The Power of Your Prayers | Draw Near With Pastor Amy Groeschel
Every prayer matters because that’s the relational part. God was there hearing my prayers, I was getting to know him. He cared for me through all of that. He was always at work doing a internal work in me of dependence upon him. We’ve said it before, and it’s so true. He doesn’t waste these things in our life.
– [Craig] Right. Right. – He uses them. Hey, it’s great to have you guys back for another week of discussing the amazing Bible study drawn near, and that’s exactly what we’re doing, is we’re drawing near to God. And I pray that it’s been a really encouraging week for you as you’ve sought God in scripture and that he is revealing his heart to you, his will for you and his goodness in your life.
And Amy, we’re looking at the praiseworthy qualities of God and the lives we looked at this week. We looked at Hannah, Samuel, David, Elijah, and Daniel. – Right. – Patterns. – Well, yes. There was a theme that I saw, and this was the importance of knowing and depending on God through prayer. Right? – So there’s one person I think, that kind of stands out to me, that did this in a way that makes me really emotional as we look at Hannah.
– Yeah. – Because her prayers were from the heart in a way of desperation before God. And you know, complete dependence on God. – Right. – And I wonder if you’re comfortable maybe talking about a time in your own life where you prayed that kind of prayer from the depths of desperation in your heart needing the presence of God.
– Yes. Yes, so I mean, when we think of Hannah, we think of her prayer. And for me, my season of Hannah and praying for years was 12 years of chronic infection. You know, just bladder, kidney, urinary, all the things, having a urologist in my young. – Horrible pain. – [Amy] Thirties. – Yeah, uhum. And. Right. It just to always live with an infection.
I don’t even think I knew what feeling well was like, like my normal was feeling drained and chilled. And when I would feel well would be like an abnormal day. And in that season there was so much crying out to God when my infections would get very acute. I remember just, ’cause they would just come on anywhere so sudden that I would just sometimes break down bawling, just going, “Not again.
Not another round of antibiotics again.” I’d already become immune to four different antibiotics. And I knew that, you know, I didn’t wanna continue to live that way. So it was a very hard season. But God drew me near as I kept crying out to him. And you know, we see people do this in the Bible. We know people that are doing this in their lives today.
And usually these are long seasons of waiting. – Well almost everybody has a something like that. There’s this, Jesus said, “In this world, you will have trouble.” – [Amy] Yeah. – And we do, we live in a broken world. And people might look at your life from the outside and think like, you don’t have a whole lot of problems.
And and the reality is, there were long seasons where I don’t remember almost any normal, meaning, like. – Right. – We would try to go, I mean, we couldn’t go for a walk. – [Amy] Yeah. – We couldn’t go out to eat. We couldn’t have people over that the pain was so intense and it wasn’t just a week, it wasn’t just two weeks, but it was, you know, a long, long, it was over a decade, long season of waiting.
