Prayer

On December 20, 2019   /   Word of the Day   /   Leave a comment

Job 22: 28

“You will also decree a thing, and it will be established for you; And light will shine on your ways.”

I want to change the way you and I think about prayer. As we charge into year 2020, I believe this is a great time to do so. I hope you have big plans for 2020. We are beginning a new decade and one that has been dreamed about for years. Science Fiction books and movies looked forward to this coming year and now it is upon us. Let’s have a great year and a great decade. If you are 85 years old this year, 95 or 15 set a new goal, a big goal and strap on your rocket boosters. 2019 was for sitting. Now is the time for setting an ambitious goal and going for it with gusto.

To make 2020 different from its predecessors we are going to have to look at things differently and do things differently. We might as well begin with one of our most sacred strongholds: prayer. If we keep praying like we prayed last year, we will get what we got last year. If you got what you wanted, that is great. If you didn’t then we should look at growing our understanding of working with God so that 2020 becomes a year of fabulous results and tremendous memories. I want for you the best of everything so let’s begin today preparing for a super year and decade.

For many of us, prayer amounts to asking God for what we want. We ask Him to do something for us. That is not an incorrect perspective, just an incomplete one. There is a lot more to manifesting our partnership with Yahweh than just asking Him to fulfill our wish list. The Christian experience has sometimes reduced prayer to little more than begging God to do something in our lives. We are active partners with God, so we need to learn our role in His way of doing things and then be fully prepared to step into that role in 2020. Today’s verse is the clue we need to send us on our way.

God did not create us so powerless that all we can do is beg Him to be active in our lives. He has spent eons pouring out His power and teachings so that we can be His partners. That means that He has empowered us to say something and have those decrees established. So, what does that begin to look like? You can pray for God to heal you. Good but let’s not pray a begging prayer, “Oh God, please heal me. Please, please God, touch my body with your healing.” That sounds good but, actually, it is unbiblical. God said he already has healed us (1 Peter 2: 24). So, we need to move to the next step – declaring. That is where today’s verse speaks to us. Decree a thing and God will establish it. We already know God’s will, it is for us to be healed, now declare God’s will, “I am healed. By his stripes, I am healed. Healing, manifest in my body.”

Whatever you need or want works by this same principle. The power to create whatever solution you need is resident in you right now (Romans 8: 11). We’ve got to start saying something. Once we do, the angels and the Holy Spirit can bring it to pass. We already know that all of God’s answers to our prayers are, “Yes” (2 Corinthians 1: 20) so what is stopping us from having all He agrees to? it is our not taking the next step, decreeing. We say, “Father, heal me.” He responds, “Okay, speak it and it shall be done according to your word.” That is the part we are missing.

Let’s get ready for a big year in 2020 by preparing ourselves now. Begin speaking the desire of your heart. The power is already in you. The answer to your question is already there. Ask the Holy Spirit to bring it up out of your spirit to your mind. Go inside yourself and understand that the power which created the universe is resident within you right now. It’s only a matter of letting that out now. God has already given you the answer to your prayer, it is the Holy Spirit. Start working with the spirit to get what is inside you right now, to the outside.

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Resident

On September 17, 2019   /   Word of the Day   /   Leave a comment

John 1: 33

He upon whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining upon Him, this is the one who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.

In the Old Testament the Holy Spirit would come “on” someone and that person would perform anointed works. Gideon blew his horn; many prophesied. But the Holy Spirit would lift off them after their task was accomplished. He did not come upon them and remain. The time of the Holy Spirit was not yet.

John the Baptist baptized in water but announced that one was coming after him who would baptize in the Holy Spirit (Matt. 3: 11, Mark 1: 8, Luke 3: 16, John 1: 33). He spoke, of course, of Jesus. When Jesus ascended to heaven, He sent the Holy Spirit to be with us, to live with us forever as we saw in John 14: 16. No longer was the Holy Spirit to come “on” us and then vacate. Instead Jesus said that He was going to send the Holy Spirit to be with us forever to be our constant helper, teacher and guide. So now the Holy Spirit has come and made His abode with us. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, “Do you not know that you are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3: 16). Then in Romans 8, the eleventh verse Paul wrote, “He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who indwells you.” Now we have the Holy Spirit with us, dwelling in us all of the time rather than coming upon us in a time of need. He is here to be your constant standby and He couldn’t do that very well if He had to come and go. So, Jesus sent Him into the world to be with us and to stay with us until Jesus comes back to establish His Kingdom in the earth. We are never abandoned because God has made provision for us to have a divine helper with us at all times.

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Anti-aging Pill

On October 6, 2017   /   Word of the Day   /   Leave a comment

Isaiah 40: 31

Those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not become weary, they will walk and not faint.

I have written to you before about the most literal sense of this verse but allow me to remind you and then we are going to see the application of it. At its most basic level this verse invites us to become intertwined with God. There are many synonyms I like for this: interwoven, intermeshed and integrated to name just a few. Isaiah communicates to us that if our lives, even our very existence, is intertwined with the life of God, then our strength will be renewed. We will soar on the wind with wings like eagles. We will run and not become weary. Enmeshed in God means we can walk without fainting. It all sounds great but is there any real world, applicable truth in it? Absolutely.

I am living in God’s grace and I bless His Holy name that this verse is true. Your body responds to God’s word. Your spirit yearns for interconnectedness with our God. And if you want the fountain of youth, I honestly believe you are going to find it between Genesis One and Revelation twenty-two. The more we connect with the trinity, the more we are interwoven with “the life.” That life within us is giving life to our mortal bodies (Romans 8: 11). It’s true!

As I said to a friend of mine one time, “Jesus looks good on you.” I honestly believe that who he is in you affects the way you look and the way your body performs. He is the life so when he makes his abode in you, then good things happen. I remember Gloria Copeland and Billye Brim talking about their skin and appearance and they agreed that the life in you helps keep you looking younger.

Okay, so here is the caveat. This isn’t your garden variety, cultural Christianity where we say the sinner’s prayer and then wait for the trumpet blast. This is interwoven life. The life of God intermeshed with all that you are. Remember the Word of the Day titled Lord of the Lunge? It is that idea, applied. Everything we do, say and think we integrate with and involve our Lord. He becomes the very present “now” in our lives. When you wake up with Him, and talk with Him, and go to bed with Him, He can’t help it, He brings more life giving momentum to your world. Honestly, some people even have a hard time dying because they are so filled up with life. That life oils your joints and produces lanolin for your skin. Maybe you will turn gray more slowly or not at all.

It’s great to have good genes. It is even better when you have a revelation of being DNA coupled with the Holy One. Let Jesus run around in your DNA chain. Then let’s talk about our genetic history and make-up. You are genetically tied to the life giving force of your heavenly Father so let’s get excited about this. Get on those eagle wings and soar. Run hard and fast. Live strong. Breathe in the life of the blessed with every breath. Let Jesus truly live his life in you but not only in your spirit. Give him your body. This really isn’t a radical idea. In fact, it isn’t even a new idea. The apostle Paul beat me to it by, oh, a couple of thousand years when he wrote, “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship (Romans 12: 1). Get a revelation on this now. Be like John so full of God that the enemy can’t kill you.

You can still be young and beautiful in your eighties, nineties or beyond when you know the secret of the anti-aging pill. Take this verse daily for skin care and for strength in your body. Get yourself all tangled up in Christ and enjoy this great life!

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Help, I’m Dying

On September 4, 2015   /   Word of the Day   /   Leave a comment

Romans 6: 4, 6

Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life . . . knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him.

I wish to share with you today about healing. Now I realize that the verse I chose in order to discuss health and healing looks more like a discourse on dying. Ultimately that reflects the point I wish to make though. Healing is in death. If you want to walk in all of the enormous benefits of Jesus’ triumph, including perfect health, then you must die.

Galatians 2: 20 reads, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me. This is generically spoken of as dying to self. We are to crucify ourselves, our flesh or worldly selves, and take on the life of Christ, joining with him in holy union so that he lives through us and we live in and through him. Ephesians 4: 22 and 24 give us an even more clear understanding: “In reference to you former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” 

Our old self was crucified with Christ and buried with him but we tend to continue wearing grave clothes instead of donning the robes of righteousness given to us by Christ Jesus. The renewed life is in doing as Paul teaches us in these passages; take off the old self and bury the carcass. Then put on Jesus in his fullness and glory. Jesus told us that in the new age, the age in which we are living, that he would live in us, he is the glory and righteousness within us. “In that day you shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you” (John 14: 20). This is the great revelation and triumph of the New Covenant. The Messiah has come, Emmanuel – God with us.

“But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who indwells you” (Romans 8: 11). You see, it is God within us which is health and healing to our bodies. The healing power of God is alive in us right now. We just need to live to that truth instead of living in the world and its decay. We shuck off the old self, don the new life in Christ and ask Jesus to fill every cell of our bodies.

If we are inviting Jesus and the Holy Spirit to indwell us then ask them to fill you to overflowing. I am reminded of the freshmen physics course where the professor fills a beaker with rocks and asks the students if it can hold any more. When they answer in the negative he pours in small gravel bits. Oh my, now is it full, can it hold any more? “No,” they proclaim. So the professor trickles in sand. “Okay, how about now?” “Certainly not!” From below the desk top the professor produces a beaker of water and begins to add water to the first beaker.” 

So, I would ask you, “Is the beaker now full?” I suggest that it is not. If the Holy Spirit was the water we could analyze that, as with each medium, the Holy Spirit is filling the negative space or the empty space. I posit, though, that after the water is added to the beaker that there is still room for the Holy Spirit to fit in that beaker. He goes in and fills the molecules and the space between the molecules and he fills the atoms and so on down to the smallest atomic particle. That is the vision I wish to share with you for your body. As you cast off your old self and put on the new self, ask the Holy Spirit to fill you down to the smallest atomic particle. Ask him to saturate every cell of your body with his presence. 

Every day see your old self dead and buried and envision your new life in Christ filled with all that he is. Let your life in Christ permeate you. In death is resurrection. In death is life. I know it is paradoxical but you can handle the paradox because you have the mind of Christ. When you die to self you can live to Christ and when Christ is your life then all of the power of the universe is not only with you but within you. You only have to die.

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