Supernatural Power For Everyday PeopleSample

Perhaps the primary reason that in times of difficulty or loneliness we think of God as being silent is because we equate “God’s voice” with material blessings, physical comfort, and happy feelings. When good things are happening, we are rarely troubled by God’s silence, even if we never talk to him ourselves or read his Word.

The idea that blessings equate to God speaking while hardships equate to God’s silence is a symptom of the way we tend to think of blessings as “normal” and hardship as “odd.” Given the fallenness of humanity and the consequential brokenness of creation, this viewpoint is exactly upside down. God is never really silent with us, not even in our loneliest and darkest circumstances. Hearing him may indeed be more difficult, and we may find “feeling” his presence harder still—that is only natural. Nonetheless, he is always with us and he is always speaking. Engaging in this heavenly conversation is the essence of walking by faith, not by sight. . . . The key to the supernatural life, then, is engaging in this divine dialogue for which all Christians are empowered to participate.

What is the divine dialogue? Put very simply, it works like this: God speaks to us in his Word, and we respond to him in prayer. God may speak to us in other ways, and we to him, but these are subjective and not normative. No, there is no other way around this truth: the primary way any Christian will participate in a friendship with God is by Bible study and prayer.

Prayer is, fundamentally, our way of participating in the divine dialogue begun by the Spirit in the Bible. It is helpful to think of prayer this way because it demystifies prayer a bit and makes it more practical and thus more doable. It also helps us guard against unbiblical thinking about prayer and its impact in our world.

Is prayer powerful? Yes, definitely, but specifically because the one being prayed to is powerful. The one doing the praying is, by her praying, demonstrating that she has no power in and of herself. That is functionally what prayer is—an expression of helplessness. If we were powerful, we wouldn’t need to pray.