Prayer Is Powerful [Awakening Faith]
True worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. (John 4:23)
Prayer is the spiritual offering that has done away with the sacrifices of old. We are true worshipers and true priests. We pray in spirit, and so offer in spirit the sacrifice of prayer. Prayer is an offering that belongs to God and is acceptable to him: it is the offering he has asked for, the offering he planned as his own.
We must dedicate this offering with our whole heart, we must fatten it on faith, tend it by truth, keep it unblemished through innocence and clean through chastity, and crown it with love. We must escort it to the altar of God in a procession of good works to the sound of psalms and hymns. Then it will gain for us all that we ask of God. Since God asks for prayer offered in spirit and in truth, how can he deny anything to this kind of prayer? How great is the evidence of its power, as we read and hear and believe!
In former times, prayer was able to rescue from fire and beasts and hunger, even before it received its perfection from Christ. How much greater then is the power of Christian prayer? No longer does prayer bring an angel of comfort to the heart of a fiery furnace, or close up the mouths of lions, or transport food from the fields to the hungry. But it gives the armor of patience to those who suffer, who feel pain, who are distressed. It strengthens the power of grace, so that faith may know what it is gaining from the Lord, and understand what it is suffering for the name of God.
Tertullian
Awakening Faith: Daily Devotionals from the Early Church
Awakening Faith: Daily Devotionals from the Early Churchby James Stuart Bell and Patrick J. Kelly
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