THE PRAYER THAT COOPERATES WITH GOD PART II

Prayer Being the Tracks of God's Will

Mr. Gordon Watts once said that God's will is like a locomotive, while our prayers are like the tracks. The locomotive is powerful, but it can only run on the tracks. God's will is powerful, but it needs our prayer as the tracks before His will can be done. God would not work alone; He has to wait for His children's will to agree with His will before He will work. There are three wills in the universe: God's will, man's will, and Satan's will. God does not remove Satan's will by Himself. He desires that man's will become one with His will, to deal with Satan's will. A spiritual prayer is an utterance of God's will. How useless is a prayer that merely utters one's own will! Our prayer cannot change God's will; it merely expresses His will. God is the initiator of everything; we are merely the channel through which His will can flow. God ordains, and we obey. He initiates, and we agree in prayer. We cannot force God to do what He does not want to do, but we can stop Him from doing what He does want to do. When God's will is turned into our prayer, He will begin working. Every revival comes from prayer. Our prayer cannot change God's will; it only speaks out His will. No one can direct God's will, and no one can make Him do what He does not want to do. However, what He does want to do can be limited by man's prayer. Although Pentecost was prophesied by God in the book of Joel, there had to be the prayer of the one hundred and twenty before He could accomplish this. God's will reaches only as far as our prayers have reached. Therefore, the more thorough our prayers are, the more the will of God will be accomplished, and Satan's deceptions will not be able to come in. We should cast a net of prayer “by means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time” (Eph. 6:18), so that God's will can prevail in all areas, and Satan will not find one crack through which to come in. In our prayer we should pay attention to three things: (1) to whom we are praying, (2) for whom we are praying, and (3) against whom we are praying. All our prayers should fulfil God's will, afford others a profit, and inflict Satan with a loss.