I learned early on in my role as a mother that prayer becomes a major part of our lives when our children are suffering. After our daughter was raped in high school, she went on a wild spree of rebellion and problems. My husband and I spent night after night on our knees praying. We begged the Lord for help, cried out, and agonized in prayer. We tried declaring Scriptures, speaking in faith that she would return to the Lord. We prayed words of deliverance. But circumstances just got worse!

At times things got so bad that I wanted to pray for God to take her home so that she would not lose her salvation. I prayed to close her womb so she would not get pregnant. I prayed to stop her, arrest her, rebuke her, catch her, and deliver her. I prayed everything and anything I could think of to get her out of this horrible time of our lives. 

We tried everything we knew to do in prayer. Then one day the Lord said to me, “Tell her you are not going to pray any longer. Tell her she...

Matthew 18: 19 tells us, “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven.”  This Scripture is often called the “prayer of agreement.” 

Now I had heard teaching about the prayer of agreement from several people and I even listened to sermons on the subject. I understood the principle, but I had not had any actual experience with this form of prayer until 1986 when we were in Hawaii on a vacation.

One afternoon an announcement came over the loudspeaker at our hotel and we heard from other people at the resort that we all needed to evacuate and head up into the hills to higher ground because a tsunami was coming. Interestingly, we did not even know what a tsunami was, but someone in a merchandise shop told us that it was a huge tidal wave!

Not having any idea what this all meant, we went back to our hotel, got our car, and started driving to higher ground. As we...

Some people may start learning about prayer by watching or observing others pray. Over the years, I had many mentors in prayer. Each person deposited some aspect of prayer into my life, either by what they prayed, how they prayed, where they prayed, why they prayed, or even by how long or how short they prayed.

I learned that prayer was an opportunity to talk to God personally. Prayer time was a time to converse with my Maker and yield to His heart. Mothers of Nations, there is no reason for anxiousness when every moment of our life we can yield to Him and talk to Him through prayer.

When asked what prayer is, people can list several examples such as a time of seeking, a time to help others, a time of fellowship, a time of cleansing, a time to adore the Lord, or a time to make petitions known. For me, prayer is all of that and more! It is a time to connect with His heart in the throne room of the Father. Each time we pray, we divinely hook up with Jesus Who is already in...

Praying for a wounded heart came easy for me to learn for some reason. God would give me a picture of a container, and as I prayed, I could see the Holy Spirit going down into the container until He reached the bottom. Then as He came up, everything in the container was taken out with Him. All the bad memories, all the pain, all the hurt, and all the anger just took hold of the Holy Spirit and left with that prayer. 

Sometimes the Holy Spirit would lead me to pray healing of the heart for a certain incident in a person’s life. Other times He would give me a word to speak that would trigger a memory and bring release. Proverbs 18: 14 (NKJV) reminds us, “The spirit of a man will sustain him in sickness, But who can bear a broken spirit?”  I learned that prayer is like soothing oil being poured over an open wound in the heart, bringing healing.

Our heart is capable of many things. It can be drawn to people or things. It can be hard, unyielding, soft or...

As prayer became a lifestyle for me, people would come asking me to pray for them. Once you start praying for other people, you never know what might happen! One time a lady came to our house and wanted prayer for her marriage. We talked a while, and then I started to pray. All of a sudden she fell on the floor, rolled back and forth, and said, “I don’t know where I am!”

Well, no one had ever fallen over when I prayed, nor had I ever seen someone go somewhere in the spirit and say they were lost! Staring at her and not knowing what was happening, I remembered a book I had read about demons and deliverance where a minister had said, “Demon, name yourself.” 

So I did just that and shouted out, “Demon, name yourself!”  Was I ever surprised at what happened next. A deep, loud, slow voice came out of that woman saying, “Medium.”  Following the format I had read in that book about deliverance prayer, I responded,...

Mothers of Nations, once you enroll in the “School of the Holy Spirit,” it seems as though He teaches one thing over and over until you learn it well, and then you move on to the next lesson. As I shared about last week, travail was just a part of the entire world of prayer that I was discovering. Next came lessons on fasting and prayer. Psalm 35: 13 says, “I will humble myself with fastings.”  James 4: 10 reminds us, “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and He will lift you up.” 

I recall that my first big step in learning about prayer and fasting was a three-day fast on liquids. Eventually I tried longer fasts and more difficult ones. Along the way I started studying fasting in Scripture. I learned that fasting is essential during times of crisis, times of need, or times of warfare and deliverance. Esther went on a fast when her country and people were facing a major danger of annihilation. Daniel fasted and received insight and...

As I was being taught by the Holy Spirit how to pray, many more prayer occasions came my way. There were opportunities to pray for people, with people, about people, and without people. Because of this, a hunger grew inside me to get alone with God and seek His face. He was drawing me into more private times with Him.

Acts 10: 9 says that Peter went on a housetop to pray about the sixth hour. He wanted to be alone and pray. You never know what revelation might come to you when you are in prayer. For Peter, it was a call to bring salvation to the Gentiles. Our secret place of prayer can bring us into a revelation like Peter had, into brokenness like David experienced (Psalm 31: 1-2), into understanding of the end times like John (Revelation 1), or into the working of miracles like Jesus (Mark 1: 35). 

One of the ways we can pray when we are alone with the Lord is called “travail.”  Now when I started out praying, I did not know what travail was nor even that it...

Prayer is an essential part of a Christian’s life and for Mothers of Nations, an absolute necessity. Prayer admits that we need God and acknowledges that He is ultimately the One in charge. Jesus taught His disciples to pray, and He demonstrated the necessity of prayer. “So He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.”  (Luke 5: 16)  We also read in Luke 6: 12, “Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.” 

In the example of my prayer experience for Peniel Bible College that I shared about last week, I had partnered with the Holy Spirit to create opportunities for God to work. Prayer opened up the heavens, brought about change in the land of India, delivered salvation to souls, and created a conduit for teaching God’s Word -- a Bible school. Prayer is not only a calling, but a necessity. God needs a vessel to pour His heart into and people to...

Intercession is a type of prayer where we intimately yield to God to work with Him on behalf of someone or something else. It is like being His partner in furthering the kingdom of God on earth. A spirit-to-spirit connection takes place as one discovers the things that are on God’s heart. Some call intercession being a “gap stander,” taken from Ezekiel 22: 30.  This is where God says, “So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.”

There are many examples in Scripture where men or women stood in the gap for someone. We read that Abraham stood in intercession for Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18: 17-33. Abraham said he had taken upon himself to speak to the Lord on behalf of others. Moses interceded for Israel (Exodus 32: 31-35). In II Samuel 12: 13-23 David prayed for his son and Daniel interceded for the nation of Israel (Daniel 9:...

The very next day after my night of “the baptism of tongues” that I shared about in last week’s blog, the Holy Spirit called me to pray between noon and three o’clock. My spirit sensed this tug-like feeling and a desire to pray came, leading me to my bedroom. Every day after that for a year and a half I would pray anywhere from one to three hours, depending on how the Holy Spirit would lead and direct me. I was undoubtedly on a new prayer journey! 

Those were days where I would lay on my side and groan, sometimes so deep that there were no words to say. I could feel the depth of the prayer in my innermost being. The Holy Spirit would occasionally instruct me to speak the word out, to prophesy, or to command demons to leave. Alone in my bedroom, with my young children taking naps, I was lost in the Spirit just obeying the Lord. And as I said, this went on for a year and a half, ending every day with me being led to read the whole chapter of Jeremiah 33...