Pastor Ken…
Good morning to all of you here. Good to have you with us. There are some things that God is saying “yes” to you right now. I once preached a message titled “He Is the God of Yes.” He’s saying, “yes.” We come each day, each moment that we approach God and turn our attention to Him, to a throne of obtaining, to a throne of receiving, to a throne of grace, which implies that His throne is a place of unmerited favor. In other words, we can’t do anything to deserve what God already wants to do because of the shed blood of Jesus. Yes, you are His son, His daughter. You are a child of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords this morning, regardless of how you feel or what the situation looks like, or whether or not you screwed up yesterday, or went to church this weekend, or prayed in the last week or not. His grace today and every day is profusely abounding to His people. And that grace is a grace that is based on the work of Jesus, on the fact that Jesus did the heavy lifting on our behalf already. He went before us to put in a perfect performance for a very imperfect people. That being us. So that we wouldn’t have to measure up to that standard. Instead we could step into that standard. We can step into the fullness of the very stature and measure and expression of Jesus, the Son of God.
We are not Jesus, but we are His younger brothers and sisters. And we have the opportunity and daily the invitation to step into who He is and what He’s obtained, that we might live under an open heaven and a resounding “yes,” from our Heavenly Father. “Yes, I’m granting that.” “Yes, I want to do that.”
And so it’s easy to receive when you realize just who you really are, that when God looks down into our lives, He sees someone who is entirely pleasing to Him. I’m not saying you’re perfect. I’m saying you’re pleasing to Him because the blood speaks. The blood firstly has been applied if you’ve professed His name and received His mercy and grace. When He looks into your life, He sees someone who’s entirely pleasing and lovely. That’s you! He sees someone who is the target of His love and goodness and His “yes.” So that’s how we approach the throne, knowing that we already are acceptable and qualified for whatever it is that we request or pray in the spirit or in our understanding.
My Instagram quote, my Twitter hashtag tweet this morning is “Never underestimate the power of a praying person.” Because we are here to simply symphonize, if you will … harmonize with the Father and what He’s already saying yes to.
Faith is as simple as hearing from God. And prayer is a matter of simply hearing from God and joining Him in that, in our requesting and in our praying. And so, in a moment I want us to pray online and in the chapel here today… I’m kinda dubbing this day, “We Agree Wednesday.” So to start out the morning, I want us to pray together the prayer of agreement for needs.
I want to read something to you. This is Mark Brazee’s book “Processing the Plan of God Through Prayer.” He talks about praying out the future and accessing our heavenly account in prayer. I was reading through this, and I was noting that he’s kind of emphasizing and sharing from a little different perspective on a couple of different things that I’ve been teaching on and praying about, including that reservoir or that account in our heavenly arena, that prayer draws on. And so let me just share a couple of quick pages with you before we pray. He says this:
Quote from Mark Brazee’s book, “Processing the Plan of God Through Prayer”
God is not in time. He is in eternity. That means He can go back a thousand years or go ahead a hundred years and start working things out for us.
I just love that. Cause that just kind of like expands my consciousness. I’m thinking way too low here. God’s not nervous about the big, hairy, audacious prayer you’ve been thinking about praying or asking for… that dream that you have in your heart. Just go for it. God loves it when we pray big prayers. He is not limited even by time or space. So why would He be limited by you asking for a big dream. He’s not.
God is not limited by time. He is in eternity. That means once again that He can go back a thousand years ago, or go ahead a hundred years and start working things out for us. But if you don’t know the future, how do you know what to pray? Because oftentimes God answers prayer through an impartation of truth, through a delivery of wisdom. The Scripture reads in Proverbs that with all our getting, we should get understanding. We should garner wisdom. It’s the principle thing. So, I know we’re Holy Ghost people and we pray in tongues and we should, but also be discerning and have your antennas up because God is transmitting each and every moment of every day… transmitting answers. Certainly we love it when God just takes care of things. But most often He takes care of things by working with us, by transmitting a step, by showing us a person to call or a thing we must do or even something we must confront… a situation we’ve got to deal with. And we’ve been praying and we’ve been praying, but we’ve been hoping that God, maybe would just solve it and dissolve it.
But in reality, He’s put the answer in front of us. He’s dropped it into your heart. And maybe He’s doing that this morning and that answer maybe doesn’t look like what your preconceived idea is, which is that you think God should wave His magical supernatural wand and it’s all gone tomorrow when you wake up.
Some of the most profound steps I’ve ever taken were steps that I was sick to my stomach to take, but I just knew God dropped something in my heart and I just did it by faith and it just opened up something brand new for me. Or maybe it was a conversation I can think of some conversations through the years, which I did not want to have, because I didn’t want to confront that deal. But that’s exactly what God was asking me to do. That was exactly what I’d prayed about. Prayer is God speaking to us often, and us then taking steps of faith in obedience to what He shows us. If you want to be a pray-er, then you’ve got to be willing to hear what He has to say. You have to willing to hear sometimes the hard things. But they’re the heaven-sent things. And the wise thing that’s going to be a turning point in your situation, your relationship, your family, your finances. Sometimes it could be to get your house in order. Like he told Terri Savelle Foy many years ago when she was struggling at a point in time in her life. And God just simply said in answer to her prayer, “I want you to get your house organized, simplify, get it cleaned up, organize it, get ready. And then I’ll talk to you after that.”
So what’s God been saying to you. Don’t look for another thing if you already know what He’s said to you or you already sense the step you’re to take. That’s what He’s waiting on then is for you to step out in that. Maybe that’s concerning prayer. Maybe you’ve been a little casual, little flippant about it, little here or there about it. If you’ll make a commitment and step into that assignment of prayer, that assignment of study, that assignment to go after God each and every day, I guarantee it’s going to be a turning point for you. And you’ll wake up not too many weeks or months later, and you’ll realize you’re the most transformed, changed person in the world. You’ll realize that the favor of God seems to follow you around. You’ll realize that things that you grappled with and struggled with and tripped you up no longer seem to be an issue.
God works. He co-labors with us. He has the wisdom. He has the direction. He has power. He has grace to deliver and to endow us with. But we must keep going, taking steps, having conversations, doing even right things when the wrong thing is happening. In the midst of turmoil and struggle and difficulty, and nothing seems to change. When you’re tempted to go with what your emotions are telling you to do or with somebody else’s telling you to do, or your flesh is telling you to do. And in that moment as a pray-er, as a believer, you have to choose what the Word is telling you to do. What you know is right to do.
God is not a man that He should lie. He is going to be faithful to you. He’s going to follow through on His promise. He is watching over that prayer and over that promise, and He’s going to do exactly what He said He’s going to do. The timing and the how and what it looks like, that’s up to Him. But what’s up to us is a decision each day to partner with Him. To step in and do even the hard thing at times that He asks us to do… to deny our flesh, to follow Him. Sometimes it’s spiritual. Sometimes it’s practical. For some, it may mean opening up the closets in your heart where you’ve closed them off, things you haven’t dealt with. That’s not something we talk a lot about in church, but sometimes the limitation is the fact that we’ve closed certain arenas, certain closets, certain corridors in our soul because of what’s happened in us in the past. What we’ve been through, regrets, struggles, abuses, failures, fears, issues from our upbringing. We just kind of wall that off from God. And while maybe temporary that protects us and keeps us from feeling vulnerable and hurt again. It also walls God off. Boundaries keep things out. But they also keep things in. And I just sense that God is saying to some of us, He just simply wants us to make a decision in the coming day, starting today, to come to Him and make yourself your soul, who you are on the inside, all of you inside more available.
Open yourself up to Him. Just say, “Lord, I don’t want to open up this thing that I shoved into a closet many years ago, or I didn’t deal with that happened a decade ago or whenever. I don’t want to, but I’m willing, Lord. Make me willing.” The scripture says He’s even able if we’ll surrender ourselves to Him, He’s even able to give us the “want to.” The will to do His good pleasure and delight. Sometimes that’s simply open up the door of our heart, let Him in, because your wall whether you realize it or not has kept Him out. His Spirit out. And it’s kept your heart small and limited so that He can only do so much in you and through you. God wants to open us up. We pray that a lot here. He wants to open the church up. He wants to open up the schools of His people, the hearts of His people. He wants to heal and restore and deliver and swing wide prison gates.
In the New Testament, we read how the church prayed persistently for prison gates to open when the disciples were thrown in and the keys were thrown away. And as they prayed, physical prison doors opened and captives that being the disciples like Paul the apostle and others were set free. How much more He longs to set us free on the inside so that we’re free to give God more of who we are. I know you think who you are is what you see in the mirror, but who you are, who I am is who we are on the inside. The real us. A spirit created in the image of God filled and flooded with God. And He wants to express Himself in bigger, more creative and fuller ways in prayer and in your calling and in your relationships.
Prayed…
Father, we lift our hearts to you. We open up our souls to you today. We invite you to invade our hearts, our lives, our spaces today by your presence and by your power.
Father, we pray that you would bathe us this morning in the freshness and in the newness of your presence.
Father, we pray and agree for a supernatural refreshing on our lives and on our souls today.
We pray for a releasing of the divine psychologists and counselor and interpreter and helper of our souls today.
Today we pray and agreed for the bondage of oppression and fear and perpetual anxiety and even suicidal tendency or thoughts that bombard some people.
Lord, we take authority over that oppression, emotional, mental, soulish.
And we stand in agreement with you that that strategy of the enemy will be defeated and pushed back and removed from your life and situation today in the name of Jesus.
We pray, Lord, for an infusion of strength and grace and supernatural aid and assistance to flow into hearts and lives and situations right now.
We lift up families today. We pray and agree for a supernatural flow of the Spirit into homes and the families into relationships into marriages into the lives of children and grandchildren.
We pray for a supernatural download of heaven to bring hope, to bring light, to bring breakthrough.
Word came forth…
I see right now that there are some real divisive things going on in some families, where situations are blowing up, where relationships seem to be fracturing and things are getting out of control. Lord, we just speak peace to those situations today. We speak “peace be still” in Jesus’ name…
And together we agree and stand up in the spirit and we say, “No, Devil, you will not have the family. You will not have marriage. You will not have our children or our grandchildren today.” No weapon formed or fashioned against the family will prosper.
Father, we pray for a supernatural divine flow and grace and help sent from heaven to stream into homes and marriages and families.
We pray for healing now in hearts, in relationships.
We pray for a turning of children back to their parents and even grown children.
We pray for a healing and a restoring of homes.
We pray for prodigal sons and daughters to be gripped by the Holy Spirit today to be awakened and arrested, so to speak and convicted in their heart … and that their hearts and their thoughts and their eyes would be turned back first of all to Father’s house. But secondly, to their house in Jesus’ name.
We stand and we agree with you today for crisis in the financial arena, for lack and insufficiency in businesses and ministries, and homes today… We say in Jesus’ name, “Lack, you’re served notice. You are not welcome in the house of God, in the families of God.”
We push back lack and insufficiency, and instead we lose angels and ministering spirits to go on assignment today.
We pray for the free favor of God to profusely abound over situations where people are in hopeless debt, hopeless struggle financially.
We pray for a release of abundance, a release of provision for that person who is about to wave the white flag and give up in their business in their church.
We pray for strength and agree that help and assistance would come to you today to stay the course, to not give up.
We break the strategies and the strongholds of depression and mental illness and emotional upheaval… of people who have gone through traumatic things and they seem to be stuck in a pattern where they just can’t get beyond it.
We pray and agree with you today for a breaking of that pattern of a Holy Ghost, supernatural interrupt in Jesus’ name
Father, we pray for a cascading of healing anointing today… healing grace and anointing.
Father, prepare us now. Prepare families.
We pray for an outpouring of the Spirit upon young people, upon children. We raise up a standard around this generation and we say, “Devil, we put you on notice. You’re not having our children. You’re not having our grandchildren. You’re not having the next generations.”
We pray for marked moments of supernatural outpouring, marked moments of revival and awakening, and a reaching of heaven to earth into the upcoming generations to reroute them away from the secular, humanistic demonic stuff that’s going on to try to reprogram a generation.
We steer the new generations in a direction to and toward God in Jesus’ name. And so we lift up children today.
We pray today for supernatural softening of hearts, opening of eyes for deception to be broken off of their lives.
We pray for divine appointments and divine people sent on assignment into their lives.