Prayer + Purity = Power - by Jim Tharp, 2003

Confess to one another therefore your faults – your slips, your false steps, your offenses, your sins; and pray (also) for one another, that you may be healed and restored – to a spiritual tone of mind and heart. The earnest (heartfelt, continued) prayer of a righteous man makes tremendous power available – dynamic in its working. (Heb. 5:16, Amplified NT)

The Holy Spirit was so faithful to deal patiently with me in the early 1980s to venture out into a ministry that majored in prayer instead of theology, preaching, administration and scholarship. I recall several sobering thoughts during those years that He used to get me to finally take the plunge in 1986: A number of times I had the sense of standing before Christ at the Judgment Seat and hearing Him say, If only you had believed Me when I said, “Whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you” (John 16:23); If only you had followed My instruction to the apostles and “tarried in prayer until you were clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:5, 8, 14, 2:1-4); If only you had “devoted yourself to prayer” (Col. 4:2); If only you had believed My Word that My Kingdom is not built by human ability and effort alone but by Spirit-anointed Prayer (Zech. 4:6), your ministry would have been in great power and your eternal rewards would have been far greater!

Those “if onlys” still ring in my soul and call me back to the Upper Room for fresh fillings of the Holy Spirit so that I might minister in power instead of mediocrity. May none of us learn too late at the Judgment Seat of Christ what might have been if we had only devoted ourselves to Spirit-anointed prayer!

I want to share an age-long formula for spiritual power and effectiveness in living and ministering for Christ. It worked for Jesus as He, though divine, operated in His humanity while on earth. It worked for the apostles, the reformers, and it has worked for the revivalists and reformers in more recent centuries. The formula is: Prayer + Purity = Power, and it still works today! Please understand that the Holy Spirit is both intrinsically and intricately related to each of these factors in the equation.

The Spirit of Prayer

Before Jesus launched His public ministry, He was anointed by the Holy Spirit following His baptism (Luke 3:21-22). With this anointing, He went to the wilderness for a six-week prayer retreat and a period of temptation by Satan.

 

Then Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and news of Him went out through all the surrounding region. And He taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all (Luke 4:14-15). In the power of the Spirit, Jesus continued to give prayer first place in His busy life. Sometimes He rose early and went out to pray in the morning darkness. At other times, He took some of His apostles and went to the mountain for a few days of prayer. On one occasion, in the midst of a healing revival, He disappeared, and His disciples found Him alone in prayer.

In His training of the Twelve, Jesus made sure they understood the role of the Holy Spirit in their ministry of prayer. They could not have a ministry unless they were filled with the Spirit, and they could not be filled with the Spirit unless they had a life of prayer. One of the greatest evidences that they were filled with the Spirit would be their manner of prayer and the fruit of their praying. In fact, nothing would happen apart from the Spirit, and the Spirit would work only in those lives that were devoted to prayer. It is clear from the Scriptures and from church history that God does not pour out His Spirit on a prayerless people. He cannot trust the fullness of His Spirit to a prayerless life.