POWER OF PRAYER FOR IMPACT (2)

“IF YOU ABIDE in ME, and MY WORDS ABIDE in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you” – John 15:7

ABIDING is the secret to experiencing and manifesting the POWER of PRAYER for IMPACT: “IF YOU ABIDE in ME, and MY WORDS ABIDE in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit. So you will be My disciples” (Jh.15:7-8). The secret of the prayer of faith is the life of faith – the life that abides in Christ and in which His Words abide.

Prayer is both one of the means and one of the fruits of union with Christ. As a means, all the things of faith, all the pleadings of desire, all the yearnings after a fuller surrender, all the confessions of shortcoming, all the exercises in which the soul gives up self and clings to Christ, find their utterance in prayer.  As a fruit of the abiding, Prayer is one of the chief channels of Impact by which, through us as fellow workers with God, the blessings of Christ’s redemption are to be dispenses to the world.

Christ assured us that if we abide in Him, we will be Israels, having power with God and man. Ours will be the effectual, fervent prayer of the righteous man, availing much, like Elijah’s for ungodly Israel (Jam.5: 16-17). Such prayer will be the fruit of our abiding in Him and the means of bringing forth much fruit. The union with the Son of God is a life union; we are indeed one with Him – our prayers ascend as His prayer. It is because we abide in Him that we can ask what we will, and it is given to us.

Abiding in Christ and having His Words abide in us, teach us to pray following God’s Will. With the abiding in Christ, our self-will is kept down, and the thoughts and wishes of nature are brought into captivity to the thoughts of Christ. In promising to answer prayer, this was Christ’s one thought: “that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (Jh.14:13). In His intercession on earth (Jh.17), this was the one desire and plea; in His intercession in heaven, it is still His great object. As the Believer abides in Christ, the Saviour breaths this desire into him. The thought, “only the glory of God,” increasingly becomes the keynote of the life hidden in Christ. Abiding in Christ, the soul learns to desire, and spiritually discern what will give Glory to God.

Abiding in Christ keeps us in the place where the answer can be bestowed. Some believers pray earnestly for blessing, but when God comes looking for them to bless them, they are not to be found. Abiding in Christ is the place for receiving answers!