The God Who Hears: A 40-Day Prayer Devotional

by James Merritt

Prayer is almost never a one-and-done deal.

Prayer is not for God to do something for us but to allow him to do something in us.

Pray

Trust

Wait

The only failure in prayer is the failure to offer prayer.

So many of our opening prayer requests can be categorized under three groups of three words:

Please give me.

Please heal me.

Please help me.

a heart for God leads first to prayer for other people, asking him to intervene and care for them before asking him to intervene and care for us. The heart for God is not me-centered but others-centered.

You see, there’s no greater way to love others than to pray for them, and it’s extremely difficult if not impossible to stay bitter toward anyone we pray for.

why knowing God is the bull’s-eye of the Christian life. We are to obey God, but we won’t obey him until we trust him, and we won’t trust him until we know him. And so the better we know God, the more we’ll trust him, and the more we trust him, the more we’ll obey him.

With knowledge we can see how God has revealed himself, but through wisdom we can know the God who has revealed himself.

first thing in order to know God: ask the Lord to give us “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation.”

On behalf of the church in Ephesus, Paul prays “that

the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which [God] has called you” (Ephesians 1:18).

We need to continually ask God to enhance our spiritual vision so with our whole being we can know the hope that comes from only him.

We are to pray that we might see the hope we have in God and to know the God who gives us hope.

Hope is the absolute, irrevocable, unshakeable confidence that God will do what he’s promised to do.

Hope for our past:

Hope for our present:

Hope for our future:

But inheritance isn’t just about monetary wealth, especially in God’s Word.

A glorious inheritance is awaiting every child of God, an inheritance so great that we’re told that our eye has not seen, nor has our ear heard, nor can the human mind conceive how great our inheritance really is

The only difference between our inheritance of heaven from ones like a generational transfer of wealth is that we’re not waiting for our Father to die to receive it. He’s waiting for us to die to give it!

When we give all of ourselves to Jesus, he gives all of himself to us. We get him, but he gets us too, and he considers us his riches.

God, today in everything I do, help me know your incomparably great power according to the power of the power of your power!

Now, it’s one thing to know the God of power, but we should also know the power of God. It’s one thing to believe that God is all-powerful, but it’s another to know that power, experience that power, and believe that power lives in us.

In other words, it’s incredible to know we have access to all the power we need to do what we ought to do and to be what we ought to be—all that we cannot do in our own power.

Knowing and truly experiencing God’s power comes through prayer to the God who hears.

Whatever you’re facing today, as a believer you have within you the power of the very God who created everything.

Consider any kind of power you want—financial, intellectual, nuclear, atomic—and the one thing that power can’t do is bring a dead man back to life.

And not only that, but to do so with a body that can never die again. When considering what the odds are that Jesus’ resurrection from the dead actually happened, many people would say zero. And I agree that the odds are absolutely impossible—apart from the power of an omnipotent God.

One of the reasons our prayers can seem powerless is that we greatly underestimate God’s power.

And not only is the risen Son of God seated on the throne of heaven at the right hand of the Father, but God has seated us with him. Paul tells us this in Ephesians 2:6: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms.” Every time you pray, then, the Lord Jesus is saying to you, Be sure you’re sitting here—right next to me.

Not only must we spend time with Jesus undistracted, but we are to sit with him. We’re invited to put the worries and challenges of this world aside and be with our Lord and Savior.

The moment we take our first breath, we’re under authority whether or not we realize it. Take the authority of physical laws, for example. We don’t have to learn to be under the authority of gravity. We figure out it’s a given the first time we misstep and fall flat on our face. In essence, Buford says, “You can choose the game, but you can’t choose the rules.”3

When a culture increasingly rejects the very principle of authority, that’s a sign it’s also rejecting God and headed for trouble.

It’s exactly this kind of individualistic, rebellious thinking that drives much of atheism, agnosticism, and humanism.

So when we pray to Christ, we truly are praying to the only being in the universe who has all authority over any other authority and is in fact the source of all other authority.

Another reason, then, we should pray constantly, consistently, and confidently is that we’re praying to the One who has ultimate authority over every foe we fight and every fear we face.

There is no greater example of our submission to that authority than when we pray acknowledging that we have neither the power nor the authority to do all we need to do and to be all we need to be. But we can go to the One who does, the God who not only hears us but enables us.

The church is not a building; it’s Christ’s body, and he and he alone is the head of that body. So remember this: It’s not our church; it’s his church. And he’s in charge of his church. He’s also ultimately responsible for the future of his church. He’s the one who said, “The gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:18).

The reason you should be committed to a local church is that you’re coming to Christ’s body, not to just a building. And you’re a part of that body. Furthermore, although our physical bodies are vulnerable to disease and death—or at least stock challenges—Christ’s body is not.

The same is true in prayer. Before you can pray effectively, you need to make sure of three things: 1.That you have a good grip on your personal relationship with God through your daily walk with Jesus. 2.That you go to God with a posture of submission to his authority over your life. 3.That you’re aligned in the direction he wants your life to go, according to the truths found in his Word.

God is more concerned with the petition of our prayers than the posture we take when we pray.

• Standing (Genesis 24:12-14) • Lifting the hands (1 Timothy 2:8) • Sitting (Judges 20:26) • Kneeling (Mark 1:40) • Looking upward (John 17:1) • Bowing down (Exodus 34:8) • Placing the head between the knees (1 Kings 18:42) • Pounding on the breast (Luke 18:13) • Facing the temple (Daniel 6:10)2

The point of posture is simply that when we pray, we should throw our whole selves into it. We should be totally involved—body, soul, mind, and spirit.

Knowing who you are and who you belong to is vitally important to your prayer life.