Tony Evans - Kingdom Prayer: Touching Heaven to Change Earth

2016 by
ANTHONY T. EVANS

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Edited by: Jim Vincent

Interior and Cover design: Erik M. Peterson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Evans, Tony, 1949- author.

Title: Kingdom prayer : touching heaven to change earth / Tony Evans.

Description: Chicago : Moody Publishers, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016028231 (print) | LCCN 2016031683 (ebook) | ISBN 9780802414847 | ISBN 9780802494771 ()

Subjects: LCSH: Prayer--Christianity.

Classification: LCC BV210.3 .E935 2016 (print) | LCC BV210.3 (ebook) | DDC 248.3/2--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028231

ISBN: 978-0-8024-1484-7

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I f the truth be told, prayer is hard work. While all serious Christians recognize the importance that the Bible places on prayer, most fall short when it comes to doing it. I must confess that it is a lot easier for me as a pastor to preach about prayer than to spend that same amount of time engaged in it.

As a pastor I am also aware of how much easier it is to draw a crowd for a special sermon, special guest speaker, or program than it is for a prayer meeting. Even when there is a determination to pray, distractions seem to always show up. The mind wanders, people interrupt, and I, like you, often fall asleep early in the process. We feel guilty, commit to do better, but after a while fall back into the same old prayer struggle of neglect or routine prayers.

This naturally raises the central question: Why is something so strategic to the Christian life, our relationship with God, and victory in life such a challenge? The answer is that prayer links us to a realm we are unfamiliar navigating. Paul calls it heavenly places. Prayer is the God-given communication link between heaven and earth, time and eternity, the finite and the infinite.

Because the enemy of our souls knows how unfamiliar we are with operating consistently in the spiritual realm, he also knows we quickly revert back to what the five senses are comfortable with. After all, when we pray, we are talking to someone who we cant see and who is not audibly talking back to us. This causes some of us to feel like we often are musing aimlessly in thin air.

When we come to realize, however, that prayer is the divinely authorized means to access the kingdom of heaven and to get that kingdom to intervene in the affairs of our earthly life, it affects both our perception of and persistence in prayer. I define kingdom prayer as the divinely authorized methodology to access heavenly authority for earthly intervention. Prayer is Gods backstage pass into a personal audience with Him. Thus the enemy, not wanting us to make contact, seeks to divert our belief, confidence, determination, and our practice of prayer. Prayer, unlike anything else, grants us legitimate authority to invoke heaven into history, so that God is welcomed into our affairs.

This explains why God allows negative events into our lives that we cant fix, forcing us to pursue Him in prayer out of the desperation of our circumstances. I was reminded of this truth when I watched the movie War Room. To save her marriage and family, Elizabeth Jordan (played by Pricilla Shirer, my daughter) turned her closet into a place of focused, concentrated prayer. She came to realize only heaven could fix what earth couldnt. When we truly come to realize that much of Gods activity in history is determined by the presence or absence of prayer, then fighting through the distractions becomes a lot more effective.

My goal in Kingdom Prayer is to confront you afresh with the untapped power and authority that we have in prayer and to motivate you and me to utilize our backstage pass to access our heavenly father for our deepest needs.

So I invite you to join me in giving God permission and an invitation for earthly intervention; an intervention that is essential if we are to experience victory in our personal lives, families, churches, and communities.

A number of years ago, I took the family on a vacation to see one of the great wonders of the world. We had already been to the Grand Canyon and gotten to ooh and ahh about the scenery there. Personally, I didnt completely understand why we had to drive that far to see a hole in the ground, but it was on the list of Great Family Vacation Destinations so we went.