We have to be watchful that when we pray we do not speak loosely. A man who was very experienced in prayer once wrote a hymn. In that hymn one line talks about prayer. It says that if one wants to pray to God he should first be well prepared about what he wants from God. Brothers and sisters, when we kneel down to pray, if we do not know what we want, how can we expect God to answer our prayer? If our prayer is aimless and heartless, it is not a prayer. Satan will utilize this and make us think we have prayed. Actually we have not prayed at all. We must be watchful and on guard. Every time that we come to pray before God, we must know what we want in our heart. If we do not have any desire, we do not have prayer. All prayers are governed by our desire. Our Lord pays attention to this. The blind man Bartimaeus beseeched the Lord, saying, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The Lord asked him, “What do you want Me to do for you?” (Mark 10:47, 51). The Lord is asking today: “What do you want Me to do for you?” Can you answer this question? Some brothers and sisters pray for ten or twenty minutes. Afterward, when you call them and ask, “What were you asking God for?”, they may not be able to tell you anything. Although they may have said much in their prayer, they do not even know what they were asking. This is a prayer without a desire. It is an aimless prayer and one that is not counted in God’s sight. We have to be watchful to guard against this kind of prayer.

When we pray, there must be not only the desire but also the word to express the desire. Sometimes in our desire we have something we want, but the more we speak the further away we seem to be from our desire. We must also be watchful to guard against this. Satan’s strategy is either to hold us back so that we do not pray or push us forward while we pray so that the more we pray the more we are lost. Therefore, when we pray we have to guard ourselves so that our words will not deviate from the center. Once we discover that our words have deviated, we should come back. We must be watchful to aim in the right direction and persist to keep out unnecessary words. We have to guard ourselves from praying the prayers that are not prayers at all.

We must be watchful in prayer and not allow Satan to disrupt our prayer with his deception. Satan will often accuse us after we fail a little and cause us to analyze ourselves while we pray so that we cannot open our mouth to God. When God’s answer seems to be far away, Satan will cause us to become disappointed and discouraged, and he will take away our strength to wait on God. Brothers and sisters, if our prayer is to be according to God’s will, we have to persist in our prayer until the end. Even when we fail, we can come before God through the blood of the Lamb; there is no need for Satan to interfere with us. We have to be like the widow who prayed until the judge had to avenge her (Luke 18:7). We have to be like the Shunammite who would not leave Elisha until he went with her (2 Kings 4:30). We believe that a delay in answers to prayer can help us know something we did not know before, and it can help us learn lessons we were ignorant of. We must never allow Satan to cut off our prayer or damage it.

Here we can sing more hymns concerning spiritual warfare, such as hymns #880, 775, 876, and 893.

When a few of us pray together, Satan will not let us go easily. He will be active in many ways and devise many plans to stop such prayers. There may be unfounded rumors, untrue reports, jealousies without reasons, complicated misunderstandings, inexplicable fear, and waves of threats that seem to come from nowhere. All these are under the secret direction of Satan for the purpose of creating some kind of division to shake the gathering of prayer and destroy this prayer in oneness. Therefore, brothers and sisters, we must “prove all things” (1 Thes. 5:21). We must not believe in anything lightly, be shaken lightly, nor pass on words lightly. If we are watchful, we will find that many unnecessary, inaccurate words and things are deceptions from the enemy. His goal is to make God’s people fearful, weak, and even dispersed. Therefore, on the one hand, we must pray, and on the other hand, we must be on guard. We must follow the example of Nehemiah, who set a watch day and night (Neh. 4:9). Our answer to Satan’s threat is: “There are no such things done as thou sayest, but thou feignest them out of thine own heart....Should such a man as I flee? and who is there, that, being as I am, would go into the temple to save his life? I will not go in” (Neh. 6:8, 11). We will not fear, and we will not stop praying. One brother said, “How much we need a watchman to guard against the deception of the devil, for the ways he uses to destroy the corporate life of God’s people are far beyond our ability to count and enumerate.” For this reason, we must be watchful to examine and oversee these things so that Satan will not have the opportunity to divide us, destroy our oneness in prayer, or cut off our prayers.
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