UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PRAYER AND WORSHIP - PART 1

This is a guest post by Marilyn Greenwalt of  How To Hear From God.


Prayer and worship is where we have the privilege and opportunity to directly communicate with God. Consider that a minute. The God who created everything that ever was and ever will be, the God who knows everything, is everywhere all the time, the Lord of all creation has provided a way for us to directly talk to him and hear from him. I put prayer and worship together because they are both ways of directly communicating with God and often occur together but are really two different things.



Let’s Start With Prayer

What do you think of when I say prayer? Many people think of long, formal entreaties to God. Many people also think you have to be a Priest or a Pastor to really know how to pray “right.”

But, when I look at the Bible and see the prayers of people in the Bible, I don’t see that. I see people crying out to God. Sometimes, they are crying out in pain and asking for help. Sometimes they are crying out in fear, sometimes in joy. But really, they are just telling God what is on their minds. Let‘s look at some prayers from the Bible:

Habakkuk 1:1-4

...God, how long do I have to cry out for help before you listen? How many times do I have to yell, "Help! Murder! Police!" before you come to the rescue? Why do you force me to look at evil, stare trouble in the face day after day? Anarchy and violence break out, quarrels and fights all over the place. Law and order fall to pieces. Justice is a joke. The wicked have the righteous hamstrung and stand justice on its head.

 Psalm 131:1-2

God, I'm not trying to rule the roost, I don't want to be king of the mountain. I haven't meddled where I have no business or fantasized grandiose plans. I've kept my feet on the ground, I've cultivated a quiet heart. Like a baby content in its mother's arms, my soul is a baby content.

And those prayers are both from the old testament, before Jesus redeemed us with His blood and gave us direct access to the Father.

Now that we are covered in the Blood, Jesus invites us to pray to God in his (Jesus) name: John 16:23-24

"This is what I want you to do: Ask the Father for whatever is in keeping with the things I've revealed to you. Ask in my name, according to my will, and he'll most certainly give it to you. Your joy will be a river overflowing its banks!”

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Three Catagories of Prayer 

There are a lot of different ways to look at prayer. I tend to think of prayer in three categories or types.

1. Personal prayer time
2. Praying the Word
3. Praying in the Spirit.

All of these may overlap at times but it is a way of organizing or conceptualizing them that makes sense to me.

PERSONAL PRAYER TIME

My personal time prayer time is pretty much what you see online at What God Said Tonight.

It is just my time telling God what is on my mind. Sometimes it is the things I think I need or want for me. Other times it is about the needs of other people. Sometimes it is just being thankful and praising and worshiping God. This personal time prayer is kind of an “anything goes” prayer time where I am just letting God know what is going on with me and then waiting to see what he has to say about it.

Prayer is our time to pour out our hearts to God. But, then, the really amazing thing is, prayer is a time for God to talk back to us. It is a conversation. When we pray, we can expect God to answer Isaiah 65:24 says,

“I will answer them before they even call to me. While they are still talking about their needs, I will go ahead and answer their prayers!”

For me, “hearing God” during this type of prayer time is words that he puts in my head. I usually don’t hear him as an audible voice, but there are words, thoughts in my head that are not mine, that fill me with peace and line up with the Bible. Then, later, I see what ever it is that he has said apply to my life or come true in my life. This is especially true when he tells me to do something and I do it, that is when I really get to see God work. He said it, I do it and I get what he said I would get.

There are three key questions to measure or test whether what we think is God’s voice is really Him or not.

1. Does it agree or disagree with the Bible?  If it does not agree with the Bible, IT IS NOT GOD. God will NEVER contradict the Bible. If you are still learning the Bible (truthfully, we are all still learning the Bible) and you are not sure if it agrees or not, use the tools in “Part 1: The Bible…” to investigate and ask some of the people that you connected with in “Part 2: Pastors, Preachers and Ministers…” to help.
2. Does it give you a feeling of peace, confidence, assurance?  If it does not, if it fills you with anxiety, doubt, fear, discomfort, it is probably not God. This is the easiest one to figure out on your own. Just ask yourself how you feel. Do you feel good or bad? It really is that simple. God only gives us good things. Sometimes he will tell me things I may not want to hear (e.g., when he told me I had to quit smoking after 20+ years of being a 1.5 pack a day smoker) but when he said it, I wasn’t afraid. I felt at peace even though I had no idea how I would do it at the time. Praise God I am now smoke free for over 7 years…but that is a testimony for another time…
3. Does what he says become true in your life? Does what he said would happen actually happen? If you do something he has told you to do, do you get what he told you would have? God does not lie so if he said it, it will happen. This one can be tricky. There have been times when I thought that God had told me something but nothing happened right away so I thought I had missed it, that it wasn’t God. Then, years later, what he said comes through and I realize it was him, I just wasn’t patient enough. However, in general, look at what you believe he has said (this is where journaling your prayers and what God says to you really comes in handy) and look at what happens.

After time, you will begin to recognize his voice consistently.

Exercise to hear God in your personal prayer time:

Try journaling your personal prayer time and what you think God says to you in return at least once a week for one month. After one month, read back over what you have journaled and see if what he said is working in your life. You may also gain some other insights by reading over what you are praying about over time. If you like the experience, keep it up! If not, keep praying but feel free to drop the journaling part of it.

PRAYING THE WORD

All this really means is finding the scriptures in the Bible that relate to your situation or the situation of the person you are praying for and speaking those promises out loud to yourself and to God. The hard part about this kind of prayer is that you need to know your Bible.

There are great tools that can help. Our good old websites at Blue Letter Bible or Bible Gateway can be a big help. Also, June Newman Davis wrote a book called Scripture Keys that has just about every issue we could ever go through in it with the related scriptures. She has since made it available online for free.

There are a lot of other “scripture keys” type books that are good. Ask at your local Christian bookstore and they can help you find one that works for you. You may also find that your Bible has a good concordance in the back that helps you find the scriptures that relate to your situation.

The easy part of this kind of prayer is that you don’t ever have to wonder if God will hear or answer it. When you are praying the word, you can know without a shadow of a doubt that God will take care of it, because it is something he has already promised to us.

When I am praying for someone else, I am always careful to pray the word of God over their situation because I want to be sure that they get what they need. This is the best way I know to do that.

Exercise to pray the Word of God:

Using the websites for  Blue Letter Bible, Bible Gateway or http://wherepeacefulwaters.com/scriptures/scripture_keys.htm or other tools (Scripture keys or your Bible’s concordance) find at least three scriptures that talk about the promises God has related to the following topics:

1. Physical healing
2. Fear
3. Your current biggest need

When you have the scriptures for #3, your biggest need, say the scriptures out loud. You may want to say, “God, it is written that…” There is power in speaking God’s word out loud so be sure to do this out loud. Keep those scriptures handy and every time you need to be reassured about what God has promised you, read them out loud again. Then, get ready to see God do something great in your life according to his promise!

PRAYING IN THE SPIRIT (SPEAKING IN TONGUES)

Now if you haven’t learned about this before, or even if you have but haven’t yet experienced it for yourself, you may be a little freaked out by this next section. That is ok, most people are at first, but try to keep an open mind and get through this, believe me, it is worth it!

Let’s look at some of what God has to say about praying in the Holy Spirit from the Bible:

• Ephesians 6:18:  “Pray at all times and on every occasion in the power of the Holy Spirit. Stay alert and be persistent in your prayers for all Christians everywhere.”

• Acts 2:4:  Talking about the apostles who were praying and waiting for the Holy Spirit to come after Jesus had ascended to heaven, “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

So praying/speaking in “tongues” (also called your “heavenly language” or “praying in the Spirit”) is Biblical. When someone is baptized in the Holy Spirit, one of the ways it comes out is they speak in a language that they do not know, sometimes a language that no one knows.

You will hear some people say that “tongues” are from the devil. I like what Bishop Dennis Leonard always says about that. He says that in all the time he spent hanging out in the bars, living like the devil before he was saved, he never once heard anyone speaking in tongues. He never even thought about it until he was saved!

What is this heavenly language? It is the Holy Spirit speaking through us. The great thing about this kind of prayer is that it is essentially the Holy Spirit praying for you. There is a lot of power in this kind of prayer.

I will pray in my heavenly language when I need encouragement and don’t know how else to pray. I pray in my heavenly language when I don’t know how to pray for someone else. I pray softly in my heavenly language when someone else is praying to lend support and God’s power to their prayer. Sometimes I just pray in the Spirit when I need strength. I ALWAYS feel better when I pray in the Spirit.

It will often feel weird at first. You may wonder. “How do I know whether I am really praying in the Spirit or whether I am just blabbering nonsense?” The best test of this I have heard is something Pastor Mark Leonard taught, the “red truck test.”

When you are talking about one thing, it is almost impossible to think about something else without that something else coming out of your mouth eventually. For example, start talking about something, anything, and try to think about a red truck while you are talking but don‘t talk about the red truck…could you do it? I can’t. But, when you are praying in the Sprit, you can easily think about a red truck or anything else and continue to pray, because it isn’t you speaking. If you have been baptized in the Holy Spirit and have your heavenly prayer language, give it a try…could you do it? Yep, me too!


If you have not received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and have never prayed in tongues, read the book of Acts. Pay careful attention to the following verses: Acts 1:4-5, 2:1-21, 10:46  and 19:9.

Then, when you are ready, just begin to pray and ask for God to fill you with the Holy Spirit. Keep praying and worshiping. If you are not sure what to say, just say, “Hallelujah” or “Thank you Jesus” and keep saying it.

After awhile, you will begin to feel something kind of bubbling up out of you…go with it even if it feels weird at first. Just let your mouth speak whatever comes out. Then just let it keep coming. You will likely feel a great release when this happens and you will feel the Spirit of God in you. A lot of people cry, especially the first time, because it is such a powerful experience.
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Congratulations! You have just gotten closer to God and you now have a power in your life, in your prayers that you didn’t have before. You will begin to notice changes in the effectiveness of your prayers and in the effectiveness of your life.

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