All my life I’ve been seeking to understand the power of prayer, prayer that gets an answer. Anyone can pray. In Russia one former army officer said to me, “I fought in the war under communism, people did not believe in God, they were not allowed to believe in Him, but when the bullets started whistling round their ears and they realised how close they were to death, they all cried out to this unknown God for help!” In a crisis even unbelievers will cry out and pray. It is easy to pray like this, but it’s harder to have a relationship with God. All my Christian life, I’ve not only wanted to pray – I learnt to pray as a child – but I wanted to know how to get an answer to prayer, how to find power with God, so that when I pray, God will answer.
In Luke 11, when Jesus had finished praying, one of His disciples came to Him and asked, “Lord, please teach us how to pray!” In answer Jesus replied, “When you pray, say, Our Father who is in Heaven, hallowed be Your Name, Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”
I could not say these words for many years because, as a boy in school, every morning we had ‘assembly’, when we sang a hymn, someone read from the Bible and we would repeat the Lord’s Prayer. I could not say it with them, because the boys around me were not praying from their hearts, the words meant nothing to them, they were talking to the air, not to God, they did not know God – they even changed the words to blasphemous ones. To the boys at school it was just meaningless repetition. But there came a time in my life when I came to really understand what it meant.
In 1972, I was arrested for taking Bibles behind the Iron Curtain and put in a communist prison: the sentence for bringing Bibles was five years, and because I was preaching the Gospel in the prison, that was another five years. I could have been there ten years! I did not want to spend ten years of my life in prison, in a foreign country! I desperately wanted to learn how to pray, because I wanted to see a miracle happen; I did not want to stay in the prison; I wanted to be free, to do the work of God.
Things were difficult in the prison in Czechoslovakia where I was, and in the first few months it seemed as if God did not answer any of my prayers. When I prayed for food, there was none, when I prayed that my wife would come, she was not allowed a visa to visit me – it seemed that every prayer that I prayed, God said no. I began to despair. We had to get up at 6.00 am every morning and sit for hours on a wooden stool embedded with nails. It was torture. In the first six months I wasn’t allowed out of my cell – my food and my toilet were in the cell. I lost so much weight. However, I would try to pray in those early hours before the guards brought the mouldy black bread and foul tasting, drug laced drink which was our only breakfast.
One morning when I had been three months in that cell, I cried out in desperation that I could not pray anymore because, I said, “Oh God, every time I pray, You say no! When I want the food parcels my family send, or a visit from my wife, or for me to be found not guilty in the court and be set free, always the answer is no! I don’t know how to pray anymore, everything I ask for, it’s no!” I sat there, not knowing what to do. “Oh God, if You don’t hear me, I’d rather die, because life has no purpose, no meaning if You don’t answer me.” While I was still saying, “Oh God, I cannot pray anymore”, I remembered the words in the Bible (I had no Bible in the prison – it was forbidden) when the disciples had asked Jesus how to pray, and He said, “When you pray say…” – and I began hesitantly to say those words, ‘Our Father’ – but as I did so, I began to argue, I cannot say ‘our’, that’s plural – I’m alone in here, no family, no friends, no believers, how can I speak in the plural? I have to say MY Father. Suddenly I knew the reality of those words, He is mine – He is my Father!
This is why prayer is communion with God – not simply reading or candles. But communication has to be two way – you speak to God, and He speaks to you. But how does He speak to you? It is true that God sometimes speaks through prophecy, or through visions, but the most important is that He speaks to all of us through His Word, the Bible. This wonderful Book, the Bible, is our ‘guide book’ through life and deals with most of the situations we will encounter in our lives.
So many people know the Lord’s Prayer, they can say the prayer, they can sing it – but don’t know the reality. I want you to read Luke 11, because Jesus did not end with the ‘Amen’ of the prayer, but actually continued, “Which of you has a friend and shall go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, because a friend of mine has come and I have no food in my house to give him.’” Jesus is still talking about prayer! Jesus says, you have no food, you go to your neighbour, you bang on the door – the neighbour says go away, it’s late, the children are asleep, go away, you’ll wake the baby. But you keep on banging, and the more you knock, the more your neighbour says, go away! Then, Jesus says, eventually, because you keep on knocking, your neighbour will get out of bed and give you what you want, not because you are a friend, but because you make so much noise in asking, and because he cannot keep you quiet. Jesus said, “I say to you, ask, and it will be given, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened.” I want to show you the greatest lesson in prayer: don’t take no for an answer, keep on calling to God, keep asking – He will answer you! Our God is a prayer-answering God. Don’t take no for an answer, keep on asking, God will give you what you need. That applies to sickness, to every problem in your life.