How should we pray?
We often receive prayers that people circulate on WhatsApp and Facebook; mostly addressing current affairs.
My concern with these prayers is what they say, and how they say it; so I want to address this in a series of devotionals on prayer.
Prayer is how we communicate with God, so it matters how we pray, as much as it does that we pray.
Christians must unite in prayer, and we must pray for God’s intervention in our society. Paul commands this in 1 Timothy. We do so, acknowledging that God already knows all our needs, operates according to His grand, eternal design, for His glory, and will not change His mind because of the intensity of our prayers – or because of the number of people who are praying.
Let’s look first at how we should not pray.
My first warning – think carefully when someone starts off their sound clip by saying “We must all pray for this urgently to…” (fill in the blanks). Is it really urgent that we all pray for it immediately?
We must pray correctly, not assuming rights and power that are not ours; or giving Satan power and authority that are not his.
So how do we recognise incorrect praying resulting from false teaching and false doctrines?
One way is to look at the prayer’s vocabulary. We are usually unaware of it when we speak, but language defines culture in a very real sense, and our words reflect our beliefs – and the beliefs of the person praying.
Who is in charge?
Jesus is. After his resurrection, Jesus declared the following: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me” (Matt. 28:16).
God is in control of everything. Governments rise and fall at His will. God willed the government we have; and all the individuals in it are under His complete control and authority. They can only take decisions that God permits.
Governments can do wrong and can contravene God’s law; but they cannot operate in conflict with God’s will, because God is sovereign, and they operate under Jesus’ authority.
We pray for our government as Paul says to Timothy, so that we can live in peace, for the sake of the spread of the gospel.
We pray for wise leaders that make good decisions. Most of all, we pray that God’s will is done. God’s will at any point in time may not be “good” (by our measure) for people in general, or believers in particular. That does not make it any less His will. Whatever He permits or initiates, serves His eternal purposes.
This does not mean we are fatalistic. That’s why we pray in the first place!
This means that “spiritual warfare” prayers that seek to bind Satan; or pray for God to defeat or limit his power over a specific place, area, government or individual; are wrong. Jesus has all authority everywhere.
Satan was comprehensively defeated by Jesus on the cross. He is not in charge anywhere. He operates only within the limits and under the authority God imposes on him.
Who Acts When We Pray?
When we pray, we should not be praying with I (or we) statements like: “I (we) declare”, “I (we) bind”, “I (we) overrule”, “I (we) rebuke”, “I (we) release”, or “I (we) smash….”
We do none of those things – God does them.
Word of faith teacher Andrew Wommack says: “our authority releases God’s power”. The only word I can think of to describe that statement is blasphemy. When we pray using language like that, we are praying “my will be done" not “thy will be done”. God releases His power, not us. He has the leash on us, not us on Him.
This kind of praying stems from word of faith false teaching, which claims that we have the divine ability to speak things into being. These teachers claim faith is a tangible force which we exercise to achieve our desired result. For example, if we want wealth, we simply speak it into being by faith.
This is of course utterly false.
If it were true, it would mean that we are God, which word of faith actually teaches, in those words. Or perhaps a Star Wars Jedi knight wielding the force - because this is mysticism, not biblical Christianity.
Their false theology is drawn from misinterpretation of verses like Matthew 18:18 Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
This verse has nothing to do with claiming things by faith, and everything to do with the role of the church in disciplining believers – the subject of Matthew 18.
Another verse they use is this one: Isaiah 45:11 “Thus saith the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker, Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me.” They claim – not that we command God - but that this means God wants us to “take our authority and command His power”.
This is misinterpretation. In the context, God questions the right of people to question him. Verse 9 says: “Woe to the one who argues with his Maker—” giving us the context of verse 11. Many translations render this verse with some variation of this: Thus says the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, and the one who formed him: “Ask me of things to come; will you command me concerning my children and the work of my hands? It is a question, not a statement.
Word of faith teaching is magical mysticism - words and faith have tangible power in and of themselves. This is not biblical and not how we should be praying.
Who Do We Address When We Pray?
We pray to God. We never pray to Satan and have no need to address him. The Bible never tells us to rebuke Satan, or to speak to him or to his demons.
Jude 1:9 says: But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.”
If the archangel Michael did not presume to overstep his authority and rebuke Satan, it is difficult to see how Christians can claim the right to do so.
We submit ourselves to God and when we resist the devil, which we do with the full armour of God, he will flee from us: James 4:7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
We do not rebuke Satan or his demons, bind them, or overrule them, any more than the archangel Michael did.
The Blood of Christ
Bible references to the blood of Christ, usually refer to His death on the cross. We do not find “pleading the blood” of Christ, or “covering ourselves with the blood” in Scripture. This is also word of faith teaching. Christ defeated Satan with His blood sacrifice when He died and rose again. We have already been delivered (past tense) from the power of darkness and are part of His kingdom. We do not need to use the blood of Christ to announce to the forces of evil that they are powerless, which is usually the purpose of those phrases. Christ did that on the cross.
What Does This Mean for Me?
When someone forwards a prayer to you on social media, take some time to apply these principles to the prayer. This will help you to decide whether the prayer is biblical, whether it is worth sharing, and whether you should even be listening to it, much less praying it, rather than just deleting it.
