Video Journal: Praying by Faith

"And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words."                     ~Matthew 6:7

We're supposed to pray on earth as it is in heaven.  There's an assurance there!  If praying for others doesn't get you excited, then you're probably not praying by faith.  Heartfelt prayer shifts things on earth into the realities of heaven!  I think that's something to get excited about.

If we're praying by faith, we'll be more concerned with the aftereffects of our prayers than with the length of them.  We'll pray anticipating what God will do.  We'll say the words He wants us to say, and then know that we're praying for something that He's already set His heart on doing.  This is a place of resting in faith.

If we're praying by faith, we'll even try to shorten our prayers so that we can more quickly see God's answer!  Remember that God moved on behalf of Abraham even before his servant could even finish praying. (Gen. 24)  God knows the need.  If we pray by faith, we'll get out of the way as fast as possible and just let the Holy Spirit work!

*Note: this post is talking about prayer in the context of praying for others, particularly for healing, deliverance, salvation, etc.  There is a place for lengthy prayers--generally when you're praying in secret, praying for your own spiritual growth, or prophesying

Video Journal: Power in The Hands

"Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle."
Psalm 144:1

When God compels us to pray, we need to accept His gift of faith.  We need to accept His power. We need to expect His love, and we need to expect from that a powerful manifestation.

God taught David how to overcome with His hands, and God is just the same today. We need to accept that God has overcome, and to believe for His will to flow down onto the earth.  We need the Holy Spirit, the Ruach Elohim, to teach us how to pray. (Luke 11:1)

Our faith is just a mirror-image of God's faith.  God's faith is the substance!  And we can conceptualize that faith really is a force when we use our hands to pray.

When our hands become controlled by the power of the Holy Spirit, that's when God takes over.

Praying with your hands, whether scanning with them, pushing with them, circling with them--whatever God calls you to do--might feel weird at first.  It's different!  God is different.  But praying and warring with your hands is worth it, because it's our calling to demonstrate the faith of God in action.

Will you Seek Him?

When things get hard, will you still seek God?  Will you put off all those distractions and the "sin that so easily entangles"?

God wants us to always pray and never give up.  God wants us to continue to search for Him, so that He may be found.  He wants us to find Him!

Do we really, really trust God?  Do we believe that He is who He says He is?

Let's forsake all, and just be with the Lord.  Let's experience His power and flow in His love.  Let's seek Him, because we believe He is good.

Let's make Jesus our hearts' delight, and look for Him even in those empty places.  God said that He'll never leave you nor forsake you.  Do you believe it?  Will you yield to the Holy Spirit within you that wants you to believe it?

Video Journal: Angelic Visitation

Regarding the angels, he says, "He sends his angels like the winds, his servants like flames of fire."
Hebrews 1:7

"Believe in the Lord your God and you shall be established; believe and remain steadfast to His prophets and you shall prosper."                                            2 Chronicles 20:20

Video Journal: Maintaining the Power and Maintaining the Testimony

Yesterday morning God spoke to me and said:

"I so desire to bless you today, Thomas, so maintain the power and maintain the testimony..."

We had a quieter day yesterday.  Sometimes that's the hardest!  When there's nothing exciting going on ..that's when you need the Holy Spirit to keep you in God's presence.  That's when you need to have Jesus by your side continually.

Even when we aren't 'ministering' to anybody, even when we aren't 'doing' all sorts of cool stuff for Jesus, He still so desires to bless us.  And we allow Him to bless us by maintaining in our spirits the wonderful things He's done in the past. We stay uplifted this way!

"And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him."          Colossians 3:17

We need to do it all for the glory of God.  That's when we can be blessed in our coming in and blessed in our going out (Deuteronomy 28:6).

Sometimes it's easy to forget.  Sometimes we forget to draw near to God.  But He can keep us in a better place.  God wants us to always be maintaining in our minds and spirits His power and His testimonies--God doesn't want us to become so bogged down in the present that we forget about the past.

God so desires to bless us.  He wants to take us from glory to glory.

Video Journal: Feet Healings in Springfield

The past two days have been awesome!  We've been hanging out with some great people...and having a great time!  God's been providing opportunities to display His love and His glory.

"And God confirmed the message by giving signs and wonders and various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit whenever he chose."                     Hebrews 2:4

Our friend Rob shares his side of the story here:

God is good!  It's a joy to see His power at work, and it's a joy to see His love change things.  

Video Journal: Interceding by Faith

"Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up"  Luke 18:1

"With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints"                                      Ephesians 6:18

When we pray in the Spirit, we will have the spiritual realm in view.  God will give us insight and show us how to pray.  The insight God gives will make us on the alert.  The insight God gives will be exciting.

God will give you the mind of Christ.  He'll show you how to pray and intercede by faith, so you can partner with Him on behalf of others.

Realize that everything God says can be accepted by faith.  Everything God does needs to be accepted by faith! You can think of faith as the force that opens the door to the next thing God has for you.

If intercession isn't a privilege, then you're not doing it from a heavenly perspective, nor by faith.  It wasn't fun for me for the longest time.  Intercession becomes a joy when you're praying for others and feeling God's love for them.  That's what it's all about!

When you're interceding with God, it's no longer a heavy burden.  Praying by faith produces tangible results.  If we as believers will just pray according to God's heart, then we'll see the faith of God shift things!  We'll see His hand line things up.  And most importantly, we'll see things on earth become as they are in Heaven.  We'll see the Kingdom of God surround our lives and situations.

Video Journal: Healed by Hearing the Word

"Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth."  

~Jesus in John 17:17

Praise God for those times when "the power of Yahweh is present to heal".  It's the greatest thing ever to be overshadowed by Him!

If we as Christians will speak the truth with faith and sincerity, then signs and wonders will follow! God wants to amaze people.  He wants to get us excited.  He wants to provide for us a platform from which we can tell others to go farther with God!

"So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God."       ~ Romans 10:17

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."           ~ John 8:32

Revival: It's Costly

Revival Requires Purity

"Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation."

Psalm 24:3-5

Revival is a place where we have received the blessing.  We meet the qualifications God has set before us, receive the blessing, and then walk it out.  And to do this, we need clean hands and a pure heart.

Revival Requires Work

"Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him,…"

Luke 14:27-29

We need to realize that revival requires building a tower.  It requires work and effort, but more than that, it requires yielding to the Holy Spirit and His measure of faith.  It's empowerment by the Holy Spirit that gets the work done.  To be empowered by the Spirit and enjoy life in the Spirit, we need to experience death to ourselves.  That's the cost.  Every time we 'die', we are filled with His word, which is Spirit and Life (John 6:63).  Every time we die to ourselves, we receive a fresh anointing and a fresh empowerment.  And that's what gets the tower built.

Instructions for Revival:

"Always be joyful. Never stop praying. Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.

Do not stifle the Holy Spirit. Do not scoff at prophecies...."

1 Thessalonians 5:16-20



Revival Requires Prayer

Here we can receive insight into what gets revival started.  If we are always joyful, if we never stop praying, then we can expect the move of the Spirit to come.  We need to pray it through.  Then, we can expect the beginning of revival. And that's when it's important that we do not stifle Him.  We have to let Him do the work!



Revival Requires Humility

If the Holy Spirit is beginning something, we need to let Him carry it out.  We need to let Him speak and move through any vessel He chooses.  We can't despise the wisdom of another.  We can't despise a prophecy.  Pride and presumption will put an end to revival!  We need to be humble and let the Holy Spirit flow.  We need to speak up when God prompts us, and remain quiet when He doesn't. We need to acknowledge that others are seeing in part (1 Corinthians 13:9), just as we are.  We need to remember that others, too, have paid the price.  We need to remember that all of us are hungry for a move of God, hungry for revival!

There are conditions to revival.  Some may disagree with this, but I believe that there are conditions to meet before God's promises are fulfilled.  God's love is unconditional, but His blessings are not. We need to go up higher and receive the blessing from the Lord.  We need to contend for revival.  It will come if we really, really want it.

Faith is A Force

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Hebrews 11:1

Faith changes things.  Faith is the Holy Spirit within us agreeing with God.  Any gift or blessing or victory that God wants to give us comes by faith.  Faith is what makes God's perfect will possible.  

Let's look into this verse a little bit, starting out with the first half of it:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for..."

There are things that all of us are hoping for that have not yet come to pass.  We've been hoping in God's promises, in His Logos and Rhema Word, and we haven't seen everything yet.  And that's okay--delays are OK--as long as we have faith!  Faith manifests the things that we've been hoping for.  Faith is as tangible as God's promises get, prior to their actual fulfillment.  And if faith is that tangible, if it's an actual substance, then we can see that our faith paves the way for God to act on our behalf.  Faith is a force that works in companionship with hope, bringing first spiritual substance and then physical substance into our lives.  Faith is a force that changes things.

"...the evidence of things not seen."

We need to remember that God is the One who can make something wonderful out of nothing.  We need to remember that things we are not yet seeing will soon be brought to us.  We need to remember that it is God who makes all things possible.  It's God who brings all His promised to pass.  And our faith need to acknowledge this.  Our faith needs to have God's foresight.  Our faith needs to produce actions, so that these actions can serve as proof--evidence-- of things yet to come.  

And if our faith is evidence of God's future purposes, then the way we live our lives today should be evidence of our faith.   Our faith will point to that future point in time when God does a miracle. Our faith will lead us to walk in a way that looks foolish to the outside world.  Our faith will probably even make us look foolish to other Christians!  Our faith should lead us to expect God to come through.   Our faith may lead us into 'dangerous' situations.

Before God comes through, our faith will be the only evidence that others can see of His future plans. In a sense, our faith will be prophetic, and our faith will be ahead of it's time. God chooses the foolish things to shame the wise--eventually!  In the meantime, however, others may try to shame us if we live according to a higher measure of faith.  Even then, it's up to us to provide the only evidence we can--our faith--of that coming moment when God fulfills our hopes.

If we have faith, we should have works.  Our faith and our actions should be in agreement!  Together, they will provide the initial evidence of God's plans.  Together, they will eventually provide the foundation for an amazing testimony.  When God comes through, and when others see that He rewarded our faith, that's when the foolish things shame the wise.  That's when true wisdom is--finally--proved right by her actions (Matthew 11:19).  That's when others can see that we partnered with the Lord.  That's when others can see that we were right act 'foolishly' and put all our faith in God.  

To quote Kenneth Copeland, faith is a force.  It is the force that brings us into alignment with God, and it is the force that makes something "on earth as it is in Heaven".  Faith is a force that heals and saves and delivers.  Faith is a force that encourages God to do something big.