Good News

Praying with People

Recall our summary of the good news:

God himself, as Yeshua, came and re-established his Kingdom, providing all individuals with the ability to enter this Kingdom and experience the peace and victory of being made innocent by the work of God.

The best way to share the good news with people is by praying with them regularly. Then they can see how you rely on Yeshua to give you observable innocence, peace, and victory over the evil inclination.

Because the people you are sharing the good news with do not understand how prayer works in the Kingdom of God, you should be willing to model this. Explain about praying for God's will to happen, about how fasting helps certain prayers resound more strongly in heaven, and about how to pray without doubts or double-mindedness.

Similarly, do not be afraid to state that you have confidence that God hears your prayers and acts in your life because your identity as a believer in Yeshua is about an accepted, covenantal, intimate relationship with Messiah and is not merely a matter of hope or ancestry. Most people will respond politely if you are willing to pray with them, even if you cannot extend the confidence you have when praying for yourself to their prayers for themself since you consider them still spiritually vulnerable to the power of iniquity and the evil inclination. (Their lives probably also lack a history of answered prayers, although God may have been unusually generous to them.)

Starting times of prayer with repentance should remain your usual practice. But people who do not understand iniquity might not see the need for repentance if they have not recently acted in sin. Often there is no need to explicitly explain iniquity: simply let your friend hear you pray in repentance. The person you are praying with will catch on that accepting Yeshua as savior is about being "delivered out of the power of darkness, and carried into the Kingdom of his dear Son" (Colossians 1:13). Most people are patient to hear you pray to be cleansed of iniquity and to increase in humility, selflessness, and other virtues, and willing to pray for these same changes in their life.