Prayer A to Z

Prayer in Heaven

Posted on June 17, 2025 by Stephen Nielsen

Prayer in Heaven: What Aspect of Prayer Now Will Be the Same in Heaven?

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Stephen Nielsen

Some would say that there will not be prayer in heaven because we will always be with God and we can just talk to Him person to person. Well, yes, I agree that we will always be with God; however, if we define prayer as communication, as soul to soul communication between two people who love each other, then there definitely will be prayer in heaven. We will communicate with God soul to soul just as we do now. Many things about our communication with God will be different—and better—in heaven; but there are some basic things that will remain the same.

If you break down what it means to communicate soul to soul you will find that this aspect of prayer is eternal. The soul is made up of the mind, the affections, and the will. With the mind, when we pray, we think about God and He thinks about us. Our thoughts about God now mainly come from the study of His Word. And in heaven for eternity our thoughts toward God will also come from the Word; for the Word of God is eternal, and our thoughts on His Word are exhaustless. We will never run out of things from His Word to think about toward Him. Matthew 24:35 says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.” Also in Isaiah 40:8 it says, “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.”

Our thoughts about God also come from our ponderings of nature, as we think about all the beautiful things in nature and the vastness of the universe. In heaven of course our thoughts about God will be much more wonderful. Heaven and earth will be new, and we will have a new, glorified mind. The wonders we will behold and think about will be awesome!

God also thinks, and will always think many thoughts toward us. In Jeremiah 29:11 God says to us, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” In Psalms 40:5 David said,

Many, O Lord my God, are Your wonderful works

Which You have done;

And Your thoughts toward us

Cannot be recounted to You in order;

If I would declare and speak of them,

They are more than can be numbered.

Also in Psalms 139:17-18 David said,

How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!

How great is the sum of them!

18 If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand…

With our heart (or with our emotions) we have feelings toward God; and with His heart He has feelings toward us. Our emotions toward God are stirred up by our thoughts of Him. So, as we meditate on the Word and ponder the beauty of God in nature, our heart is stirred in us to love Him and commune with Him. And of course, as 1 John 4:19 says, “We love Him because He first loved us.”

God’s love toward us doesn’t have to be stirred up. It has always been there. His love and all His wonderful thoughts and plans for us are eternal. That is, His love for us is from eternity past to eternity future. God’s very nature is love. He loves all people whether they choose to accept Him or not. And he demonstrated His love for us by sending His only Son to earth to die on a cross for us (Rom. 5:8). But His love doesn’t touch all of us. Only those who choose to accept Him and obey Him will experience His love; and happily, they will experience His love forever. Psalm 103:17 says, “But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him…”

The third part of the soul is the will. With the will we choose to listen to God and obey Him. This part of prayer is vitally important. It is the part that keeps communication with God alive, because if we don’t choose to listen to Him, speak to Him, and obey Him, and if He doesn’t listen to us and speak to us, then prayer is over; it is dead.

So what we are saying is that this soul to soul communication is the basis of prayer. We commune with God and He communes with us—through the mind, the affections, and the will. And we also communicate with Him verbally by words of our mouth. And whether we pray just in the mind (with the heart and the will), or also with words, we do it in conversational style, just as we are speaking to a friend. This is the nature of prayer now, and I believe it will continue this way for eternity; for God will always be our friend and lover, and He will always want to be near us and converse with us. Jeremiah 31:3 says, “The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying: ‘Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you…’”

Posted in Reblogs | Tagged bible, Christianity, faith, God, Jesus, prayer, soul to soul communication | Leave a comment

Begin Praying with Earnestness

Posted on June 12, 2025 by Stephen Nielsen

4 Ways to Begin Praying With Earnestness

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Stephen Nielsen

If you really want to pray with earnestness here are four ways to start.

1. Pray for it. Ask God to show you His heart and ask Him to give you the same desires and burdens that He has. Then ask Him to give you the energy to pray concerning those burdens and to put His fervency and power into your prayers.

2. Be Obedient to pray whenever God calls you to pray. If we are obedient to pray when He calls us to pray He will be faithful to give us just the right amount of earnestness it takes to pray and bring the answer. Even if you don’t feel a lot of desire to pray at first, pray anyway, because your act of obedience will put the Holy Spirit to work in you. He will warm your prayers up, and the more you keep praying the more the Holy Spirit will bring burning fire to your prayers.

3. Love others fervently. The Greek word ektenos, translated as earnest, is used in Acts 12:5 to describe prayer. But the word is also used in 1 Peter 1:22 for how we are to love one another. Here Paul writes, “Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently [ektenoós] with a pure heart.”

So here we see that the fervent (or earnest) love we may have for someone is the same earnestness that we will have in our prayers for them. In fact, we cannot pray for someone with earnestness without loving them with the same earnestness. Thus earnest prayer is born of earnest love. And even if we are not praying for a particular person, if we are just praying regarding something in our own life, we can still pray with earnestness; it comes out of our fervent love for God and for His will.

4. Abiding in God’s Word. When we spend time meditating on the Word and praying the Word into our life, God will show us His heart. Before long we will have the same (or a portion of the same) desires and burdens He does; and we will pray with the same earnestness that His Spirit prays for us (Rom. 8:26).

Posted in Reblogs | Tagged bible, Christianity, faith, Jesus, prayer | Leave a comment

Earnest Prayer

Posted on June 11, 2025 by Stephen Nielsen

How to Pray with Earnestness — 3 Steps

Posted on July 28, 2016 by Stephen Nielsen

God has given us prayer, a vehicle to call upon Him, because He knows that we will always have needs. We have little needs, average size needs, and sometimes huge needs. Sometimes our needs can wait, but sometimes our needs are urgent. Whatever size the need is, and however urgent the need is, God will give us just the right kind of prayer with the right amount of earnestness that is necessary to bring help to each need.

Step 1. Earnest prayer begins with God giving us a burden and a desire for something—to possess something, to bring something about, or to change something. Along with that desire, He also causes us to seek Him and to seek His will concerning the thing we desire.

Sometimes He puts us in the middle of a difficult situation so that we are familiar with the burden that He gives us and so that we feel the burden as He does. But sometimes the burden seems strange to us, because we are not so involved with it, and so we have to pray through it and grab on to it so as to make it our own. In this case, I would say that we should be constantly asking Him how to pray and how to understand the burden He is giving us.

Step 2. After God gives us a desire and a burden to pray for something, the second thing He does is He puts in us the urge and the energy to pray. And when we obediently follow the urge of His Spirit and pray with the energy of His Spirit, this is how we begin to pray with earnestness.

Step 3. But earnest prayer is not easy. It’s really a lot of work. Earnest prayer is prayer that is worked at constantly; it is a continual determined effort (in the Spirit) to bring an answer. Sometimes God requires our earnestness in prayer to be so intense that it is agonizing, as one whose muscles are sore and as one who is extremely tired—as a runner who has run his hardest and his body is in agony as he strives for the finish line.

From the Greek word agonizomai we get the word agony. This word is used of how Epaphras, one of Paul’s co-workers prayed and how he himself prayed for the church (with agonizing earnest prayer, Col. 1:2-29; 4:12). This kind of earnestness is how we should pray for ourselves in our struggle against the devil and against our flesh. Thus our prayer against the enemy must be continual and unrelenting; and at times it will be agonizing work. But if we keep at it, if we keep trusting God and asking Him to help us in our prayers, He will bring us the answers that we desire and that He desires for us.