I’d like to talk about prayer. People make two statements.
One is, “I have a prayer life.”
And there is what the saints of old said, the world changers: “I have a life of prayer.”
The person who has a prayer life designates a certain part of their busy day to go and pray.
A person with a life of prayer, designates a portion of their busy time of prayer to do life…
When Paul said, “Pray without ceasing” I am certain he understood that we had to sleep at night, that we had to have jobs.
What he was talking about is that we must get to the point where life is interrupting our prayer time, and NOT that our prayer time is interrupting our life.
Meaning, I am in an attitude and state of prayer, all the time.
No matter how much I can plan, sometimes a jet is late.
Sometimes a flight will be cancelled, and I arrive at the church where I am to preach, only moments before I am supposed to preach.
I can’t rely on an afternoon where I was alone with God.
What I rely on is the fact that I never broke that communion at all. Just as Paul told Timothy,
“Be instant in season and out of season.”
That is what needs to happen.
We need to rediscover prayer to the point where, I think, “I don’t want to leave this room to go do life, because I’m not ready yet.
That’s what Martin Luther said. He said, “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/29874.Martin_Luther
As much as I love my brothers and sisters in the Lord, and I certainly don’t want to sound like I am anti-pastor.
I’m not. I think there are a handful of men and women that have been real traitors, but by in large, the pulpits in America are God-fearing, sacrificing men and women who love their people and would do anything for them.
Men and women who didn’t buy into the big screens, skinny jeans and fog machine version.
And they paid a desperate price for it.
Some of them have lost church members.
But I have a word of encouragement for them:
It is going to turn, because America’s appetite is turning.
And the person who is in search of a good cup of coffee and a 12-minute sermon with valet parking, is a dinosaur.
They are going to be replaced by, “I don’t need coffee because I’m wide awake.
I don’t care how long you preach, Pastor, because you are turning me from a confused person, into a soldier, fit for war.
Pastor you are making me armed and dangerous, to fight for my community, and against the works of the devil.
The appetite is changing.
So, I would tell every Pastor, hold on just a little longer.
Don’t compromise the blood, the cross, the second coming of Christ.
Don’t sacrifice the baptism in the Holy Spirit or signs, wonders and miracles done according to the Spirit of God.
And most of all, preach holiness, “without which, no one will see God” (Hebrews 12:14).
God has placed a tremendous burden on me for this hour, to speak what He says, when I hear it.
Scientists discovered, some years ago, that the electricity that runs through your house is far more powerful than we ever imagined.
An electric current, at a certain temperature, far below zero, begins to superconduct.
This means that at room temperature there is a drag on electric current.
Now, if you use that as an analogy for the anointing: when a vessel of God dies to self, they remove the drag that is on the anointing.
When we witness in history a woman like Kathryn Kuhlman, or a man like Oral Roberts, healing evangelists, we wonder why they operated on such a seemingly different plane of power than others.
The secret is that they learned to superconduct, and not allow the anointing to be dragged by anything.
They had no axe to grind in the pulpit, a personal viewpoint, a hidden agenda to make money, or to be famous.
They simply wanted to please the Holy Spirit.
And, in that obsession, they superconducted and the anointing flowed freely.
That is also my obsession.
When I get in the tent and I begin to preach to lost souls, and I hear that a parent brought a child who is dying of leukemia, or that a man with children has had multiple heart attacks and maybe won’t live through the next few months, and, instead of relying solely on doctors, they come to my tent.
That places an awesome responsibility on me.
Not to believe that I can heal them, but to believe that I can get out of God’s way.
When I wrote the book, VESSELS OF FIRE AND GLORY, at a certain part of the book I felt a certain grief.
I grieved over the Holy Spirit.
Because the Bible says, “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not grieve the Spirit.
And that word grieve means, don’t hurt Him.
We have broken His heart.
I began to see how He was insulted, marginalized, misrepresented and reduced to some New Age ‘force.’
This member of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit was wounded and hurt by our behavior.
Because Jesus emphatically stated that it is to our advantage that I leave.
It is for our sake I must go away, because otherwise the Helper cannot come.
And we have rejected that help.
We thought we knew how to preach better.
Billy Graham said that it amazed him how the preaching of the simple Gospel, and the truth of it, that the Spirit of God would drive it into the hearts of men everywhere he went.
We have got to let the Holy Spirit take over again.
He knows how to handle the virus.
He knows how to handle the government.
He knows what we ought to be saying.
When I began writing my blog, and writing this book, and speaking out, I said, “Lord, You can’t anoint me to do that!
You can anoint me to do ministry, and He is, but why?”
The answer was found in 1 Samuel 10:6,
“Then the Spirit of the Lord will come upon you mightily, and you will show yourself to be a prophet with them; and you will be turned into another man.
And when these signs meet you, do as the occasion demands; for God is with you.”
The kind of things I am saying in this hour would have been inappropriate, even ten years ago.
But this is what the occasion demands.
And that is why, Pastor! Let the anointing have its way.
Begin to speak the message that may not be the line of your denomination. It may not be the tradition that you are used to.
It is from the word of God, but it is a focus on exposing the evil of the swamp and the power of God to overcome that evil, and bring America back to God.
I want to pray for every Christian that loves America.
Do you love this country – the home of the brave, the land of the free? The land of opportunity created and forged out of a wilderness by a miracle from God.
We can’t lose it.
We can’t lose this gift.
And the stupidest reason ever to cripple our children with socialism, would be because they were too afraid that they couldn’t succeed without the government being their nursemaid.
God, I pray for an awakening.
I pray an anointing for common house cats will turn back into lions.
I pray that a fire will be ignited in the heart of everyone listening.
Those who have been called by You to preach your Gospel in a pulpit, as a Pastor, help them to see their duty.
Help them to understand that safety is in obedience and not in escape.
If we’re in rebellion against God, if God has told us to speak out, there will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, unless we obey the Lord.
Jonah discovered that, when he was told to go to Nineveh, but refused, and went in the opposite direction.
God, let us run toward the truth, and not away from it.
Give us the courage to speak out in an hour when thieves are robbing us of our rights and our freedoms.
Lord, let us be turned into a new vessel of God, and do what the occasion demands.
In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
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