Considering how many born again, Holy Spirit baptized believers there are in the United States alone who have the rivers of the Spirit inside them, you’d think the whole world would be deluged with the waters of the Gospel by now. And it would be if we let those rivers rush out of us. But the reality is that we don’t.
Most of the time, all we have to offer is a barely trickling stream.
Why is that?
To a great extent, it’s because we’ve let our American culture invade our Christianity. We’re a nation of performance-oriented people. We’re always pushing to be the best and accomplish the most. We’re driven to produce, produce, produce! External efforts and results are our primary focus.
Nationally that may be an acceptable mentality. But it doesn’t mix well with Christianity. It messes things up.
When we get production-minded in prayer, for example, and start using our own natural efforts and mental muscle to produce greater results, we lose our supernatural edge. We get our attention on the outflow and start trying to pump out more and more prayer because we want bigger and better results.
We start praying out of our own wisdom, our own strength, and our own ability. Like the heathen in Matthew 6:7, we start thinking God will answer us because of our “much speaking.” So instead of being Spirit led and Spirit inspired, our prayers become rote, repetitious, and religious.
We may even be praying all the “right” things, confessing the Word like a machine gun, using the correct biblical principles, and praying every scriptural prayer we’ve been taught. Yet in the midst of it all, we can easily become like the people in Jeremiah 2:13. Those people committed two evils. They forsook their fellowship with God, the fountain of living waters, and they relied on the broken cisterns of the past.
Let me assure you, I love scriptural truths. I think biblical principles are vital. But they can never, ever replace living contact and fellowship with God. The moment we start depending only on the revelations of the past is the moment we start to dry up. When we begin to rely on the memory of a time we experienced the presence of God in the past instead of connecting to Him in the present—hearing His voice, experiencing His presence, and fellowshipping with Him today—the tide of the Spirit within us ebbs.
We become like broken cisterns because as important as scriptural principles and spiritual memories are, they have no power in themselves. Apart from living contact with God, they cannot hold the water of life.
If we want the rivers of the Spirit to keep flowing through us, we must go continually to the throne of God to fellowship with Him. We must draw from the fountain of living waters every day.
Scripture Reading: Psalm 63:1–8
On the chilly March night in 1972 when Lynne Hammond took her first step into a life of Spirit-led prayer, she had no idea what was about to happen. All she knew was the hunger in her heart for God wouldn’t let her sleep. In the few short months she’d been born again, her desire to fellowship with Him had grown so strong she could hardly contain it. “Help me, God!” she cried. “I want to know you. I want to be able to talk to you. Please, teach me to pray!”
Suddenly, a heavenly presence flooded the room. Lynne sensed waves of spiritual fire sweeping over her and a beautiful language began to flow like a river from within her. Although she’d never heard of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, she knew instantly, without a doubt—this was God!
What began that night soon blossomed into a life of prayer that ultimately became a ministry of prayer when, in 1980, Lynne and her husband, Mac, founded Living Word Christian Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Under Lynne’s leadership, the prayer ministry at Living Word has become an internationally recognized model for developing effective pray-ers in the local church.
A teacher and an author, Lynne publishes a newsletter called Prayer Notes, has written numerous books, and currently serves as the national prayer director for Daughters for Zion. Her passion for inspiring and leading others into the life of Spirit-led prayer continues to take her around the world to minister to believers whose heart cry, like hers, is “Lord, teach me to pray!”