"O come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God and we are the people of His pasture and the flock under His care." Today, if only you would hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day in Massah in the wilderness. (Psalm 95:6-8) You may wonder why a book about storming heaven begins with a prayer about bowing and kneeling. It's because it is from this position of humility and submission that we find our answers and win our battles. In understanding Him, we learn He won't deny us our requests. In pouring out our heart to Him, we learn He would never break our heart. Not only do we grow to understand our place in His Kingdom, we grow to understand His amazing love toward us. He is waiting and longing and expecting to answer our prayers and give us our heart's desire. We are members of His household, children of the King of Kings. We are heirs to all of His incredible promises and recipients of His matchless grace. Like most people, I've had experience with prayers that seem to fall on deaf ears, prayers that appear for all practical purposes to go unanswered. In fact, at one point in my life, I actually told people if there was a God, He was a serious underachiever. It's amazing to me that He still loves me after such an insult. I'd lost family to devastating illnesses. I tried without success to ease the terrible suffering experienced by four members of my six person family. I watched them die untimely and painful deaths. In some cases it was more like seeing them tortured to death. If there was a formula to reverse suffering or to talk Jesus into showing mercy, I certainly couldn't find it. It was a very black time of my life. That's why I'm excited to share this book. I spent years studying prayer, reading about prayer, praying prayers. For more than twenty years my life has been devoted to discovering how to pray effectively. I don't believe there is a formula, really, though I believe the format of The Lord's Prayer is an excellent blueprint. Daniel, David and Solomon give us beautiful prayers as well. The endorsement I give for the prayers in this book is: they worked. It's not because of what I studied, read or wrote. It's because during the process of learning what touches the heart of God, what He wants, what pleases Him, I learned to pray His Word.
