Mark 11:24 – “That’s why I urge you to pray for absolutely everything, ranging from small to large. Include everything as you embrace this God-life, and you’ll get God’s everything.”
- Prayer is not learned in a classroom but in the closet
E M Bounds explains, “Praying is the best school in which to learn to pray, prayer is the best dictionary to define the art and nature of praying.”
Hope MacDonald in her book, discovering how to pray said, “We can read all the books that have ever been written about prayer, but until we actually choose by an act of our will, to pray, we will never learn.”
1. Prayer will help Christians everywhere fulfill the Great Commission
1500 new converts per day reaching 2 billion un-evangelized persons would take 4,000 years with zero population growth
2. Prayer will help unify Christians for this task of world Evangelization
While lots of things can and do divide the church, prayer is not one of them. Prayer brings us together from diverse backgrounds, if we can learn to pray together, we can learn to work together.
3. Prayer will take us to new personal levels of our spiritual journey
Charles H. Spurgeon preached Spirit anointed sermons backed by hours of prayer. He said, “In the ark of salvation we find a lower, second and third story; all are in the ark but all are not in the same story. Most Christians, as to the river of experience, are only up to the ankles; some other have waded until the stream is up to the knees; a few find chest (breast) –high; and but a few—oh! How few—find it a river to swim in, the bottom of which they cannot touch.”
4. Prayer reaches everywhere for every need
“There is no other item as universally available to mankind as prayer. Jonah prayed from the belly of a fish. We teach the importance of prayer because its power is far-reaching and may penetrate where people cannot go.
5. Prayer will help Christians zero in on the supreme task of the church
Supreme task of the CHURCH is the conversion of lost souls!
Dr. R. A. Torrey said, “We live in a day characterized by the multiplication of man’s machinery and the diminution of God’s power. The great cry of our day is work, work, work, organize, organize, give us some new society, tell us some new methods, devise some new machinery: but the great need of our day is prayer, more prayer and better prayer.”
6. The experiences of millions of praying Christians is proof that prayer works.
Prayer is effectual and makes a difference in the destinies of men and nations.