James 5:16 Confess faults to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous one avails much.
We all know that prayer needs to be an essential part of our lives. And if you're like me, we would love for the Lord to answer all our prayers instantaneously -- however, we know from experience this is not always the case!
Oswald Chambers was quoted as saying, “We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.
Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours.”
While our prayers may not be answered immediately, we know the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man or woman radically changes the world around us!
Charles Spurgeon once said, "We cannot all argue, but we can all pray; we cannot all be leaders, but we can all be pleaders; we cannot all be mighty in rhetoric, but we can all be prevalent in prayer."
So let’s commit to spending more time in prayer today! Make sure you don't allow the enemy to rob your time to pray -- for it's in prayer that we tap into God's unlimited power that makes demons tremble!
Copyright 1999-2025 Worthy Devotions. This devotional was originally published on Worthy Devotions and was reproduced with permission.
How to display the above article within the Worthy Suite WordPress Plugin.
[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]The children of Israel were delivered into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years for doing evil in the sight of YHVH. Then a wonderful event takes place: an announcement to a barren and childless woman that she will conceive and bear a son. The announcement is given by one who is called “malach-YHVH”, literally “Angel (of) YHVH. This messenger, in two separate appearances, reveals God’s commandments concerning the boy to be born. At the angel’s behest, the couple offers a sacrifice to YHVH, then they ask to be told his name.
This interesting passage speaks of a time when Israel had no blacksmiths to make weapons and was without any armament to defend themselves. The enemy had succeeded to disarm Israel by removing their weapons, and those who forged them! He’s attempting the same tactic today.
From the moment we were conceived we began aging, growing older by the day. We may slow down the physical aging process by exercising, eating right and other natural techniques – but we cannot ultimately stop it. This mortal flesh, our outer man, is “wasting away” and moving toward decay as we await the immortal bodies promised us in the Resurrection.
In his letter to the Colossians, Paul reveals the prophetic nature of Shabbat and the Biblical Feasts as “shadows of things to come”, whose substance is the Messiah Yeshua (Jesus). My study of the feasts therefore seeks to discover their relevance to the Lord, His identity, work, and purpose for my life in relationship to Him.
A few years ago, I was in a debate with an atheist who had a legal background, and the Lord gave me a revelation about the tactics of the enemy. At Yeshua’s first coming, his tactic was to destroy the infant before He could grow up; [Revelation 12:4-5]. After the Lord’s death and resurrection, Satan continued his direct assault by attacking the church through persecution, which lasted through the first three centuries. The tactics of the enemy were to destroy any “eyewitnesses” of God’s goodness.
An interesting parallel exists between these two passages of scripture: Isaiah 53:9 and Acts 3:15. Isaiah renders the “death” of the messiah in the plural form, “deaths” (“motav”). Acts renders the life of the Prince of Life as “lives” (“chaim”). Some scholars suggest that the plurality of the word death indicates a violent death this servant would suffer, and that making the noun plural is a way of emphasizing the terrible intensity of his experience. Jewish counter-missionaries suggest that the “death” in plural shows that the suffering servant is not an individual man, but a group of people, specifically the nation of Israel, thus denying that the passage refers to an individual messianic figure.
Proverbs says the “highway of the upright is to depart from evil”. It’s a highway — a way of life so to speak. And this proverb coincides with the central teaching of Yeshua (Jesus) — “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” What does it mean to repent? The Greek Word is “metanoia” which simply means to change your mind about sin or to depart from evil.