"If you are prayer-less, you are powerless, and if you are powerless, you are useless."

Minister Carol Jones taught this powerful principle during a prayer and leadership class that my husband Mike and I attended at our church on Saturday. If you want to live a victorious life as Jesus' disciple (student), you need consistent prayer. Life challenges will overwhelm you if you don't!

I wrote down some key points from the class to share with you. Keep these in mind to create a more effective prayer life:

• Prayer helps you set right priorities. You say you don't have time to pray, but the reason you don't have time is because you don't pray.

• Prayer is a discipline. Decide to set your affections on things above. 

• Prayer is not a formula, but a relationship that is based on the work that God has finished already. 

• A key component of prayer is to be thankful to God for His finished work. Appreciative people do not have time to complain.

• Jesus operated in power, wisdom, and authority by staying connected to His Father through prayer. The Bible is full of references to Jesus praying. See Mark 1:35, Mark 6:46, Luke 5:16 and Luke 6:12. 

• Through prayer, you have the ability to take authority over demonic influence.

• Prayer must be based on the Word of God. All the prayers you need are in the Word.

• Train your mind to be obedient to God's Word. Use God's Word as a net to capture disobedient thoughts.

• It is important to pray with the Spirit. Praying with the Spirit allows you to pray God's perfect will (see 1 Corinthians 14:13-15).

• An essential prayer is to pray that God anoint, prepare, and send laborers into the harvest of souls for salvation.

This is our prayer for everyone in the Take Back Your Temple community (Colossians 1:9-12): 

"For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, for all patience and longsuffering with joy; living thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light."

Be blessed in Health, Healing, and Wholeness,