God has already spoken. He is waiting for someone on the earth to say it back.

You have prayed. You have fasted. You have kept vigil through the night. And still you have wondered, quietly, whether anything is actually happening.

The problem is almost never sincerity. It is information.

For years Sunday Adesina watched believers pray loudly, pray long, and see very little. Then he opened his Bible and found what every answered prayer in Scripture had in common. Daniel with the scroll of Jeremiah. Elijah with his face between his knees on Carmel. Nehemiah in a Persian palace. The apostles under threat of death. Not one of them invented the content of their prayer. Every one of them found what God had already said, and prayed it back.

Three strands, one cord

Prayer, prophecy and the Word are not three separate subjects. They are one cord with three strands — and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

The Word is what God has written: His settled, permanent, public will.
Prophecy is what God has spoken: His intention declared before it appears.
Prayer is what a believer on the earth does with what God has said.

Pull out any one strand and the whole thing comes apart in your hands. Take away the Word, and prayer becomes noise. Take away prophecy, and you pray generalities into the air. Take away prayer, and the promises sit on the shelf, true but never arriving.

The question that quietly undoes most believers

If God has already promised it, why must I pray it?

The answer is in a single verse. In Ezekiel 36, God spends thirty verses making unconditional promises to a scattered people. He will gather them. He will cleanse them. He will give them a new heart. And then He says: "I will yet for this be enquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them."

He has decided to do it, and He will still require them to ask.

Prophecy does not remove the need for prayer. Prophecy creates it. The promise is not the reason to relax. The promise is the assignment.

What you will learn

How to find in Scripture what God has already said about the thing you are facing
Why a prayer built on the Word is answered differently from one built on your own imagination
How to pray in the Spirit, with honest answers to the objections you have heard raised against it
The three distinct senses in which the Bible uses the word "prophecy," and why confusing them causes real damage
Six biblical tests for weighing a prophetic word, so you neither swallow everything nor reject everything
What to do when the answer is slow, without concluding that the fault must be yours
How to stand as a watchman over your family, your workplace and your city

Also included

Thirty scriptures arranged as first-person prayers, grouped by need
A twenty-one day guided prayer schedule
Reflection questions for every chapter, for personal study or home cells
A complete scripture index

Written by a pastor rather than a professor, for the believer who is ready to stop wondering whether prayer is working and start knowing.

Read it with your Bible open.