“God’s Private Number”

 

BIBLE READING: Jeremiah 32-34


                One of the greatest invitations to prayer ever given to anyone was spoken to Jeremiah when he was in prison for preaching the truth. God said: “Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” (Jeremiah 33:3). God mercifully spoke to him in his distress with both a command and an invitation. Truthfully, It Is a Command! God takes the initiative: “Call unto Me.” Jesus said, “Men ought always to pray.” Paul said, “Pray without ceasing.” God says to Jeremiah, “Call Me!”

                Have you ever had an important person give you a card with their unlisted number on it and say, “Call me”? If someone important gives you his private number, that’s a great privilege. Almighty God came to Jeremiah and did just that: Jeremiah 33:3. These verses express the importance of the Person Who spoke to Jeremiah:

            “Ah, Lord GOD! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you. You show steadfast love to thousands, but you repay the guilt of fathers to their children after them, O great and mighty God, whose name is the LORD of hosts, great in counsel and mighty in deed, whose eyes are open to all the ways of the children of man, rewarding each one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds.”

                                                                                                                                                                -Jeremiah 32:17-19

                And like Jeremiah, we have His personal number. He gave us His card, saying, “There it is. And I want you to call Me.” There’s not one of us who cannot contact heaven. Never say in a situation, “There’s nothing I can do.” You can pray.  Every failure in our lives, when properly analyzed, is a prayer failure. There’s not a single sin in our lives that proper prayer would not have avoided, not a need prayer cannot meet. It’s our greatest source of untapped power! Our spiritual lives will not rise above our prayer lives. We must learn to pray. When we don’t pray, we deny ourselves an incredible privilege. I want to tell you ten things that help me to pray.

Ten Little Lessons I’ve Learned About Prayer

#1:          Make prayer a habit. When you fail, start over, day by day by day, until prayer becomes a habit.

#2:          Designate a time and place for prayer where you regularly go to pray.

#3:          Make that time and place the most optimum for you. Find the time when your mind is the   

                keenest, your attention strongest.

#4:          Take some things with you: your Bible, notebook, pen and devotional materials. It would be                           unthinkable for me to have a quiet time without a Bible and notebook. The weakest ink is

                better than the      best memory.

#5:          Begin by reading God’s Word. Don’t pray, then read the Bible. Read the Bible, then pray. What  

                God says to you is more important than what you say to God. Your prayer will be enlivened

                and instructed when you get into the Word of God.

#6:          Learn to pray about things all through the day. “Pray without ceasing.”

#7:          Keep a record of your requests and answered prayers. I keep a journal where I enter requests.

                The other day I decided to look back about ten years. I was incredibly blessed to see how many

                prayers God has answered. A prayer journal will increase your faith.

#8:          Put on the whole armor of God. Prayer is warfare. All the artillery of hell will come against you

                 when you pray. The doorbell rings, you get sleepy, your mind wanders. You must put on the

                 whole armor of God.

#9:          If you’re by yourself, pray out loud. If your mind is like mine, it wants to wander when you

                 pray. There’s something about vocalizing your prayers that keeps your mind from wandering.

#10:        If your mind wanders, pray about that thing. Thoughts will come to you like, I must remember

                that I need to do this. Here’s a secret that works wonderfully. If the thing drawing your

                attention away from your prayer is that important, evidently, it’s really on your mind, so pray

                about it. The thing distracting me becomes the focal point of my prayer. Then return to your

                original prayer.

        God can do anything He wishes. There’s no prayer too hard for God to answer, no problem too big to solve, no person too lost to save, no promise too difficult to keep. Nothing lies outside the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.  Prayer is your guided missile. It can be fired from any spot. It travels undetected at the speed of thought. It hits the target every time. And if you don’t see the answer right away, remember it can have delayed detonation. Satan has no defense against your prayers. There is no anti-prayer missile. God promises, “Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” — things exceedingly abundantly above all that we can ask or think.                                                                                                                       -Adrian Rogers

                                                                                                               

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