approach our Heavenly Father, fully cognizant that without the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives, absolutely nothing we do for the Father, absolutely nothing we offer Him and absolutely no thoughts, no matter how noble and charitable we may think they are, will be accepted by Holy, Sovereign God.

We all can quote verbatim, what Jesus has revealed about worship and worshippers of Almighty Sovereign God. God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth. John 4: 24. Sadly, too many of us keep our old ways of thinking and acting, and as worshippers of the One True God, we take worship to be what we participate in on the Lord’s Sabbath or when we meet specially for such an activity. Yes, I use the word activity, for whether we want to accept it or not, going to Church worship services, on any and every day of the week, is one of our religious activities. What we have not been able to come to terms with is that worship is not what we do, but what is done in us, through the Spirit of God Himself. Worship is who we are and because we are worshippers, we worship. In the same way, prayer is worship, for prayer is of God, to God and must be in spirit and in truth.

Receive it or reject it, the fact is that no one worships God, who is Spirit, without Holy Spirit taking full charge of our lives. We are flesh and flesh and Spirit simply cannot be one. In other words, the highest, noblest, most well-intentioned and highly regarded human-inspired works, will never be or can ever be pleasing to God. He is Spirit and because we are flesh, nothing that is human-led or human-inspired will ever reach to God. God is Omniscient and in His Divine knowledge and wisdom, He has given each of us the Gift of the Holy Spirit to be our Abiding Indweller – teaching, admonishing, rewarding – so that our quickened lives, worship God in spirit and in truth.

It is in this freedom, where ‘cage’ does not hold us hostage, we approach this week - viewing, embracing, ingesting, living - answered prayer. This week provides all who truly want to know worship, in spirit and truth, with a prayer-veiling time, which is most extraordinary, sincere and totally out of the box of tradition. We are taken by faith, to a time, which has come to us as a type of Spiritual Zoom, to be with Jairus and Jesus, in a most unconventional place.