Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
2 17 2025

Tonight is Courageous Mens Group 7pm – We Hope you can join us.

Prayer: From God, Through God, To God

We all seem to struggle with prayer. There is always a distraction, a text, phone call or something that unsettles our resolve to approach the Father in prayer.  Jesus gave us the Lord’s prayer.  He showed us His way.  So, we know but yet we still struggle with pressing through to our knees effectively.’ I was reading this article by Steven Winter on prayer, and I want to quote some of his insights to help us all in the dynamics of prayer, incorporating our Triune God in the entirety of it. 

He says we pray in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness, interceding for us (Romans 8:26). So, we have double help with our prayers. Both God the Son and God the Spirit speak to God the Father on our behalf.

This pattern encourages us to be Trinitarian in our prayers, praying to the Father through the Son in the power of the Spirit. This is “the grain,” the directionality of prayer, as Fred Sanders observes (The Deep Things of God, 211). When you’re cutting a piece of wood, it’s helpful to know the direction of the grain.

“Jesus’s passion, pleasure, and purpose is to bring us into the presence of the Father.”

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis memorably expressed the wonder of prayer to God:
An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian, he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God — that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying — the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him that is pushing him on — the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life . . . he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself. (163) 

We have all failed so miserably time and time again to fall to our knees in prayer. Stephen encourages us to call on the power of the Holy Spirit to help us pray.  It isn’t our will that will get that done.  It is only the power of the Holy Spirit (sent from God) inside of us compelling us upward into a closer relationship…A closer union/communion to God.  We are so used to praying our way.  We carve out the time,  make the time, (sometimes) we pray.  When it is Christ himself, who lives to make intercession for us.  Call on the Holy Spirit’s power, again, and you will find His strength is sufficient.

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Blessings, 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toy1hiDSfJU
Who you say  I am  Jenn Johnson
 
Excerpts taken from an article by: Stephen Witmer (@stephenwitmer1) is the pastor of Pepperell Christian Fellowship in Pepperell, Massachusetts