The Personal Reality of Answered Prayer

So how, then, do we become the instrument of prayer that God uses to speak to Himself? Very simply. When we first pray, we pray with the “front door” of our being - our minds. And the next time we return to prayer, we find that God has left something on the “back door” of our being - our hearts.

For example, when we first start praying our “ground-zero” prayer - “Show me what to pray for and what to stop praying for” - we are praying deliberately with our minds and have hopefully not brought any preconceived notions with us into prayer. Then we turn from prayer and go about our ordinary business of living. And then the next time we come again to prayer, we will suddenly and unmistakably “see” exactly what it is God wants us to pray about or stop praying about. Between the two times that we have been exercised in prayer at the front door of our minds, God has visited the backdoor of our hearts and lain His concerns there.

That, in a nutshell, is the most basic way I believe prayer operates for most Christians in the modern milieu.

Modern secular people who have never read the Bible and are big fans of Isaac Newton and Sigmund Freud often get the chilly willies when they hear a Christian say “The Lord told me to ....” or “The Lord laid it on my heart to ...” They are so alienated from their own depths and so lonely inside their own skulls that the idea of somebody sharing their mental space with the Supreme Being positively frightens them to death if it does not provoke them to outright laughter.

Then again, there are times when they are right to be so afraid and skeptical. Receiving things on the backdoor of the heart is not the last step in the process of prayer.

What is the last step? The last thing we have to do, as I have written before, is consult whatever knowledge of the scriptures we currently have or can find out about in order to decide if what was left on our back door is anything like the kinds of things that God had left on the backdoors of all the men whom He used to write the scriptures. Just because we do in fact receive things on our back door, that does not mean they have come from God. I will elaborate on this again, because it is a very important point.

I Jn 4:1
1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
(KJV)

There is a false kind of mysticism about that declares that “the spirit of God is above the word of God.” This is utter nonsense. Any spirit that declares that it is “above” the word of God cannot be from God at all. We know this because we know the Holy Spirit of God caused all of the men who wrote the Bible to write what they wrote. And we know this because it was revealed to the apostle Paul that the revelation he had from Christ was the final one.

Col 1:25
25 ... I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God;
(KJV)

That word “fulfil” means “to finish up, complete.” In our prayers, we expect - not to add new chapters or doctrines to the Bible - but rather to receive practical direction for making our lives a practical working out of what is already in the Bible.

John 14:12
12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
(KJV)

Christ came down from heaven to begin His Father’s work. And Christ left off some of that work to return to His Father in heaven. We who are still down here communicate with Him in prayer in order to be directed in the work He has left for us to continue. That is what we look for in prayer. To be conformed to His image, and to continue His work.

I’ve have already spoken of the other hazards of what may be left on our back door after prayer. There may be things left by deceiving spirits that are designed to trip us up. And there may be things left there that are put there by our own lusts because we are not completely Christ’s yet.

I spoke of secular people getting the chilly willies from people who tell them “The Lord told me ...” In that regard, I remember a particular instance. There was a famous Christian ... I’ll guess I’ll call him an “entrepreneur.” He once told a Christian businessman, “The Lord told me that you should sell this xxxxxx to me for [ an amount very specific and favorable to the “entrepreneur”].” That businessman was fortunate enough to be skeptical because I believe that was a perfect example of someone’s ambition leaving something on their backdoor that God didn’t put there.

So we ask for direction at the front door, and then we turn around to find He leaves us His answers at the back door. This is all what I would call the personal reality of answered prayer. It is all going on inside you and it would prove nothing to any other person but you.

So now I come to the objective reality of answered prayer, and the interesting topic of synchronicity.