It is important that our prayers express a high level of intensity, commitment and focus.
Dr. Roberto Miranda
SUMMARY: Passionate prayer, accompanied by action and specific petition, is what provokes a response from God. Sometimes delays and silences from God are part of His treatment to purify our requests. Passionate action generates a favorable decision from heaven. The story of Blind Bartimaeus illustrates this, as he passionately cried out to Jesus and took daring action to receive his miracle. When the Lord stopped and asked him what he wanted, Bartimaeus declared his specific request, and Jesus responded immediately. Passion, action, and petition are the three elements that make a successful prayer.
In the sixteenth century, the great Scottish reformer John Knox exclaimed to the Lord in one of his prayers on behalf of his nation: "Give me Scotland or I die!" That is the kind of desperate prayer that God has been pleased to honor through the centuries, and which has always drawn power from the throne of grace. Sometimes God allows us to find ourselves against a rock and a hard place so that the posture of concentrated faith is aroused in us that provokes from heaven the response we expect. Often times, the delays and silences of God are part of his treatment in our souls, to purify us of everything that contaminates our requests and takes away their strength and intensity.
In Jeremiah 29:12, God promises the Hebrew exiles in Babylon that at the end of seventy years of discipline and spiritual treatment their prayers will finally reach His throne, because they will have acquired that quality of total surrender and concentration: “Then you will call upon me, and you will come and pray to me, and I will hear you; and you will seek me and find me, because you will seek me with all your heart. And I will be found by you, says the Lord. It is precisely that passion, that state of definition and lucidity regarding what we are asking for, which allows us to be clear and precise in presenting our requests. When our passion takes on red-hot intensity, our action and our request will possess that definite quality that is so pleasing to God! Many times throughout Scripture we see that it is precisely that kind of passionate action that generates a favorable decision from heaven.
In Jeremiah 29:12, God promises the Hebrew exiles in Babylon that at the end of seventy years of discipline and spiritual treatment their prayers will finally reach His throne, because they will have acquired that quality of total surrender and concentration: “Then you will call upon me, and you will come and pray to me, and I will hear you; and you will seek me and find me, because you will seek me with all your heart. And I will be found by you, says the Lord. It is precisely that passion, that state of definition and lucidity regarding what we are asking for, which allows us to be clear and precise in presenting our requests. When our passion takes on red-hot intensity, our action and our request will possess that definite quality that is so pleasing to God! Many times throughout Scripture we see that it is precisely that kind of passionate action that generates a favorable decision from heaven.
