Apart from rising above the challenges that life throws up and finding God’s Peace in the ‘storms’ of life, waiting on the Lord, or ‘entwining our heart’ with His, Isaiah 40:31, brings another blessing too. As we wait on Him and ‘rise up on eagles wings’ we begin to see things more clearly from God’s perspective, and this then radically alters our prayer life. It shifts us from trying to persuading the Lord to work according to the ideas that we have of what would be good, towards sensing what is on His heart, and coming into agreement with His will.
Sometimes, even when we have understood that praying is not about bending God’s will to fit mine, we can still find it hard to know what exactly Jesus meant when He said “The Father will give you whatever you ask in My Name”. John 15:16. How do I know that that for which I am asking, fits with what Jesus would be asking for, if He were me? I think it comes down to seeing the situation, or the person for whom I am praying, through His eyes?
When we ‘soar’ with the Lord we can, with a heart full of faith say, ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, Matthew 6:10, not as a fatalistic statement because we don’t really know what is going on, or what we should be praying for, but as a faith statement. We can pray ‘your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ because we are in harmony with heaven, having risen up, as if on eagles wings, to take our place in the spirit in the heavenly realm.
For me this is why no prayer meeting can ‘work’ without us spending some time ‘waiting’ on the Lord. As we, whether we are on our own or with others, turn our hearts to Him with thanksgiving and worship, we catch the thermals of His love and soar with Him into that heavenly realm. We will be growing in our ability to hear His Spirit and catch His heart. Then as we pray we won’t be persuading God to fulfill our agenda, we will be increasingly hearing the conversations in heaven, by His Spirit, and agreeing with our God.
Then there are those mysterious conversations recorded in Matthew. First of all when Jesus was speaking to Peter saying “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” Matthew 16:19.NASB. He is assuming those disciples would ‘know’ what was going on in heaven.
Then speaking to all the disciples He says, “Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask for, it shall be done for them by my Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.” Matthew 18:18,19. NASB.
Prayer, then, involves agreement among God’s people, and agreement between God’s people and the will of God in heaven. The power of agreement comes when, as a group even as small as two or three, we welcome the Lord into our midst with thanksgiving and worship, and we let His Spirit lead us in our praying. As we soar with Him, above the situations that we are carrying in prayer, we will increasingly ‘see’ what needs to be bound or loosed, and increasingly ‘hear’ what heaven has already done. Then we can with faith say, ‘Your Will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, as we agree with each other and the Lord. Praying with even one other person in this way increase our ability to discern God’s will as we ‘soar’ and hear from heaven.
As we said yesterday, thanksgiving can be such an important key as we ‘wait on the Lord’. It keeps our focus off of the ‘problem’ and raises our sights to heaven. Thanksgiving also helps us to gain the revelation that we need to have in prayer that, whatever battles are being played out on the earth, Jesus has already won in heaven. Thanksgiving feeds our faith in the Lord, His purposes, His plans, His goodness, His love and His power. We can then pray ‘with faith’, raising our spiritual high 5’s of victory, even before things are played out on the earth.
