Eph 6:18 and Phil 4:6 have the sequence of prayer, and then petition. Prayer implies fellowship and worship. It is contacting the Lord just to be with Him. Prayer needs to precede our requests and petitions. After you spend time with the Lord, you get mingled with Him until your requests are His requests because you are one with the Lord. Our starting point in serving the Lord is our love for Him and time with Him. We need to spend time in His presence as a prerequisite of our serving the Lord and working for Him. When it comes to our needs, how do we ask the Lord to take care of our personal needs? How do we pray for practical things? If we’re enjoying the Lord and touching Him, it might be that we don’t have the need to pray for them. Prayer is always first, then comes petition. Prayer includes opening worshipping, contacting, and absorbing God. Then comes petitioning. As we fellowship with Him, he will touch us about which things we should pray for and which we don’t need to pray for. Sometimes we feel obligated to pray for things, but in fellowship wih the Lord, we need to have the peace even not to pray for things that the Lord is not praying for.
It’s easy to appear before Him, but it’s hard to be silent before Him. It’s very difficult to stop your being and be in fellowship with the Lord. Actually, we’re not completely stopped, our spirit is engaged which needs our mind and emotion in order to be expressed. If we exercise to call on the Lord until we touch Him, our whole being will calm down. The first thing in the morning is the best time because our whole being is calm already. The hardest thing in our prayer life is to have an unrestrained mind. To learn how to calm our being takes a while. We need to practice this. Because our mind is so active, it will always try to insert itself into our fellowship time with the Lord.
It’s hard to hear Him and then talk to Him afterwards. Our prayer in fellowship with the Lord will turn into prayer of petition based on our asking. We shouldn’t ask for things, but ask about our condition. Ask and then just be quiet. When you ask someone a direct question, there is pressure on him to answer the question. For example, if someone asks me “What’s your name?” it is hard for me to remain silent and not answer. We can put pressure on the Lord to answer us by the questions we ask Him. Don’t ask for things. Just ask questions. Every one of us has something going on that affects us. Start with what’s bothering you today. Just open and calm yourself down. Say, “Lord, what about this thing? Why is this bothering me?” Then wait for Him to answer. These questions do not come from our mind but flow out of our innermost parts.
It’s easy to confuse answers from the Lord in our spirit with answers that arise from our mind. When we receive answers from the Lord, His speaking is full of light and we repent. When we ask a question, our mind immediately tries to answer, so often what we think is the Lord is our mind answering. If it’s the Lord, we experience blazing light coming into our being immediately because our mingled spirit knows us better than anyone else. We have to be still and quiet before Him so that our spirit can answer but not our mind. We also have to wait sometimes for an answer from the Lord. It always comes with light and we need to repent. The reason we keep being bothered by repetitive issues is because we’re in our mind. We keep engaging our mind and the cycle continues. We need to appear again and when the answers come they are full of light.
Every time we contact the Lord’s people our speaking has to be new and fresh. The freshness comes from the contacting the Lord. Even in reading the Bible we are with the Lord. We can read and fellowship and read and read and fellowship and just be under His dispensing.
Our prayer time with the Lord is individual and personal. The whole goal is to contact the Lord. It takes energy to speak to the Lord, but it takes more energy not to speak with the Lord.
Sometimes it feels like our time with the Lord is a “miss.” We can get discouraged if we present ourselves before the Lord with seemingly no results. However, take courage. There are people on the earth who will give the Lord thirty minutes as an offering. Be one of those few. Just offer up your time as a sacrifice. That’s a great success whether we feel Him flowing or not. When we absorb God, we can’t necessarily measure or feel it. We may only feel it once a week. The other times it’s very ordinary, without much feeling. The truth is, when we call “Lord Jesus”, we are in our spirit. We should not examine or judge our time with the Lord because our measurement is wrong; only the Lord knows how much we have gained Him each day.
When we are by ourselves, it’s hard to touch the Lord personally. It’s good to have the meetings and the FTTA classes. It’s a real blessing to have this corporate setting with such a supply. When we prayread in a group it’s much different than when we’re with ourselves. Use the time just to call on the Lord. Just calling on the Lord is not a waste of our time. He is a person and we need to be filled with this person by calling with no agenda. When we don’t call on the Lord in the morning, we are dead throughout the day, but when we do our whole day is directed.
“Oh Lord Jesus” is the best prayer. “Oh” makes us open, makes us need Him, and is a great place to start. It really opens us. “Lord” tells Him he is our Owner, Head, King, Boss, and Husband. He is everything. He is in charge. “Jesus” is the incarnate Triune God, the God-Man. I need Jesus! There is no better way to pray than calling Oh Lord Jesus. He’s the only one that pleases God. In order to please God, we need this wonderful Jesus. The more we call the less of our own feeling we have and the more of His person we have. In this calling, the Lord opens a way for fellowship throughout the day. Our corporate prayer time will be the overflow from our morning time. It all starts in the morning. Our morning fellowship with God sets the standard for our times throughout the day.
"Living Christ our Victory" 