Why Your Prayers Might Not Be Working by Apostle Arome Osayi: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Malachi 4:5-6

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord, and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.

Luke 1:5-17

Zacharias and Elizabeth were both righteous before God, walking blameless in all His commandments, yet childless because Elizabeth was barren and both were well advanced in years. While Zacharias ministered at the altar of incense, an angel appeared and told him his prayer was heard, that Elizabeth would bear a son to be called John, and that he would go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn hearts and make ready a people prepared for Him.

An Anointing Must Be Modeled to Bear Its Full Name

An anointing is a commitment to make the concentrated presence of God available to a man's spirit, giving him abilities he does not have naturally. Every anointing carries a potential, but many who wear an anointing never reach the fullness of what it was intended to produce. Elijah's anointing found its fullest expression in a season of national repentance in Israel, and because he modeled every dimension of it so completely, that grace came to be identified by his name. When the same kind of national decline reappeared centuries later, God sent for that same measure again, this time upon John, so that Malachi could prophesy, "Behold, I will send Elijah."

Unbelief Can Block the Very Breakthrough Being Offered

Prayers ascend to God in the form of incense, and the purest sacrifice a person offers is not the one spoken with the mouth but the one that comes from the heart; a prayer offered with bitterness still carried in the heart rises mixed with that bitterness. Zacharias was positioned rightly, as an intercessor interceding not only for his own need but territorially, which is why the angel could appear to him at all. Yet when told that his wife's barrenness was broken, he asked, "Whereby shall I know this? I am an old man, and my wife is well advanced in years." He had spent years praying for others' miracles at that same altar without the faith to receive his own. Because of that unbelief, the angel identified himself with unusual authority, "I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God," and struck Zacharias silent, so that his doubt would not contaminate God's plan through his own mouth.

An Anointing Creates an Appetite That Must Be Fed

An anointing does not simply rest on a person; it creates a desire, a hunger, and a person's attempt to satisfy that hunger is what moves them out of ordinary religious routine into real consecration. Someone who has genuinely received something spiritual will be more at home in extended fasting than in eating, not because there is no food available, but because an appetite has been created that only that pursuit can satisfy. A person still operating on thirty minutes of prayer and a twelve minute devotion, and nothing more, has not yet taken the journey; if nothing about a person's hunger has changed, nothing has actually happened to them spiritually.

Just as the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness after His baptism, so a genuine spiritual investment drove John into the wilderness rather than the city, determined his diet of locusts and wild honey, and dictated his camel skin clothing, not personal preference but the witness of the spirit he carried.

Insufficient Witness Costs a Generation Its Breakthrough

John 10:39-42

When people sought Jesus at the place where John had first baptized, they came not to bring their own needs but to report, "John did no miracle, but all things that John spoke of this man were true." There was a shortfall between the allocation John received, described as the spirit and power of Elijah, and what was actually manifested in his ministry.

Matthew 11:20-24

Jesus said that if the mighty works done in Chorazin and Bethsaida had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, and that if the works done in Capernaum had been done in Sodom, Sodom would have remained to this day. Sodom's judgment was not simply that it was beyond saving; it was that the witness sent to it, Lot, carried insufficient power to turn it. Territories are lost not because they cannot be reached, but because those sent to them lack the power to back up the message they carry.

Acts 1:8

The church in a land is not lacking eyewitnesses, people who know theology and can quote scripture; what is lacking are power witnesses, people whose lives carry an ability that compels belief rather than merely informs it.