My God answers prayer! He is a God of Fire and Power! How do you set fire to wet wood? - You can’t, but God can! When Elijah called upon the Name of the Lord, Fire fell from heaven and consumed the sacrifice. O God send the Fire of the Holy Spirit, we are waiting and expecting You to answer, now!
‘Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’ (Jeremiah 33:3, NKJV)
We serve a praying answering God; a God of miracles, signs and wonders. Nothing is too hard for Him; when we call in faith, believing in His promises, God does the impossible.
Knowing Jesus: the key to answered prayer
I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own (John 10.14, NKJV)
Just being religious, just knowing there is a God, is not enough. There has to be something more; there is a vast difference between knowing about someone and actually being in relationship with them. So many people are sick and in need of healing. Often when first diagnosed with their condition, in their hearts they whisper, ‘O God help me’, but yet they don’t really believe in Him; it is a phrase of comfort, rather than a reality. Many people who utter those words don’t even expect an answer: they pray, take medicine, go to the doctor; yet nothing improves. Why is that? They don’t understand what prayer is, who to pray to, nor how to pray.
Now a woman, having a flow of blood for twelve years, who had spent all her livelihood on physicians and could not be healed by any, came behind and touched the border of His garment. And immediately her flow of blood stopped. (Luke 8:43-44, NKJV)
It took the woman with the issue of blood twelve years to find the One who could heal her. She spent all she had on doctors, yet her symptoms never improved. I can imagine she observed religious rituals and ceremonies, yet none of these helped. But one day she reached out to Jesus in faith and immediately was healed. What made the difference? She called upon the living God in faith. It was as if a light shone in her heart, what was once a theory became a reality: she KNEW Jesus could heal her! One translation says, ‘she kept saying to herself, “If I only touch His garment, I shall be restored to health.”’ (Matthew 9:21, AMP) - What was that? The prayer of faith. With each step towards Jesus, her faith grew, she kept praying, ‘If I only touch His garment…’ and suddenly, when she did, the miracle happened. The answer was not in the garment Jesus wore; the faith she had connected with the Power in Jesus; so much so, Jesus felt healing power leave Him.
The fire and power of prayer
“Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that You are God in Israel and that I am Your servant, and that I have done all these things at Your word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that You are the Lord God, and that You have turned their hearts back to You again.” Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood and the stones and the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench. (1 Kings 18:36-38, NKJV)
God challenged the people through Elijah: ‘How long will you halt between two opinions? If the Lord is the true God, follow Him, serve Him, obey Him. But if these false gods are real, follow them!’ (1 Kings 18:21). We all face this challenge: how long will we waver between unbelief and belief: how long will we doubt God? If we do not actively believe the Lord God, you will end up believing the lies of the devil.
Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal who had taken over the spiritual leadership of the people: ‘You pray to your god, but he can’t see, he can’t hear, he can’t answer. There is no god there! I’ll pray to my God, because I know Him and His power, and the God that ANSWERS (prayer), He is the real God!’ The spiritual crisis we are in now is the crisis moment when God is challenging spiritual leaders to test the reality of their own experience.
Just knowing that there is a God is not enough - even the devil knows and can quote the words of Scripture better than many (Luke 4). You need to be like Elijah and know who God really is.
Elijah gave a challenge to the false prophets: ‘You prepare a sacrifice, pray, and ask your god to send fire.’ They spent all day but their god did not answer. When evening came, Elijah prepared a sacrifice, but can Elijah’s God answer? Before he even began to pray, he commanded his men to dig a big trench right round the sacrifice, then pour twelve barrels of water over it. What was Elijah doing? First, he had challenged the prophets of Baal, and they failed to get an answer to their prayer. Now he was calling on God to send fire, which would take a miracle, but before he prayed he himself made the answer to his prayer absolutely impossible by putting water where he needed fire!
Choose today whom you will serve
We must get back to the authority of the Bible. When God answers, He does it by a miracle. The only real evidence of the reality of God that I find in my Bible is the miraculous. At this point, if Elijah does not believe in a God of miracles, who can do things which are absolutely impossible, he is a dead man! If you do not believe in a God of miracles, you will not get an answer. As Elijah said to the people, choose today which kind of God you will serve! The challenge is even more necessary in our day: dead god or living powerful God? You are the one who must choose.
When Elijah asked the people, ‘Are you for God or against Him?’ They didn’t answer yes or no, they just sat in the middle. But we need to demonstrate in our lives what God can do! It only took one man, Elijah, to demonstrate the power of God to a whole nation! Let’s call upon the power of God! Let’s believe God like Elijah did! Let’s rise up and do something in Jesus’ Name! We need to get baptised with the Holy Ghost and fire!
Elijah called down fire from Heaven and it came on the sacrifice. If you today are not Elijah, at least be the sacrifice on God’s altar! O God, send the fire, we are waiting and expecting You to answer now!
‘Holy Ghost Fire’ used by kind permission of www.vinesong.com