Pastor Ken…
Good morning, everyone. So good to have you with us today. God is truly up to something good and it’s only getting better as time progresses in this hour.
He desires light and truth to penetrate into the inward parts of your being…
I was reminded this morning as we were worshiping that Psalm 119:105 says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Then verse, 119:129, it says, “Your testimonies are wonderful, therefore, my soul keeps them.” In verse 30, it says, “The entrance of your words gives light. It gives understanding to the simple.”
My prayer is that you would be invaded with light and understanding this morning. We serve the Light Bringer, the One who brings light. His angels are angels of light. His words bring light and illumination. The Bible says He desires light and truth to penetrate into the inward most parts of our being. So wherever you’re at in your journey, whatever assignment in prayer or in the spirit you find yourself at or in this present season of life, my prayer is that God just inundate you, that His light would cascade, that His wisdom would flood your heart, that He would level you up your understanding.
God’s elevator of revelation…
I often pray, “Lord, take me up in your elevator of revelation.” How many of you know God has an elevator of revelation that He desires to take us up? And how high we go is up to us. The Bible says that blessed are those who hunger and thirst for the rightness of God, for the understanding as far as God sees it and has presented it in His Word, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for that, for they shall be filled. Amen.
The Holy Spirit is a believing spirit…
And so, I was also thinking about how the Holy Spirit is a believing spirit. In other words, He’s not a doubting spirit. He’s a believing spirit who wants to lead you and me out of our doubts and into the reality of the fullness of our redemption and God’s highest intentions for our future.
Do you know that the angels of heaven, and for that matter, the host of heaven, it’s strange to them that we doubt. It’s strange to them when we have second thoughts because there’s no shadow of turning in the mindset of God concerning His will and desire to bless you and do good things for you. There’s only belief. There’s only faith.
I often think that the angels probably look like a dog who encounters something new… You know, dogs kind of tilt their head like this, like, “What? What’s with that?” And sometimes I imagine angels when we doubt or get over into unbelief or freak out because of a situation or because something hasn’t happened according to our timetable, or we haven’t seen the answer to our prayer yet, they just kind of go, “How can they do that? How’s it even possible that they can doubt?”
Because in the heavenly dimension and the heavenly realm and in the angelic ranks, there’s only belief. There’s only faith. Heaven and the heavenly dimension is saturated, it drips with understanding… it drips with wisdom… it is inundated and saturated with belief and faith in the one and true and living God and what He stated to you and to me and through His words.
Overwhelmed by the atmosphere of heaven…
So I pray this morning that wherever you find yourself in life, whatever you’re facing, whatever challenges or doubts that are trying to worm their way into your consciousness and tempt you in some way, that they would just be overwhelmed by the atmosphere of heaven. What a privilege to come right up into the presence of God because of the redemptive work of Jesus… because we are declared righteous and holy and justified due to the work of Jesus.
He’s rigged things in our favor…
So He can come right into His presence, right up into His lap and receive the fragrance of Him and be saturated by belief and understanding and the knowledge that God is up to something good. That what I’ve said before is true, that He’s, in fact, rigged things in our favor. He’s rigged your future in your favor. He’s gone ahead of you to prepare a way with that situation regarding your finances, your next step, a relationship. Whatever is in your heart, whatever He intends for you, He has made a way. He has rigged things in your favor. And it’s our engagement with His presence through prayer, through worship, through the Word that positions us to just simply receive what He’s already done.
I want to double-dog dare you…
Hebrews 4:9 says, “There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For anyone who enters God’s rest, also rests from their works just as God did from His.” So I want to just challenge you… I want to double-dog dare you this morning to make a decision to just exhale those doubts and fears, that past that you’ve been through, that trauma that you’ve experienced, that failure that occurred for whatever reason… even if you had something to do with it. Aren’t you glad that the blood of Jesus speaks loud and clear and ought to speak louder in our lives each and every day? So let the blood of Jesus speak loud over your past. Let the blood of Jesus speak loud over that failure, that shame that you feel, that doubt that is trying to compete for your attention.
That we might find a Sabbath rest…
What’s the blood of Jesus? It’s the announcement that it is finished. Jesus has fulfilled all that was needed and required to the “nth” degree. That we might find a Sabbath rest, that we might exhale all of our doubts, that we might release the full range of our sins and shortcomings and weaknesses and whatever it is that has tried to attach itself on the way of a stronghold or a self-defeating attitude or behavior.
We could release that today in the presence of God and it can be absorbed into the sea of forgetfulness. And we can each and every day receive through this rest through exhaling what is not ours, and inhaling a fresh breath in the midst of His presence.
Revivalist Billy Sunday quote…
I think it was the great revivalist of the 19th century, Billy Sunday, who said “The only way to keep a broken vessel full is to keep it always under the tap.” It’s really simple, but it really helps me because it reminds me to not trust in me. It reminds me that I’m a broken vessel in this earth realm. I have a soul. We can be tempted, but I have the opportunity each day to be filled. And the infilling of heaven into this broken vessel, into your broken vessel can flush out all that the enemy is trying to attempt… everything that is not of God. But it’s something we have to do daily. Stay under the tap. Stay in His presence. Whether it’s in morning prayer or just a simple acknowledgement of Him as you go about your day, a simple prayer in the spirit or in your understanding… a simple turning of your attention to Him and saying, “Lord, what’s up? I love you. Thank you for your goodness, your faithfulness, your kindness. Thank you that you’re at work. That right in this moment, I don’t feel real good, or I feel like a hot mess because of everything going on in my household today or whatever. But I thank you, Lord, that I don’t have to live by seeing. Instead, I can choose to live by believing, and I believe that I am situated under you. I’m situated in you. For in you, we live and move and have our being.”
You were created to be filled…
You were created intentionally out of the mindset and heart of God to live filled. The Bible proclaims “be being filled,” right? Speaking in Psalms and hymns and spiritual sayings, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.
Somebody wrote regarding this passage in Hebrews four about rest. They said, “It has been said in the last 2,000 years of the teachings and preachings of how to successfully live a Christian life and please God. And “please God” could actually be encapsulated in a simple two-word exhortation: “Try harder.”
In other words, religion teaches us, “try harder, be better, don’t do bad, measure up, show up, strive, struggle, strain, put forth more effort.” But this author goes on to say, “Do you keep struggling over the same sin and habit? Do you continue to try harder? Are you struggling to love the unlovely and obnoxious people? Try harder. Failing time and time again to rise an hour early for prayer and Bible reading. Try harder. Not giving enough, serving enough, witnessing enough, attending church services enough. Try harder. You know the prescription: bear down, double up, lather, rinse, repeat, in an endless, frustrating shame-soaked cycle of defeat and failures that robs you of your confidence before God and keeps you feeling like the only Christian in the world who isn’t properly doing all the right things.
Rest is precisely what we are called to do in Jesus…
Okay, I’m just reading it for just sake of time, because I know nobody else here is identifying with what I’m saying, right? No, that’s not true. None of that sounds very restful, does it? Yet, rest is precisely what we are called to do in Jesus, particularly rest from striving and straining to earn God’s approval.
Can I just pronounce over you this morning? “You’re forgiven… Once for all and for all time!” Jesus dotted the I’s as I like to say, and He crossed all the T’s. He fulfilled the heavy lifting on your behalf so that you could be forgiven. Forgive yourself! Let it go. It’s a new year. It’s time to go. It’s time to move forward in rest and in the fullness of what He intends for us in the coming year. And that is goodness. Regardless of what you experienced last year or what CNN is purporting for the coming months. You’re forgiven. You’re enough.
You’re beautiful to Jesus…
You’re, in fact, beautiful to Jesus. You’re draped in the beautiful robes of righteousness that Jesus purchased with His very own blood. So see yourself draped in those robes. Qualified, sanctified, justified.
When you go back and do a little word study on what the word justified means from a scriptural standpoint, it literally means that God sees you just as if you had never sinned and just as if you had always obeyed and done the right thing.
Of course, the Bible is true, that when He looks down, He sees you as entirely pleasing to Him. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are things we grow in. There are some behavioral holiness issues that we are journeying through this life. There’s a mind renewal process that is perpetual all the days of our life on planet earth. But concerning who you are on the inside, the real you in spirit, the real you and what Jesus recreated you to be is entirely pleasing and lovely. And a full qualified candidate for answers in prayer. You are a full and qualified candidate. In fact, I would take it a step further. God is excited to answer your prayers today. He has called you to pray, to ask, to seek and to knock, that He might answer because He’s already decided to say “yes.”
God is a God of “yes”…
I describe my heavenly Father as the “God of yes.” You are fully qualified to receive healing, to receive promotion, to step into abundance and unprecedented opportunities today. Can you just grab a hold of that this morning? Can you believe that God intends for the glory of God to inundate our nation to reroute situations in our churches and communities and families?
There is no doubt angels cock their heads like a dog when they see the church or they see us with a second thought of doubt or unbelief, or that maybe it’s not going to happen for me, or maybe God’s done with me, or maybe it’s just not going to work out. They just kind of go… That’s just a curious thing to me that humans would doubt. Because if they could see things, angels would say, and I’m speaking maybe for my angel. If they could speak, they would say, “How’s that possible?”
Because in the real dimension where everything emanates from, right? The Bible says this realm came from that realm. In that realm, there’s only a heavenly God-ordained faith and certainty, a boldness and a confidence, and an intentionality that what God has promised, what He has prophesied, what He has dropped into your heart as a pastor, a leader, a pray-er, a mom, a dad, a child, a student… that is going to happen. That is going to be so.
Get in a place of agreement with God…
But He needs us to get into a place of agreement and start agreeing and believing the same thing. Even if you’re going through a dark hour, a dark night of the soul especially so, God wants to leverage those difficult moments, those hot messes of a day, those difficult places, that persecution, those symptoms… He didn’t cause it. He’s not the author of it. But He wants to prompt us as a church to respond rightly when the wrong thing is happening.
Abraham made a decision to see delay as an opportunity…
Like Abraham. Year after year, the promise went unfulfilled what he had prayed. Yet the Bible says that he made a decision that the adversity and the delay was not a denial from God, but instead an opportunity to step into the messiness, to step into the seeming delay and all the more so. The Bible reads, grow strong in faith, in believing in the character, in the promise of His Heavenly Father, of the Lord God of heaven, and the Lord of Israel.
The Bible says He grew strong in faith by setting His focus intently like a flint on God, and praising Him and saying and agreeing with what God has said and what He had promised. So He grew strong in the valley, in the dark place, in the delay. God is able to make it happen.
Our job is to believe…
Our job, our pay scale is not to make it happen or figure out how to make it happen. Our responsibility and our divine invitation today and every day is to believe. Relationship and prayer and spending time in His presence is an opportunity to let Him reintroduce Himself to us each day. It’s an opportunity to grow deeper in our intimacy with the Father, to know that He is good and that truly He stands in our future as a church, as a nation, as individuals, as a family, having prepared the way well in advance of you for sure being born.
A book about your life…
The Bible says even about us individually that all the days of our life were jotted down, were penned down in a book, chapter and verse, what God intends for your life and what you are called to be and to do even before you were born, that book was written. So, of course, God has a way for us forward in 2023. Our assignment is to believe. To agree… to know that there’s opportunity in adversity. And that opportunity is to say, “Okay, Lord, I don’t feel like it at the moment. It doesn’t look like it. Nothing’s changed today. In fact, it seems like I’ve taken a step forward and ended up two steps back.” I think it was Job has said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him?” He’s not slaying us. But the point is, is that even if you end up a step back today, yet will we trust Him? Because He will surely be faithful to you. He will be faithful to the church. He will be faithful to this nation, to that situation you find yourself in. He is more passionate to work and to move in your family, in your finances, in your deal than you are.
That’s why I’ve said before you get in the heavenly dimension and you were to maybe navigate the streets of gold and encounter some of the disciples from the first century, or even Jesus Himself, you would hear nothing but faith being preached in conversation, in mighty declaration. There would be fire emanating from the eyes and the words of Jesus. Just something about His presence, something about His Word that its effect is that it wants to burn up all that is secondary and lesser and confusing and difficult and unknown.
Prayed…
Father, we pray for the church to break that gravitational pull of this earth realm and this these earthly ways
We pray for a supply and energy and a boost of the Holy Spirit, just like there are booster rockets that enable a rocket to do so.
We pray for a divine boost to churches
Lord, we lift up Europe… we lift up that combination of nations. Lord, move and work and do what must be done. We loose angels and ministering spirits to operate and function and assign and align and work to precipitate the plan of God in Europe as it needs to be.
So we send out a warning, we send out an alert today to Europe. Open up! Open up, in Jesus’ name! Now is the time. This is the day. Now is the moment of visitation.
Oh, we prepare the way, Lord, for your visitation in the UK. Throughout Western Europe up into Scandinavia, down into France and Spain and Portugal.
Lord, that there will be connecting with hungry hearts now over in the Eastern Europe… in western Asia
We pray for a release of your glory. We pray for salvation. We pray for redemption and the miraculous to come to a full display in those nations
Lord, in this moment of time, in your name, no nation goes unturned. No nation goes without a visitation… a supernatural, yet systematic visitation in every nation. From one nation to the next nation, the Spirit of God is traveling like a train going through the nations now. One final time… one last time. Visiting. Calling. Inviting. Welcoming. Working. Doing what must be done out ahead of the great and final call that will split the eastern sky.
