Access connection

When you “pray without ceasing,” as Paul prescribes in I Thessalonians 5:17, the idea is to have a constant inner communion with God.

“Instead of just having that internal dialogue, what we call self-talk, with yourself, you realize that God the Holy Spirit, who lives within your spirit, wants to commune with you,” said Jordan in his Sunday night study. “He wants you to talk to Him about what’s going on in your life. When you begin to do that, instead of just thinking, ‘Well, should I do this or shouldn’t I do that,’ you think, ‘Lord, should I do this or that.’ All of a sudden there’s accountability.

“When you realize every thought you have, God Himself is right there with you, hearing you say it, you don’t have to pray through the roof; He’s right there with you. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to go to some temple to pray.

“What you need is to be conscious of the fact that there’s that uninterrupted, constant, personal communion in your inner man between you and your Father. When you realize that, all of a sudden your thinking process becomes different.

“I used to work with Brother Reynolds down at the Mobile Rescue Mission, and you’d be sitting talking to Brother Reynolds and sometimes you couldn’t figure out if he was talking to you or the Lord. You’d be talking to him and he’d say, ‘Lord, now I pray you’d bless so and so,’ and then he’d say, ‘Ricky, do this.’

“Early on I got a little confused by that but then I came to appreciate it because I realized he just had that constant dialogue with the Lord and when he spoke out . . . you see, I have that dialogue in my heart, you don’t hear it, but if I speak it, if I talk audibly, then you hear what I’m saying. That’s a wonderful thing and when Paul says, ‘I would that men would pray everywhere,’ that’s the kind of praying he’s talking about.

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“When Paul talks about ‘lifting up holy hands,’ he’s not talking about just the physical posture you’re in, and when you get caught up in the physical posture, thinking that’s making prayer more prayer, you’ve missed it.

“There’s something Paul had in mind when he talks about holy hands because there’s a thing in Scripture where your hands aren’t holy. He’s not talking about physical cleanliness; he’s talking about spiritual cleanliness.

“Isaiah 1: 15-16 says, And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.
[16] Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;

“He’s talking about the fact the nation has been corrupted with the false religions; the Baal worship. They’re in complete spiritual revolt against God’s Word. Their hands are full of blood.

“You see, when Paul talks about ‘lifting up holy hands,’ he’s talking about having a prayer life that is not connected with apostasy. He’s talking about being sound in the truth; he’s not just talking about swaying to the music.

“You watch people on TV who say, ‘Lift up your hands and worship God,’ and they make that an issue! And you begin to check their doctrine and see they are corrupters. That’s doing to the church exactly what Israel had done to the Word of God back in the Book of Isaiah!

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“In your prayer life and talking to God, you don’t talk to Him doubting His grace to you. If you talk to God wrong (wrongly dividing the Word), He doesn’t come along and go, “Ah-ha-ha, I caught you!’

“What happens is if you talk to Him about it, you begin to learn the Scripture and the Scripture begins to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, if I’m trying to confess my sins to get God to forgive me, and I read over in Romans that God doesn’t impute sin to me, how does that work?’

“You see what the Scripture will do? It will eventually cause some dissonance. In order for someone to change their mind about something, you first have to create a situation of confusion where they question what they’ve been believing and another passage will bring dissonance and then you have to go and start learning.

“I talk to people all the time who come to that. And that’s when you begin to understand something about right division and you begin on your own, able to find out what the answers are.

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“Prayer’s not something you use as a way to get what you want from God. It’s not a ritual to make you more spiritual. God’s not some vending machine up in the sky.

“Paul says in Romans 8, ‘Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. [27] And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.’

“The Spirit of God is going to take the Word of God, and with the sound doctrine out of the Word, He’s going to guide your life. How? Through the application of sound doctrine out of the Word of God rightly divided. That’s how the Holy Spirit guides our intercession to the real needs.

“You see, the Holy Spirit can get right down to the deepest real need in the issue. Not the surface need but the REAL issue; the spiritual issue underneath the surface.

“ ‘With groanings that can’t be uttered.’ You remember the Lord Jesus Christ stood at the grave of Lazarus in John 11:35? Every kid in a Scripture-quoting contest knows the verse; it's the shortest one in the Bible: ‘Jesus wept.’

"Tears are called “agony in solution.” There came a point where there wasn’t anything to say; He just wept. He couldn’t utter the sorrow but He expressed it.

“Paul says ‘we know that all things work together for good.’ That verse has a context. We know that all this application of sound doctrine to the details of our life works good and what is the good? It’s that we would be conformed to the image of Christ.

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“I think Ephesians 3:12 is one of the great prayer passages in Paul’s epistles that’s overlooked most of the time. He writes, ‘In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.’

“You understand you can come to God that way? Look back at chapter 2:18: ‘For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.’ We have access right into the hearing of the Father ‘by the faith OF him.’

"Talking to Peter in Galatians 15, Paul refers to the faith OF Jesus Christ. He reasons, 'Even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.'

“It’s not your performance, it’s HIS performance! Our justification before God is not based upon what we do; it’s based upon HIS trustworthiness—what He’s done. We’re justified by HIS faith in God’s Word. Christ’s faithfulness is our resting place. He’s who God trusts and we can trust Him too. There’s a lot of comfort and peace in that.

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“When we pray ‘in the name of Jesus’ (Paul, in Ephesians 5, says that’s how we are to pray), that’s not a formula that you add at the end of your prayers. That’s the attitude with which you approach God.

“It’s an expression of our knowledge that we have no righteousness of our own; no right of our own to approach God, but Jesus Christ has given us His right, His righteousness and we come boldly with confidence by the faith of Him.

"You see, the purpose of Christ in redemption, in saving us, is to give us a personal relationship with God and that’s the basis of prayer; it’s not trying to get something from God.

“It’s not getting material or financial gain from God. Paul says ‘having food and raiment let us therewith be content.’ If ‘godliness with contentment is great gain,’ what does God consider to be great gain? I mean, what do you really need anyway?

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"Our faith resting in the truth of God’s Word to us allows the Holy Spirit the liberty to take that truth of who we are in Christ and bring it into our experience, and we have access with confidence by the faithfulness OF Him; by His trustworthiness.

“Paul writes in Philippians 3, ‘Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death.’

“The guy’s been saved 35 years and he’s still saying, ‘All I want is to know Him.’ “You see how HE'S the object?!”