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

by Corey Russell

you need to understand that there is one decision, there is a one thing, and

you do this one thing, it will set a trajectory for many other things to be aligned in your life. If, however, you don’t get that one thing right, it will take you in a completely different direction. You can have the whole world yet lose your soul.”

while driving us into greater humility, mission, and unity with the Holy Spirit. He’s going to release great presence and great pressure.

Why? Because presence and pressure produce prayer. And in prayer at the feet of Jesus, listening to His words, is where He is going to develop the life of prayer anointed by the spirit of prayer.

We only unify with that which we submit to. We only unify with the Holy Spirit to the degree that ...

YOU MUST CHOOSE

So, what did Mary do? Mary chose. She had a choice. Jesus did not make the choice for her. Neither will He make it for you but will honor the choice you make.

Can you—in the midst of all the allurements, voices, seductions, opportunities, and money—choose to sit at His feet with a Bible open and an engaged heart, listening to His voice?

It’s one thing to sit at His feet when you have no options, but what about when you live in a nation that is filled with options? Who can do it in the big cities? God is calling for a people out of Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco, New York City, Tokyo, London, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Nairobi, and every other city in the world who can begin to declare war on the seduction of busyness by dialing down and listening.

come out of boredom and to discover fascination with Him, our beautiful God.

Mary took her greatest commodity—time—and sowed it into a place where moth and rust cannot destroy. What she did will NEVER be taken away from her. Eternal treasures. Eternal investments. This is the stuff I’m going after. I want the stuff that will live forever. I want the stuff that will endure the fire of His gaze and be carried with me into eternity as gold, silver, and precious stones, don’t you?

If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire (1 Corinthians 3:12-15).

He stated that you find the gold, silver, and precious stones under the ground, hidden from the eyes of men, while you find the other three above the ground where everyone can see.2

yet the stuff that was hidden from the eyes of men and known only to God will translate to gold, silver, and precious stones that we will carry with us into the age to come.

therefore, I am choosing to sit at Jesus’ feet, dial in, and listen to His words because it’s from this place my life will have its greatest impact, and it’s from here the lifestyle of prayer is developed.

THERE WAS MAN WHOM JESUS CALLED THE GREATEST man born of a woman. His name was John the Baptist, and he lived his entire life in one place: the wilderness.

Though this man never performed a miracle, never opened a blind eye, never unstopped a deaf ear, and never raised a dead person from the grave, His life and message literally shook a nation.

but what if the wilderness is where we are called to live while on this earthly pilgrimage?

The wilderness that I’m talking about is not a geographical wilderness but an intentional life of choosing to live dependent on God. Nowhere is this more practically realized than through living a life of consistent prayer for decades.

And yet, it’s in our weakness that His strength is made perfect. Prayer will inevitably bring you into your need for God, and this is absolutely beautiful.

We live in a society that only values bigger, better, and more, and yet Jesus, who was fully God, emptied Himself of all of His divine privilege, came to the earth, and lived dependent upon Abba as His Source.

When we are asking Jesus to teach us to pray, we are asking Him to make us humble as He is humble, and that strikes at the heart of our independence and self-determination.

The essential revelation of prayer is that God is strong when we are weak, and few things speak of weakness like taking our time, looking at an invisible God, and relying on Him as our Source.

Yooo

but what if God is calling us to a life in the wilderness? What if He is calling you to receive your destiny or have it manifest there?

Somewhere along the way, though, they shift out of the life of prayer as Jesus goes from wooing them to confronting them.

Many of us are guilty of praying as long as there is a benefit for us on the back end. We will “put in our time” with God as long as it results in more opportunities, more anointing, more money, and more stuff.

God will kill this in us in the school of prayer because Jesus isn’t a stepladder into our destiny. He wants to kill our destiny so that He can release His destiny through us.

So, Jesus takes us to the wilderness. This is where God brings His favorite ones because He longs for grea...

In the same way He delivered Israel out of Egypt so that He could bring them to the wilderness to marry them, God is bringing a whole generation out of the shallow end of Christiani...

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse (Malachi 4:5-6).

to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Luke 1:14-17).

John was out in the wilderness for twenty years, living among a radical group of people who were given to prayer, fasting, and eating

the Word together. What happened to John in the wilderness over those twenty years?

All of his illusions were destroyed. All of his fantasies were destroyed. All of his props were destroyed. All of his masks were destroyed. All of the tentacles of the culture were ripped out of his soul, and he was brought into an entirely di...

I cannot overstate that, if you are going to persist in a life of prayer, you will come face to face with all the illusions within, the imposters within, and you will come into an earth-shattering revelation of God and yourself, thereby delivering you from the voi...

In Deuteronomy 8, the Lord told Moses that He brought the children of Israel into the wilderness to test them, humble them, and make them know that man doesn’t live by bread but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. This is what happens in the wilderness. He makes you live on His words.

After twenty years of eating His words, the Word came to John, and all of history was changed: “The word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness” (Luke 3:2).

He invited them to come out of their sin and come into the Kingdom of Heaven.

John the Baptist was fearless. He lived by a completely different set of values and a radical system. Where did he get them?

He got them in the wilderness. In fact, he never left the wilderness. And it was his voice “crying in the wilderness” that proclaimed, “Prepare the way of the...

God called me into full-time ministry in the weakest and most vulnerable season of my life. I was the most disqualified, and yet God in His grace qualified me.

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the Way of the Lord.’” One preacher declared that God was raising up voices across the earth like that of John the Baptist’s who would prepare the Church and the lost for the second coming of Jesus. Through the lives and message of these voices, they would prepare others for His glory and shaking.

I was grateful for others who were a voice. It’s simply that I was not satisfied to rejoice merely in their light while never getting the reality for myself. I knew God was calling me to more than “just dancing around someone else’s fire.” He was calling me to get into the fire.

God was calling me to an intense life of preparation and consecration. It would require a deep devouring of the Word of God so that, in a coming day, I would manifest the nature of Christ through my life and words. This kind of authority in preaching would be fleshed out in my life as the Word becomes flesh in us.

In the same way that an electrician runs the electrical wiring through small holes to wire a house, I knew God wanted to take me on a guided tour from Genesis to Revelation, revealing His Son in Me and through Me, so that I would be entrusted with the deep mysteries of Christ. I knew that my part was to prepare for the wiring, but I also knew that there would be a day of manifestation when the light switch was turned on and that which had been prepared was ready to be a conduit of the power, glory, and conviction of the Holy Spirit.

“A sermon born in the head reaches the head; a sermon born in the heart reaches the heart.”3

fire

He spoke comfort to my heart, breaking the power of the enemy off me and reconnecting me to His storyline for my life.

There have been many other times, however, that have been pretty boring and uninspiring as I have sat for weeks asking God to speak to me and have heard nothing.

Truth be told, there have been days when I haven’t even felt saved!

In all of these seasons, my insecurities, fears, and wrong paradigms of God and myself were clearly manifested in me and to others. I have walked through times when I came face to face with my own brokenness, weakness, and sin. On such occasions, feeling completely naked and ashamed, I’ve heard God say to me out of His great grace, mercy, and love, “You are My son in whom I’m well pleased.” This is what the wilderness looks like.