Pastor Dustin…
Thank you for joining us today for prayer on Friday. On behalf of Pastors Mac and Lynne, our senior pastors, and Pastor Ken Olson, our Prayer Ministry pastor, we want to welcome you and thank you for joining us this morning. This is corporate prayer. And so this is where we all pray, right? Whether you’re in Europe, Asia, this chapel right now, wherever you’re at, we all have a supply to bring in a supply to give.
Noah led group in worship…
Pastor Dustin continued…
This verse just dropped into my heart as we were worshiping. It’s John 3:30. He says “He must increase, but I must decrease.” It just settled in my heart as we were worshiping. We weren’t singing about ourselves. We were singing about Him. We were worshiping Him. Our focus was on Him. And then what happened? His presence came and filled this place. As we decreased, He increased.
I’ve been thinking about revival and a move of God and about church services and summer camp and just everyday life. And I felt like the answer came to me in the form of this verse as I was just seeking Him about it. He must increase, but we must decrease. In other words, sometimes we need to get out of the way. Sometimes we do too much. Sometimes we just need to let Him speak. Sometimes we just need to make room for His presence.
I was talking to Pastor Steve Munds. He used to be the youth pastor here at this church years ago. There was this summer camp that they did years ago. And I’ve heard it from his perspective and from other people who are there as youth. And it’s amazing to hear each person’s story. And when they share it, they all cry.
One of the guys used to work here and I stopped him in the hall and asked him, “Hey, were you there at that summer camp?” And he goes, “Yes.” And immediately he just started crying and started telling me about it. And so what happened was they were at a summer camp and were just worshiping. And as they were worshiping… I’ll tell this from the A/V guy’s perspective first because I think it’s funny.
So he’s in the A/V booth as they are worshiping. And then the room started filling up with like this fog. And he’s ticked! He’s like “Who turned on the fog machine?” The machine that creates haze [for the cameras to create a lighting effect]. So he ran to the back of the room… because it’s getting thick in there. He looked and the fog machine is in the box, unplugged with the plastic on it still. And so he was like, “There’s a fire!” He started looking for the fire… “Where’s the fire?” But there was no fire.
And then it dawned on him … “Is this God?” He didn’t know. Nobody told him that God could do that. And he’s like, “Is this God?” And so he went back and he’s just kind of like, “Oh my goodness.” He’s looking around and all of a sudden, he started hearing all these voices. And so he’s trying to turn the volume up cause they sound so good. And he can’t because they’re not in any of the monitors. It wasn’t anybody singing. It’s angelic voices. But he wasn’t thinking along those lines. And so he was like, “Where are they?” He’s trying to find them and he couldn’t find them. It got louder and louder, and then he started hearing instruments. At some point he realized, “I think this is God. I’m just going to let God do what He wants to do and stop trying to turn the sound up on God.”
I was talking to somebody else who was on the worship team. And when they were standing there, they could just feel like presence just surround them and they could see with their natural eyes this cloud. Somebody else was saying that they saw angels flying overhead and singing.
Almost everybody there saw it. I say almost because there was one person … I’ll talk about that in a second. But there was gold dust and jewels that fell from heaven. It was on the ground, and it stayed there. Somebody took it and put it in a jar and brought it to a geology lab at a college here in the Metro. They knew somebody whose dad worked at a geology lab. He looked at it and he’s like, “This isn’t from earth.” It was just lying on the floor all around them. People were putting it in their Bibles. I mean, it was just there. There was one person that was there the whole time… Afterwards, somebody came up to him and said, “Did you see all that?” And he said, “No, I didn’t see any of it.” This kid did not want to go to camp. He had no interest. He was angry. He was frustrated. He had a bad attitude, and he sat there the whole time and never saw anything, never experienced anything. And they said, “Well, do you see the dust? Do you see the gold?” And he said, “Yeah, I see it.” They asked him, “Did you see it falling?” He’s said, “No, I didn’t see it fall.” He missed all of it! Because he didn’t want to see it. He’d made up his mind.
But I was asking Pastor Steve Munds, “What do you do when you see the glory come through the back wall, when you start seeing angels flying over…” I was like, “What do you do?”
He said, “You get out of the way. You shut up and you get out of the way and you let God do what He wants to do.”
And that’s what I thought of when I read this verse. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” As we were singing, I just thought we want revival. We want a move of the Spirit. We want all of these things. For sure we want to see people get saved. For sure we want to see people get delivered and healed and set free and all of those things. But I think at the heart of it, it’s because we just are in love with God, and we want more of Him in everything that we do. And if you’ve tasted and seen that He is good, if you’ve experienced Him, you know that, that’s an itch that nothing else can scratch. That’s something that nothing else can satisfy. And there’s no way to exhaust it all. It’s just this overwhelming experience. And yet, you know that it’s infinite. It’s eternal. There are depths to it that you will not experience until you step into eternity. Right?
Prayed…
Father, we just want you… that’s our heart. That’s our cry. We want you in everything that we do, in every part of our lives …
Father, you are our prize. You are our supply. You are everything that we need.
Thank you, Jesus, for an outpouring of your Spirit …
Father, we thank you that your presence would manifest in a greater degree… in a greater way than we’ve ever experienced it before
At summer camp next week, Lord… we recognize our need for you… we recognize our dependence on you.
We thank you that there is provision in this place. We thank you, Father, that every need is supplied according to your riches and glory in this place…
Addictions are broken off… mindsets are changed … attitudes are changed … hearts are transformed … hardened hearts are made soft and pliable in your presence…
Lord, we ask you to do what only you can do … what you can do in a moment… what you can do in a second
Father, we pray that the atmosphere would be so charged with your love and so charged with your power … that as people come into the church, they feel chains falling off. As people come into the church, they feel filled with hope … filled with faith… where there was emptiness, you fill them … where there was weeping, there is dancing… where there was ashes, there’s beauty… where there was brokenness, there will be wholeness.
People coming into this place, people streaming … people clicking on YouTube channel and the presence of God filling their hearts, filling their homes, saturating them … the atmosphere of the home changing …
I thank you that it would be like an open heaven… That the atmosphere of this building, the atmosphere of our homes, the atmosphere of our cars, I pray that it would be like the atmosphere of heaven
Father, I pray you would so fill us that we would carry that presence everywhere we go… our eyes, our attention, our focus would be on you. And we would be like vessels… We would be like written epistles… We would be dispensers of the anointing. We would be like dispensers of heaven everywhere that we go, because we’re so filled with your presence.
Demons would flee… like Peter, just the shadow… just walking by people get healed.
Let’s pray for summer camp. We’re believing for a manifestation … we’re believing for miracles. We’re believing for signs. We’re believing for wonders… unusual miracles… we pray, Father, that they would just be so changed. Changed by you. So changed by you in their minds and their hearts. We believe that this time is a setup. We believe they will come in one way and they will leave another way… They will come in with addictions and bondage and warped ways of thinking, and it will be broken off of them. And they’ll see the truth and that truth will set them free in Jesus’ name. And they will leave with a revelation of who you are and who they are… who they’ve been called to be … what’s in front of them.
No plan or attempt of the enemy will prosper against it. No weapon, no word, no accusation, nothing forged or spoken against it will prosper in the name of Jesus … that no sickness, no disease in Jesus’ name… no strife, no division in Jesus’ name. The atmosphere of the camp will be like the atmosphere of heaven… honor, love, respect, unity.
So we just thank you for that, Father. And we pray that it would be a faith explosion.
Faith will be preached. Faith be heard. Faith will be received. People will leave filled with faith, filled with hope, filled with confidence about the future, about the things that you have prepared for them. We thank you that doors will be opened. Things will be broken off. We thank you for miracles. We thank you for financial miracles in Jesus’ name. We thank you for supernatural debt elimination in Jesus’ name. We know that you’ve done it and you can do it. And so we’re asking you for it in Jesus’ name. I thank you, Lord, that marriages… for restoration taking place in those services… couples receiving words from you … Reconciliation. Faith to continue … or hope to continue, or people who are going with plans of getting divorced, as they step into that atmosphere and as they come in contact with you… we’re praying, Father, that change and transformation will take place in their hearts. You will do a work that only you’re capable of doing … people tuning in online.
