Prophecy + Prayer = Power
We know prayer is powerful, but what happens when a son or a daughter partners their authority in prayer with the potency of prophecy?
My heart has been recently stirred and moved by the faith of the Roman officer (centurion) in Matthew 8. We all know the story—how the centurion approached Jesus asking Him for a miracle. When Jesus responded that He would go with him to the centurion’s house, the officer replied:
Lord, who am I to have you come into my house? I understand your authority, for I too am a man who walks under authority and have authority over soldiers who serve under me. I can tell one to go and he’ll go, and another to come and he’ll come. I order my servants and they’ll do whatever I ask. So I know that all you need to do is to stand here and command healing over my son and he will be instantly healed (Matthew 8:8-9).
The following verse tells us that Jesus was astonished when he heard this and remarked, “He has greater faith than anyone I’ve encountered in Israel!” (Matt. 8:10). The Bible then tells us that Jesus told the Roman officer to go home, because all that he believed for was done for him. This is, yet again, another insight into prophetic prayer. The Roman officer understood that his decrees were met with answers. He understood the authority of Jesus—that by a decree the solution was released. This is how prophetic prayer works. We speak the answer upon His authority, and a summons is released in heaven to usher in the answer.
Speaking the Answer
I discovered the potency of combined prayer and prophecy much by accident. I did not fully realize in my moments of learning that I was partnering prayer with prophecy, but the results of these colliding forces have been monumental. The experiences I have walked through were like intentional ambushes of “purposeful training” set up by the Holy Spirit Himself. I should probably warn you that by reading this article, you have essentially signed yourself up for these “not-so-accidental ambushes of training” from the Holy Spirit, so you might want to prepare yourself. You may still be asking, “What is the difference between prayer standing alone and prayer that is partnered with prophecy?” I see it this way: Prayer covers and surrounds situations; prayer petitions the Father and converses with Him in intimate relationship. Prayer is a conversation between a son or a daughter and their Father. Prayer asks for answers. Prophecy is the intention of the Lord upon a matter; it is the answer of the Father’s heart spoken into a problem ahead of time. When prayer is combined with prophecy, these types of conversations produce solutions. The strategies of the Father’s heart that align with His Word are given and then spoken as a decree into the very core of a situation. This combination sets off a supernatural chain of events directly affecting the natural world and overturning impossibilities. When this prophetic solution is released from your mouth, while simultaneously offered up in prayer to the Father, it is so overpowering to the enemy that it not only destroys his current plans, it dismantles any of his future plans.
I have seen the strength of prophetic prayer at work in my own life. The more I have studied it, the more I have realized that it is not a gift for the intercessor alone, nor is it a gift for the prophet alone. I believe that prophetic prayer is a gift that is given to the entire body of Christ. I believe that every son and daughter has been given this supernatural weapon that has the cataclysmic ability to completely turn the tide of every battle that we face, whether it is a cultural battle, a battle within the home, or a battle of nations. Prophetic prayer moves in a similar way to John the Baptist who prepared the way of the Lord. Prophetic prayer strikes the ground of a situation like lightning, announcing and preparing the way for the Lord to come in with answers, overturning demonic strongholds with one touch of His might and power. This partnership abruptly interjects and halts the plans of the enemy with the intentions of God’s heart. Prophetic prayer overturns that which was planned for evil, oftentimes before it even has a chance to manifest. When a son or daughter is moved by the intentions of their Father, they have the authority to pray from a vantage point that is devastating to the works of darkness.
Prophetic prayer is a partnership of force that is activated by your spoken word, authorizing the armies of heaven to respond on your behalf. Prophetic prayer emits aroma to the earth much like the fresh scents of spring that tell of warmer days on the horizon; it releases a heavenly fragrance into the earth that sings “change is in the air.” Mountains that gloat pridefully of their apparent impossibility to defeat begin to crumble and disintegrate like dust the moment you speak with your authority. The sounds of your decrees are carried upon the winds of the Holy Spirit, who causes your words to fill atmospheres once dominated by darkness. Victory is emitted through the prophetic prayers of your voice. In his book Authority in Prayer, Dutch Sheets writes, “God has given you jurisdiction over your world—under His authority, of course. He wants you, not sin, demonic powers, negative circumstances, or any other outside force to govern it.” My prayer is that the fruit of this article would be the realization in your spirit of the authority in Christ that you carry, and as a result you would begin to release this authority upon the jurisdiction of your life, your family, and your nation and govern the earth with the solutions of heaven.
Prophetic Prayer in Training
One of my first “training” sessions in releasing the prophetic solutions of God was not quite what you would expect. It was a time when an airline lost my suitcase. While a mere suitcase may seem irrelevant to the weightier issues of the world, it was in these smaller, seemingly frivolous situations where the Holy Spirit began to teach me the importance of trust and praying bold prayers. We had been traveling all night on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Houston, Texas. There were a number of elements that contributed to my bag getting lost that day, and among those were the fact that we had only just made our initial red-eye flight (with special thanks to LA traffic for delaying us and causing this predicament in the first place). We were working for a friend who was scheduled to speak at a corporate event in Houston the following morning and we had multiple boxes of his product with us to sell at the event, along with our own suitcases, all together totaling about 15 items of luggage. We arrived with less than 45 minutes until departure, and as you could expect there was pandemonium at baggage check to ensure our entire fleet of luggage was secured on the flight in time. It was a miracle that the staff at LAX even checked our bags to begin with. In addition to this, we had to make a connection flight in Las Vegas, which meant that all of those bags had to be transferred onto our connecting flight. Upon arriving in Houston, dressed in my most comfortable tracksuit attire and looking a little worse for wear after having slept very little through the night on the two flights, we waited for our bags. I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach as I watched each and every bag and box slowly make their way out onto the conveyer belt. I just knew. My heart sank as the last bag tumbled out of the opening and the conveyer belt came to a stop.
I must stress the importance of this bag of mine. I was scheduled to be selling all of the products at a corporate event in just under a few hours, and within that bag was most of my makeup and business attire for the next few days. There was no way I could show up dressed as I was, and there was no time to go shopping to buy new clothes; we were driving straight from the airport to the event. To add to the problem, we were leaving this event at the end of the day and driving straight back to the airport to take our next flight for yet another corporate event scheduled in Florida the next day. I approached the lost bags counter and gave them the corresponding ticket for my suitcase and after about fifteen minutes of nail-biting suspense, they managed to track my luggage down and found it had been mistakenly kept in Las Vegas. The baggage handler was holding my luggage, and on speakerphone he read out the numbers on the tag, the exact corresponding numbers to the ticket that I had just handed over. I was then informed that they could not get the bag to me in Texas until a further two days away. By then, we would be in Arkansas and I would have to endure two full days of corporate events, dressed as I was, with no toiletries, no change of clothes, no makeup, no corporate wear, and no time to buy anything else. Both Nate and our two friends were sympathetic, but only my husband could read the extreme stress showing on my face. Our two friends were ready to move on, with tight schedules to meet weighing on their minds, and so they shrugged, “things will work out,” and began walking toward the exit.
If you have ever lost a bag, you will know the feeling. I felt defeated and frustrated at the prospect of the humiliation of selling products to high profile business leaders basically dressed in the next best thing to pajamas. Right then I remembered a scripture my dad had often prayed whenever he had lost something—Mark 4:22. “For there is nothing that is hidden that won’t be disclosed, and there is no secret that won’t be brought out into the light!” I realize that scripture is speaking of spiritual matters, but I had seen my dad’s words of faith cause it to manifest lost things in the natural as well. I felt the words of that scripture bubbling up within me. Suddenly, they burst out of me in a very loud outpouring of a heartfelt declaration, with tears streaming down my face in desperation. “Father God, Your Word says that if anything is hidden, You will bring it into the light. I know my bag is not lost, but it has been hidden from me, and I need it now. Father, I release Your angels to bring it to me in Jesus’ name. Bag, you will return to me right now.” It is amusing how we see things playing out in our own minds. As I was praying, I was hoping that somehow I would get a knock on our hotel room door in an hour or two, just in time for the event, but God’s ways are so much better than ours.
Our two friends who were walking a few steps ahead of Nate and I turned and stared almost in disbelief when they heard me praying, with the look on their faces that read, “What on earth are you doing?” Not even a moment passed when all of a sudden, right in front of all of our eyes, the conveyer belt to the left of us that we happened to be walking past abruptly turned on and started to move, and right there at the mouth of where the bags emerge there appeared my bag. I didn’t believe it was my bag at this point until it made its way right to where I was standing and the conveyer belt halted. I turned it over looking for my identifiable tag just to be sure and there it was. Our jaws dropped, and then loud laughter erupted from all four of us. I ran back to the lost bags counter and showed my suitcase to the lady who had just found it in Las Vegas, and she was just as shocked as all of us. “It’s Jesus!” I shouted. “Jesus delivered my bag.”
While it may seem insignificant or even petty that God would deliver a lost bag, it was important to me and it actually left me feeling overcome with His love for days to come. It was an act of love, the response of a loving Father who cares about the little details of my life, and He moved immediately in response to my impassioned decree. I didn’t know it then, but the Holy Spirit was using moments like this one to train me in prophetic prayer in its simplest form. I cried out to my Father, I told Him my problem, and then I spoke the answer. I began to wonder, “God if You responded to something as little as my lost suitcase, how much more will You answer me when it involves the bigger things of life?” I began to see problems differently, both the smaller obstacles within my own life and then on a larger scale—the dilemmas of the world. I began to see them through the eyes of possibility when hand in hand with my Father.
I believe God’s desire is to stir up your faith for the same thing, to pray bold prayers of prophetic declaration over the little and the big. To speak His answers into every circumstance that might look impossible, and to hear His heart for the earth and the problems it faces. For every problem, He has a solution—and it is found in His Son, Jesus. He is waiting on His sons and daughters, who have been given all of His authority, to partner with Him and release the answers of His heart to a broken world. If you will dare to pray the answers boldly, despite what it may appear to look like in the natural, He will respond, and when He does it will astound you.
Unveiling God Solutions
In my earlier experiences of learning prophetic prayer, I discovered that they each involved something important that was lost, just like my lost suitcase. In this instance, the verse from Mark 4:22 came to my heart, and I want to highlight why. Let us take a moment to read that verse, along with the two verses that accompany it on either side. Mark 4:21-23 in the Passion Translation reads:
He also gave them this parable: “No one lights a lamp only to place it under a basket or under the bed. It is meant to be placed on a lampstand. For there is nothing that is hidden that won’t be disclosed, and there is no secret that won’t be brought out into the light! If you understand what I’m saying, you need to respond!
What was Jesus referring to when He mentioned hidden things? I believe that Proverbs 25:2 points us to the answer. It reads:
God conceals the revelation of his word in the hiding place of his glory. But the honor of kings is revealed by how they thoroughly search out the deeper meaning of all that God says.
The Hebrew word for “word” mentioned here is dabar (Strong’s, H1693). It can be translated to literally mean, “word, speech, utterance, or matter.” So what are the hidden things Jesus was referring to and the revelation that God conceals? He conceals the answers for the earth within His Word. When we consider that Jesus is the Word made flesh (see John 1:14), we can know that the revelation for “matters and problems,” along with the deeper insights of His Kingdom, can be found within the hiding place of His glory—discovered through intimacy with Him. Jesus is the solution to every problem and matter. Who are the kings who thoroughly search out these deeper meanings? You and I are those kings (see Rev. 1:6). Jesus is the King of all kings; He is our Great Priest, and you have been established as a king under His rule and reign. For too long, many of God’s sons and daughters have hidden their lamps and the answers of His heart and not released these solutions into the earth. It is His desire to restore that which has been lost, and He longs to do it through you and I. We are here to affect culture, not to be infected by it. A king or queen of the earth may live in their kingdom while reigning over it, but they live separate from it. You and I have been called to live in the same way, to live and reign over the earth, but to be separate to it. Why? The answers that you carry within you are vital to restoring heaven to earth and they cannot be infected by the mindsets of the earth. That is why God hides these answers, so that they can only be obtained in intimacy.
In relationship, the revelations and solutions you receive are then released into the earth through your utterance. Notice Jesus said in Mark 4:23, “If you understand what I’m saying, you need to respond!” Only those who dare to go beyond the normal status quo and enter into the secret place of His glory will be able to understand and hear the solutions of His heart and respond as such. What is the ultimate purpose of these solutions? To uncover those who have been lost and to bring them back into the arms of the Father. Every solution in the heart of God is designed with one purpose and outcome in mind—to unveil His glory and bring the lost home.
Pray from Victory
Your prophetic prayers carry the authority of Jesus to usher in the answers of heaven ahead of time, just like the Roman officer. Have you been praying like the Roman officer? Or begging God to move? It’s time to shift your perspective into the realm of extravagant and bold faith—to release the answers of heaven into the earth.
Christy Johnston
