“I mentioned that our Heavenly Father can communicate with us. We can also communicate with God. This activity is known as prayer.
Prayer is communication with the spirit world because God is an infinite Spirit being. Prayer is well known but I want to highlight the following.
- It can happen that we pray and ask God for something. As answer to our prayer, God may tell us to do something first. Let me give you two biblical examples to illustrate what I mean.
- A blind man came to Jesus and asked to pray for him so that he could see. While Jesus was praying for the blind man, He wet some soil with His spit and put the clay on the blind man’s eyes. Then the man could see. Take note, Jesus did not only pray for the man. (Mark 8:22-26)
- Elisha prophesied to a man and woman that they were going to have a son. The boy was born and died a few years later. The mother asked Elisha to come and pray for the boy. Elisha spent the afternoon with the boy’s corpse and prayed. At one point he laid with his body, on top of the corpse. The boy became alive only after Elisha laid on the boy. (2 Kings 4:32-36)
I have experienced that this biblical principle is still applicable today. For example, I felt that a curse that rested on a specific person, had to be broken. As I prayed, God the Holy Spirit told me to demonstrate prophetically the breaking of the curse in Jesus’s name, by tearing a piece of paper into pieces.
I mention these things to you so that you may know that Father God could tell you to do something as part of the answer to your prayer. If one does not know it, one may not recognize God’s voice when He speaks to you about it.
Let us consider a contemporary example. During February 2014, my son, two friends and I, travelled to Ethiopia to visit the Timkat Christian Festival in Lalibela as well as some ancient churches in the Tigray region.
One of the churches we visited, was the Abuna Yemata Guh church. The church is located about 2580 meters above sea level in a cave of the Abuna Yemata mountain range. The church was probably built in the sixth century and is known as the most dangerous church in the world.
The reason for this is that one must climb perpendicularly up the mountain without any ropes and bare feet, for about 45 meters. Then you need to cross a very old wooden bridge that connects two rock towers and walk along a very narrow path to the church that was carved into the rock. The narrow path runs against a rock with an abyss of about 100 meters on one side and a perpendicular rock on the other.
My friend Kobus had an anxiety attack when he had to cross the wooden bridge.
When I came to him, he stared at me with frozen eyes as he anxiously clung to a tree.
He could not speak.
I prayed with him and left him at the one guide while I walked to church.
After we were in the church for a while, Kobus calmly walked in. I was very surprised and asked him what happened. He then testified that in his moment of need, he cried out to God.
The Holy Spirit then spoke to him and said that he should sing a specific song. When he finished singing the song, the Holy Spirit told to sing the song again. Kobus did so and when he was done, the Holy Spirit clearly asked him: “Do you trust me to take one step in the direction of the wooden bridge?”
Kobus left the tree he was clinging to and took a step in the direction of the wooden bridge. When he did this, the anxiety and fear left him! He could walk over the bridge, along the 100-meter abyss, without fear and join us in the church.
He later climbed down the 45-meter rock face without any problems.
