The Power of Prayer & Your Purpose From God

Priscilla Shirer on TBN’s Praise to speak about the importance and power of prayer and how God is fulfilling a greater purpose than you could ever imagine. Listen as she teaches the importance of wearing the armor of God and trusting that God has you where you’re meant to be today, and will lead you to where you’re meant to be for your future. Through prayer, your answers will be fulfilled!

Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week..

Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

You want the manifested presence of God.
I’m talking about where you can look back over your circumstances and realize that his fingerprints were all throughout that thing.
I’m talking about where you can see footprints in the sand as you actually recognize that God was walking beside you the way I’m talking about what other people call coincidence encounters.
You see the sovereign hand of God that was aligning your footsteps and setting you in the right place at the exact right time, the manifest presence of God, I wanna submit to you that Jesus is there in this difficult moment in your marriage, in this trying moment in your finances, in this struggle on your job, in this uh difficulty in this relationship, you’re rubbing corners with your boss or your spouse or this struggle you’re having on your university campus or in your high school campus this hard time that you were having.
He is there. He just may have come in the package you don’t prefer.
And that oftentimes the fingerprints of God are not recognized, not because he’s not there.
It is just because the expectation we have set up about what he looks like and how he will speak and how he will move the prayer request, the solution that he will bring, doesn’t align with the prayer requests that we have prayed.
We have boxed God into the way we want him to answer.
Instead of believing that his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts as high as the heavens are above the earth.
That’s how high His thoughts are above our own.
And so we box God in when we say Lord answer my request in this particular way, do you know that you limit not God?
But you limit that? I limit our experience of God. When we say Lord answer my request exactly this way.
I have learned to pray here, Lord is my request. You said that I can make it known.
Here’s how I would like to see you move in my circumstance.
Thank you Lord, that I can come boldly and make my request known. So I’ve made my request.
But at the end of that prayer, I’ve learned to pray, Lord do it or do something better?
Because do you know there are categories of options that our brain doesn’t even know are available and accessible to us.
And if we limit God to what we can think and what we see as the way we have not even considered the categories of opportunity that this divine holy Almighty being has accessible to Him.
Y’all. He’s not just thinking about you.
He’s thinking about your Children and your grandchildren and your great grandchildren and those that are to come and how his kingdom purposes are gonna be outworked in this generation.
And so on this occasion, the Messiah shows up and nobody recognizes him except somebody say, accept except a guy named Simeon.
He had been told and promised just like we have that he would see the manifest presence of God.
He’d been told it. He’d been promised just like we’ve been promised because of our relationship with God through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit in dwelling us that we will see the fingerprints of God working in our lives.
This is called the manifest presence of God. It is unique to omnipresence.
Omnipresence means that God is everywhere all at the same time.
I’m so grateful for God’s omnipresence because God’s omnipresence means that when I fly back to Dallas, where I live, when my new friends that I just met from Uganda, fly back to where they live.
Um that when you all fly back to where ever it is, you’ve come from whether all over different areas of California or afar, it means that no matter where we go, He is as much with me as He is with you because He is omnipresent.
But if you’re anything like me, you’re grateful for his omni presence. But you want more than that.
You want the manifested presence of God.
I’m talking about where you can look back over your circumstances and realize that his fingerprints were all throughout that thing.
I’m talking about where you can see footprints in the sand as you actually recognize that God was walking beside you the whole way.
I’m talking about what other people call coincidence encounters.
You see the sovereign hand of God that was aligning your footsteps and setting you in the right place at the exact right time, the manifest presence of God.
I wanted to know what made Simian’s eyes open to recognize what nobody else in this scenario did.
I figured whatever opened up his eyes might open up our eyes as well. Are you ready?
Three things that I wanna point out to you?
It says in verse 26 about Simeon, it says that it had been actually verse 25. I wanna start there.
There was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simian. He was righteous, devout looking for the consolation of Israel.
We could spend a whole lot of time in those three.
But here’s where I want to hear the Holy Spirit was upon him.
The Holy Spirit was upon him.
It says that he came into the temple verse 27 in the spirit.
Verse 26 says it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit.
Look at the presence of the Holy Spirit permeating this text.
Look at how the author has over and over and over again.
Highlighted the work of the Holy spirit in opening up Simeon’s eyes to be able to recognize the manifested presence of God before him in the person of Jesus Christ.
Luke. Here he is just in the second chapter of this book.
And by the way, just in these first two chapters, he has already alluded to the spirit 10 times.
The work of God’s spirit is so powerful and so needful to a fruitful experience in the life of the, of the believer that even before the book of Acts, even before Pentecost, even before the spirit has come, Luke points out the movement of the spirit here in the life of Simian.
This shows you how important the spirit’s work is how critical it is to making sure that your spiritual senses, your spiritual radar is heightened so that you can detect the presence of God.
The Holy Spirit was upon him. Now, I want you to see the work of God’s spirit.
This is just the first uh characteristic of Simian, but I wanna just just take some time for just a few moments on it.
The work of God’s spirit is so important. We, it deserves a little bit of our attention. Here.
There are three ways that the Holy Spirit is described as relating to Simian in these few verses, just just a few ways that the Holy Spirit relates to Simeon in these few verses.
The first thing it says is that the Holy Spirit was upon him.
Now, listen I want you to know that if you have placed faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit lives on the inside of you.
Ephesians chapter one says that the moment you believe you received the Holy Spirit, you were sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise.
I want you to know that at the moment you became a believer in Jesus Christ, you received the most incredible gift you will ever receive this side of eternity.
And that is the very presence of God living on the inside of you.
The Holy Spirit is not a ghost or a wind or a fire or a dove.
He is often symbol by those things, but don’t minimize him. That ain’t who he is.
The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity.
Not third because he is least in value just third because he’s the last to be revealed to us in the pages of scripture.
But all of the power, all of the glory, all of the authority, all of the grandeur of God, the father is in the person of the Holy Spirit, which means if you’re a believer in the Holy Spirit lives in you, that means all of the grandeur and all of the greatness, all of the authority of God himself now lives on the inside of you.
So if you are a believer, you have the Holy Spirit, you are not waiting on more of the Holy Spirit, all of the Holy Spirit, you ever gonna get.
You got the moment you got saved.
Now, you do need to be filled by God’s spirit so that his influence in your life grows and grows so that you operate under the gifting of the spirit so that you can live according to the fruit of the spirit.
That means living beyond your natural capacity.
It means when your patience runs out, you can still have more patience with that person.
It means when gentleness has long since left the building, you still find you got a little gentleness for that person.
When self discipline, I mean, you just don’t know, have no more self discipline in that area.
We need the fruit of God’s spirit.
So we need to be filled by the spirit as we yield the human obedience, we are filled, which means He influences us more.
Our mind is renewed and transformed. We are sanctified into the image of Christ Jesus.
So the Holy Spirit is in you, but send me in his relationship with the spirit is not described in that way.
It doesn’t say that the spirit was in Him.
It says that the Holy Spirit was on Him, which means there is a difference between the spirit being in you and the spirit resting on you.
Listen to me the gift of God’s spirit in you.
Oh This brings tears to my eyes, the gift of God’s spirit in you.
He will never leave you nor forsake you.
There is nothing you can do to work yourself out of a relationship with the Holy Spirit. Ok?
But Him being on you, you got to live a life.
I wanna live a life that is a magnet for the presence of God to rest on me.
We can sit in this conference and until we’re blue in the face and applaud the truths of God and say amen to the truth of God.
But if we leave this room and live in a way that is out of alignment with the truth of God, we will not have the spirit resting on.
If you want the mark of God’s presence on you.
I’m talking about where other people can see you operating in your gift moving about in the assignments that you have been given, where they can just see there’s a unique favor on your life toward that particular task, that particular endeavor, where you are marked by something that gives you favor, that gives you His grace for a particular area of your life, then you must live.
I must choose to live in a way that honors God so that God’s presence can rest upon us because He will not force himself on you.
He offers you this resting of his presence and his grace upon your life.
If you will choose to live in a way that does not uh disturb His presence that does not keep Him from being able to be near you because you have chosen here, it is to be holy dude and I were sitting together on a airplane and he was seated over the wing, our seats were directly over the wing of the airplane.
And so he was sort of just looking out at the wing of the plane and there we were suspended in mid air flying to our destination.
And I could tell he was mesmerized by this whole concept that this tube of steel is in the air holding us up and that um this, this wing is connected to the plane.
He was sort of just dissecting this entire, this entire situation.
And as he looked over the wing, he looked back at me and said, mom, how do they get that wing on this plane?
And I said, buddy, I gotta be honest with you, I have no idea.
I have no idea how they get that, that wing on the plane.
I don’t know how it works, but I have an idea for you, Jude.
You have an uncle, their dad’s brother, Uncle Vaugh. He works in the airline industry.
He actually works in the business where they, they make all the veins and the wiring that connects the different parts of the aircraft.
So I saw this as a teachable moment.
I said, you should talk to your uncle Vaugh when we get home.
It’d be a great opportunity for you to learn something.
And then I said to him, you know, what you can be, whatever you wanna be when you grow up to do, you know that you can do whatever you wanna do.
Like if you wanna make airplanes like your Uncle Vaugh, when you grow up, you can so totally do that if you’d like to.
And as I said that to him, I said, buddy, you can be anything, you wanna be in your life, anything you wanna do, you can do it.
He looked back at me and he said, mom, I don’t wanna do what Uncle Vaugh does when I grow up, I wanna do what you do when I grow up.
You know, it’s one of those moments where you’re just thinking, baby, what do you want?
Whatever you want, I’m gonna give it to you.
Oh but wait for it because I looked back at him and said, buddy, what does mama do now?
I had expectations about what his answer was going to be. At least some framework about how he might respond.
Lord. I’d love to or mom. I’d love to share the Lord with people. Mom. I’d like to write mom.
I would like to do a, a myriad of different things. Maybe that he could have said.
But he looked back and he said, he said, mom, I want to do nothing just like you, you do nothing all day, every day, you do nothing.
I said, buddy, you see how like the clothes you’re wearing right now are clean.
How do you think that they actually get clean? He said, well, that’s just like washing. That’s no big deal.
I said, but you eat every day, you eat actual food. How do you think it gets cooked?
And he said that’s what moms do. That’s no big deal.
And I said, but, you know, every now and then there’s a book or there might be a Bible study.
There’s even, there was a little film, a little movie.
You remember it spent, we spent like three months making that, that what do you think I’m doing?
He’s like you just sitting behind the computer all day, just doing it. You’re doing nothing.
I laughed.
And then I thought in that moment right after the conversation, how much that is like my relationship with the Lord.
In fact, there was confirmation of that because the very next day and I only share this with you to make this point.
But the very next day after that conversation with Jude, my publisher sent me an email.
They sent an email to tell me about something that they know.
I never know because I’m keeping up with three sons.
They said, Priscilla, we just want to let you know that fervent, a little book that I had written.
We want you to know that it’s on the New York Times best seller list.
It actually won a few awards.
They said that to me in the email and all I could do when I looked at it was chuckle because it was just the day before that my son said to me that when I was doing to him to what looked like and amounted to nothing.
That is exactly when I was crafting something that hopefully would be a blessing to people’s lives.
And the Holy Spirit said to me that’s just like you and me, Priscilla because I’m behind the scenes orchestrating and crafting the chapters of your story.
All the while you think I’m doing nothing, you point an accusatory finger at me wondering where I am and why I’m not hearing your request and why I’m not moving in the way that you would like me to move.
You’re assuming that I’m sitting back passively ignoring you where all the while I am busy making a story out of your life, the likes of which you can’t imagine.
I can’t to encourage somebody today that there’s a chapter that is being written right now with your story.
I’m talking about right now in that difficulty right now, in that valley year of your marriage right now, in that trouble in your finances, that difficulty on your job, that hardship with your coworker.
I’m talking about that one coworker.
The one that if she says one more thing to you, you go knock her out. That one.
There is a chapter. He is crafting a manuscript.
He’s writing that one day when we see him face to face we’re going to see the story that he was telling.
And every single crown we get, we’re going to turn around and place it right back at his feet and say thank you Lord for this privilege that we had to live a life, a life in relationship with you.
And so even with these hardships and even with these hurts, we pray and we pray in gratitude, we pray in gratefulness in advance, thanking him for the answer that he will give us that is simultaneous to what we’ve asked for or the answer that is so far beyond our capacity to even comprehend and pray that we trust him for something that, that has so much generational ripple effect.
The likes of which we may never see in our grandchildren and our great grandchildren and our great great grandchildren.
I’m so glad for the prayers of a grandmother and a great grandmother and grandfather in my life who prayed himself that y’all, they didn’t get to see the fruit of their prayer.
But how glad I am that they trusted him to do what they were asking or something better.
And it occurred to me that while I did value prayer, I had neglected intentionality with prayer.
Um being strategic in prayer, actually trying to detect where you see the enemy’s fingerprints at um at kind of his handiwork, meddling in your life.
Um where you anticipate, he might want to take advantage of a weakness or a or a, a bit of divisiveness.
Um and just being mindful of that so that when we pray, we’re not just randomly saying words that we’ve heard all along or words that we’ve kind of memorized along the way or words that are comfortable to us.
But we’re actually um praying in a way that is targeted.
It’s kind of exactly what you described a few moments doing the work to find the promises of God that actually apply and everything that we intentional prayer.
Um And then writing it down, sometimes we need to write our prayers down only because it keeps us focused.
It reminds us what we praying about. You know.
So when it’s posted there in that war room and you come back in there day after day, you’re reminded, this is your prayer.
This is where you’re focusing your um your prayer life on and, and until I see an answer, I’m gonna keep praying this prayer.
It also gives you a great track record with God because then when God does answer, you can see that date at the top of that page of when you started praying that and then you’ll be able to put a date down of when God answered.
However, in his sovereignty, he chose to what a great track record, not just for you but your grandchildren and your great grandchildren to see how grandmama or uh grandpa prayed and believed that God would answer.
I think the thing I loved about uh you know, even and the prayer because in Ephesians six, it talks about the armor, you know, which we’re familiar with.
But then prayer is, yeah, that’s right. Kicks into to that sword.
It, it’s, and it’s not the, the, the prayer. That’s oh God, why, you know the whining?
I mean, you can do that for a minute because we all need to whine for a minute.
The complaining side, you can complain to God because the psalms, David complained for a bit.
I mean, you know, he went, he went on a journey with God.
He he was in and real with his pain and agony before God.
And so there’s gotta be a rising and there has to be a point where you, that’s the thing.
So at some point, yes, do the complaining.
But at some point, you have to begin speaking the truth of what God has to say about your marriage, about your health and about your family, about reconciliation.
And I just remember even that for me with um just some situations and you know, family and extended family that was hard.
It was so hard and, and I remember moments of, you know, the complaining before God because of course, I was perfect and they were the problem.
Well, everybody else needs to change. Yes, they would, it would really help out my life totally.
Um Then, but so I, you know, complained but then I started, you know, talking about pulling out the scriptures that talked about unity and reconciliation and, and together and faithfulness and just declaring that.
And I’ve seen God do what only he could do in the lives of people.
I mean, I saw it in my health, but I also have also seen in relationships with people.
And so I just think that that if, if people understood more about the power, you know, some people say, well, all I can do is pray.
No, no, that’s not all that’s the, that’s the thing to do, right?
Is, is 2nd 2nd chronicle 7, 14, if my people, right, who are called by my name, humble themselves and pray right, then he’s gonna heal our land.
We’re too busy complaining about our land and our government and all that’s happening. It’s like, well, you can complain.
But if you prayed as much as you complained, maybe we would see something different.
And you know what if I were your enemy? What I’d want to do is devalue in your mind.
The potency of what I know to be the most powerful weapon you have against me.
So he’s made our churches focus on being a house of great programs or a house of great preaching and a house of great singing when they’re supposed to be a house of prayer because it’s the prayer that pushes back the kingdom of darkness.
So if I were the enemy, that’s exactly what I do I devalue.
What I knew was the most potent weapon that you had in your arsenal against me.
So we do everything first except pray, pray.
And so for you, uh personally, so how do you, when do you, when do you pray?
Are you late at night person? Are you the middle of the day person? Are you?
Well, I born at you first of all, lest anyone think that my life is, you know, I’m up on a mountain top praying and God all day.
That’s right. Um My life is very much like everybody else’s that. It’s just laundries and laundering kids.
And it’s kind of that thing where, you know, once your feet hit the floor in the morning is over, it’s just full on for the rest of the day, right?
And so um I have this ongoing uh actually part of my prayer is Lord, would you continue to help me to prioritize this in my life?
Because it can so easily kind of get pushed off of the, that that position of priority.
So I just say, Lord, I need you to stir, I don’t wanna manufacture passion.
I want you to stir in me a passion to where I don’t wanna go a day without prioritizing prayer and then hearing back from you listening to you through the scriptures.
And so I try to do that in the morning because it seems like that’s the best time if I wait till the end of the day, I’m, it, it ain’t gonna happen.
No, that’s the same with me. No.
If I don’t, if in the morning, if I, if it doesn’t happen then, yeah, then it just gets, it’s like if it doesn’t happen just the very first time I know then once you get going, it’s, it’s true.
But I will say I learned a bit from Brother Lawrence that, you know, age old saint from that book practicing the presence of God.
Um That really just gives us freedom, lifts that burden off of us, of feeling like if we don’t have an hour to spend with the Lord at the beginning of the day, that it’s a waste of time to practice God’s presence all day long.
So my kids are a little bit older now, but I went through a season four or 56 years there where I would just write down scripture verse on a three by five card, the same one on five different cards maybe.
And I’d put one on the bathroom mirror where I’d be washing little hands all day.
One where I was gonna be doing the dishes, one where I was folding clothes, one near the sandbox outside.
And I just would have the same verse for like two weeks.
So everywhere I went, I was just running into this verse.
And by the time I got to the end of the day, not only had me and the Lord talked about this one verse a lot.
Not only was it inscribed on my heart, but it became God’s word to me.
It became um something that really there was life in it.
It wasn’t just a verse I’d learned there was life in it because me and God been talking all day long for a couple of weeks about the sentiments that he’d um inscribed in this, in this passage of scripture.
So I think that idea of practicing the presence of God.
Um It takes that guilt off of, I didn’t have my quiet time and it didn’t look like this and it didn’t fit in a comfortable little box.
Well, look, do it, however, you gotta do it, practice his presence all day long. How do we do that?
Well, number one, by being creative with how you can feed yourself on his word.
So my sister, five kids, she’s got this little clip on our dashboard.
She’ll do the same thing, write a three by five card down with scripture and she puts it in that clip.
And so, you know, running errands for two hours every day, trying to get kids to soccer practice and everything.
She’s just running face to face um in face to face with this, with this verse over and over throughout the scriptures.
When things come up in the middle of the day that are problems you might call a girlfriend about, you might, you can still call her.
But also call on God, just ask him about it.
Ask him about what scripture verse applies to this particular uh circumstance.
How would he want to lead and guide you?
And you’ll be amazed how you’ll begin to see the encounters that you have the circumstances that align the little beckonings and convictions of God’s spirit.
How they all begin to work together to help you to, to realize you actually are hearing God’s voice and seeing His providence as He steers you in the direction of His will for your life.