Pray Amarillo

Today as I sit in the prayer room and listen to the singers sing the Word of God, I am mindful of the humility of God. Jesus, the most humble man to ever live, beckons us to put on humility like He does. Humility is the true fragrance of God, and it gives an effective witness for the kingdom. Our words, our attitudes, and our facial expressions must always be soaked in humility as we go out and when we’re at home. He is exalted and glorified when we choose to put on humility.

Jesus walked among the ones He created, so high above them in power, in wisdom, in influence, and in insight, and yet He lived as a humble man from Nazareth. We see the true humility of God in the face of Christ. As we respond to the cry of heaven to put on Christ, the Holy Spirit will give us power and strength to be like Him.

He gives grace to the humble; He makes happy the poor in spirit. We go low, and He lifts us up.

God, give me power and grace as I choose to put on humility in all that I do and say.
Thank You, Jesus!

Acts 19 is the most outstanding success story of Paul’s missionary career. One of the greatest triumphs of his life was that the entire province of Asia was evangelized in two years. The revival fire spread throughout all of Asia Minor and in 312 A.D., even brought about the conversion of Emperor Constantine. Christianity became the dominate religion in the Roman Empire, which had once tried to extinguish the early Church.
Can you imagine the Gospel spreading so quickly that even the pagan leaders in other countries would become radically saved? If it happened 2000 years ago, why not today? When there is demonstration of the Holy Spirit’s power, entire nations are transformed!
The government of God backed up Paul’s words with such extraordinary signs and wonders that an entire continent was touched in only two years! Beloved, it will take more than just eloquent teaching to touch this generation. We must have the power of God! We need to cry out for a fresh baptism of fire–another Pentecost–if we want this magnitude of revival and revolution in our cities.
We invite you to join us for the “Awakening ” service at the HOP every Wednesday to Saturday from 6pm to midnight. Come with a heart to receive all the Lord has for you! Help us contend for revival in our city.

Whether we realize it or not, each one of us, by nature of our design by God is a living thirst. As Thomas Dubay has coined the phrase we are “incarnate thirst” –thirst in the flesh–”an aching for the infinite”. This is true of believer and unbeliever alike,, and no man can avoid this condition. Every day, each one of yearns out of innate void within, a cavern undeniable that is thirsty for communion with God and unfulfilled by anything less.We were fashioned with this innate reach toward in infinite God with a very real plan.

To the proud heart that does not love God , this could not be more offensive.For no matter how hard they might try to escape it, they cannot be independent of the Lord and cannot escape their undeniable need for God. This cavern-so to speak- was there before ever we discovered it, and the only one that has rights to it is the One who called it into existence in the first place.

The Lord once said to this woman “Make yourself a capacity, and I will make Myself a torrent”. He desires that we would be as a space opened and outstretched toward the divine-Himself. We are to turn our innate thirst like a yawning cavern and direct it with a heart of faith and love toward God, refusing to fill this open space with lesser frivolities.

Simply stated, if we do not find lasting pleasure in Him, we will not find it. And we must recall again what makes our thirst so precious. It is not a mark of deficiency in our being, but a sign of being truly alive. The hungriest people are those most alive, and those most connected to their great need are those closest to touching what it means to truly live.

As I have given myself and my heart to the vulnerability of this heart posture through the years, many pitfalls and difficulties have arisen along the way, one of the greatest being doubt and disillusionment. Countless times I have felt the sting of desiring the Lord and not experienced any response on His part. Such a double dose of pain has been mine as I have yearned for God deeply, and added to that pain has been a feeling of rejection or remoteness. With this two-fold sting comes the immediate pull toward doubt that always becomes disillusionment over time. We doubt the Lord. We question whether He truly fill the hunger as He promised. We doubt ourselves. When we see no breakthrough, no tangible answer, we assume rejection and think perhaps the Lord has overlooked us and does not answer us do to our failings. When yielded to, these doubts become an immediate soil for the weeds of disillusionment to take root. This is where many sincere hearts-hearts that truly love and long for Jesus –give up in their pursuit of hungering after the Lord, painfully resorting to living at a distance from the One they most love.

One of the most costly aspects of love is the raw heart, open and vulnerable in a place of waiting and remaining unanswered. When we really hunger after God, giving our heart so vulnerably and expectantly to the longing, and contending for God’s fullness in either our personal prayer life or in our circumstance, we know true pain and suffering of soul. Remaining in that struggle, even when seemingly yet unanswered, cannot happen by sheer willpower but by our receiving revelation of Jesus and His purpose for this age.

The revelation that must grow in our hearts is that Jesus is a Bridegroom who has betrothed us to Himself and made a covenant with us (Matt. 26:27-29; 2 Cor. 11:2 ). Just as He told us, He has gone away for a time to prepare a place for us, giving us His Spirit as a guarantee, and He will come again just as He promised (john 14:1-3; 2Cor. 5:4-6) Even now He sits at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for us continually. He has not resorted to some eternal, distant bliss, living in far-off indifference from us. Rather, He continually watches and searches out our every moment, our every word in prayer, our every thought and deed, desiring that we would join Him in the place of yearning and hastening the Day of His second coming (2Peter 3:12). This revelation of Jesus as He is even now keeps our hearts form their bent toward doubting Him. We understand that we are, in fact, joining Him.

The nature of the  human heart is to despise pain. We run from adversity, flee from sorrow, and do whatever we can to advert difficulty. It is the most natural response of the human heart to avoid pain and suffering and to reach for comfort, joy, and pleasure instead. We do this in all realms of life-from the physical, where we do not like the feeling of hunger or weakness; to the relational, where we seek to avoid conflict and defend our hearts against rejection or heartache; to the practical, where we construct our lives in an effort to steer clear of conflicts in every dimension. In our prayer lives and intimacy with God, this natural aversion shows up quiet frequently. We despise waiting on the Lord without immediate response and are quickly apt to settle for mediocre pursuit rather than a radical one, because we are afraid of the pain, so fearful of the cost, and reluctant to embrace the rigors of truly being abandoned to God.

This is where the nature of man and the nature of love come into conflict and go their separate ways like an inflexible fork in the road. Man in his depravity goes one way-his own self preserving way-and love in its glory goes another-the way of self sacrifice and self denial. Man seeks, at all costs, to do whatever he can to shield himself from pain. Love seeks at all times, to avail itself wholly, to embrace every wound and every ache without observance of price, willing to go to any lengths in longsuffering and selflessness for another. And its here that the Lord brings us to the place of choice: whether or not to choose and embrace Him even though it so chafes our natural inclinations.

When Jesus entered our existence as a Man, having taking in  fullness our humanity. He did that which no man had ever done before and no man could ever do again except through Him: He loved in the fullness of self sacrifice while living in the frail confines of humanity.  The forceful tide of humanity’s bent toward self preservation, even at the  expense of others, had no pull on Him. Jesus was wounded in every way-in heart, in relationship, in circumstance, in reputation, and in body. But, in every way, He neither evaded it or fled from it. He faced such woundedness head on with foreheads set, not shrinking back from any invitation toward greater love and greater sacrifice(Is.50:7). Why? Certainly not because there is any intrinsic good in pain and suffering. No, it was all for the sake of the vision that continually hung before His distant gaze- the joy that was set before Him (Heb. 12:2).

And this vision He sets before our eyes. This heart He asks us to embrace, thus calling us to live where He lives (Phil. 2:5; Heb.12;3). He stands at that inflexible fork in the road and bids us to love Him as He loved us, to befriend Him as He first befriended us, and to follow Him down the road that only love travels. It is a costly road and means refusing the comfort of self preservation and allowing for the vulnerability of love. Yet, as Paul reminds us, the excellence of knowing Him so far surpasses any price we might pay or loss we might incur (Phil.3:7-8). Our gaze is set upon the joy of knowing Him and the everlasting union with Him, forever minimizing the momentary troubles that we undergo in such pursuit (2Cor. 4:17).

God expresses Himself through His living Word. Hans Urs Von Balthasar said so brilliantly in his book entitled Prayer, “God’s Word is Himself, His most vital, His most innermost self” (pg.15). The knowledge or the life of God is communicated through the Word of God. Prayer is not meant to be a monologue. It is meant to be a dialogue that utilizes as specific language: God’s language, His Word. Often we have to be quiet for a moment-shut down everything and sit and receive the Word.
This is the door, the medium, through which we converse with God and His life is opened up to us. If we do not understand the purpose of the Word, we will miss out on the life of God. Finding God through His Word coverts us into a better likeness and image of our Creator. Every word in the Bible is a divine door into the heart of God and a divine ladder that brings us into the spiritual realm to be with God where He is.

Instead of reading God’s Word casually or disconnectedly, I come to it with humility and expectation. I make a point to be intentional and engaged. And I acknowledge that Jesus is calling me to know Him as much today as He did thousands of years ago when the Word was spoken. Every time we come before the Word, the Word of God pierces us to the core. It brings down our arrogance and pride, but edifies our spirits and enlightens our minds. Most importantly, the Word of God ushers us into an encounter with the living God. That’s its purpose. If we don’t receive the Word with that paradigm, if we don’t’ expect to meet Jesus each time we open the Word, we become dry and unaffected and bored. We will only know about God; we won’t truly know Him.

Yes. Love always pines and yearns when the beloved is absent, and we-as those who love Jesus in the time between His advents-are in every way subject to such longing. Yet this brings us to a dilemma-a difficulty with a certain sting to it. The dilemma is that though our minds know He was here and then taken up to heaven-and our mouths may give testimony to being His Bride awaiting His return-the longing of our hearts for Him is disproportionate to the time we are in. The difficulty is that though we claim deep love for Jesus, the degree of our satisfaction in the way things are indicates we might be guilty of a grave error in the laws of love. Yes, we do love Jesus. But if we love Him so, shall we not also miss Him greatly in His absence? Shall we not long for His appearing because He is the one we can’t live without? The sting that we must receive comes when we put this question to ourselves: could it be that our lack of mourning for Him might be significantly tied to our lack of truly knowing Him?

The fact is that we long for proximity and despise estrangement from those we love. If we truly love another, an aching and mourning must accompany any separation from that beloved one. Otherwise, there might be good grounds for questioning if it was truly love at all or if we actually know the one we “love.”

If we are willing in humility to bring our own hearts into question, we might find that we are the ones violating love’s laws. The very thing that Jesus searches for, the very thing that He refuses to come back without, is a rare find in all the earth. It is the heart of a yearning Bride in deep affection for an absent Bridegroom and in continual longing for His appearing, not just occasional pining.

In his book, Systemic Theology, Wayne Grudem articulates this dilemma well:
Do Christians in fact eagerly long for Christ’ return? The more Christians are caught up in enjoying the good things of this life, and the more they neglect genuine Christian fellowship with Christ, the less they will long for His return…To some extent, then, the degree to which we actually long for Christ’ return is a measure of the spiritual condition of our own lives at the moment(1093).

Just something to think about.

Jesus looks for a very specific response from us as His friends during this time. He searches for hearts that mourn and long and fast for Him as an expression of our friendship and intimacy with Him. He seeks those who cannot live as though things are all right in His absence, but rather yearn continually for His second coming. This mourning for Him and longing for His coming are produced by our growing in the knowledge of Him-the antidote that turns us from the error of a scoffing, unbelieving attitude and yields us to the assurance of all His promises (2Peter3:17-18). Jesus wants the intensification of our passion and desire for Him to culminate into living blamelessly in holy love before Him. This is what He searches for even now, and this is our part to play in the great story unfolding.
Attentive to our every decision and our every word, Jesus desires friendship on earth. He looks for a collective Bride that does not just pay lip service to Him, occasionally sprinkling His name into their language or claiming belief in Him according to convenience. He looks for those who live as though things are actually as they are-as though the Bridegroom that we love and will soon marry is away right now.
Though He has given us the Holy Spirit and we know the consolation of His indwelling presence, and though He has given us His Word and we know that which He has promised and spoken to us, the actual Person is not here in the flesh. We can’t touch Him; we can’t see Him with our eyes or hear Him with His own voice. Every day is a waiting, a preparing, and an anticipating of His most longed for coming again. For things to go on as they are is not okay. John Piper states, “The Bridegroom left on a journey just before the wedding, and the Bride cannot act as if things are normal. If she loves Him, she will ache for His return”.