Not a Spiritual Wishing Well

1986

Based on that and certainly you have enough evidence in your own life to know that satan is hard at work to destroy the building of the Kingdom, the expansion of the borders of God. You’ve seen enough of that to know that that’s true, but due to the nature of the war it’s my objective and certainly must be any teacher’s objective to equip the saints for the works of the ministry—to equip the saints with spiritual weaponry, supernatural weapons that can demolish satan’s strongholds. And the one we’ve talked about specifically is prayer.

We’ve got to realize the importance of that. That it is very important. It’s not just some insurance policy or a last resort kind of thing of getting out of trouble—which is what it’s mocked and made out to be. When you get in a lot of trouble, when you can’t bail yourself out, well, at least get on your knees and pray about it, right? Isn’t that the way you see it in the movies and things? Prayer is not a psychological escape mechanism that’s just used to sort of subdue those terrible thoughts that we have in our minds, and to remove our anxieties. That’s not what God intended it to be—an escape mechanism. Prayer cannot be used just to remove guilt, and it’s used that way some times. Like, for instance, a person will confess sin and will say, “Yes, Father, I really have sinned,” and pray about sin and maybe even cry over it, but refuse to change their lives. Now, there’s no power in prayer for a person like that. If you’re not willing to forsake sin, then confessing it is a mockery. And it’s actually blasphemy in the eyes of God. So that’s not what prayer is about.

Prayer is not a spiritual wishing well where we choose our wildest dreams. Some of you have been in an Amway presentation where they set up the chalkboard (I see a lot of smiles) and they write up, “Okay, what do you want? What do you want? What’s your wildest dream?” But that’s really not what prayer is supposed to be, is a spiritual wishing well. But rather, it’s by God. It’s a supernatural weapon for the purpose of tying up the strong man in order to take his possessions—in order to bind up the strong man and demolish satan’s strongholds. “…those people that satan has taken captive to do his will,” the end of 2Timothy chapter 2. We can demolish those strongholds.