Praying God's Word: Breaking Free from Spiritual Strongholds

Top Highlights

“Prayer keeps us in constant communion with God, which is the goal of our entire believing lives. Without a doubt, prayerless lives are powerless lives, and prayerful lives are powerful lives; but, believe it or not, the ultimate goal God has for us is not power but personal intimacy with Him. Yes, God wants to bring us healing, but more than anything, He wants us to know our Healer. Yes, He wants to give us resurrection life, but more than that, He wants us to know the Resurrection and the Life.” (source)

“It is never the will of God for warfare to become our focus. The fastest way to lose our balance in warfare is to rebuke the devil more than we relate to God. The primary strength we have in warfare is godliness, which is achieved only through intimacy with God; therefore, God will undoubtedly enforce prayer as one of the weapons of our warfare because His chief objective is to keep us connected entirely to Him. We will never win any spiritual battle without prayer, but when the heat of battle has momentarily cooled, the plunder from the battle is a far greater intimacy with God. Prayer is not the means to an end. In so many ways, it is the end itself.” (source)

“I’ve come to believe that God generally prioritizes one of two objectives: showing us His supremacy or teaching us His sufficiency.” (source)

“In the process of demolishing strongholds, our objectives are to cast down anything that exalts itself in our thought life and to take our thoughts captive to Christ. What does Scripture mean by ‘taking captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ’? This is the key that I finally recognized after many months of studying these verses: We take our thoughts captive, making them obedient to Christ, every time we choose to think Christ’s thoughts about any situation or stronghold instead of Satan’s or our own. What are Christ’s thoughts? The Word of God revealed to us. I finally learned that the way to make our exalted, overpowering thoughts bow down in obedience to Jesus Christ is to choose to think His thoughts about the matter rather than my own or those influenced by the enemy.” (source)