Rabbi Schneider - A Prayer for Limitless Power
I just finished writing a book called "The Key to Answered Prayer". And the primary point that I make in this book is this: that when our prayers are in alignment with God's will for us, He absolutely, most certainly, and specifically will answer those prayers. So when I pray for people and when I pray for myself, I want to always measure my words and what I'm asking for with the written word of God. Because the written word of God reveals to us what the Father's will is for our lives.
So a great way to train yourself to know how to pray is to study the prayers in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that were prayed by God's patriarchs, His prophets, the apostles of the New Testament. And when you study those prayers, you then have a model for what is important to God. And when you apply those same principles that you see modeled in the lives of the prophets and the patriarchs and the apostles, and when you take those prayers, then and apply them to your own life, you can be assured that you're moving down the right river, down the path to holiness. And as you're praying in alignment with God's heart, beloved one, His power is going to be released into and upon your life.
Now, I just used that word "power". And on the last broadcast in this series, I talked about the Apostle Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3. And now we pray that God will release His glory into our lives by strengthening us with power in our inner man. Power is an important word for the New Testament believer. The Bible says that Jesus prophesied that His disciples would wait in Jerusalem. And as they waited in Jerusalem, they'd be baptized in the Holy Spirit, the Ruach HaKodesh-with power. Power is very important. Because power is what enables us to apprehend the Lord. Power is what enables us to take a grip of God, to bring God from being a concept of someone that's out there in the sky somewhere to become someone that is real and living inside us.
So what I want to do is I want to return to where I left off last time in this series to the book of Ephesians 3. I'm just going to read through the Scripture of what I covered and then we're going to press on to some new material. Now, as I read, I want you to listen for that word "power" because it's so important. Hear the word of God. Paul said, "For this reason I bow my knees before the Father..." And remember Jesus said that He came to bring us into a relationship with the Father. So notice Paul's prayer here. "For this reason I bow my knees before the Father..." Notice it wasn't Jesus who Paul was praying to here. But Paul was praying to the Father. In fact, every one of Paul's letters begins the same way. "Blessed be the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ".
Jesus Himself said, "No man cometh to the Father but through me". But unfortunately, many New Testament Christians, they never pray to the Father. They only pray to Jesus. And we can and should pray to Jesus at times. But the primary model of prayer that we see in the Brit Chadasha, in the New Testament, is that our prayers should be directed to the Father. Even Yeshua taught us to pray when He said, "When you pray, pray in this way: our Father that art in heaven..." So I want to challenge you right now that if you find yourself only praying to Jesus, if you find yourself only singing songs to Jesus and you've left out the Father, you've kind of missed it. Because Jesus never claimed to be the destination. Yeshua rather claimed to be the way to the destination. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man come up to the Father but through me".
So we're wanting to get our heart in alignment with God. And one of the things that we do is we posture ourselves in prayer so that we're speaking most often to the Father. So Paul begins his prayer this way. And he says in Ephesians 3:14, "For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father..." And I talked about that in the previous episode what does it mean to bow our knees? And then Paul continues. He said in verse 16, "That he would grant you, that the Father would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, His manifest presence to be strengthened with," here we go, "P-O-W-E-R, power, through His Ruach, through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts..."
So get this equation here in the Spirit. The Father strengthens us with power by His Spirit, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts. You get that the Father releases His glory into our life, which translates to His power into our soul by His Spirit, so that Christ would dwell in our hearts. Now, I know that for many of you that I'm talking to right now, your relationship with Jesus is real. But it is most accurately described as you're praying to a Jesus that's out there somewhere. You're praying to a Jesus that's up in heaven. When you pray, you're praying to someone that is outside yourself. But notice that Paul's prayer here is that we would come to the realization of Christ, listen now, as someone that's not first out there somewhere, although He is at the Father's right hand, but that we would come to the revelation that Christ is in our inner man.
So that when we are strengthened by the Spirit with the Father's power, we enter into an experiential reality that we apprehend, beloved, that Jesus is inside us. If we don't know Yeshua inside us, we'll never know Him. Until we come to a fellowship of experiencing Jesus in us and us in Him, we'll never feel connected. We can never feel intimately connected to God, we can never feel intimately connected to the Father, and we can never feel intimately connected to Jesus until we're strengthened on the inside by God's power through His Spirit to apprehend His reality inside us. He's not over here and He's not over there. He's inside us. So, once again, listen. "For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man..." And then when we're strengthened by His Spirit in the inner man, what happens? We apprehend a deep communion of fellowship with an indwelling God.
So we continue in the 17th verse. "...so that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith..." Now, when we think of that word "faith," a lot of times we think of some type of, you know, just outward projection. Faith. You know, faith that moves mountains. We're thinking of an outward projection of faith. That people are healed by their faith. And that is true. But faith is also simply something that revelation produces. What produces faith? Revelation power. And so when we're strengthened by God's Spirit, we apprehend by revelation, which produces the faith. And faith is a substance. It's real. It's not just a concept. It's real. That we know that God is living on the inside of us.
So as we continue on, once again, Paul says, "The result of this strengthening is that Christ will dwell in your heart through faith". It's not just like a concept. A lot of times people think of faith as a concept. I'm not talking here about faith as a concept. I'm not talking about faith as something that's other than. I'm talking about faith as an apprehension. This is why Jesus said, "When you believe that you've received what you've asked for in prayer, you'll have it". It's not a projection of something on the outside. It's a knowing inside that you have it already. So we apprehend that Jesus is in us. And there's a fellowship that develops as a result of this, an intimacy, a deliverance from loneliness, a deep security that is rooted in our inner man.
Let me say it again. When we apprehend by faith that God is inside us and that we're in Him, as the Scripture said, that we don't have to go to heaven to apprehend God and we don't have to go to the bottom of the sea to apprehend God. But He's in us. He's inside us. So when we realize this, there's a communion, there's a divine synergy that takes place, that we begin to walk in this love relationship that produces a deep security in our soul that allows us to enter into the reality of Jesus who said He was meek and lowly of heart. How was Jesus meek and lowly of heart? He was so secure that He didn't have to broadcast Himself anymore. He was so secure in the Father's love that it produced a meekness and lowliness of heart. Secure in Papa's love. This is the focal point of prayer. The focal point of prayer. We're talking about keys to answered prayer.
The focal point of our prayer should be to apprehend God, to know Him for ourselves. Jesus said that the gift of receiving Him is eternal life. And when we think about eternal life, many people think that that just means that we go to heaven when we die. But eternal life is more, beloved ones, than going to heaven when we die. Eternal life is also now. Eternity is now. Eternity is beyond time. Jesus Himself is the eternal one. And Jesus described eternal in this way in John 17. He said, "This is eternal life: that you would know God, that you would know the Father and Jesus Christ whom thou is sent". So to the degree that we know the Father, and that we know Jesus, that we've entered into this place of deep intimacy, this place of deep connection, this place where we become secure in the Father's love, to the degree that we've entered into this reality, it's to that degree, O beloved children of God, that we're experiencing eternal life.
So let's continue on with Paul's prayer here. "So that apprehending the Father within us and our inner man would result in us being grounded in love..." Not just being loving people to other people, but we're rooted in God's love. A lot of times people think, well, the fruit of the Spirit is love. So they think they've got to go around, you know, being do-gooders. And we should be do-gooders. But that's not where it starts. It starts with being rooted in knowing God's love for you. That's what Paul's talking about here. That you'd be rooted and grounded in the love of God, knowing His love for you.
And then Paul continues in the 18th verse, "That you'd be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth..." I mean, what is he saying here? He's talking about the Father's love is more enormous, more infinite than the sky. It's bigger than the bluest ocean. The height, the depth, the breadth, the width. It surpasses understanding. It's so, so... There's no word to describe the depth and the power. It's so big. It's so wide. I mean, my words are so empty in trying to describe it. Paul is doing his best to describe the enormous ocean of the love of God that we would know it. That we'd be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ. Because the Father's love is all imparted to us through Christ, through Yeshua, through the Anointed One. That we will know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.
I want you to think about this. When you think about Paul praying, "That we would know the love of Christ," I want you to think about this. All the Father's love is directed to His Son. The scripture says that the Son is in the Father and always has been in the Father. Some translations read that the Son is in the bosom of the Father. The Father is love. And love by its very nature needs to be focused on someone. So from all eternity, God the Father loved His Son that's always been inside Him. And all the Father's love, beloved ones, is focused on His Son. All the strength of the Father's love is focused on Jesus.
Now hear this. You have been grafted into Jesus. So the same love now that the Father loves His only begotten Son, Jesus, the same love that is focused on Jesus from the Father is now focused just as passionately on you and I, because we are now in Christ. We are in Christ. And this is what Paul is praying for, that you and I would comprehend. So listen again. That we be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you would be filled up, that you would be filled up with the fullness of God.
And as I shared earlier on the previous episode, everyone is searching to be filled up with something. Human nature is that it needs to be filled. God created us to be filled with Himself. Unfortunately, in our deception, we seek to fill the empty void within us with everything that can fill it. That's why the Lord said in the book of Jeremiah, "Why do you seek to draw water from cisterns that hold no water? Why are you trying to drink from something that will not satisfy you"? What the Lord is promising here is that as we come to the revelation, as we come to the comprehension of His love for us, we're going to be filled up with the fullness of God.
You know, the things in life that are really important, the things in life that really matter are things that cannot be seen. In other words, when it's time to leave this world, are we really going to care about our car? Are we really going to care about our house? Is the job that we used to have gonna really matter? No, the things that really matter are those invisible things, the relationships that we've built, the relationships that we formed. When people get on their deathbed, they don't regret that they didn't have a different car. What they regret is that they didn't spend more time with their loved ones, that they didn't reach out more to people, that they didn't help people more. It just shows us that the thing that really satisfies the human soul is not based in material world, it's based in love, it's based in relationship.
And this is what the Father is calling us to, to enter into this comprehension of His love for us, so that we can be filled up with the fullness of God. And then Paul ends His prayer there in Ephesians by saying that the one that raised Jesus from the dead is able to do exceedingly more than we ask or think. Whatever it is that you're believing God for, whatever it is that you'd like to see the Father do for you, let me tell you, He's got better plans for us than we have. Eyes has not seen and ear has not heard, and it's never even entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for those that love Him. So the Father says, Call upon me and I will show you great and wonderful things that you know not of. I hope that this series has motivated you to recognize Father has more for you. Seek and you shall find.