Introduction
FOR A LIFE-CHANGING ENCOUNTER WITH CHRIST
We have opportunity in our ministry to interact with numerous people through conferences, online discipleship classes, Bible study groups, Sunday services, and meetings with business leaders. We encounter so many wonderful believers who have an earnest desire to live a life pleasing to God and effective in His kingdom. Very often they express to us a deep burden to understand and grow particularly in the area of prayer.
These Christians enjoy reading their Bible, serving in their local church or ministry, and sharing their faith, but again and again they tell us that they don’t see victory in their prayer life. Even when they spend considerable time in prayer, they often fail to sense that their prayers are vital or effective.
As we’ve heard these longings from God’s people, God has placed a burden on our hearts to write this book.
In doing so, our goals are these:
1. To open afresh your mind and heart to the prayer life of Jesus.
2. To help you anticipate and recognize the activity of God in your prayer life as He conforms you to the image of His Son.
3. To exhort you to obey and respond to all of the fullness of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—as He develops your prayer life.
4. To help you see the immediate urgency of the hour in which we live, and the impact we can have through our prayers.
5. To show that immediate and thorough obedience is key to your prayer life.
Look to God’s Enabling
Our desire is that
Experiencing Prayer with Jesus will not be simply more information about prayer for you, but that it will lead you to a life-changing encounter with Christ…and therefore forever rearrange your prayer life into continuing fellowship with our Lord.
While there are many wonderful examples of prayer and passages on prayer throughout the Scriptures, we know of no better model and demonstration of what the heavenly Father desires for our prayer life than the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. And at this critical time in history, we don’t need simply “more prayer” from God’s people; we need specifically the kind of praying exemplified in the life of Christ. Therefore we’ll be focusing especially in these pages on closely observing our Savior in prayer.
However, as you become more aware of this gap in your own life, we urge you not to become discouraged. Instead, press ahead to ask, “Why is there this difference?” and especially, “How can I allow the Holy Spirit to change my prayer life to be more like the Lord’s?”
Be assured that God not only desires that we pray in a Christlike manner, but He also enables us to do so. Through His Holy Spirit within us, the Father is working to conform us “to theimage of His Son” (Romans 8:29; see also Galatians 2:20), and this transformation will preeminently involve and affect our prayer life.
For Being Used by God
When we look at the people God used in the Scriptures as well as those He used throughout Christian history, we see their lives marked by a deep awareness and practice of prayer with their heavenly Father. In most of the biographies and testimonies from people whom God has used in mighty ways in the past, there’s a confession that the key to their work and to the measure in which it honored God is directly linked to prayer that mirrored the prayer experience of Jesus.
We believe this link is needed today as much as ever. There’s an urgent necessity for the requests and supplications of God’s people to reflect the prayer life of Jesus Christ as we see it unfolded in the Scriptures.
Copyright © 2006 by Henry Blackaby. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
