I believe one of the greatest revelations any of us as Christians can ever receive is that we cannot produce what God wants to produce through our prayer lives without the help of the Holy Spirit.
It’s impossible. There’s simply too much we don’t know!
We see problems all around us, but in most instances, we have no idea what’s causing them or what conditions need to be changed in order to solve them. We see the Devil causing trouble in the world, but we don’t understand exactly what he’s up to and how to pray against it. We’d like to get out ahead of him by praying about the future, but we don’t know what the future holds.
Just in our own natural understanding, we can’t even pray adequately about God’s purpose and plan for our own lives! His plan for us is too big and too supernatural. As Ephesians 3:1 puts it, He has purposed that through us “…the complicated, many-sided wisdom of God in all its infinite variety and innumerable aspects might now be made known the angelic rulers and authorities (principalities and powers) in the heavenly sphere” (Eph. 3:10 Amp.).
How can we possibly pray about such a mind-boggling purpose?
Not in our own ability, certainly … not just in our own humanness … but only by God’s divine power. We do it by a divine intervention of Him where He comes down upon us through “the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3:11) so that His fire connects with our tongues and causes us to speak and pray in ways that move us out beyond our natural limitations and into the realm of the supernatural.
That’s what happened to the first 120 disciples on the day of Pentecost. They were waiting together in the upper room for the Promise of the Father that Jesus had talked to them about just before His ascension and— …suddenly there came a sound from heaven like the rushing of a violent tempest blast, and it filled the whole house in which they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues resembling fire, which were separated and distributed and which settled on each one of them. And they were all filled (diffused throughout their souls) with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other (different, foreign) languages (tongues), as the Spirit kept giving them clear and loud expression… (Acts 2:2–4 Amp.).
Notice, according to those verses, when the fire of God fell that day, it didn’t engulf the whole group together in a one-size-fits-all kind of way. It divided up into tongues and settled down separately on each individual. Every person there got his or her own personalized flame!
To read more of Lynne’s Prayer Notes article, download it here.