Pastor Ken…
Good morning! Welcome on this Thursday morning. It’s great to have you with us.
We are to stir ourselves up…
Today, I thought maybe I’d start by sharing a reflection of something I’ve been meditating on and thinking about. Even though there are things that we know and we’ve heard taught before, the Bible encourages us to give more earnest heed to those things which you’ve already learned, lest that any time we let them slip. That we’re, in fact, to stir ourselves up, stir our faith up, our understanding of by way of remembrance, or reminding ourselves. Being repetitive and pouring over the scriptures and over the narrative of Jesus’ teachings and the writers of the early church. And I think because life just has a way of distracting us and captivating our attention and leading us astray to things that are of lesser value and not that important in the eternal scheme of things.
Billy Graham interview on his 80th birthday…
In fact, I was listening to somebody share a bit of an interview that occurred a number of years ago. In fact, it was on Billy Graham’s 80th birthday. I’m sure most of us have heard of Billy Graham. Amazing and outstanding man of God in the generation he lived in. He was friend and pastor to prime ministers and presidents around the world alike. And he was being interviewed by Larry King on his 80th birthday. And Larry was commenting to Billy that after all these years, you must feel pretty good about your life and pretty good in the golden years of your life and what you’ve accomplished, having conducted crusades around the world and influenced leaders in the highest offices of authority, not only in in America, but beyond. And Billy replied to that and said, “I’m the greatest failure of all men. I was too much with men. And too little with God.” He went on to say, “I was in too many meetings where I was too busy to be with God.” And finally he said, “If I would have been more with God more people would have had more of a sense of God about me when they were with me.”
Becoming sensitive to His communication with us…
I thought that was interesting. And this morning as I was getting ready, I’m always kind of checking in with my heart. I’m still working at staying constantly in contact with Him. But you know, I do this kind of check in and just say, “Lord, what’s up and what’s going on? What are you saying, Holy Spirit?” He’s in our lives, as the New Testament says, to reveal, transmit, and disclose the will of God to us. And the closer we walk with Him, the more sensitive we become to His dealings and to His communication to us.
Testimony of childhood friend…
And as I was just kind of reflecting this morning, I was reminded of someone that… well first, I felt like I needed to pray for him. I’ve learned the habit when somebody kind of pops in my mind or comes up in my heart, at a minimum, I do what Paul did. He described this kind of prayer where he just “makes mention” of people before God. So I just lifted up… This was actually, my first childhood friend. I was friends with him when I was like five, six years old. And I just lifted him up. But then I was reminded of the fact that just a couple years ago, shortly after Covid had begun, he called me up and I hadn’t spoken to him in probably 30 years, honestly. And I was kind of surprised to get his call. And he was super excited and wanted to share something with me. And he went on to tell me that in the past few weeks, he had come to know Jesus. And he had a quite a dramatic conversion.
A war over his soul…
He went on to share how he’d lost his job actually shortly after Covid and moved up north to his family’s cabin. He’s got young kids. And at that time, one day he was at home and had a seizure. And I don’t remember if he had them regularly or if it was just something that came out of the blue. But he had a severe seizure and ended up on the floor. I believe his wife called the ambulance. They came out and long story short, they were able eventually to help him. But what he shared with me was what happened when he was basically unconscious or semi unconscious during that seizure. He shared with me, “Ken, you just wouldn’t believe it.” First of all, he let me know that he found Jesus. But not before, he said, “I went through some pretty dramatic things.” He shared how during that seizure and when he was just out basically and kind of between heaven and earth, he saw lightning and he knew very clearly that the hordes of hell, I’ll put it that way… the demonic entities that had an attachment on his life did not want to let him go. It was like a Star Wars episode. He saw lightning and he could feel darkness warring over his soul. Well, eventually, he came to. The paramedic happened to be a Christian and was praying for him and would then go on to lead him to the Lord.
And he was up north somewhere and that next weekend, he found a small Pentecostal church in a small town up north and went to church. I just was, even now I just sense the anointing like, wow, I mean, powerful, what God did. After all, a grown man, lived for many years and almost finished his career and lost his job and moved north to live at the cabin. And God meets him in this place between heaven and earth while he was having a seizure.
The realness of that spiritual dimension and the forces that dwell in it…
There’s a lot I could say about that. But the thing that really just kind of stirs me is just the very realness of that spiritual dimension and the forces that are at work. Yes on the side of darkness but also on the side of light. While we may profess Jesus and be on our way to heaven one day, the enemy is still at work in the church and in people’s lives. While he may not keep us out of heaven, attempting to stall us out in our spiritual journey or prevent us from taking our place in prayer or hinder us in some way by the temptation to engage in something that seems like it’s not a big deal, but it in the end, steals from us in our lives.
There are beings that try to prevent us from having fellowship with our Lord…
What he shared was remarkable to me. And you know that, that goes on all the time, right? Even when we’re praying. I know that the sound kind of was fritzing out and freaking out here before I got here. And sometimes I think that our technology picks up on spiritual disturbances and things going on in the spirit dimension. But one of the things, of course, the enemy does to try to attack and wage a war of attrition on the church and believers is to prevent us from our place of fellowship with our Heavenly Father. And you’ll notice in my ministry and in my teaching that it just is a central thread that it has to do with relationship. As I think I said yesterday, God didn’t send Jesus to the earth to die, to be hung between heaven and earth, to shed His blood to do what He did so that we could ride a fence, spiritually speaking. So that we could just kind of get by and do our own thing. He died and He shed His blood and He suffered an enormous beyond-words cost so that we could find relationship. So that we could know the God of heaven, our Heavenly Father, creator of the heavens and the earth, and know Him with increasing degrees of intimacy and understanding. I mean, everything outflows from Him.
We are to be in union with Him so we can subdue the earth…
In fact, somebody said this one time that God designed for us to be so in union with Him, that we would subdue the earth or operate in our spiritual authority from our place of communion with Him. So God wants us so in union… and you know, the forces of darkness come to war against our minds and our souls and our emotions and to attack us in various ways. But guess what? We win! We have already won. We stand. I’m going to remind you this morning, you stand and you live and you move and you have your being from a place of victory, from a place of completeness and wholeness.
Prayer keeps you properly positioned…
And it’s your relationship. It’s time of fellowship. It is prayer that keeps you properly positioned in the place of victory, in the place where you are synchronized and can readily and consistently receive the outflow of redemption and relationship, which is what Jesus spoke to when He said that I have meat or food that you know not of. He went on to say that He was sustained and was supplied and was propelled in His earthly ministry because of His Father and His Word.
He summed it all up. We all know what He said. He said, “I don’t do anything unless I see My Father do it in the spirit. And I don’t say anything unless I hear Him say it in the spirit.” So He was in such union with His Father that He was able to subdue storms. He was able to subject death to life. He was able to preach to multitudes and see miracles that aren’t even recorded because the world’s volumes couldn’t contain them all.
Times of fellowship with Him are vital…
So as we continue to know God’s plan for our future, His timing for things, His next steps for us individually and as a church collective. We come to know His wisdom from times of fellowship with Him. Victory and dominion flow out of our time with our Heavenly Father. In fact, time with God is vital in bringing change to us and leading us further and further into God’s ordained plan for our future.
“God created us to be in charge…”
Somebody once said this too; faith is no struggle to the one who knows God. Isn’t that good? Hallelujah. I believe it was Nancy Dufresne said this here recently. She said, “God created us to be in charge.” In other words, to exercise dominion. To not be overcome, but to overcome. Overcome darkness. Jesus said that He came to overcome darkness by the works He would perform. And those works and those miracles and those messages and what He did was a direct result of His union with His Heavenly Father.
Don’t stop praying, keep going…
I suppose that’s why the Bible admonishes us to pray without ceasing. It goes on to say, “pray for all people with all forms of prayer.” Don’t stop praying. Keep going. Even if life is maybe a slightly easier right now, or you don’t have any immediate challenges. Your prayers are being released into that, and they speak directly to that spirit dimension that my friend experienced those lightnings and the war between the two kingdoms: the kingdom of darkness and kingdom of light. Ultimately the kingdom of light won out. Can you say amen?
We were created to have connection with Him…
But your prayer life and your union in being in relationship with your Heavenly Father and giving attention to that and giving priority and place daily and even moment by moment to that is making a difference. It is producing a result. It is allowing God to use you. We get stuck and caught up with God. “What do you want me to do? What are you saying? Where am I supposed to go? Where are my next steps?” When that’s not really even our concern. Our concern is how are you going to use your time today? What’s your focus and attention going to be on? This life or are you going to devote some of that to Him? Because once again, what outflows from that place with Him is everything your heart cries for. In fact, humankind’s greatest longing and need is met and ministered to from that place. We were created to have connection with Him.
Nancy Dufresne’s book entitled “His Presence Shall Be My Dwelling Place.”
And there’s an old book by Nancy Dufresne entitled “His Presence Shall Be My Dwelling Place.” I want to read just a few excerpts from it here. She writes in chapter two, “Living in such view of the throne of God, we need never to fail. We need never to make another wrong decision in life. It is when the throne becomes blurred or your relationship with God, your connection with Him, in other words, becomes blurred by faulty vision that mistakes are made. Feeding on the truth that the greater one is in you holds you in the grasp of victory. Where failure never need touch your life.”
We should be binding and loosing every day…
And I would add to that, there shouldn’t be a day that goes by that we aren’t binding and loosing. Jesus gave us the keys. They’re in your hands. The keys of His kingdom. The keys of the spirit dimension to permit and to prevent, to bind and to loose, to halt and to stop and to release. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah talked about God inviting us to command Him concerning the works of His hands. If you do a little bit of a deep dive into the New Testament and especially where it talks about Jesus saying, “Ask of Me and I’ll do such and such a thing,” you’ll find that the word ask in numerous places in the New Testament carries the very real connotation and maybe the better translation concerning my promises God says, “command ye Me.”
God is a God of yes…
Because as I’ve said before, God is a God of yes. He’s already said yes to all that pertains to your life. He’s already said yes to healing. He’s paved the price for it in full, in fact, right? He’s already said yes to you being clothed with peace. He’s already said yes to you being restored in your emotions and in your psychology and in your relationships. He’s already said yes to you prospering. He promised that you and your family would increase more and more. He’s already said yes to triumph and victory. Yes to you being strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.
Don’t be detoured, don’t be denied…
He is the God of heaven who’s saying yes over you and me this morning in the situations that concern us. And His yes is a good yes. He says that I have only good and hopeful plans for you, and I’m saying yes to you. So keep going. Don’t be detoured, don’t be denied. A delay in your walk of faith or answer to your prayer is not a denial. Just keep keeping on. And stay refreshed in your soul and in your consciousness regarding what God has said to you. Pray-ers ought to be the most up to speed with the Word people on the planet. We should be a people always refreshed in our consciousness with the promises of God. We should hold a firm grasp on what God has said concerning the church, concerning our lives, concerning any particular given situation.
Be students of the Word…
What pray-ers ought to be is students of the Word, where we hold a firm grasp. I think if we would be more of that, the time we spend praying, I think at times, would be less. Because we could exercise our authority out of that place of fellowship and union with His Word. And when we say a word, we believe that word. That’s why faith is no struggle to the one who knows God, knows Him through His Word, knows Him through worship, knows Him through prayer, knows Him through times of quietness and stillness.
We must decrease that He might increase…
So that more and more we’re on this journey where we are diminishing in and of ourselves and our understanding and our strength and what we think and what we want and our will and more and more we’re increasing. Was it John the Baptist that said, “I must decrease that He might increase.” And as we do so, we do become less in our soul and less than what we want in our selfishness and what we think, and our preconceived ideas and our penchant to be captivated by the fearful things around us and the past that we just went through. And more and more we’re captivated by the brightness of His glory.
God’s glory emanates from His Word…
Well, let me just say this, that God’s glory emanates from His Word. It doesn’t just come from some far off ethereal, cosmic place. His glory firstly emanates from His Word. His glory is revealed in the narrative of the life of Jesus. His glory is revealed in the utterances of the prophetic words of the prophets of old. His glory is revealed in the acts of the apostles, in the writings of John the Revelator. His glory is revealed there. And He wants His glory to be revealed in you and in me. He wants the brightness of His countenance to shine ever brighter. And for that power that is to and toward us who believe to grow so that we do decrease more and more. So that when we go to pray, it’s not so much an exercise on what we’ve learned… 1, 2, 3, how to pray. But instead, as we go to pray and we go about our day for that matter, God is in a fuller measure in us so that when we pray more and more, it’s less us praying and more the Spirit of prayer, a.k.a. Jesus in us that is saying and praying and deploying authority.
Jesus laid down His life to God while in prayer…
That’s why Jesus could speak to those wind and waves, because He in the spirit, He had opened Himself bare to His Father and let the Father minister to Him and speak to Him and show Him and prepare Him and wire Him up to do what He was called to do. So He would walk through crowds of naysayers and those who were bent on hurting Him. He could walk right through with authority and not be detoured and went all the way to the cross because His life was not His, but His Father’s. He’d already laid it down in prayer. He’d already laid His life down.
Will you lay your life down?
