Dave shared…
I got something in prayer last week. We were praying for the people in Las Vegas. There was a gal in our group that had a daughter who was there. She said her daughter went for something else, not for the concert, a business thing. She happened to go to the concert. She was there and then decided to do something else and left. It was right before all the shooting happened. Her mother didn’t know that. Her mother woke up in the morning and her husband told her what was going on. Her husband was distressed by it. He said, “I told her not to go.” She said, “I didn’t panic. I knew in my heart not to worry about it.” She prayed and gave it to the Lord.
They hadn’t heard from her daughter and they had been calling her. No answer. There’s a temptation to believe the worse. She said “we need to pray for these people and we did.” During the prayer, the Lord spoke to me about it. I kept getting in the spirit these words. “Enter into the rest” and “enter into the peace.” This is what came out of that. The Lord said “Many people are attracted to the circumstance when it happens. Their soul is tugged on” like the husband “to draw into that natural worrying and concern.” But there was a choice that the mom made and she chose not to go in that direction. One would make the argument to say “What does that have to do with what happened in Las Vegas? Because when she was aware of the situation, it was after it happened. So what does that have to do with it?”
I’ll tell you what it has to do with it. As we were praying, the Lord showed me something. He said, “Your prayers can reach forward and back.” Prayers have the ability to reach into the future and reach into the past. The Lord said that when she made a decision to enter into the rest… that was the thing… labor to enter into that rest. Labor. How many know what when you’re in a circumstance like that, it is a labor to enter into that rest. I recall a situation with my daughter where she got her hand slammed in the door of a car. I could tell her fingers were broken, cuz I could see the bones popping out. We rushed her to the emergency room. My wife took my daughter and left right away. I had my son. He was a mess cuz he’s the one that shut the door on her hand and was crying. They were only about 7 or so. I’m trying to calm him down and she’s on her way to the hospital. The Holy Spirit spoke to me and said to sing in the spirit. I did that. As I did, the Holy Spirit helped me. The psalms started coming out. And peace and rest came on me.
By the time I got to the hospital, I’m in the waiting room and she came out and there were no broken bones. Nothing. You could see the same situation. The accident happened and what is my listening to the Holy Spirit have to do… what does me not getting fearful and not entering into that place of worry have to do with her situation? What it does is it takes my faith and it goes back in time when that incident happened and it corrects the situation so that the world we live in today is changed. Do you understand?
That’s important to understand because if you see it and understand it, now when you approach your life in prayer, it’s different. If you constantly keep yourself aware of that because then you’re thinking nothing is impossible. You have this thing in your mind that nothing is impossible. Not only is nothing impossible, but now you’re not concerned about a whole lot. We can fix that, right? What do you mean? That happened yesterday. Yeah, we can fix that.
While I was praying on Wednesday, the Lord showed me that, what had transpired with this woman’s prayer. Before she didn’t even know what she was doing, but after the Lord had given me that in prayer. I explained to her what the Lord showed me and she was like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.” She explained what the process was.
I just wanted to share that with you because there’s a lot of work we can do in prayer with that in mind. All we tend to do is prayer about what is happening today and what’s going to happen in the future. What if we had a prayer session where we prayed about the past? Uh oh… what would that do? What if we knew something that the Holy Spirit wanted us to know and we started praying about the things that had happened in the past… drug addiction, the alcohol situation, the problems that people have gotten into that can’t get out of… all the issues of the past and why you can’t really do anything about that now.
Well, can you?
God can. But He needs you to help Him do that. He needs you to recognize that it is possible. That’s all He’s looking for. Has He not given us the authority in this earth? Jesus said I’m going to take what is mine and show it to you. But what did Jesus have? What was it that God gave to Jesus? He gave Him the revelation… He gave Him the Holy Spirit. Just use the example of the fig tree situation. He spoke to the fig tree. The next day, you could tell He wasn’t too concerned about the fig tree. It was the people around Him that were concerned about the fig tree. When He rose Lazarus from the dead, was He concerned about whether Lazarus was dead or not? Why wasn’t Jesus concerned about Lazarus? We can’t say that He didn’t know because they were constantly reminding Him. He didn’t “buy in” to the reality that others and the circumstance was feeding Him. He completely labored to enter into that place of grace. That means you got to get your soul in a place… and you can pray for this too, by the way. In Romans, it talks about that I think in the 8th chapter. It talks about how when we pray, that we can choose. Do you remember the example where He’s talking about “help my unbelief.” A man said to Jesus, help me with my limitation. So when he’s asking to be helped from his limitation, what he was asking for is there is something that I don’t get that I need to get. Help me with that. That’s what he was saying. So if we recognize that you can pray for that, then it’s okay for us to do that. So I like the idea of praying about the past. But not so much praying about the past by saying, “I didn’t like this president so let’s get rid of that guy. I didn’t like that situation so let’s get rid of that” as much as looking at it with the past not limiting your prayers. Maybe that’s the way to look at it.
What that does is it allows you to enter into places in the spirit that your soul won’t let you go. Your soul won’t let you camp on an issue when you’re praying about something that… “What am I praying about that for? That happened two weeks ago.” Your mind won’t let you go there. And subsequently, you usually don’t spend any time in prayer there. Especially if anybody has kids, that’s a good example of that where they’re not in the right place and they need some direction. You think you can only pray about what they’re dealing with right now. That’s not necessarily true. So you can’t just say, if my daughter or son is in this situation, I can pray that they can be in this situation. Well, you can. I agree with that and I would even go as far to say you can pray for now and in the future but very few spend any time in the past. That’s why I think it’s important for us to look at it that way because if we do look at it that way, then all of a sudden, when you enter into the spirit and when the Lord is starting praying in a certain direction, then you’re with Him. The Holy Spirit starts moving in a certain direction. You don’t have any resistance to go that direction and spend time there. Because some of those things need to be prayed out.
And not only that, your position on those things. I’ll give you an example of that. “Well they had a hard time growing up and weren’t raised right. They had this happen to them and they were in this circumstance.” That’s just a bunch of baloney. A lot of people use that as a way to keep themselves from pressing into a certain area. Even getting correction in their lives. So what I’m trying to get to here is this and then we’ll start praying. I’ll give you an example from me. I grew up in a situation where it was not a good situation for kids. I have a brother, one year older than me. He grew up in the same situation. If you look at our lives, they’re two different lives. If you saw him and me you’d say, “How in the world could you have come out of that situation?” Same mother and father, same circumstances. Same financial situation. Everything is identical. One comes out good and one doesn’t. How does that happen? God.
What does the world say about that? They look at the person whose life isn’t working out, they’re in and out of prison. All messed up. They want to spend money to put them through therapy, talking for hours about things that don’t matter. We are all supposed to say, “Well, that’s the way it is. I feel sorry for that person. Let’s take care of them.” As a country, let’s take care of all those people that have hard lives. This may seem insensitive and if you come from a place where it’s been that way, I feel I can say that because I came from that. I know the difference. What this world needs is Jesus and that’s the bottom line. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. Everything else is man’s idea. It doesn’t matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter what your circumstances are. I don’t care what happened to you. Or maybe you didn’t have a financially good upbringing. “My parents were poor and I’m poor and my grandfather was poor so therefore it comes to me that I’m poor.” That’s stupidity. Sorry, but that’s what it is.
What you’re doing is choosing to believe something that you have the ability to change. Not necessarily you as a person has the ability to change it, but you have the ability to allow God to take you into a place to change it. See what I’m saying? Every one of us has that ability to allow… I was talking to somebody yesterday. It seems like every day something bad happens to him. That’s what we’re praying for, for these people when we pray. We don’t live in a place like that. There are varying degrees of that too.
I remember one day walking through the parking lot and I saw someone I knew. They pulled up in a car that was not in the best shape. I knew that, that person went to college just like I did, did all the right things and kind of like my brother and I. I knew the person. The Lord said, “That’s what that person chooses.” They choose to live that way. Now that’s rough. You might say, “They don’t choose to live that way.” No! You have control of the outcome of the rest of your life. You do. And it’s how your perspective is and the way you see life is the way you’ll do it. If you believe that God is more than enough, sufficient in all things, then you can do that. You will live that way. I am a perfect textbook example of that. I don’t come from money. I don’t like that way. I don’t look at money in a way that “got to have it.” That’s not the way I see money. I see money as a tool that God gives us the ability to do His work in the earth. That’s how I see money. And it’s the proper perspective. We take what God has given us and use it the way the Holy Spirit desires.
One thing I find unique that as Christians we say, “Ten percent is God’s money.” I have a clue for you. It’s all God’s money. 100%. That needs to change if we want to change financially in our lives. If you look at everything you possess and you’ve given it to the Lord, it’s almost like, “That’s sacred. That 10% is sacred.” In the old days, they used to bring their best for offerings. It’s like taking that offering and they do this in the east. I see this all the time. You walk into these restaurants and stores and they have Buddha there and they have oranges and candles to appease the god. In the Old Testament, it was always about offerings, offerings, offerings. You always brought your best. If you look at the way they did the tithe in the past, they always took the best. Well, you think about it was almost like a payout. If I give you this ten percent, then you’ll take care of my 90. Then we go into the dispensation of grace which is different than the previous dispensation. Back then, they had a law and they had things they had to do. In the New Testament they said all of the law is encompassed in these two laws: love the Lord with all your heart and love thy neighbor. Even those two things you can’t do without the grace of God. You do not have the capacity to love the way God wants you to love when somebody steps on you, spits on you, does all kinds of things. You have not the capacity to love that person except by God’s grace. How many know that? The desire is to do the opposite. So if it’s all given to us and we look at it from that standpoint, the financial situation, when we’re giving our ten percent, maybe the way we need to readjust that in the view of the New Testament in view of the current dispensation of grace, because really nothing you do in grace will get you what you want. Cuz all have fallen short of the glory of God. The scripture is completely clear about that. The scripture is clear about grace when it concerns sin, correct? It says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So none of us can say that if we go to church and do this and that, none of us can say that we can operate in that place and say we’ve come to that place. Here’s my oranges. Here’s my offering. I went to church this week, I read my Bible, I prayed and did all these things, now I’m acceptable in Your sight. We all laugh because we know that’s ridiculous to think that way. But I think if we take one step further and look at it from a financial standpoint, really grace is about giving your whole life to God and allowing Him to lead your whole life. And if it’s your whole life, then it’s your whole everything. I just say that for this reason, that if we look at it that way, then we act differently. Then it’s okay to take your money and do things that you would normally do like give to missions and to live your life relative to that world.
My focus today is to pray about the stuff we are not covering because of the way we pray. I think it’s important that we do that because I think we can be more effective if we pray that way. More effective instead of praying just in one dispensation, because God sees the end from the beginning. If the end is here, and the beginning is here, He sees the whole thing all at one time. And He can affect it all at one time. How is that? He can go back in time and set something in place that you didn’t even know. I’ll give you an example of a financial situation. You could pray today about what God has called you to do in a financial situation and He could go back ten or twenty years back and He could tell somebody in your family to invest in this piece of real estate that’s been sitting there this whole time. And then tomorrow you get a phone call and say this uncle has left you this piece of property. That He could have gone back and told that uncle to invest in that property when it was pennies on the dollar and today it’s worth millions because some big major corporation wants it.
Have you ever driven around and some of these cities and see empty lots. Right in the middle of everything. You got Cisco, you got eBay, you got google, all these big corporations and then you see this piece of property that’s barren with nothing in it. Have you ever wondered “Who owns that?” Somebody owns it. And it’s sitting in the middle of everything. Just think about it that way.
Barb shared…
I was going to mention that what you said at the last part that we need to see the way God sees and when we pray in the Spirit, when we pray in tongues, it’s like God takes us right where He is and when we pray in tongues, we’re praying, it’s like you’re turning in a circle and you can pray into any time period because He can direct your tongues where they need to go so everything is set up for you. He can reach back and cause your prayers to go exactly where they need to be so you have what you need now. So just to begin to see the way He sees, that nothing is impossible. You can go back into any part of time or even go forward into any part of time and have what you need.
Prayed…
Thank You for this opportunity to come before you and allow the Holy Spirit to help us work with You in this world.
Thank You for moving on our behalf in those ways and how You’re changing things
How You reach in to the past and reaching into the future and causing those things to be
By the faith of Your people, that if we could see You as You are, Lord, that we could become like You
We can become like You in our faith and the way we approach our faith and use it
We’re no longer looking at it from our little view of the earth
We’re looking at it from Your view
We see the end from the beginning
Every situation, every disaster, everything that’s happened in times past, Lord, we know that we have the capacity to get in agreement with You, to work with You, to see change
To see the reality that we call reality change into what it is You desire
Nothing is impossible… we can work in the place where nothing is impossible
We work with you in the “nothing is impossible,” Father
We can enter into those places with you where we can start seeing in the reality of the truth that you desire, Father
You desire that nothing be broken, nothing missing and all sufficiency in all things would be met
We don’t have to accept the circumstances the way they are
We look to you and say, “Lord, we need some help and insight, help us pray.”
That we could be more effective to live in a world that is more than enough
