The Priceless Value Of Your Prayers

By: Norm Rasmussen

If you are like most Christians, from time to time you go through attacks of doubt from the enemy that your prayers are all that important.  Maybe you are in a season like that right now.  Maybe you don’t even see it is an intensified attack from the devil to weaken your prayers for yourself and others.  Don’t beat up on yourself if that happens to be the case.  You’ll pull out of it.  God will help you.

Maybe you are discouraged with life and ministry as well.  Maybe you’re in a season where it seems as though your prayers and trust in the Lord simply are going nowhere. 

Super-saint Apostle Paul and Timothy went through a time such as you are going through.  They were on assignment from God to touch lives in Asia.  They were there to see the Gospel spread. Yet opposition upon opposition beat them down to the point of despair.  Scripture tells us they became so discouraged and depressed that they literally wanted to die and go to heaven, to be freed from the pain they were experiencing:

For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life.  (2 Cor. 1:8 NAS).

Satan had put an all-out, no holds barred attack upon them to take them out.  His orders were clear and direct: “Take Paul and Timothy out by any means, at any cost!”

Faith was dim and growing dimmer in God’s soldiers.  Their prayers seemed to go unheard.  Their emotions were overtaking them.  They weren’t sleeping.  Their bodies ached from the elements.  No one was interested in hearing Truth.  “God – do you even hear our plight?!” no doubt was their most frequent cry to God. 

What carries a soldier of the Lord through when discouragement and depression wraps around you like a giant python snake?  Two things:

1) The resurrection power of God that brings life no matter how close to death we are.  (Emotionally … I believe it’s literally possible to be dead at times, with hopelessness, desperation and depression).  Paul and Timothy where that dead, I believe.  

“Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead, who delivered us from so great a death, and does deliver us: in whom we trust that He will still deliver us.”  (2 Cor. 1:9-10 NAS).

2) The prayers of God’s people covering each other’s backs.

“You also helping together in prayer for us, that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the gift granted to us through many.”  (2 Cor. 1:11 NAS).

Here is where we must always remember the priceless value of our prayers for others.  No matter how discouraged we might be in our own situations … never believe the lie that God is not using your prayers in concert with His angels to keep the devil's attacks from gaining even greater victory in the life of another brother or sister in the Lord.

Perhaps the most hindering lie we can believe is that just because prayers for ourselves seem not to be heard by God, it does not mean at all that they are not being heard and responded to when we pray for others!  The Apostle Paul constantly prayed for others in the Church, no matter how discouraged he was in his own life.  He knew how priceless in value his prayers were for others.  After all, God had taken him into the third heaven, and no doubt it was revealed to him things in the spirit realm that the Church needed to know about to fight the good fight of faith against satanic opposition – the same fight you and I have right now, and will have until our time is done, or the Lord returns.  Certainly Satan’s attacks aren’t going to diminish, scripture assures us of that. 

But we have contact with the Body of Christ that Paul and Timothy didn’t have.  We have you, precious one, to cover our backs in prayer. 

Remember … God ALWAYS answers unselfish prayers.  That is never the issue.  Timing is always an issue.  That’s where we usually fall short in the eternal scheme of things.  We want God bringing breakthrough sooner than what He ordains it to happen.  The pain and suffering up until breakthrough time is what is working in us “an eternal weight of glory” – not the actual breakthrough. 

Does God always answer our prayers the way we would like to have them answered?  Of course not.  When we are believing God to save unsaved loved ones, we may die and go to heaven before we see our prayer for them answered.  Furthermore – remember … God wants our unsaved loved ones saved more than we do, but He will not override the will of any individual when it comes to eternal salvation.  The one who betrayed Jesus -- Judas -- his mother and father could have been praying for his salvation up until he took his own life, yet God knew what was in the heart of Judas.  I’m not implying that we should ever quit praying for salvation for our loved ones – never while they are still yet alive!  But if they never turn their lives over to Jesus Christ prior to their dying … we must not conclude that God doesn’t answer our prayers.  The conclusion we need to always come to grips with is that God knows the final outcome of those we pray for, and no matter what our will is in a given matter, leaving the final outcome up to God is the wisest thing we can do.

Jesus will one day return.  Done deal.  Yet He will come back when the Father ordains Him to come back – not when I pray for Him to come back.  What God has told us in His Word is to pray and be ready individually for His return, not pray for His return.  God wants us to be wise in the prayers we pray, because if we aren’t, He knows how much easier it will be for the devil to shake our confidence in our prayers in the future.  Take care of your prayer life like you would take care of the life of your newborn infant. 

Prayer is one of God’s ordained weapons for each believer:

“And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; praying always will all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints”   -- Ephesians 6:18 NAS

The devil never stops trying to get God’s people to quit praying.  He can’t stop God from responding to our unselfish prayers, but he sure has been given a lot of latitude to get us into an emotional state where we simply believe the lies he convinces us of believing, which is almost always … “Your prayers don’t matter so quit praying them.”  Or … “God doesn’t care about your own personal needs, so why pray for someone else’s?  Let that person pray for themselves!”  Another one of his many tactics is:  “You prayed for that person once.  If you pray twice, that really means you aren’t trusting God.”  Here is his classic lie:  “God is sovereign over the affairs of mankind so God is going to do what He wants to do no matter how much you pray and believe about a given matter, so quit wasting your time and energy.”

Here is the one revelation of fact Satan does not want us getting a good handle on:  Most of God’s will is executed on earth by the prayers of His Church.   

Believers in Jesus Christ are the Army of God.  Sure … the battle is intense.  Yet you and I have an unlimited supply of prayer bullets to fire in our rifles.  Let’s not let the devil talk us out of firing our Holy Ghost rifles at the enemy when we see our brothers and sisters taking barrages of incoming enemy fire.  Let’s cover their backs … because we’ll certainly need them covering ours in prayer before we know it.

Get back on your knees, praying saint, and start firing those bullets!