God says the rain falls on the just and the unjust. For our reading benefit, we could easily say the “money falls on the just and the unjust.” I cannot tell you how many times I have heard a believer ask, “Why is it that God allows the ungodly to prosper while Christians suffer with little?” The answer is found in reviewing the end-times. The way one spoils a rich kid is by allowing him to get sick from spoiling himself. As we look around at the end-times, we see an entire world prospering, but only for a season. As with all spoiled children, people of the world only focus on others to get what they want, in order to spend it on their own pleasures.
“You ask and do not receive, because
you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures” (James 4:3)
Typically,
God avoids supporting anything that gets in the way of true dependence on
Him. Money has a way of leading people
away from God, NOT to Him. God uses all
things to lead each of His children to call out to Him – not, his banker. Believers are being awakened to the reality
that their fight in life is not against flesh and blood, but the powers of
darkness and the principalities of the air (see Eph. 6:12). So many Christians today are deceived into
thinking that what they see is what they are to battle. As the Lord draws near, we can be assured
that our battle with the world, the flesh, and the devil will intensify. Worldly ideas of pop psychology will increase
as the primary solution to our troubled minds.
More rapidly than most of us realize, the questions people ask are based
on worldly fables called philosophies of man.
God is calling each of His children to call upon Him and He will deliver
according to His divine Truth and Will.
Fear of
confronting the enemy has held most believers back from boldly going before the
throne of God regarding the temptations and afflictions of the enemy. God’s greatest servants have always shared an
appreciation of the magnificent power of prayer and the complete victory over
Satan’s kingdom available to all believers, through the mighty Person and work
of our Husband, Jesus Christ.
The book of
Ephesians is the New Testament handbook on spiritual, biblical prayer. Get to know this book like a handbook. The believer’s emphasis in prayer must be
upon a biblical and sound doctrinal approach to this subject. The Word of God recognizes that we encounter
the three faces of Satan—the world, the flesh, and the devil. When a person becomes born-again, his/her
relationship to everything in the physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional
world completely change. Since the
believer is a citizen of heaven, he is given the power to face the enemy toe-to-toe. Scary? Well, look at it this way. Either we face him
head-on or he will constantly be nipping at our heel—eating away our lives a
little at a time.
To resist the
limited power of the enemy, one must submit therefore to God first, then resist the evil one and he
will flee. It is a promise given to us
by God (James 4:7).
Because of
our newly found relationship with God, all believers are marked targets for
attack from God’s enemy—Satan. Where
does he seem to attack first? The love of money, of course! Since the love of money is the root of Satan,
I would think this would be his main area of attack. If he can get the Bride of Christ to love
money more than our Husband, believers will then begin to worship money and
ultimately, Satan – a simple scam from a complex enemy.
Understanding
that he is relentless in his attacks, believers must embrace the Truth that the
Father has given them a defense system—the power of prayer.
First things
first, we must not depend upon
feeling and experience as an evidence of our being strong enough to pray. The power and ability to pray boldly is to be
based upon objective fact and not upon
subjective feelings. The power of prayer
is to be appropriated by faith and faith alone.
The following are the Four
Phases of Effectual Prayers:
1. Personal Reflection &
Confession
2. Praise & Adoration
3. Prayers of Supplication
4. Worship & Affirmation
PERSONAL REFLECTION & CONFESSION
The following
outline presents a biblical procedure for your, and my, personal reflection and
confession time with the Lord.
• Engage in an honest appraisal regarding your
selfishness. It is important to be
open and honest with God about yourself.
• Confess all known sin (1 John 1:9). Verbalize your sins against yourself and
others. Confessions take back from Satan
any ground which he has taken from you.
• Extend forgiveness to those who have hurt
you. Unforgiveness is the primary
reason most Christians don’t pray consistently.
List out who hurt you, how they hurt you, and your reaction. Bring the offender and how they hurt you
before Him and extend forgiveness to them in prayer. Now confess to God that your reactions to
these offenses are sin, accept His forgiveness, and tell Him you are willing to
seek the offender’s forgiveness for those reactions.
• Yield yourself to God (Romans
6:13). As an act of your will (displace
your feelings), yield all areas of your life to Him—spiritual, psychological,
physical, social, marital, parental, and financial.
• Express your passion and desire for the Holy
Spirit to renew your mind.
• Believe with your mind that the Holy Spirit
will fill you up with His power—remember to set your “feelings” aside and
claim this by faith.
• Now obey God in all that He reveals
and expresses in the Scriptures and begin to pray doctrinally.
PRAISE & ADORATION
Walking after
the Spirit is absolutely essential if we are to bring praise and adoration
before the Father. When God said to
enter the courtyard with thanksgiving and prayer, He was quite serious. That means in richness and poverty. We must learn
to “abase and abound” as an equal gift from God. Many Christians attempt to praise God while
having “things” in their lives they are not thankful for. Philippians 4:6 says: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication
with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” It is difficult, if not impossible, to pray
and supplicate with anxiety in one’s heart.
The way to remove anxious thoughts is through thanksgiving! “In Him, you also, after listening to the
message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were
sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our
inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God's own possession, to the
praise of His glory” (Eph. 1:13-14).
Thanksgiving and praise for what He has accomplished for us through the
Holy Spirit of promise is enough to be thankful for in spite of our
infirmities. Prayers of praise and
adoration are simply admiring the Person and work of God no matter what
circumstance we are faced with. It is
crucial to acknowledge before God that we are grateful for all things, before we petition for all things.
PRAYERS & SUPPLICATIONS
Intercessory
prayer is the practice of praying or applying the objective, absolute Truths of
the Word of God as the hope and basis of resolving our prayer burden. God loves for us to pray His Word back to Him
- claiming His attributes, promises and redemptive work as the foundation of
our faith and hope that He will answer our supplications. The hope and solution of the prayer burden,
however, is always based upon the objective absolutes of God’s attributes and
character as revealed in His Holy Word.
Experienced
prayer warriors know that using their own ideas, or words, accomplishes nothing;
but by using the Word of God in prayers, the enemy shutters and backs
down. He, the enemy, cannot stand when
the Word is used to combat the elements of his doings. Quoting verses while praying is what puts the
enemy in his place—dark places. When we
attempt to confront the tactics of our foe by using our own sincerity and
efforts, we will soon discover he is not intimidated by us or our efforts. Doctrinal praying should occupy much of our
daily prayer time. It must be used in
praise, petition, and intercession.
Herein, lies one of God’s greatest gifts to us for our prayer
times.
Believers
have a supernatural resource of wealth and riches in the grace and gifts bestowed
upon us in the Lord Jesus Christ. The
Truths are ours for claiming power, position, authority, and total victory over
Satan’s world, which actually belongs to God the Father. The believer’s victory over the enemy is
absolute when the enemy attempts to use God’s Truth to defeat us—his primary
tactic of deception.
“For though we walk in the flesh, we
do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of
the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every
lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every
thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:3-5).
It is
important we learn to pray aggressive biblical prayers for family and friends
who we believe are struggling with the bondage of the love of money. Pray this prayer aloud when led to intercede
for an individual.
SAMPLE INTERCESSORY PRAYER FOR MONEY
BONDAGE
My dear heavenly Father, in the name
of our Lord Jesus Christ,
I bring myself before You and ask for
the Holy Spirit's guidance that I might pray in the Spirit as You have taught
me. I thank You, Father, that You have
sovereign control over all my money or lack of it. I thank You for the level of material
possessions that you have placed in my life.
In the name of the Lord Jesus and as a priest of God, I ask for mercy
and forgiveness for the sins of the love of money, which grieve You. I plead the sufficiency of the blood of
Christ to meet the full penalty that my sins deserve. I claim back the ground I have yielded to the
enemy in my life, which I have knowingly, or unknowingly, given to Satan by
believing the enemy’s deception. In the
name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I resist all of Satan’s activity to use Your money
or possessions that You entrusted to me.
Exercising my authority, which is given to me in my union with the Lord
Jesus Christ, I pull down the strongholds which the kingdom of darkness has
formed against me with the love of money.
I smash, break, and destroy all those plans formed against my mind,
will, emotions, and even my wallet. I
destroy in prayer the spiritual blindness and deafness that Satan has
perpetrated against me.
I invite the
Holy Spirit of God to bring the fullness of His power to convict, to bring to
repentance, and to lead me into faith in the Lord Jesus Christ – my Savior. I cover myself with the blood of the Lord
Jesus Christ and I break Satan’s power to blind me to the Truth of God.
I believe that You, Jesus Christ, and
the Holy Spirit are leading me to claim my freedom in You and I thank You for
the answer to my prayer. In the name of
Jesus, I joyfully lay this prayer before You in the worthiness of His completed
work. Amen.
Now, we can
talk about praying for money with a biblical and Christ as Life manner.
Scripture
taken from the New American Standard Bible, ©
Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The
Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
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