Scripture focus…
First of I want to read Luke 8:17 in a few different translations. We are to pray for hidden things to be revealed. That is what is happening right now. We want things that are hidden to be revealed.
For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad. (AKJV )
For there is nothing hidden that shall not be disclosed, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come out into the open. (AMP)
For nothing is secret, that shall not become manifest, nor hid, that shall not be known, and become manifest. (YLT)
For all that is secret will eventually be brought into the open, and everything that is concealed will be brought to light and made known to all. (NLT)
There are many different cities in Europe alone that they found weaponry, even a missile launcher. I believe the Holy Spirit reveals things that are hidden, and He will show the things that are to come. So when we are praying for leaders and those in positions of authority, presidents, kings, prime ministers down the list, we need to pray for wisdom. We need to pray that they would see things or mysteries would be revealed, things that were hidden. We need to pray that the military, every service person would see things that needed to be seen, be uncovered, before things would happen that would have been planned to happen. We have seen things that have been uncovered, and just in the past few years, there have been plots that were so close to coming to pass but they were uncovered so that nothing ended up happening.
I want us to listen to what Pastor Mac had to say this weekend in response to the Paris attacks.
The following excerpt was given by Pastor Mac Hammond on Saturday, November 14 at the 11 a.m. service at Living Word Christian Center…
What our response should be to this should be amply clear. If it is possible there, it is possible here. They view America along with Israel as the greatest of their enemies. So to suspect for a moment that an enemy would not attempt to accomplish their purposes here would be blind. So the questions that is raised is how do we conduct our lives and how do we approach the matter and is there anything we can do? I think there are some spiritual answers to that and some things that we can do in the natural as well. I think that the most significant understanding we should have is that the moment that we alter the way we live to accommodate the fear these kinds of attacks generate, they have won. You stop going to the mall, you stop going to the movie, you stop going to football games, you stop gathering together out of fear of the possible consequence, then they have already won.
The Bible promises you liberty in Christ. So, if you look to the Lord and look to your covenant, your safety is assured by that covenant, there is not really anything they can steal from you that doesn’t produce a graduation in your life. I mean if you go to heaven, you may not get 77 virgins but you are going to get blessed. Amen. There is really nothing that can be stolen from you. You need to think about these things a little bit but your covenant with almighty God provides a level of security that is supernatural in origin and that the enemy cannot penetrate. So take time to establish your heart in the truth of the Word, to plead the blood of Jesus before you go out for your day, to keep the blood over your family, over your loved ones and over this nation. Your covenant will take care of you.
Unfortunately that’s not necessarily so for America. Because America is going to be… the destiny of America will reflect what we as a collective group, meaning the American people, do. If we are all in faith, if we as a Christian nation believed our covenant with God then obviously America’s destiny would be under the blood as well. But unfortunately in this day it seems that about half of Americans are sadly deceived and affected by purely secular humanistic kinds of thought and values. I think that can be changed.
I think the things that we do… and if you are thinking to yourself I didn’t come to church to hear about what we do in politics, well… there is the back door. Because basically these are things… if you can’t talk about this stuff in church, where can you talk about it? Certainly there are those in government that would like to keep the mouth of the church shut, but if you can’t talk about it here within the context of Christian responsibility then we really are lost as a nation.
But what do we do? First of all, be aware of your covenant. Keep your family, your life tied into that covenant by faith and under the blood. But then, as an American, you pray for the land. The Bible says that if you do so, you enable the Lord to move supernaturally and chambers of government and other places and high ups. You know the prayer for America has to be given a priority in this day and at this time certainly if you are interested in the destiny of the greatest nation on earth not being a goat nation but being a sheep nation.
The second thing I think is so important that we do is put leadership in office that has the same paradigm of reality that you and I have. In other words, a view of reality that is predicated on the Word of God. Unfortunately, we have a president right now who has made a declaration that America is not even a Christian nation. I have a hard time imagining how anyone can be willfully ignorant of the fact that 60% of the data that was used in the formation of our founding documents, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, came from the Bible. We are a Christian nation. We have been founded on the principle that we refer to as the Judeo/Christian ethic and that is the only reason this nation has prospered like no other since its formation over two hundred years ago.
We also have an administration in office that will not even acknowledge the fact that Islam is a major part of the problem we experience today. Certainly it is not politically correct to make such a statement. Certainly there are millions of Muslims that are peace loving and represent no threat. But it is absolute fantasy to ignore the truth that the Islamic religion and culture is what has given rise to the most poisonous form of terrorism the world has ever known. Not only was it incubated in that culture but that culture sustains it and makes it possible. Not to acknowledge this is part of the problem and it has an impact on the conduct of our strategy against terrorism. And it has to be thought about and it has to be addressed. You can’t separate the problem from its origin and from the very environment that sustains it so you are going to have to talk about it, and you are going to have to deal with it. Perhaps this isn’t the format to do that it, but you have to at least elect a leadership that has pulled their head out of the sand enough to identify the problem in order to begin dealing with it.
We need to elect a leadership that is going to generate consensus and unity of purpose and effort rather than the greatest polarity this country has ever known. The earmark of effective leadership is being able to bring parties together, parties of differing opinion, viewpoints that seem to be at odds and finding consensus in order to go forward. That is the earmark of leadership. Jesus said a house divided against itself cannot stand. We like to blame “so and so” for a refusal to negotiate; well it’s the leadership anointing at the top that makes the framework, puts the framework in place for consensus to be reached. You can look down through history and see it occur.
Franklin Roosevelt generated a consensus during a very polarizing time. There was a lot of this nation that wanted to be isolationist. They didn’t want to go to war. But he managed to generate a consensus that produced a victory that literally saved civilization as we know it. John F. Kennedy generated a consensus to put a man on the moon in just the matter of a few short years. Ronald Reagan, his arguments and bickering with Tip O’Neal are legendary but they had a relationship that enabled consensus to be reached that rebuilt Americas place in the world as a leader and as a respected leader. There are others who didn’t. I served in the Vietnam War. We had leadership in office then that couldn’t generate consensus and what happened? We lost. Whether you think the war was just or right or moral or wrong, that’s irrelevant. Had we been of one heart, one accord as a nation, we would have won. That’s the result of unity.
We are going to look at a scripture this morning, really unrelated to this discussion now, that makes that point. When you are one, nothing can be restrained that you determine to do. And so when we elect representatives coming up pretty soon now, it needs to be with these kinds of characteristics. We are a Christian nation, always will be. We can clearly define who our enemy is and develop a strategy that would have some measure of effectiveness.
And thirdly, we need to look for a man or woman who will produce the level of unity and one accord necessary to mobilize this great population of freedom loving Christians in America. And we need to go vote. I see stats that say 70% of Americans proclaim to be Christians. Well, where are they at the polls? If they had all showed up, we wouldn’t have the mess that we have right now in government.
You measure who you vote for not by party affiliation, not by what entitlement somebody might give you, or what their cultural heritage might be… these are not reasons you put somebody into office. Our esteemed governor here in Minnesota called us a republican church. You know, I have only one interest and that is in seeing the principle of God’s Word promoted and embraced and if there happens to be a candidate that is more closely aligned to the principle to the Word than another, it makes no difference to me what the party affiliation may be. That’s the man or woman and that’s the way we should vote but the key is to go vote. If 70% of all Americans are Christian’s voted, we would have a landslide of the kind of people in office that would move us down the path our founding fathers intended us to move down.
So if something of this sort happens as what happened in France, we need to revisit some of our basic views of life and reality and what our reactions to them might be. Of course, it is as we align our lives with these truths, these principles that the grace of God, the enabling ability of God is able to function. Grace does not operate in a void. God’s unmerited favor does not occur to you in a void. It occurs only in the environment of faith. So it is important that we approach the matters at hand believing that His Word is true, that when we face an enemy we can’t understand or the strategy is unclear, we can rest assured that His enabling ability will lift us above the challenge if we put His Word first place in our lives.
Pastor Ray shared…
A friend of mine was at a prayer meeting at the state capitol and a pastor got up and started talking about our founding fathers and said they were all involved in the occult. He went on and on. And this is a pastor. So many people just don’t have the information. They have information but the wrong information and so they are speaking the wrong message. Especially in terms of pastors, they are the shepherds over the sheep and so I am just really grateful and thankful for Pastor Mac and Lynne.
Annie shared…
Jesus said that if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness. So, it came to me in the context that the light that is in us directs everything that we do and everything that we believe. If we are believing a lie, that lie is the light that is in us and that lie will direct what we do. So, the light of the Gospel, the light of God’s Word, should be the light that’s directing everything. I was telling Pastor Ray that I have a whole shelf of books at home about Islam. After 911, the Holy Spirit directed me to study on Islam because I wanted to get to the truth and see what the light was. One of the key things I saw is that it is a very clever deception that was orchestrated to create confusion and it is extremely confusing. One reason our nation has such a hard time admitting that Islam is the problem is because they are confused. Well, we worship the same God because of Abraham, Ishmael, they believe in Jesus etc. Well, the Devil took this piece and that piece and another piece out of the Bible and then he twisted it into a legalistic system that is designed to create destruction and fear and it’s very much based in fear.
I have a lot of stuff I could say to back up what I just said. Okay so one of the key things that I saw early on was the light that is in us is God’s Word so everything we believe is based on God’s Word. So what did God’s Word say about Ishmael? Did He say well, I am going to start this other religion through Ishmael and through this other religion they’ll say that God is a God of hate, God is a God you can never know, Jesus didn’t really die on the cross, and there is no way you can ever have propitiation for your sins? He never said that. That’s what the Koran says. Okay there is one truth. The light that is in us is truth, right. So here is what God said about Ishmael to Abraham.
Genesis 17:20 And as for Ishmael, I have heard you. (He is telling Abraham, I heard you pray about your son. You got off my will and you had this child that wasn’t part of my promise or my plan but that’s okay. I am a merciful God. I have a plan for him. He is just not the child of promise.) I will surely bless him. I will make him fruitful. I will greatly increase his numbers. He will be the father of twelve rulers and I will make him in to a great nation. (21) Then God said but my covenant I will establish with Isaac whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year.
So we know that the Ishmaelite’s are the Arab tribes. So He is saying there is going to be twelve tribes. I am going to bless them. They are going to be a great nation. So they are still around. They haven’t been wiped off the face of the earth and God loves them and He prospered them. God was saying to Abraham I love Ishmael. I will bless him. I will increase him but he is not the child of promise.
We were all Ishmaelites too, right? This is what the Lord had shown me. Through Jesus, all of the Arab tribes had the same access to Isaac’s blessings the same way we do. In Christ, we are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise. So what happened when the Gospel went out is it went to the Arab tribes. When I went to Prayer Mountain one year, Billye Brim had an Iraqi man share. He said people don’t understand that Arabia used to be Christian before Mohammad. Mohammad was 500 years after Jesus. So they were either paganism, Mohammad was from a pagan tribe, or many of the tribes became Christians. He said in all these Arabian countries as well as Turkey which is a Muslim nation, Iraq… Anyway Christianity had gone very far and so this is how Mohammad actually learned about Christianity and the Bible because at that time there were Jewish tribes and there were Christian tribes. Mohammad hand-picked different things but it was really the Devil motivating this confusion.
Another thing I learned was that the majority of Arabs in the United States, before the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979, were all Christian and the majority of Arabs in Lebanon were Christian and they lived side by side with the Jews. We all know that Christianity has a history of persecuting the Jews but still the Christian Arabs were much friendlier to Israel and to the Jews than the Muslims. This is because the Koran commands that you must kill every Jew when you find them. They see the Jews as the enemy of God. You have to kill them. Well the people of the cross, Christians, are second in line.
Many people are confused. When they hear the word Arab, they hear Arab Muslim and that is not the truth. Now all of the Christian Arabs are being pushed out or rather they are being wiped out. The oldest Christian communities in the world are in the Arab countries and through Isis they are now being completely annihilated. They just go from town to town and you either deny Christ or get your head cut off. That’s just the way it is. But that’s the way Islam has been. It has been like that from its inception. This is nothing new. This is just the first time we have experienced it. So most Muslim are not Arabs. The most populace Muslim nation in the world is Indonesia. They have the most Muslims. Iran is almost 100% Muslim and they are not Arabs. They are Persians. Afghanistan is 100% Muslim and they are not Arabs. When I hear people call Arabs like they are Muslims it just kind of… because many of the Arabs like Steven Curry, he is an Arab. His father is an Arab. They get associated with that. But we need to love the Muslim people because they need Jesus. They really need Jesus.
As I read all these books, a lot of them were from former Muslims. Like this one author, he had memorized the entire Koran by the time he was around 11 years old. Then he became a professor of Islamic history at Alessa University in Egypt, the biggest Islamic university in the world for Sunnis. He started seeing all these inconsistencies and having questions and that is never allowed. So he ended up getting thrown in jail. He actually was sharing a jail cell with an Islamic Al Qaeda terrorist but he couldn’t tell the guy why he was in there because if he knew he would have killed him. So he let the guy think he was an Islamic terrorist as well. The thing is Jesus said seek and you will find. This man wanted to know the true God. He wanted to know the truth and that’s one reason why these terrorists are killing all these people.
You know they, the ISIS guys, are like Saul of Tarsus. Paul said I compelled them to blaspheme. How did he do that? He must of said “You either deny Jesus or you know… “ He was doing the same thing they were doing. He was motivated by a religious fervor but Jesus apprehended him. And that’s what I always have to keep in my mind when I see these terrorists. They are so full of hate. They are so full of fear. That’s really what it is. It’s fear. They live in such fear of their God because their book tells them there is no way you can ever please him and there is no way you can ever know if what you are doing is pleasing him. But if you blow yourself up and kill some infidels, that’s the only guarantee you will ever have. The guarantee we have is that Jesus died for us. But the only guarantee they have is that if they kill non-Muslims, then they get to paradise. But they have to die doing it because if they don’t then there is no guarantee. You could kill five million Christians and Jews but if you don’t die in the process well… you still might have to go to hell. That’s why they blow themselves up. It’s fear. And the other thing the Holy Spirit said to me is that their god demands that they give their son to die for him but our God gave His Son to die for us. It would be so beautiful for them all to learn that and that’s the true solution. The truth will set you free. It’s the light.
I haven’t repeated this to a single soul because it disturbed me so much. I cried for three days. This was a month or two ago that I heard this account. There are so many horror stories concerning ISIS but this was a Christian family. He was a pastor who had a lot of underground churches in Syria or Northern Iraq. Anyway they finally caught up with him, I mean these are underground house churches. ISIS got him. They… it’s so difficult to even repeat this and I haven’t repeated it because I don’t even want to… but do you know that these people’s love must be remembered. You think of all weird things when you are a mother. When my children were small, I used to think would I be able to stick up for Jesus if someone threatened my child? Because you love your child so much and I just thought God wouldn’t … He would give me grace to do whatever I needed to do but you know as a mother you just battle worry and you have to go through all that. This Father, they threatened him with all these things and he wouldn’t deny Jesus so they took his twelve year old son and tortured him in front of the father to get him to deny Christ. Then they cut the boys fingers off and he still wouldn’t deny Christ. Then they crucified the twelve year old boy and the father in front of all the women and the family. And then they took the women and in front of everybody who was watching and raped them and beheaded them all.
This just happened! Our media does not report it. They report useless things. I couldn’t repeat this but I cried for three days. I just thought Lord, that is so… I mean that man and his family are in heaven and then as I prayed about it one time and the Lord said to me, what about the people who did that. What is happening to them when they put their head on their pillow at night? There are two things that are happening. They are either being tormented by the demons that they yielded to or they are being wooed by the crucified Jesus who is appearing to them. So, I just started praying for those ISIS guys, whoever did that, because Jesus died for them and that He would manifest His hands, His feet, His side and say “Why are you persecuting me” to them.
Lady shared…
We have lived side by side with Muslims in Kenya. And so just recently I have heard what has happened through a newspaper online. But I just watched this on TV two days ago on Al Jazeera and they were doing an investigative kind of reporting from my country concerning what the government is doing to the Muslims. And rightly granted, when you hear a story about how they are really torturing the Christians, this is what just came to mind and that is why I am sharing it. As Christians, how do you react? Do you react in fear or do you react in anger or do ask for the Holy Spirit to show you what you really need to do? Well this is how the government has reacted in my country. They have a Special Forces unit that has been trained to just kill the Muslims. And they are killing them in hundreds, children and women and the Muslims are retaliating by burning up churches and it’s just back and forth and back and forth.
Is that the way? They are very proud in speaking to this reporter about what they do. They are taken to court and it’s corrupt and they come out and they are killing the women and our children and all that. What do you do? They call themselves sharp shooters. You just find them wherever they are and shoot them and their children and their wives. And so I was just so angry that it’s happening in my country where 70% are considered Christians and we are supposed to love and pray for them. And I am not in agreement with what the Muslims are doing. I am not. But the majority are good Muslims. Bridget Daniel, if you know who she is, she said they are irrelevant because they are not speaking against the horrors of the atrocities that the Muslim culture is doing and so it’s true they are very irrelevant right now. But is that the way we are going to react, by killing them off?
It’s hard. It’s hard. I don’t even know how to pray for it but the Holy Spirit does because He loves them and He wants them to come to Christ. But there are so many women and children especially in Nigeria who have been killed and burned and raped although some of them are coming back. And you know it’s just hard but we have to pray for them. We have to pray for the Muslims and I am telling you it’s Christianity and Islam right now. It’s a religious war. It is a religious war. When we see the Muslims, just ask God to give you the grace to love them; just share the love of God that through that somehow, somehow they will come to Christ. I know they will but you know it’s much bigger that any of us. But you know what, the war is not ours. He says the battle belongs to the Lord. Just be faithful to stand in your position and do what He has called you to do. Stand your ground and don’t give up to the Devil. Don’t give in to anger. Don’t give in to hatred. Stand your ground and do what the Lord has called you to do. Pray them in.
We spent the rest of the hour in worship…
