You might have a deep hunger for God, but if you don't attend to His Word, you will not be vitally united with Him. If you fail to feed on the Word of God-reading, studying, meditating on it and obeying it—your prayer life will be weak and ineffective.
If you want a powerful, effective prayer life, you must spend enough time in the Word of God for it to come alive in you.
George Mueller, a tremendous man of God, spent days poring over the Word of God. Sometimes he would study what the Word had to say about something for two weeks before he prayed about it. Then, when he prayed, he kept the Bible open before him.
I prayed with an older woman for several years who was much the same way. She was so full of the Word of God and she had gotten it so deeply into her heart, that it would come out of her mouth with tremendous power when she prayed. That Word became a sword slicing through the devil's schemes and bringing forth the will of God.
I've never known anyone who could use the Word of God like she did. As she would yield herself to the Holy Spirit in prayer, she would use verses from the Bible in the most unusual and amazing ways. I'm telling you, when she said, "It is written," the devil got out of her way!
Now, someone else might say, "It is written," and it might not impress the devil one bit. He knows what is written, and it doesn't bother him when people quote the Bible.
Too often, that's what Christians do. They just repeat scriptural words that aren't really alive to them. They speak the Word, but they're not really believing it because they haven't spent enough time meditating on it to move into a place of faith.
When the Word of God is alive to you, when it is more real to you than the natural world around you, your prayers are effective. When you've stored up that Word within you, the Holy Spirit can quicken it to you and show you how to pray it out. But you have to give Him something to work with.
You have to have the Word of God, not just in books and on tapes and in Bibles on your coffee table. You have to have it living in your heart!
The best kind of prayer—the kind that always brings results—is the kind of prayer that comes from a believer who's full of the Word of God and responsive to the Spirit of God. The Lord has been looking for people who would pray like that for a long time.
In John 4:23-24 NKJV, Jesus said, "The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."
When the Holy Spirit is joined with the Word of God, the result is always powerful, effective prayer.
by Lynne Hammond & Patsy Cameneti
Excerpt permission granted by Harrison House Publishers