Prayed…
We open up our hearts for more of You
We open up the door of our hearts for more of Your presence to be manifested in this place internally and externally
Wherever we go, You go
The flow and power of Your Spirit, the anointing, always resident within us
Increase of Your mighty presence
The following excerpt was taken from Hosting the Presence by Pastor Bill Johnson:
Can God Come to Where He Is?
Some are bothered when we talk about God coming into a situation, His Spirit falling upon us, or the Holy Spirit moving in a meeting, etc. Often, as we get ready to minister to people, we will invite the Holy Spirit to come, in the John Wimber fashion. The question is, “Why invite God to come when He is already here?” It’s a good question. It makes no sense whatsoever to pray that way unless we understand that there are different measures and dimensions of God’s Presence. When He is here, there is always more to come. It’s important to hunger for and invite that increase. Isaiah had a perception of this reality, saying, “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple” (Isa. 6:1). The word filling implies that His robe filled the temple, but then continued to fill it. He came, but He kept coming. There is always more!
This is at least a partial list of these measures of His Presence; each one is an increase of the previous:
• God first inhabits everything and holds all things together (see Col. 1:17). He is everywhere, the glue that holds His creation in place.
• A second dimension of God’s Presence is His indwelling Holy Spirit in the lives of those who have been born again. He specifically comes to make us His tabernacle.
• A third dimension is seen when believers gather in His name. As He promised, He is “there in their midst” (Matt. 18:20). This is where the principle of exponential increase comes into play.
• A fourth measure or dimension occurs when God’s people praise Him, for He says He “inhabits the praises of His people” (see Ps. 22:3). He is already in our midst but has chosen to manifest Himself upon us more powerfully in that atmosphere.
• A fifth measure is seen when the Temple of Solomon was dedicated: God came so profoundly that priests were incapacitated (see 1 Kings 8:10–11). No one could even stand, let alone play instruments or sing. They were completely undone at that measure of Presence.
I mention these five levels only as principles, in an effort to give a snapshot of how He longs to increase His manifestation upon His people. The day of Pentecost and the gift of the baptism in the Holy Spirit may in fact illustrate all of these principles combined as an entire city came under the influence of God’s manifest Presence.
If you would like to purchase this book, please contact LW Store online or call (763) 315-7015.
The following excerpt is taken from the book Rees Howells, Intercessor by Norman Grubb…
Chapter: “Visitation of the Spirit”
From the time of special dedication on March 29, 1936, when so many of the College (both staff and students) laid their lives on the altar as intercessors, the Spirit was at work in the College. The climax and consummation came in the New Year of 1937. It was the “Pentecost” of the College, from which they emerged, not a loosely-linked company of consecrated individuals, but a body in the full sense of the term—a living, integrated organism, infused with one life and one purpose. Dr. Kingsley C. Priddy, … a member of the staff and later headmaster of the school, gives the following account of those days:
“In the Christmas vacation of 1936 much time was given to prayer. As we approached the new year of 1937 there was an increasing consciousness of God’s presence. The first outward sign that He was working in a new way was when one of the staff broke down in prayer, confessing her sense of need and crying to the Holy Spirit to meet her. Then we heard how the Holy Ghost had so manifested Himself in the glory of His Divine Person to some of the girl students that they wept before Him for hours—broken at the corruption of their own hearts revealed in the light of His holiness.
“An awesome sense of God’s nearness began to steal over the whole College. There was a solemn expectancy. We were reminded of the 120 in the Upper Room before the day of Pentecost. Like them, we only wanted to spend our time in prayer and supplication—conscious that God’s hand was upon us—conscious that He was about to do something. God was there; yet we felt we were still waiting for Him to come. And in the days that followed, He came.
“He did not come like a rushing mighty wind. But gradually the person of the Holy Ghost filled all our thoughts, His presence filled all the place, and His light seemed to penetrate all the hidden recesses of our hearts. He was speaking through the Director every morning, but it was in the quiet of our own rooms that He revealed Himself to many of us.
“We felt the Holy Spirit had been a real Person to us before; as far as we knew we had received Him; and some of us had known much of His operations in and through our lives. But now the revelation of His Person was so tremendous that all our previous experiences seemed as nothing. Three was no visible apparition, but He made Himself so real to our spiritual eyes that it was a ‘face to face’ experience. And when we saw Him we knew we had never really seen Him before. We said like Job, ‘I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee’: and like him, we cried, ‘Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.’
“In the light of His purity, it was not so much sin we saw as self. We saw pride and self-motives underlying everything we had ever done. Lust and self-pity were discovered in places where we had never suspected them. And we had to confess we knew nothing of the Holy Ghost as an indwelling Person. That our bodies were meant to be the temples of the Holy Ghost we knew, but when He pressed the question, ‘Who is living in your body?’ we could not say that He was. We would have done so once, but now we had seen Him.
“In His nature he was just like Jesus—He would never live for self, but always for others. We were people who had left all to follow the Savior, and had forsaken all we had of this world’s goods to enter a life of faith, and as far as we knew we had surrendered our lives entirely to the One who died for us. But He showed us, ‘There is all the difference in the world between your surrendered life in My hands, and Me living My life in your body.’
…
“Why had He manifested Himself to us in this way? He made that quite clear. It was because there was a work to be done in the world today that only He could do (John 16:8). No wonder the Master told His disciples not to move from Jerusalem until they had received ‘the promise of the Father.’ But when He had come, they would be His witnesses ‘in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.’
“Many of us on the previous March 29 had put our all on the altar for the sake of giving the gospel to every creature. We had become willing to be any cog in the machinery that God needed to put that through in our generation. But now the Holy Ghost said, as Jehovah had said to Moses, ‘I am come down to do it.’ And we knew that He was as almighty as He was holy.
“As those days of visitation went on, we were just prostrate at His feet. We had thought that there was some virtue in our surrender: that we, with thousands of others, would be the people to evangelize the world in this generation. But now He had come, and we were out of it—except in so far as our bodies would become the temples in which He would dwell and through which He would work. He said, ‘I have not come to give you joy, or peace, or victory. I have not come to give you any blessing at all. You will find all that you need in Jesus. But I have come to put you to the cross, so that I may live in your body for the sake of a lost world.’”
If you would like to purchase this book, please contact LW Store online or call (763) 315-7015.
Continued praying…
There’s a work that must be done, Father, through the Church
We must be carriers of that presence, our temples must be filled to the overflow
Rivers of life bringing water
Our assemblies must be filled with the overflow of Your presence
The manifestation of Your goodness and power, we must have
Yes, we’re thankful that individually we can experience You but there is a work and harvest and an inheritance that must be reaped
Father, we don’t see this as an optional experience
We must have You for the work that is to be done
We ask that there would come to us a greater revelation and participation and greater contending for Your glory
Your Word reveals to us Your heart and desire—that Your temple be filled with Your glory
Father, we desire and declare and dedicate and consecrate to spending time with You to be more filled with Your presence
Father, we must have distinguishing marks now and this great nation and the nations must see You
We ask that there would come to the Church an internal strengthening and ability to contend for the harvest
We ask that You would pervade the consciousness of believers everywhere to say more of You and less of us
More of Your presence, more of Your operations
A fresh touch
You gave gifts unto men for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry
Therefore, we ask for a fresh touch of Your presence
A clearing of distractions
We invite You in a greater way
We know the season in which we live
We contend for the supernatural
You said to put You in remembrance
You said we would go from one degree of glory to another
Pushing out the things that would cause distractions from you
We lift up the carriers, Father, to carry
They must go
Bring them to the forefront
A steady increase, a steady momentum now for the Church to keep up the pace
For the Church to take its place in every nation, every tongue, every people group
Doors that will open up these ways
Doors that will move the Church to You
Connections, the connections for the way of the Church
Shaken out of those ways and shaken into the new
Pressing into the new of Your presence
Turnarounds, changes, absolute rearranging and changing within the body now
Orders from heaven concerning the base and place of the operation of Your will and way
We plead the blood of Jesus over the body of Christ
Leaders, we declare, you can go—you will and must go all the way
Those are the laborers—the pray-ers, the pastors, the ministers
Together they go and flow
There is a new way of flowing these days
Real steady in these ways