Devotional Prayer
1 John 5:14-15
Message #5
This is our fifth message in this special series titled Alone With God. All of these messages in this series are based on our Daily Devotion Journal (DDJ). Do you have one with you? If you do not, you may get one by visiting www.calvarynuevo.org/resources or you may DOWNLOAD A DAILY DEVOTION JOURNAL HERE.
I said at the beginning of this series that this devotional process that we call the Daily Devotion Journal (or DDJ) is the only thing I have ever seen to be one hundred percent effective in bringing transformation to a Christian’s life. There are other things (we call Spiritual Disciplines) I’ve seen work a percentage of the time on a percentage of the people. But I have never seen one person make this devotional process a regular habit in their lives, over time, and not be truly and significantly transformed by it.
The DDJ is really just three primary steps to devotion. Meditate, Apply, Respond. And all three of those primary steps must be done in an attitude of prayer. There is dedicated prayer at the beginning to prepare you for your time with God, and there is dedicated prayer at the end to conclude your time with God. And in the middle, this entire time with the Lord is wrapped and immersed in prayer.
The word, “communion” is most often the Greek word KOINONIA. The word refers to “a deep relationship of sharing, of oneness, of having in common.”
The verb KOINONEO means “a relationship or a sharing – in communication.”
Prayer is KOINONEO – a sharing (a relationship) with God – in communication.
This communion (sharing) with God, called prayer, is the conduit of our relationship with God. Prayer is where our relationship with God exists.
Before the fall, Adam and Eve had full communion with God.
Sin destroyed that communion.
Jesus Christ restored that communion.
Prayer is practicing that restored communion.
It is that “ongoing communion” that “Koinonia with God” that radically transforms our lives. That is what “devotional prayer” is all about and praying (in that communion with God) within our devotional time is one of the most powerful ways we can pray.
If we will learn to:
1 John 5:14–15 (ESV)
14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.
15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.
One of the most powerful things in the Christian life is knowing that you are asking for God’s will and knowing that he will bring his will to pass in your life. All we have to do is know how we can get into alignment with God’s will, and learning to approach the Word of God the way we’ve been studying in this series will do that for you.
So, I want to go through the Daily Devotion Journal one more time with you showing you what I mean by “wrapping (saturating) this entire time in prayer.”
But first, let me give you some encouragement about this whole process from George Mueller. George Mueller is known as one of the mightiest men of prayer in the last two hundred years. He financed the care for over 10,000 orphans in total, all through prayer and faith alone. His “secret” combination of using God’s Word in his prayer is a lesson that’s been taught a million times (I’m sure). Here is a quote from one of his books describing his approach to such powerful prayer.
George Mueller
Now … after having asked in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon His precious word, I begin to meditate on the word of God, searching, as it were, into every verse, to get blessing out of it.… The result I have found to be almost invariably is this; that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer. When thus I have been for awhile . . . I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others, as the Word may lead to it.
Possibly the mightiest man of prayer of the 1800’s is describing (in essence) what we are teaching in this series. That’s because he helped me develop the Daily Devotion Journal years ago.
Okay, now… let’s go through the Daily Devotion Journal one more time (and last time).
First, you PRAY to prepare yourself. You pray to shut everything else out, to get alone with God. You pray to make your heart ready to hear from God, and more importantly, to receive what God is saying to you.
Then, as you MEDITATE on the scripture, you’re in that time of prayer and communion with God in his Word. You’re reading the Word slowly, you’re mulling it over, and you are actually communicating with God in prayer according to what you’re reading. You’re hearing from him in his Word and you’re “working through it” in prayer. This is where your paraphrase of the scripture comes from – as you’re writing out this scripture in your own words, it is the outcome of your meditative communion with God in prayer.
Then, your APPLICATION is your inward acknowledgment of what God is specifically pointing at in your life… in line with this scripture and for this time in your life. This inward acknowledgment is accomplished (acknowledged) in prayer as you interact with God, according to this scripture, to hear what he is saying to you personally in it.
Then, your RESPONSE is a commitment to God in prayer of what you are going to actually DO about what the Holy Spirit has impressed on you in line with this scripture and at this time in your life.
Do you see how this entire time with God is immersed in an attitude of prayer? So, it’s only fitting that we close this time with the Lord with prayer and that is the last step on our Daily Devotion Journal. The journal page simply says PRAY: Write your prayer to God in response to this scripture. This prayer can take many different directions, but it needs to be “in response” to what you’ve just gone through with the Lord in his Word.
This final prayer is the wrap-up of your communion with the Lord during this devotion time. You’ve heard from the Lord in your meditation on his Word. You’ve applied what the Holy Spirit has impressed on you to your life, personally and specifically. You’ve committed to a response of action in obedience to what God has shown you. Now, what do you say to God about all that? What is in your heart at this end of this devotion time that you need to pour out to God in prayer?
Maybe your initial prayer would be “Lord, SAVE ME!”- as Peter prayed in Matthew 14:30.
Or maybe, “Holy Spirit come alongside me and HELP me,” as Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would in John 14:16.
Maybe it’s, “Lord, Transform me by the renewing of my mind with this truth you’ve given me today” – as Romans 12:2 calls us to.
That’s all good, and that’s all according to scripture. But the very best way we can pray to finish this life-changing devotion time with God is to write out a prayer that is kind of a summary of what we’ve experienced during this time with God.
So, let’s take a look at one more completed Daily Devotion Journal, and instead of focusing on one section, I’d like to move faster through it so you can see how the entire process reinforces the theme of the scripture and how it applies to my life.
Today I’d like to start with reading the scripture then reading through my Daily Devotion Journal on the scripture, and I hope you can sense the “communion with God” in prayer that permeates the entire devotion.
God is genuinely speaking something crucial to me here, something that I genuinely needed to hear on that day. The scripture is Psalm 29, and the reason I picked Psalm 29 is because that day was the 29th of the month. So let’s start with the scripture.
Psalm 29 (NLT)1 Honor the Lord, you heavenly beings; honor the Lord for his glory and strength. 2 Honor the Lord for the glory of his name. Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness. 3 The voice of the Lord echoes above the sea.
The God of glory thunders. The Lord thunders over the mighty sea. 4 The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is majestic. 5 The voice of the Lord splits the mighty cedars; the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon.
6 He makes Lebanon’s mountains skip like a calf; he makes Mount Hermon leap like a young wild ox. 7 The voice of the Lord strikes with bolts of lightning. 8 The voice of the Lord makes the barren wilderness quake; the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
9 The voice of the Lord twists mighty oaks and strips the forests bare. In his Temple everyone shouts, “Glory!” 10 The Lord rules over the floodwaters. The Lord reigns as king forever. 11 The Lord gives his people strength. The Lord blesses them with peace.
Powerful Psalm, right?
Here is my MEDITATION. Ascribe (which means to give or attribute) to the Lord all the glory and honor and all the strength due to him. Worship the Lord in his splendor and his holiness. His voice is over all creation, his glory thunders – full of majesty. The voice, the spoken Word, the Greek word RHEMA, the voice of the Lord will level a forest and it will shake the foundations of the earth. In his temple, all cry out, “Glory!” He rules over all, he rules over every crisis, the floodwaters, and he reigns forever. From this Lord, from this God, we get our strength and our peace. His strength is my strength. His peace is my peace.
Here’s my APPLICATION. Worship is to ascribe, to give to the Lord all he is due, to acknowledge his great worth. I must acknowledge who my God is and where my God sits. I must acknowledge what my God controls and what my God can do with his spoken Word. I must live according to who my God is. And I must live according to the unending supply of his strength and the unending supply of his peace that he will give to me as I worship him.
Here’s my RESPONSE. I will do it, Lord! I will always worship you. I will always acknowledge who you are and I will always acknowledge what you can do. I will always place you above everything and always acknowledge that you alone reign supreme in my life no matter what! And I will look to you alone for my strength and my peace.
Here’s my CLOSING PRAYER. I say yes, Lord! I say, yes Lord, you are worthy! You are mighty! You are enthroned above all creation and you are enthroned above all else in my life. You are the only great and awesome God able to shake the earth at its core. All creation cries out, GLORY TO YOUR NAME! Please pour out your strength and your peace on me today. For the glory of your name in my life, amen.
Now, here’s the point. Do you think that Psalm was speaking to something personal and specific in my life on that day? I promise you; it was. And do you think that Psalm gave me something from God that day to renew my mind and thereby continue to transform my life? You better believe he did. Can you see how much better this is than me just rattling off my laundry list of prayer requests to God that morning? This kind of time with God done on a regular basis will radically change the way I think and the way I live. Not because I am demanding my will be done in heaven, but because I’m praying God’s will be done on earth.
God’s Word reveals God to me, and it reveals God’s will to me. And knowing WHO God IS and knowing WHAT God’s will is will radically change my life.
Starting, covering, and ending this devotional time with the Lord, by praying in line with God’s Word, will force God’s will into your heart and into your mind. Ultimately you will remove yourself from the throne of your life and you’ll put Jesus Christ there and your self-will will be replaced with God’s good and perfect will and your life will be transformed. As Romans 12:2 says,
Romans 12:2 (NLT)
2. . . let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
THAT is life transformation.
So, next week, in our last message in this series, we’re going to talk about HOW to find the scripture that you will use in your Daily Devotion Journals. We’ll talk about the power of focusing our devotion time on the same topic for thirty days in a row.
And we’ll talk a little bit about how to approach scripture so that you’ll know you’re “in the same lane” (in the same general area) as God’s originally intended meaning of the text.
So, stay with me and learn how to have powerful, life-changing devotional time with the Lord.
I said at the beginning of this series that this devotional process that we call the Daily Devotion Journal (or DDJ) is the only thing I have ever seen to be one hundred percent effective in bringing transformation to a Christian’s life. There are other things (we call Spiritual Disciplines) I’ve seen work a percentage of the time on a percentage of the people. But I have never seen one person make this devotional process a regular habit in their lives, over time, and not be truly and significantly transformed by it.
The DDJ is really just three primary steps to devotion. Meditate, Apply, Respond. And all three of those primary steps must be done in an attitude of prayer. There is dedicated prayer at the beginning to prepare you for your time with God, and there is dedicated prayer at the end to conclude your time with God. And in the middle, this entire time with the Lord is wrapped and immersed in prayer.
The word, “communion” is most often the Greek word KOINONIA. The word refers to “a deep relationship of sharing, of oneness, of having in common.”
The verb KOINONEO means “a relationship or a sharing – in communication.”
Prayer is KOINONEO – a sharing (a relationship) with God – in communication.
This communion (sharing) with God, called prayer, is the conduit of our relationship with God. Prayer is where our relationship with God exists.
Before the fall, Adam and Eve had full communion with God.
Sin destroyed that communion.
Jesus Christ restored that communion.
Prayer is practicing that restored communion.
It is that “ongoing communion” that “Koinonia with God” that radically transforms our lives. That is what “devotional prayer” is all about and praying (in that communion with God) within our devotional time is one of the most powerful ways we can pray.
If we will learn to:
- Pray to MEET God before our devotional time
- Pray THROUGHOUT our devotional time – in communion with God
- Pray to FINALIZE our devotional time with God
1 John 5:14–15 (ESV)
14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.
15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.
One of the most powerful things in the Christian life is knowing that you are asking for God’s will and knowing that he will bring his will to pass in your life. All we have to do is know how we can get into alignment with God’s will, and learning to approach the Word of God the way we’ve been studying in this series will do that for you.
So, I want to go through the Daily Devotion Journal one more time with you showing you what I mean by “wrapping (saturating) this entire time in prayer.”
But first, let me give you some encouragement about this whole process from George Mueller. George Mueller is known as one of the mightiest men of prayer in the last two hundred years. He financed the care for over 10,000 orphans in total, all through prayer and faith alone. His “secret” combination of using God’s Word in his prayer is a lesson that’s been taught a million times (I’m sure). Here is a quote from one of his books describing his approach to such powerful prayer.
George Mueller
Now … after having asked in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon His precious word, I begin to meditate on the word of God, searching, as it were, into every verse, to get blessing out of it.… The result I have found to be almost invariably is this; that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer. When thus I have been for awhile . . . I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others, as the Word may lead to it.
Possibly the mightiest man of prayer of the 1800’s is describing (in essence) what we are teaching in this series. That’s because he helped me develop the Daily Devotion Journal years ago.
Okay, now… let’s go through the Daily Devotion Journal one more time (and last time).
First, you PRAY to prepare yourself. You pray to shut everything else out, to get alone with God. You pray to make your heart ready to hear from God, and more importantly, to receive what God is saying to you.
Then, as you MEDITATE on the scripture, you’re in that time of prayer and communion with God in his Word. You’re reading the Word slowly, you’re mulling it over, and you are actually communicating with God in prayer according to what you’re reading. You’re hearing from him in his Word and you’re “working through it” in prayer. This is where your paraphrase of the scripture comes from – as you’re writing out this scripture in your own words, it is the outcome of your meditative communion with God in prayer.
Then, your APPLICATION is your inward acknowledgment of what God is specifically pointing at in your life… in line with this scripture and for this time in your life. This inward acknowledgment is accomplished (acknowledged) in prayer as you interact with God, according to this scripture, to hear what he is saying to you personally in it.
Then, your RESPONSE is a commitment to God in prayer of what you are going to actually DO about what the Holy Spirit has impressed on you in line with this scripture and at this time in your life.
Do you see how this entire time with God is immersed in an attitude of prayer? So, it’s only fitting that we close this time with the Lord with prayer and that is the last step on our Daily Devotion Journal. The journal page simply says PRAY: Write your prayer to God in response to this scripture. This prayer can take many different directions, but it needs to be “in response” to what you’ve just gone through with the Lord in his Word.
This final prayer is the wrap-up of your communion with the Lord during this devotion time. You’ve heard from the Lord in your meditation on his Word. You’ve applied what the Holy Spirit has impressed on you to your life, personally and specifically. You’ve committed to a response of action in obedience to what God has shown you. Now, what do you say to God about all that? What is in your heart at this end of this devotion time that you need to pour out to God in prayer?
Maybe your initial prayer would be “Lord, SAVE ME!”- as Peter prayed in Matthew 14:30.
Or maybe, “Holy Spirit come alongside me and HELP me,” as Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would in John 14:16.
Maybe it’s, “Lord, Transform me by the renewing of my mind with this truth you’ve given me today” – as Romans 12:2 calls us to.
That’s all good, and that’s all according to scripture. But the very best way we can pray to finish this life-changing devotion time with God is to write out a prayer that is kind of a summary of what we’ve experienced during this time with God.
So, let’s take a look at one more completed Daily Devotion Journal, and instead of focusing on one section, I’d like to move faster through it so you can see how the entire process reinforces the theme of the scripture and how it applies to my life.
Today I’d like to start with reading the scripture then reading through my Daily Devotion Journal on the scripture, and I hope you can sense the “communion with God” in prayer that permeates the entire devotion.
God is genuinely speaking something crucial to me here, something that I genuinely needed to hear on that day. The scripture is Psalm 29, and the reason I picked Psalm 29 is because that day was the 29th of the month. So let’s start with the scripture.
Psalm 29 (NLT)1 Honor the Lord, you heavenly beings; honor the Lord for his glory and strength. 2 Honor the Lord for the glory of his name. Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness. 3 The voice of the Lord echoes above the sea.
The God of glory thunders. The Lord thunders over the mighty sea. 4 The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is majestic. 5 The voice of the Lord splits the mighty cedars; the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon.
6 He makes Lebanon’s mountains skip like a calf; he makes Mount Hermon leap like a young wild ox. 7 The voice of the Lord strikes with bolts of lightning. 8 The voice of the Lord makes the barren wilderness quake; the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
9 The voice of the Lord twists mighty oaks and strips the forests bare. In his Temple everyone shouts, “Glory!” 10 The Lord rules over the floodwaters. The Lord reigns as king forever. 11 The Lord gives his people strength. The Lord blesses them with peace.
Powerful Psalm, right?
Here is my MEDITATION. Ascribe (which means to give or attribute) to the Lord all the glory and honor and all the strength due to him. Worship the Lord in his splendor and his holiness. His voice is over all creation, his glory thunders – full of majesty. The voice, the spoken Word, the Greek word RHEMA, the voice of the Lord will level a forest and it will shake the foundations of the earth. In his temple, all cry out, “Glory!” He rules over all, he rules over every crisis, the floodwaters, and he reigns forever. From this Lord, from this God, we get our strength and our peace. His strength is my strength. His peace is my peace.
Here’s my APPLICATION. Worship is to ascribe, to give to the Lord all he is due, to acknowledge his great worth. I must acknowledge who my God is and where my God sits. I must acknowledge what my God controls and what my God can do with his spoken Word. I must live according to who my God is. And I must live according to the unending supply of his strength and the unending supply of his peace that he will give to me as I worship him.
Here’s my RESPONSE. I will do it, Lord! I will always worship you. I will always acknowledge who you are and I will always acknowledge what you can do. I will always place you above everything and always acknowledge that you alone reign supreme in my life no matter what! And I will look to you alone for my strength and my peace.
Here’s my CLOSING PRAYER. I say yes, Lord! I say, yes Lord, you are worthy! You are mighty! You are enthroned above all creation and you are enthroned above all else in my life. You are the only great and awesome God able to shake the earth at its core. All creation cries out, GLORY TO YOUR NAME! Please pour out your strength and your peace on me today. For the glory of your name in my life, amen.
Now, here’s the point. Do you think that Psalm was speaking to something personal and specific in my life on that day? I promise you; it was. And do you think that Psalm gave me something from God that day to renew my mind and thereby continue to transform my life? You better believe he did. Can you see how much better this is than me just rattling off my laundry list of prayer requests to God that morning? This kind of time with God done on a regular basis will radically change the way I think and the way I live. Not because I am demanding my will be done in heaven, but because I’m praying God’s will be done on earth.
God’s Word reveals God to me, and it reveals God’s will to me. And knowing WHO God IS and knowing WHAT God’s will is will radically change my life.
Starting, covering, and ending this devotional time with the Lord, by praying in line with God’s Word, will force God’s will into your heart and into your mind. Ultimately you will remove yourself from the throne of your life and you’ll put Jesus Christ there and your self-will will be replaced with God’s good and perfect will and your life will be transformed. As Romans 12:2 says,
Romans 12:2 (NLT)
2. . . let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
THAT is life transformation.
So, next week, in our last message in this series, we’re going to talk about HOW to find the scripture that you will use in your Daily Devotion Journals. We’ll talk about the power of focusing our devotion time on the same topic for thirty days in a row.
And we’ll talk a little bit about how to approach scripture so that you’ll know you’re “in the same lane” (in the same general area) as God’s originally intended meaning of the text.
So, stay with me and learn how to have powerful, life-changing devotional time with the Lord.