Full text of Bible teacher Derek Prince’s sermon: ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. In this message, Derek Prince says, “The most influential people on earth today are those who know how to get their prayers answered.”
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TRANSCRIPT:
Derek Prince – Bible teacher
If I were to ask you here, whom do you consider the most influential kind of person on earth? I suppose you might think of various different answers.
Probably your mind would turn to political leaders such as George Bush or Mikhail Gorbachev or others, men of science, or maybe even military commanders.
But I don’t believe that they are the really influential people. I look in a completely different direction.
As I understand it, the most influential people on earth today are those who know how to get their prayers answered, because they can release the omnipotence of God into situations which goes far beyond anything that the wisest or most powerful human being can do.
So I want to speak to you in this message on certain requirements for getting our prayers answered.
But first of all, I just want to read you three statements from the New Testament about what prayer can do.
The first is found in Matthew 21:22. Jesus Himself is speaking, and He says, “And all things, whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.”
Notice: all things that you ask in prayer, you will receive. There’s no restrictions. There’s just one condition: ‘believing’; the condition there is faith.
And then we turn to John’s Gospel 15 and verse 7. And again we have the words of Jesus to His disciples.
John 15:7: “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.”
Another version says, ‘ask what you desire and it shall be done for you.’
Notice there: ‘what you desire’. There’s no other restriction. But the condition is: ‘if My words abide in you’. In other words, if we pray according to God’s word.
And one final Scripture in the first Epistle of John, chapter 5, verses 14 and 15.
John 5:14-15: “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him (that is in God), that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.”
There again, it says ‘whatever we ask’. But again, there’s a condition attached. It’s ‘according to His will’.
So if you take those three passages together, you’ll find that the scope of prayer is unlimited. Nothing is excluded.
But the conditions are three-fold: faith, according to God’s word, and according to God’s will.
And they go together, because God’s word reveals God’s will. And we know that when we’re praying according to God’s will, we will get what we pray for.
So I want to deal in this message with what I consider to be the basic requirements for praying that kind of prayer, for making you a person who can change the course of history.
I don’t know whether you’re aware, but in the light of the recent events in Eastern Europe, the overthrow of the Iron Curtain, the release of political liberty inside the Soviet Union. In 1987, the church in Russia, which was looking forward to its 1000th anniversary, set aside the month of January for prayer and fasting.
And I believe if you look for the real cause of the dramatic political changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, it’s not in the decision of politicians, it’s in the prayers of God’s people.
And I’d have to say, and I trust you’d agree with me, that if that amount of authority has been committed to us as believers in Jesus and in the Bible, we are really foolish if we don’t make use of it.
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And I think we’re negligent, I think God is going to call us to account if He’s committed that kind of authority to us and we don’t appreciate it and make use of it.
Now, for the conditions that I want to speak about, I want to turn to the Sermon on the Mount, and particularly to this 6th chapter. And I want to take the first part of what is familiarly known to Christians around the earth as the Lord’s Prayer.
Jesus says in Matthew 6:9: “In this manner, therefore pray.”
I don’t believe He means that we’ve always got to use precisely those words, although they’re beautiful words. But I believe that He set forth a pattern of the way we ought to pray. And typically it’s very concise, but very complete.
Now, I only want to take the first two verses, verse 9 and verse 10. I believe they contain the key to effective prayer. I hope I can put this key in your hands, and you can walk out of this meeting with a key that will unlock the omnipotence of God.
Let’s just read those familiar words; I’m reading from the New King James version:
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
First of all, we address God as Father. That makes all the difference. We’re not praying to some remote, unknown deity, some impersonal force, but we’re praying to a person who has made Himself our Father through Jesus Christ.
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