Currently viewing the tag: "Prayer"
The more I love Thee with a truly gracious love, the more I desire to love Thee, and the more miserable I am at my want of love. The more I hunger and thirst after Thee, the more I faint and fail in finding Thee. The more my heart is broken for sin, the more I pray it may be far more broken.
A Puritan’s Prayer.
From Valley of Vision by Arthur Bennett
Yet I have set My King on My holy hill of Zion.” Psalm 2:6
When the nations rage against God and attempt to cast His fetters, God is not moved even in the slightest. Instead He has a word for the rulers who dare to speak past His established plumbline of truth and righteousness. The sure and clear message of God, even in times of national moral crisis, is that God’s Son is seated high in majesty and power above ever other name that is named. Once our hearts are united in prayer with Jesus, and at the moment that He draws us into His secret place, everything becomes so expressly clear: “He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall hold them in derision. Then He shall speak to them in His wrath, and distress them in His deep displeasure: “ Psalm 2:4-5.
Just as in the time of Elijah we face a confrontation with a demonic force that exalts itself against God and against His anointed. Elijah was a prophet sent by God to bring down the strongholds of darkness that Jezebel had built all over Israel. The spirit of deception which Jezebel had sown in Israel brought the people out of communion with God and into covenant with false idols. Instead of worshipping God, the Israelites were led to believe that their salvation could come from another source. But Elijah knew God in the secret place. Elijah knew that God was the King and all other ideas or idols or false gods were deceiving the people into great sin. Elijah was so intimately acquainted with God’s voice that he didn’t doubt of God’s power to draw the hearts of the people back their God and King.
In California today there is a battle for identity – the very definition of marriage is under fire. We are facing a confrontation with the influence of ethical humanism which claims that man’s ideas and opinions are superior to God’s. But just as Elijah spoke to the people of Israel, there are prophets and intercessors throughout our state that are contending for the destiny of our state. Instead of trusting in and relying on the operations of the mind to survive, we are people of the Holy Spirit. God’s ways are far better and longer lasting and exceedingly more bountiful than any humanistic ideal that exalts itself against the Cross of Jesus. God’s eyes are set upon the treasure at hand: the hearts of the people of California. “How long will you falter between two opinions. If God is God, then worship Him!! Let the sacrificial altar of fasting and prayer be continually kept aflame along with the passionate fires of intercession in faith that God will answer from on high and baptize our state with justice, righteousness, truth, and mercy and turn our hearts back to God’s heart.
Galatians 5:13, “Serving one another in Love.”
John the Baptist was blazing brightly in the desert of Israel during the time when Jesus stepped on the scene. This forerunner John was so completely abandoned to serving the Lord that Jesus came to him to receive the baptism so that all righteousness could be fulfilled. John’s eyes were gazing upon the Lord and out of this flowed the outpouring of the greatest servant besides Jesus – a burning man who went low and fasted and prayed in the wilderness so that many others would reap the benefits of his labors.
The calling of the intercessor is to follow the steps of our Lord and to bend low and become the servants of all – a man or woman who counts their lives as a grain of wheat that falls to earth and dies for the sake of the prodigal sons and daughters who are still a great way off to be brought home to their Father’s loving embrace. [Luke 15:20]. To serve one another in love is to fall on our knees in earnest expectation of God’s power and to cry out for mercy on the lost, to cry out for the blood of Jesus to cover the doorposts of our national guilt, and to call upon Jesus to anoint this generation of burning Nazirite lovers to walk in power and authority so that we will witness a mighty deliverance of those who are “bound by the strong man” of sexual immorality.
God has raised up leaders and anointed men and women throughout the state of California to carry the torch of intercession and lift their voices for justice and truth. As many are praying this very day for our state’s leaders and elected officials may we also not forget the hundreds if not thousands of pastors and leaders of the many congregations in our state – that our prayers would bring the power of God upon them – Oh that the cry for our church leaders would resound in Zion’s gates: Psalm 80:17 – Let your hand rest on the man at your right hand, the son of man you have raised up for yourself.
