Praying Within the Will of the Father

Ok, so I've been reading this great book by a guy named Darren Wilson called Filming God: A Journey from Skepticism to Faith. Darren has been making movies for a while that focus around making God more famous. Darren wants to find people who love radically and step out in faith to act on the radical love they see from God. He finds these people and follows them around, and as he puts it, "along with radical love comes radical events."

Anyway, these people are so aware of the Holy Spirit and of the voice of God. Some have had encounters with demons, some have heard the audible voice of God, some hear the audible voice of God everyday, some have seen angels, all of them have experienced healings and visions and the inaudible voice of God. They have all these crazy stories to tell, but the thing that stands out to me as the common denominator in everything is that these people pray. They pray without hindrance. They pray boldly. Mostly, they pray very very often.

Notably, prayer is two-fold.
Prayer is 1) Bringing your requests before God and 2) LISTENING. The people Darren talk to seem to do so much more than talk when they pray. They wait and they listen. It seems to me that the reason their prayers are so effective and produce healing and salvation and crazy stuff you couldn't even imagine is because they are doing everything within the will of the Father. They do everything within the will of the Father because they know the will of the Father. They know the will of the Father because they listen for it. And this takes time.

Jesus' prayers worked because he was perfectly obedient to the Father and perfectly united to His will. So Jesus didn't go around asking for healing when it was not a part of the Father's will. He submitted his prayer to the Father and so his prayers were always within the will of the Father.

Darren told a story about a man who he visited for filming. This man was lying on the couch one morning and finally came to eat breakfast at some point. Darren asked how his nap had been, and the man told Darren that he had been praying. Just laying there, praying while other people were doing other things in the next room he was praying for what I think Darren said was almost 30 minutes. Another time Darren was filming this same man waiting for him to go pray for some miracles, but instead he stood in the middle of the crowd for around an hour praying asking God where to go. Later that same day after a very unsuccessful day of filming when the team thought they were finally going to get some footage and everyone is staying to clear out and they are running out of time this same man prays with the team for 45 minutes, just waiting on God. He told a story about another man who spent multiple hours every morning in his laundry room praying.

These people spent serious time waiting on the Father and listening intently to find out what His will was. Since they spent so much time with God, they knew him intimately, and so could recognize His voice when they heard it, and could follow obediently into His will.