Master Effective Prayer: 6 Key Principles to Deepen Your Connection with God

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Explore how you can be fully alive, becoming the man God intended. This is On Target with Vince Dacchioli. Hello men, how you doing? Welcome to our On Target Institute Men On Target session number seven. In our last session we talked about the importance of knowing God.

There are going to be a few sessions on getting to know God, but in that session we talked about the importance of reading the Word. In this session we're going to be talking about prayer, the importance of prayer. This may be one of the most important sessions that we do, so I really want to encourage you to drill down here. As a reminder, in all of these sessions we're doing right now, the secret to all of this, we covered this before is spending time, and we go over that word again, time, that four letter word, time alone with God. We've been talking about how you cannot develop intimacy in a crowd.

Very important not to allow your time in church or with others in prayer to substitute for your personal alone time with God. This is very important. Let me begin by going to John 15 verses one to eight, and let's look at these verses for a moment. This is where Jesus says, I am the true vine and my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.

You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, he says, and I will remain in you, the idea of really being in Jesus. Nothing brings us there more powerfully than prayer, by the way. He goes on to say this, no branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in me.

Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear, listen guys, much fruit. Apart from me, he says you can do nothing.

If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, listen guys, ask whatever you wish and it will be given to you. This is to my Father's glory, he says, that you bear much fruit. Showing yourselves to be my disciples, and guys that's the key.

We want to become the man God intended. We want to be true authentic disciples of Jesus. Now, I want to share with you in this session what I call six principles for effective prayer. Let's go through them. Principle number one is to schedule it.

Guys, listen, if you don't schedule it, you will never do it. It's very important that you understand. If prayer needs to make it onto your calendar, look at your calendar. You've got a lot of other things on your calendar. The things that tend to end up on your calendar, the ones that are important to you, the number one thing that should be on your calendar is this whole idea of scheduling time to pray every single day.

Number two, find a quiet place. A quiet place. Listen, if you don't have a quiet place in your home, maybe go out and sit in the garage in your car. If that doesn't work, go to a park and find some place in a park where you can get alone or a place at your church. Find a place where you can be quiet because if you can't do that, it's going to be very hard to move on.

I remember reading a book years ago. The title of the book was simply Eckert. It's the story of Jack Eckert from the Eckert Drugstore Empire. I think he's retired now, living in Florida somewhere, but it wasn't a Christian book, but I remember when I read the book, Jack Eckert in the book had a meeting that he would be involved with every single morning, an early morning meeting. It was on his calendar and everybody in the organization knew about this meeting.

He would go into his office and he would close the door. He had found a quiet place right there at work, but the point is he scheduled it and he had a quiet place and everybody in the organization saw it on the calendar. Jack Eckert meeting with God and everybody protected that quiet time for him. That's the kind of attitude we got to have about our quiet times with the Lord. We've got to schedule it and we've got to find a quiet place and we've got to protect it.

Listen guys, I don't know about you, but this is one of the most difficult things for me. My mind is wandering all the time. I can be in the middle of a prayer time and be thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch. You probably don't have that problem, but I want to tell you, I have that problem. My mind goes everywhere.

So I can be in the middle of a prayer. I can be really drilling down on something and then I'll start to wander. Let me tell you what I do. In order for me to have a quiet mind, and we're going to talk about this in the next session, I just begin to praise God or I might just read a psalm or a proverb or sing a little bit. I'll just start to praise him.

I'll start to call on Jesus and just tell him how much I love him. And it helps me to get all the clutter out of my brain. And I'll encourage you to try that, you know, but it's very important to have a quiet mind. Just be empty so you can hear God when he speaks to you. OK, number four, listen, seek him first, not what you want.

Seek the giver of the gift, not the gift. I don't know how many of you guys might have children. I've got grandchildren now. And what do you think when a little child comes running up to you and jumps up in your lap and says, oh, daddy, oh, daddy, oh, daddy, I love you, I love you, I love you. You're just the most incredible daddy in the world.

What's the first thing you're thinking? I'll tell you what you're thinking. What is that child want? OK, I'll never forget I was on a trip one day, a business trip, and I came home and I knew that my little grandson, our first born grandson, was going to be at my home. And I was excited to come to see him.

And I don't know, he was probably maybe four years old at the time. And I walked into the back door of the house and I walked into the kitchen and Parker is his name and he was way down at the end of a hallway and he saw his grandpa and he's eyes lit up and he says, Papa, you're home. And he came running down the hallway, jumped up into my arms, gave me a big hug and says, Papa, you're home. Oh, I'm so happy to see you. I love you so much.

I love you so much. And listen, guys, he didn't want anything other than his papa. Come on, guys. You know what I'm talking about. You know how that feels when that little child does that with you.

Or maybe it's a pet, but all they want is you. They just want to be near you. They want to love on you. Why would we think our Heavenly Father would be any different? What he wants is for us to desire just to crawl up in his lap and be with him.

So before you start asking him for anything, seek him first. Tell him how much you love him and just sit in his lap for a while. OK, then ask his will in all areas. Ask his will. Jesus said this.

He says in Mark 14, 36, Abba, Father, he said, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Now here, Jesus is talking about the pain and the agony associated with his pending death on the cross, and he's saying, Lord, all is possible for you. Please take this cup from me. But then what does he say next?

Yet not what I will, but what you will. In other words, what Jesus is saying is, look, notwithstanding the fact that this is going to be painful, my pain is not what's foremost here, Lord. It is your will that's important. OK, so it's very, very important that we get that kind of an attitude. It goes on in 1 John 5, 14.

This is the confidence we have in approaching God, that if we ask anything in accordance with his will, listen, he hears us. Very, very important that we pray in accordance with his will. Then, number six, finally, pray with authority. Now, listen, against the forces that are at cross purposes with God's will. Pray with authority.

It goes on in Luke 5, 3, or I'm sorry, in Luke 10, 19, it says, I have given you authority to trample on scorpions and snakes and to overcome all the power of the enemy. In Psalm 5, 3, it says, in the morning, oh, Lord, you hear my voice. In the morning, I lay my request before you and wait in expectation. I love that verse. But listen, I remember Pastor Hayford years ago would say something like this.

He'd say, you know, there are forces at work in our lives. And he would say, you cannot train a demon, nor can you cast out the flesh. And guys, that's a way of saying, look, sometimes it's your own flesh that's getting in the way. And sometimes there is demonic influence in the world. And if you're not sure what it might be, if you're not sure what the forces are that you're up against, what I encourage you to do is get around the elders of the church and get people to pray about your situation.

But please remember that there are forces at work that are contrary to God's will in your life, the world, the flesh and the devil. Those are the three forces that are always at work trying to outdo what God wants to do in your life. And you need to pray against those forces. Psalm 25, 15, my eyes are ever on the Lord for only he will release my feet from the snare. Now, how do you pray?

Here's how I pray. I start with confession. Just start confessing the things in your life that you're not proud of. Things maybe you've entered into that you need to just lay before God. Start with that.

Have a list. I have a list of all the people that I want to pray for. And I go through it every single day and I pray for everybody on that list. And there are people that will sometimes come off the list and there are people that will go on the list. And you don't have to hit everything every single day.

Sometimes your list can be very long. I know mine gets pretty long and I might have some people on my list that I get to once a week and others that I pray for. If it's a serious issue, I might be praying for somebody, for instance, that is in the hospital and needing a healing every single day. And write down your requests, write them down. And so that you can go back to them and refer to them later.

Now, in keeping with our promise, we want to explore life implication and life application. Here is life implication. If I'm not praying every day, I will never develop an intimate relationship with him and truly understand his will for my life. That's not going to happen if you're not praying every single day. Life application, here are your discussion questions.

And I want to encourage you to really drill down the knees. Do you struggle finding time to pray? Number one, on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate yourself in the six principles for effective prayer? Where are you? Where do you need to work in that area?

And then what can you do to improve? Those are your questions. We'll leave that up on the screen for you. Now, I pray during this discussion time that God blesses you richly. And until next time, guys, listen, don't forget about it.

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