Teach Us to Pray: Prayer That Accesses Heaven and Changes Earth

by Corey Russell

And they weren’t witnessing some religious activity performed by Jesus. No, prayer was His life, His inhale, His exhale.

They had connected the dots and discovered that Jesus’ public life of ministry was the direct result of His private life of prayer.

Parents, your kids will remember your tears when you talked to Jesus far more than your words to them about following Jesus.

You know you are serving in a wrong spirit when you become aware of what other people are not doing. This kind of serving will ultimately lead to accusation against Jesus concerning His empathy and fairness.

There is a direct connection between the priority you give to hearing Him speak and the authority of your speaking for Him.

When our lives and ministries are built more around busyness and managing opportunities than sitting at His feet and hearing His words, the words we speak and sing—no matter how biblical they are—do not carry the same weight and authority to shift people, change circumstances, and impact nations. They can’t and don’t release Heaven here on Earth.

The devil will let you do a lot, but if you want to put hell on notice, take your seat at Jesus’ feet and don’t let any amount of money, platform, opportunity, betrayal, hardship, or tribulation talk you out of that.

Because presence and pressure produce prayer.

When most of us think of a wilderness, we think of it as the tough, dry season we have to go through so we can get to our destiny, but what if the wilderness is where we are called to live while on this earthly pilgrimage?

The wilderness is the furnace of transformation. It’s the context by which God causes all the dross, all the culture, and all its stuff to surface. We get delivered from the masks and the illusions, and we begin to see correctly.

I’m afraid that, after all of our Sunday services have ended and everyone has gone home, what most of us just experienced was more of a pep rally than an encounter with the living God.

We need leaders who pray more than talk. We need leaders who have learned the lost art of waiting on God and making ministry to Him their first ministry.

We need leaders who fear God more than man. We need leaders who believe God’s opinion of them is greater than anything else.

God, make me a voice in this generation. God, make me a shepherd after Your own heart. I want to know You for real. I want to burn with Your holy fire. I want to feel what You feel, see how You see, and move like You move. I open my heart to You. Release upon me the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation in the knowledge of Your Son. Set my heart on fire. Lord, make my life a life of prayer. Amen.

The first is found in what we call the Lord’s Prayer, and that truth is prayer is about walking through the open door. The second truth is found in the parable that immediately follows the Lord’s Prayer. In it, we discover prayer is also staying long enough for closed doors to open.

Again, as I’ve said before, just make a consistent time and place to pray. Then show up and start reaching for God. It’s truly that simple. If you build it, He will come, but if you want to get it perfect before showing up, you will never pray.

Faith in prayer flows out of revelation—revelation of who God is and where He lives. And since revelation never stops, as we see in the worshipful response of the four creatures, faith continually flows out with fresh proclamations. In essence, Jesus taught His disciples and us to join in with the four living creatures full of eyes in declaring the Father’s holiness—“Our Father in heaven, holy!”

Leaders are the ones who don’t quit and who press on and press into the release of fullness.

In a general sense, the fear of the Lord is the awareness of God. It’s the living awareness that He is, He sees, He hears, He cares, and He responds accordingly.

There are no superheroes in the Kingdom. There are simply weak people who long for more and who don’t give up.

I want to say clearly that fasting as well as all spiritual disciplines do not earn us anything from God. These are gifts from God to make us vulnerable to the truth of who we already are in Christ.

Our minds need renewing so that we can approve the full will of God in our lives, and fasting weakens our internal resistance to it and to the truth of the Word of God.

In fasting, God allows that which is in our hearts to be exposed, and He begins to feed us on His Word.

Fasting increases mourning for Him. Fasting releases revelation of Jesus as the Bridegroom.

our understanding and clarity of theology doesn’t produce more fascination, wonder, tears, and worship, then we are on a slippery slope.

“If our minds grow faster than our hearts, we lose discernment.”

It’s not the information that’s going to save the world. It’s revelation of the information.

My ability to impact others with truth is directly related to the impact that the truth has had on me.

Jesus commands us to throw our lives, our pain, and our burdens in prayer upon the One who owns the harvest, loves the harvest, and has died for the harvest. This is the highest response to seeing the needs of the nations.

The verse we’ve historically turned into a rallying cry to go is actually a rallying cry to pray.

God loves the harvest more than we do. God is more invested into the harvest than we are. Our greatest usefulness to Him is our being conformed to Him.

No, that’s not what Jesus died for—our forty-five-minute Sunday services and twenty-dollar offerings and two-minute evening prayers.

“A man can receive nothing unless it’s been given to him from heaven,”

I know what it feels like to have a leader see me in a limited light. It was this verse that I clung to in those times because I knew no one could stop what God had ordained for me. I also understood that I could not make happen what God had said no to. It was this verse that freed me from the temptation to defend myself, fight for myself, or make room for myself.

One of the most crucial understandings that leaders must gain in these days is that we are stewarding another Man’s wife. Our call as leaders is not to draw her to us, our giftings, or our abilities, but to introduce her to the One who purchased her with His royal blood: Jesus. We must prepare her for her wedding day to her Bridegroom by proclaiming His heart, His zeal, His tenderness, His covenant, and His longing for her. We must proclaim the “why” of the cross in addition to the “what” of the cross.

Something that I tell people often is that I never go to the Bible to find a message to preach. My goal is not preaching. It’s connection with God and His heart and His Word.

The four living creatures are night-and-day preachers of the “holy, holy, holy,” and yet their message comes out of who it is they have been staring at. In many ways, they are my model as a preacher. Their focus is on God—not on themselves and their articulation or their wisdom or nuance. They’re fascinated with God!

We need Bible preaching and teaching—not just cool stories.

God will use great presence and great pressure to produce great prayer.

The more you engage Him, the more a cry will begin to arise within you for His coming because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of adoption that cries out.

Yet I’m convinced that it’s ultimately our lack of control, our inability to define Him, or our inability to put Him in a box that unnerves us.

this is the most highlighted revelation of Jesus that John carried. More than “Lamb of God” or “Bridegroom,” Messiah is One who “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

John told the crowds, “My baptism can only prepare you for Him and will clean the outside, but He is going to get up into your business and release fire. His fire will get where the water can’t get, and it will remove all hindrances.”

It’s in the fire where we see Jesus’ longing to be closer to us. He is the Bridegroom who longs and desires to get closer, but He must first prepare before He invades.

God will use messengers to prepare and equip the Church for these days, but it will be God who will make it all happen.

Are you satisfied with dancing around other people’s fires, or do you want to get into the fire?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be an echo. I want to be a voice.

We need voices that didn’t learn their messages from a man or from a book. We need voices that, in the wilderness of prayer and fasting, heard the Voice from Heaven.

We will not get these words at a drive-thru of convenience-driven Christianity, but they will be slowly made flesh in us as we allow the scalpel of the Word of God to divide soul from spirit, as we allow the fire of the Word of God to burn the chaff of sin, as we allow the hammer of the Word of God to break the rock of our hearts, and as we allow the water of the Word of God to wash the defilement out of our lives.

Nothing will deliver us from the fleeting opinions, thoughts, and words of this age like the revelation of eternity.