Prayer is Powerful

Most recently, God has reminded me of this by showing me a demonic figure in my garden. After feeling, all day, like the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to me about something specific, he led me into prayer in the evening. He led me to pray against very specific demonic strongholds in my family. I prayed for about an hour and was about to wrap it up, when I saw a dark figure in the garden, walking towards our bedroom door. I got a fright, I thought it was a thief. I quickly swung my torch onto the figure - and there was nothing there. It was God's way of telling me - that prayer is not finished. Sometimes we pray for something for a long time, and nothing seems to be happening, and we can lose heart - but always pray with faith, believing, because there are unseen changes happening in the spiritual realm, that we mostly cannot see. We must not forget that our enemy is persistent, and we must not stop coming against him in prayer. If we give up, he wins.

My daughter was born with Coeliac disease - it is manageable, but incurable. We managed it for the first eight years of her life. Then, one day when I was gardening, God told me quite unexpectedly to go and pray for her. I did it, and then followed up with a step of faith - I told her to eat something that would normally have made her very sick. She has been healed from that Coeliac disease since that day, and it's now eight years later.

Once when my son was young and we were 65km from the nearest hospital, he damaged his neck and dislocated his collar bone. He was in a lot of pain and couldn't sit up or turn himself over in bed, and he was crying. I sat and prayed for him, and as I prayed he started to scream, "stop! it's burning!" But I didn't stop, because in spite of his screams, I felt God quite clearly telling me to keep praying. After a while, the screaming stopped and a little while later, he sat himself up. When we did get him to the hospital to be checked, they told us his collar bone had been dislocated, but had gone back into place 'by itself'.

Not every prayer is answered the way we want it to be, but don't let that dishearten you. Even Jesus prayed, "Father, remove this cup from me" - and although angels came to strengthen him, he drank that cup. When God says 'no' - that doesn't diminish the power of prayer, it just reaffirms God is sovereign.