You Have to Know God

1986

The first week we studied about the position of prayer in God’s eyes. It was a pretty important thing because it gives you an understanding that prayer isn’t just something that you do to somehow help you to mentally escape from anxiety or anything like that, but it actually has a place in the working of the universe. In God’s plan for His creation prayer was a very important facet of that and shouldn’t be taken lightly at all. it’s very important.

First of all: Prerequisites for prayer. I just want to maybe iron in and cement in some things, many of which you already know about prayer. I think we all realize that you can know everything there is to know about prayer, be an expert in a Biblical sense about what the Bible says about prayer, you can even pray an hour a day, and yet go your whole life and never see a supernatural answer to a prayer other than something that statistically could have happened to anybody anytime. Would you agree that that’s possible? To never see the supernatural workings of God even though Biblically you know everything there is to know about prayer and you pray all the time.

Question: “Do you mean like knowledge, not Spirit, knowing all those things”)

That’s really what I’m saying. You can have a knowledge, Peter said in 2 Peter 1, and yet be unproductive and unfruitful in that knowledge. So knowledge in itself isn’t the key. I think you know whether you have seen something that can be explained in no other way except by the supernatural Hand of God. Now you know whether you have seen that in your life or whether it’s just something that might have happened anyway, if you flipped a coin it might have come out that way. And that’s what I want to help prepare you to do is to see those things. I’ve got a manila file folder at home where I just started recording on the inside in a very informal way of the things that just were beyond anything that could have been explained by chance. I’m on the back side of that file folder now still going on those things. I didn’t used to know about that. I went for probably six years as a Christian without really seeing anything like that, and I want to share some of the differences with you. Even though I knew how to pray and I prayed before, there wasn’t any mark—there was no real fruit that that was successful prayer.

The explanation that I can give best about that is kind of like rabbit hunting. I went rabbit hunting in Tennessee a few times with some folks. We went back into the woods and let these little doggies go, those cutest little things you hear yelping out in the distance. If you’ve ever done that, you know how much fun that is. But I went out there and I had basically the same kind of clothes on that the other guys did. I had these orange mittens with the hole in them for the trigger for the gun. I had as good a gun as anybody did, and I could shoot tin cans with the best of them. And yet for every ten rabbits that everybody else got, I got none. I had to ask myself why that was. I could say, “Well that’s because I really believe in the command, ‘Thou shall not kill,’ and so I just refuse to.” They were sitting there waiting for me to do it, and I wouldn’t do it. But that’s not really a very good explanation. I certainly had all the right gear to get the job done, and the rabbits were definitely out there. But the difference was that I had the equipment, but they knew rabbits. See there was a big difference. They knew how that thing was going to circle around. Inevitably they would be standing right where that rabbit was going to cross by, and I would be 50 yards away and never see it. They did that time after time after time. They knew how to kick a bush and get one to come out. They knew which bushes to kick. They could read tracks. They knew where the holes were. I don’t know how they knew those things. But the difference was that I had all the right equipment, I had all the gear, but they knew rabbits.

That’s one of the very essential things about prayer. You can have all the right equipment, to know intellectually the right things, the right ways to pray. Things like we shared last week on the chalkboard. You can know all of those things—know the nuts and bolts, but going hunting isn’t going to be enough. You have to know God. You not only have to know about how to pray, but you have to know God Himself. If you’re going to come to God in prayer, you’ve got to do it on His terms. You don’t tell the rabbit, “Listen, I’m out here waiting for you. You’ve got to play the game my way.” You have to do it on their terms because they are not following your instructions. You have to be where they are. And that’s really what I want to say about prayer—is that you need to know God, and you need to pray on His terms if you really want to see an answer to prayer other than just feeling a little bit better after you get done praying and being very poetic about it. That’s not really what prayer is. It’s a supernatural weapon that has Divine power to demolish satan’s strongholds. It’s not just a poetic kind of thing.