Carlos / Walker Spirit-Empowered Prayer

Partnering with God in Advancing His Kingdom
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9752848-6-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 218 Seiten

Manny Carlos serves as a bishop and the chairman of Victory in the Philippines, Dean of Spiritual Life for Every Nation Seminary, and has been a pastor for over thirty years. He holds a Doctor of Ministry degree in Preaching and Leading from Asbury Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Mini, have four children, Jeremy, Daniel, Hannah, and Samuel. The central premise of Spirit-Empowered Prayer is that communion with God and the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit is the key (the only key) to genuine spiritual transformation. The book serves as a practical guide to becoming a disciple fully engaged in a Spirit-led prayer life, one without the formalized prescriptions that promise a greater communion with God but merely rely on an individual's willpower to overcome the power of fleshly desires and distractions. Manny Carlos uses examples from the formative years of his spiritual life to make an inescapable point-that regimens and resolutions to pray more faithfully, more passionately, and more effectively are alone insufficient to sustain spiritual disciplines. His initial efforts in following various formulas of prayer echoed the early frustration of the apostle Paul in Romans 7-desiring to do one thing but lacking the power to accomplish it apart from the power of the Spirit. Put simply, if you're a person hungering and thirsting for a deeper and more meaningful prayer life-one that is far more empowered by communion with God and far less dependent upon formalism or rules of discipline to sustain your devotion, then this could be the book for you. You should be warned, however. Though the method is very simple, the cost is very high. It is nothing short of absolute surrender to the love of God and the desire to live continually in his presence.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carlos, Manny

Walker, Walter

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE PURSUING PRAYERS For your name’s sake, you lead me and guide me. — PSALM 31:3 I became a believer and follower of Jesus in 1984, a year after graduating from the University of the Philippines (UP). Though it’s not uncommon to hear people say that they “found Jesus” or even that “Jesus found them,” I thought such comments were quite extraordinary. It never occurred to me that either one of us was lost. During my college years, members of the Campus Crusade for Christ in UP had twice tried to point out the nature of my lostness, but their Four Spiritual Laws presentation didn’t get much traction with me. I remained aloof and rather proud of my restraint. There was, however, the temptation to launch into a defense of my religious traditions. For the first through the sixth grades, I went to an elementary school operated by the Jesuits and attended Mass regularly throughout high school and college in the village chapel where my family lived. I distinguished myself among my friends by sitting through the Mass while they sneaked outside to smoke. By virtue of those efforts, I considered myself a good enough Catholic. I was grateful for my religious upbringing and that I knew about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as well as the Ten Commandments, but I was ill-equipped to defend my Roman Catholic faith. I was just fulfilling my religious duty. Nonetheless, I was slightly irked that someone who didn’t even know me had the nerve to suggest I change religions. Deep down, what really bothered me was that after all those years, I had almost nothing to say about what I believed or why. So, I chose not to argue. No doubt those two UP Campus Crusade students were led by the Spirit to make what must have seemed like an unsuccessful gospel presentation. However, that conversation intrigued me for some time. In mid-1984, I had a chance encounter in our village with a childhood friend. It had been a few years since Jet Antonio and I had seen each other. We took turns catching up on how things were going for us. It was one of those conversations in which it was hard to resist talking about the dreams and plans for all the big things you were going to accomplish. After graduation from UP, I had accepted an engineering position at a multinational oil company. I was pretty proud of that and could hardly wait for the opportunity to casually mention it. After all, I assured Jet, it was just a stepping stone to bigger and better things. My friend worked the conversation around to the topic of religion. And, of course, I responded with a comment about trying to live a good Christian life. At that point, our conversation shifted to a more serious tone. “You know what would save you, Manny?” I suddenly felt like I was in catechism class again, trying to think of the correct answer to the priest’s question. However, this was a rhetorical question, and thankfully, Jet continued without giving me a chance to answer. “It’s by putting your faith in Christ alone, not in your own goodness.” He went on to quote from Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). When asked if I had ever heard that verse, I had to admit that I had not. Of course, that could have been said about almost any passage on what I would later come to understand as sola fide (by faith alone), sola gratia (by grace alone), and solo Christus (by Christ alone). Two thoughts crossed my mind. Maybe I had overdone it with my comments about my great job and my big dreams, and Jet’s comeback had to do with my thinly veiled boasting about my promising career. My second thought was that someone was after me, and if it was God, my mother must have had something to do with it. It’s not that she had arranged the chance encounter meeting with Jet and certainly not the conversation with the two students at UP. While my father was an absentee Catholic, my mother was a devout Methodist and the daughter of a lay Methodist minister. Mom accepted Christ as her savior at age fifteen and was as bright of a light for Christ as anyone I had ever known. Though she would have preferred that I embraced her Methodist upbringing, she followed my father’s preference that I would be brought up Catholic. My mother could not have been more gracious and never said a negative word about it. I wondered if the persecution her family experienced growing up in her home province for being a Protestant might have heightened her concern about the same thing happening to my siblings and to me. It should have been no surprise that she was still praying for me. Some of my earliest memories were of her leading me in a simple prayer each night, and I had no reason to believe she had stopped. In retrospect, my spiritual apathy during the years at UP had most likely fueled her continuing prayers for me as well as for my siblings. Just as Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord (Genesis 32:22–32), my mom was persistently wrestling with the Lord over her spiritually apathetic son. From this conversation, the reality of the power of prayer eventually dawned on me in a somewhat unexpected way. I began to realize that God was after me, and it would only be a matter of time before the next evangelist showed up. • • • It was a few months after my chance encounter with Jet that my immediate boss at the oil company, Chito Poblete, came into my office and introduced me to his insurance agent. Chito had just recently surrendered his life to Jesus. It was another divinely orchestrated ambush. The quick introduction and discussion about religion turned into a conversation about being born again. It was the first time I had ever heard the phrase, and I was as bewildered as Nicodemus at his first encounter with Jesus (John 3:1–8). My assumption was that I was born and baptized into the church, and that was quite sufficient. Perhaps the term “sufficient” is not the best descriptor. As awakening teenagers, prone to wander into trouble, the catechists would often remind us that salvation was dependent on a lot of things. And it was important to keep up the good works because none but the saints (most of whom were already dead) and a few of the ultra-holy could be sure of their eternal outcomes. The idea of the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice and the assurance of salvation was completely foreign to my way of thinking. It seemed too good to be true. I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of the insurance agent’s gospel presentation. The English poet, Francis Thompson (1859–1907), referred to the pursuing Holy Spirit as “the hound of heaven,” and it was obvious that he was drawing me closer to himself. Being pursued by the Holy Spirit, I felt like the man who frequently went out onto the lake in his boat because he had heard stories about this mythological creature called a fish. He’d never actually seen a fish, much less caught one. He would return each week because he enjoyed the people of the village, the stories they told, and the songs they sang about the great monster in the lake. He also continued the habit of dropping the hook into the water because that was what everyone else did. Then one day he was shocked to discover that something was alive and on his line, pulling him into the deep and perilous waters. The monster was real after all! That was a little like what it was for me. I’d attended church most of my life, religiously dropping my unbaited hook in the water with no real expectation of catching anything. Then to my astonishment, suddenly something big and powerful was on my line. Right there in my office, I prayed to receive Christ into my life, repented of my sins, and put my trust in his sacrifice alone for my salvation. I felt a heavy weight had been lifted from my soul, and something (or someone) came alive within me. Immediately, I was hungering and thirsting for more. I had never really believed that God paid much attention to my prayers, and even if he was aware, what difference would it make? During the times that I did pray, I was merely reciting the scripted responses in church. But mom’s prayers—that was different, and now something was different inside me as well. I started attending Bible studies at work where my boss was a participant. When the study leaders laid their hands on me and prayed for me to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I immediately began speaking in unknown tongues. I was alive in Christ. I sensed an overwhelming joy from being filled with the Holy Spirit, and I had the assurance (I knew that I knew) that Jesus Christ was my Savior. No doubt there were still a lot of weeds and thorns trying to choke out the seed that had been planted in my heart. I needed to be discipled, which would come a little later. Attending Bible study and being baptized in the Holy Spirit, I began to slowly develop the confidence to pray conversational prayers with God. It was amazing that I could actually talk to God as a son talks to his parents. Christianity offered a relationship with God, opened for us through Christ’s death and resurrection, not just a set of moral imperatives to follow. Over time I discovered that the Scriptures provided a vocabulary by which I could petition the Father for things that I needed and the situations I faced. After two years with the company, doors began to open that would lead...