I am always hungry for greater degrees of spiritual expression and so are the people who pray with me. Yet a few years ago, some of us realized that we’d settled in on one level of prayer and stayed there. It was as though we’d taken an elevator to a certain floor, gotten off there, and explored every room on that floor.
We knew there were more expressions of the Spirit to be released. There were higher places to go in prayer. And the Lord showed us that He wanted us to use our faith to find them. He didn’t want us to get on a spiritual treadmill and do the same thing over and over in our prayer lives.
He doesn’t want you to do that either. God is calling us all to higher places in prayer.
“But, Lynne,” you might ask, “How do I go higher? How do I release new expressions of the Spirit when I don’t know what they are?”
You do it by trusting in the Lord with all your heart and leaning not to your own understanding and by acknowledging His leading as you pray and letting Him direct you.
If you’ll think back about it, you’ll remember that’s what you had to do when you first received the baptism of the Holy Ghost. You had to trust God in a major way just to step out and pray in tongues. Why? You had to trust Him because it was so unfamiliar. You had no idea if you were doing it right or not. You had no understanding of it and no experience with it. So you had to muster up every ounce of faith you had, throw your dependence on God, and pray!
Today you’re probably so accustomed to praying in tongues that it takes very little faith for you to do it. You can just open your mouth and go. However, there’s one problem with that. When you stop putting faith with your prayers, you stop advancing and start saying the same things over and over.
That’s not what prayer is about! Prayer is not rote recitations. It’s not speaking in tongues like a machine gun. Prayer is following God. And to follow God, you have to trust Him. You have to use your faith.
That’s what our prayer group did when we realized we needed to go higher. We said, “Lord, we trust You to take us there.” Then we stepped out by faith and yielded further to the Holy Spirit than we ever had before. Sometimes we’d all be thinking we’d responded to the Holy Spirit as much as we could, but then I’d say, “Everybody, yield!” and we’d realize that, sure enough, we could yield some more!
I encourage you to do that in your own prayer times. As you do, you’ll find yourself giving voice to new expressions of the Spirit. Your tongues may sound odd to you because you take up a different dialect, but don’t get distracted by the manifestations. Just keep your attention on the Lord and trust His leadings. Speak to Him as if you’re having a conversation with Him and He is standing right in front of you.
I can tell you from my own experience, you’ll be blessed!
Scripture Reading: 1 Corinthians 14:2
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!”