Answered Prayer… Guaranteed!: The Power of Praying with Faith

By Frederick KC Price

Price explains a biblical and experientially based method of prayer. It will provoke assurance and confidence that God hears your prayers and answers them. Most Christians struggle with their commitment to prayer and wrestle with a proper prayer attitude and even posture. Price debunks the teaching on prayer that says, “Sometimes God says yes, sometimes He says no, and sometimes He says wait.” He teaches how God responds to faith and faith alone, and why it is critical for us to understand how to pray in faith and not in doubt, ignorance, or presumption.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charisma House
• Release date: Oct 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781599797014

Book preview

Prayer

Introduction

How do you pray?

Well, I get down on my knees or go into my room and …

Wait, that’s not what I meant. I mean, what method, what process do you use to pray? Are your prayers answered? How do you know?

There is a popular saying among pastors today that states, God answers all prayers, but sometimes God says yes, sometimes God says no, and sometimes God says wait. Doesn’t that seem like an odd form of answer to you? I mean, if you order a Big Mac at McDonald’s and you pay your money, you expect a hamburger. Barring the extremely unusual situation that McDonald’s runs out of meat or french fries, once you pay your money, no isn’t an option, and, for most people, wait isn’t an option either.

Is it true that no and wait are God’s answers to prayer? If not, are you getting what you pray for? And if you do not get what you pray for, why not?

Next to the salvation experience and receiving the Holy Spirit, there is no issue in all of a Christian’s spiritual life that is as critical as getting prayer right! Yet you’d be amazed at how many people don’t know that not only are there different kinds of prayers, but also that you can no more use the wrong prayer to get a certain result than you can use a Phillips head screwdriver when you need a hammer. Prayer permeates a Christian’s life. It should be the first thing a Christian does in the morning, and it should be, as Paul commanded, done without ceasing during the day.

Unfortunately, most Christians are not informed that there are different types of prayer and that there is a proper formula for praying, so they attempt to use flowery language capped by a catch-all phrase, If it be Thy will. People who do this are well meaning. They are sincere. But usually they are sincerely wrong, and they rarely get prayers answered.

Other people, like a desperate quarterback at the end of a football game, just throw a prayer up there and hope it sticks. They hope that whatever they ask, and however they ask it, God will respond. But will He? Is God obligated to act if we don’t follow the rules?

This book is a formula for answered prayer—how to do prayer. Have you ever said, I hope God heard that prayer? Would you like to be assured that if you follow His instructions you can be guaranteed He will hear you every time? In the following pages, I want to share with you one of the biggest blessings of my life: God’s instruction manual for prayer. This is not some gimmick. Don’t think for a moment you are treating God like a supernatural candy dispenser. Quite the contrary, the principles I am going to share with you involve taking God at His Word. They require that we put up or shut up with our faith. That’s why some people resist what I’m about to tell you, because it’s all about faith—faith, and knowing God’s promises.

There is a way to pray so that you know God hears you and has already answered your prayer. There is a way to pray in faith—all the time—a way to get answers.

And no isn’t an answer.

Chapter One

Use the Right Tool

Many Christians aren’t aware that there are several different types of prayer discussed in the Bible, and if you use the rules or tools from one prayer when you should be using the tools from another prayer for your needs or your requests, it won’t work.

Have you ever watched a talented mechanic or craftsman work? He always has the right tool. You or I might strain to reach underneath an engine or struggle with pliers to put together some little piece of furniture. But for a master mechanic or trained craftsman, it seems that no problem is too great. The mechanic whips out a long instrument that has a ratchet on the end, slithers it up through the crowded engine compartment, and has a bolt out in seconds. A craftsman can affix the perfect-sized screwdriver head to an electric drill and assemble a complex-looking bookcase in minutes. If you talk to these people, they will always tell you that it is critical to use the right tool. A screw won’t come off easily with pliers—if at all, and you can’t drive in a nail with a screwdriver.

This principle is critical when it comes to prayer. Many Christians aren’t aware that there are several different types of prayer discussed in the Bible, and if you use the rules or tools from one prayer when you should be using the tools from another prayer for your needs or your request, it won’t work. You would be applying the wrong spiritual tool to your needs or your request. Consider what Paul wrote to the Ephesians. He concludes a long section in which he urges the Christians at Ephesus to put on the whole armor of God (Eph. 6:11), then to stand (v. 14), saying this should be done by praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit (v. 18). I’ll deal later with the concept of praying always, but notice that Paul tells us to pray with all prayer. This refers to all kinds of prayer, or to put it in a different way, Paul is saying there are different kinds of prayer.

How to pray and what to pray for are entirely different issues.

A failure to understand that there are different kinds of prayer and that they don’t all do the same thing has led some ministers to claim we cannot pray correctly at all, or to conclude each prayer with if it be Thy will. They frequently use Romans 8:26 as a proof text to show that we do not know what we need, so, in essence, we can’t possibly pray correctly:

Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

—ROMANS 8:26

Let me note in passing that this passage is sometimes used by ministers to claim that we don’t know what we should pray for. Yet these same ministers may deny praying in tongues, which seems clearly indicated by this verse. We will discuss this more in a later chapter.

How to pray and what to pray for are entirely different issues. Can we agree on that? What I use my car for and how to start it have little to do with each other. This verse does not say that we do not know how to pray. It says we do not know what we should pray for as we ought (emphasis added).

The context of this verse deals with intercession for others. Paul was discussing intercessory prayer, which is a totally different type of prayer tool than what we call petition prayer.

It helps to know from the outset what the different prayer tools are—to know a ratchet from a screwdriver, as it were, in the realm of prayer. We have no problem understanding that baseball, basketball, and soccer all have different types of balls, different playing surfaces, and different rules. Why is it so hard to think that prayer is any different? In fact, there are six different types of prayer mentioned in the Bible, and God intended them for different functions.

1. The Prayer of Agreement

In Matthew 18:19, Jesus introduced the prayer of agreement when He said:

Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven.

Right off the bat you can see that for the prayer of agreement to work, people involved in the prayer have to … agree! You cannot know what someone else wants—what someone is believing for—and God cannot answer your prayer for someone else against his or her will. To use the prayer of agreement, you must be sure that the person with whom you are agreeing is in line with what you are asking for. If someone asks me to pray in agreement with them, I ask, What specifically do you want me to pray for? Even husbands and wives sometimes are not in agreement over what to pray for when they use the prayer of agreement. If they are praying for a new car, the husband might be praying for a sports car, while the wife is praying for a small SUV. Neither of them can get their prayer answered because they are not really in agreement.

You absolutely must be on the same page when using the prayer of agreement. It is even difficult to set yourself in agreement with people over their healing, because often healing to you may mean something totally different than what healing means to a sick person. Some sick people just want to be out of pain. A person may be praying for a doctor to provide a cure—and there is nothing wrong with that, unless you are praying for the person’s supernatural healing. It isn’t the same thing! As a pastor, I have even had people ask me to pray for them to be well when in actuality they were believing to die. One time, after I had just started out in faith as a minister, a young woman who was sick seemed to be getting worse and worse. Finally I asked this woman, What are you praying for? I’m praying for your healing.

To use the prayer of agreement, you must be sure that the person with whom you are agreeing is in line with what you are asking for.

She replied that she wanted to die—that she’d been in an abusive marriage and that she was just as happy to go and be with the Lord as to continue living with her husband. So here I was, praying for her to live, and she was praying to die!

In that situation, whose prayer do you think will take precedence with God? It would be hers, because we cannot violate her free will, nor can God. Get some information before you commit yourself in prayer agreement with someone else. If you are both in complete agreement, then watch out! You will have double the faith working on a problem.

I want to reiterate, though, that you cannot use the prayer of faith or the prayer of consecration and dedication if you need the prayer of agreement. Use the right tool. The prayer of agreement is useful in the context of marriages, say, when a husband and wife are buying a new home and need guidance on which home to buy. Or the prayer of agreement works quite well in a business setting where two Christians are in business together and are believing for a specific sales target. Make sure you are in perfect agreement about what your prayer request is before you join with another believer in the prayer of agreement.

2. The Prayer of Faith

The prayer of faith, also known as petition prayer, is the prayer that most people think of when they use the term prayer. Petition prayer is between you and God. It is you asking God for a particular outcome, whether it’s a job, money, a lifetime mate, or whatever. The key verse for the prayer of faith is Mark 11:24, where Jesus says:

Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.

The rule to consider here is when you pray—not after you pray … not when you feel something … not when you see something. When you pray (the moment that you pray) you must believe that you receive what you asked for.

This is a difficult concept for some people. God is a present tense God. He doesn’t operate in the past or in the future, but in the now. Whenever you pray, at that moment you are in the present. At that precise time, you must believe that you receive what you are praying for. At the moment you pray, believe that you receive what you have requested. Hebrews 11:1 says, Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Your faith is substance—it is something real, something tangible. It is evidence of things you cannot see.

Think of a court of law. The jury was not at the scene of a crime, but the attorney introduces a photo of the crime scene that shows blood. That photo takes the place of the thing itself, the crime scene. The evidence is proof of something the juror cannot see but knows nonetheless. Your faith is proof of something that you have received … but can’t yet see. The Amplified Bible says it this way: Now faith is the assurance (the confirmation, the title deed) of the things [we] hope for, being the proof of things [we] do not see and the conviction of their reality [faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses]. The Worrell New Testament says, Now faith is an assurance of things hoped for, a sure persuasion of things not seen. Confirmation. Title deed. Assurance. Sure persuasion. Substance. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

If you have asked God for something once, you must have faith enough to believe that He heard you and that He has answered your prayer.

Notice that Mark 11:24 does not say when you will actually see the result of your prayer. It does not tell you how long it will take for that prayer result to appear, and this is where many Christians get hung up. God lives in one eternal now. There is no past or present for Him. But we are temporal beings who live in the context of time. When you pray in faith, God immediately gives you what you prayed for—in the spirit realm. But in the natural world, due to a number of factors, it may take time for the answer to manifest itself. As an example, when you make a stock market transaction and tell your broker to sell one hundred dollars of stock, he sells it right then. But you do not possess the actual money until he sends it to you through the mail or transmits it electronically to your account. Even then, you will likely get a check, and that check does you no good until you endorse it and put it in your account. We do not have a problem understanding these processes we have to go through in the natural world. We know they are required to bring something you have into a reality you can use.

Let me give you yet another example. You may get your new credit card in the mail with instructions from the bank that you must make a phone call to activate the card. That card is in your name, and it has a limit of many thousand dollars set aside for you—yet it will not work unless you go through the right steps to activate that card.

Part of the faith required to make a prayer transaction, to activate your faith request, is that you can only pray one time for something—because