PRAYER

One of the greatest experiences that best prepared me to serve overseas has to be the times spent with other individuals in prayer.  Learning to faithfully be on my knees in prayer and how to petition to our God on behalf of other lives as well as my own life has been the key that has opened doors for us in our lives and work.  I even remember the very first time my youth minister asked me to pray out loud for our group.  I was extremely nervous and unsure of what I was doing, but it was the start of learning how to pray.  Since that day I have sat in prayer meetings where I would listen to mature believers, who obviously knew what they were doing as they were bold and confident before our Father in their requests, and I would learn from the examples they set before me.  They did not know of course the huge impact they were making on this new little prayer warrior, but they were.  I would hear passion in their voices as they spoke with God and I could only imagine what their times with God were like spent behind closed doors.  I wanted that passion and thirst for God as well.   When I would pray behind my closed door at first, and for quite a few years, I would quickly run out of things to pray for.  I would have a very empty head all of a sudden when it came to my time in prayer.  Over the years I would learn how to use God’s own Word in my prayer times and so as I poured over scripture I would underline verses I could use in petitioning for myself and others.  I learned the purpose in prayer and the many different types of prayer.  The very first time I sat in a prayer meeting that went longer than one hour, my awareness of God’s presence in our time before Him grew.  After spending four hours of prayer with these women I began to understand how to thirst and hunger more for Him.  Prayer is simply sitting with the Lord and placing all of our attention on Him as we speak His promises and pour out our hearts to Him.  My prayer life deepened more and more as my time with Him alone became fuller.  I no longer would sit running quickly out of things to pray for, but instead I would pour over His promises in scripture and take hold of them and as I would do that the Holy Spirit would speak clearly into my heart the things He wanted me to petition for. The prayer time would not stop during that quiet time in my day.. it would continue as I would go about my day and the Holy Spirit would keep speaking into my heart what to pray for next.  I learned how growing close to the Lord really did in fact mean giving Him time in your day.  It meant being disciplined to sit still before Him every single day and it meant trusting Him to be faithful in those times of prayer to help us know how to pray.  I know some people like to attain things quickly, even a super deep relationship with God, but He created it to be something where we would have to invest in the relationship in order to receive from it.  Our lives today are so busy and fast, yet our God doesn’t change to adjust to us.  We need to change to adjust to Him.  If you want to thirst and hunger for Him, you have to make the investment to get to know Him and to do that involves prayer and reading His Word.  They go hand in hand.  You need His Word to pray, to know what promises to ask for in faith, and you need to pray as a result of reading His Word, which commands us to pray without ceasing.  

Spiritual War

There can be so much to say about the battles that take place in our lives and those around us on a day to day basis, however, I will use this writing to share some things I have personally learned, experienced, and been reminded of since serving and living overseas on the topic of spiritual warfare.  The first thing is that whether your emotions feel like it or not we are in these battles.  We cannot just wake up in the mornings and choose not to be a part of the day’s battle, for if we do so, and sometimes in our subconscious thinking we do this, we still will ultimately find ourselves within the trenches seeking help.  I have many times said that I was tired of the spiritual attacks we would receive and would call out to God that I was tired of fighting.  It came to a point of me feeling and expecting one endless attack after another, so bad that I would be able to predict that each week would have a new wave of attacks for us and I would wonder and even ask out loud, “What would our attack’s look like this week”.  Such thinking and feelings of hopelessness came as a result of choosing not to fight, thus leaving myself always in defense mode.  It was as if I would be standing at bat ready to hit the pitched ball when it came, even though I couldn’t see where it was coming from and how it would be pitched, but I hoped that I would be able to hit it out of the ballpark.  My odds in these battles were turning against me as I fought this way.  Then it got worse as each year would bring on us an unusual season of extremely difficult attacks that would always leave us questioning our purpose and reasons for serving Him overseas.  And even these seasons would come around the same time each year.  Fighting in this manner became exhausting mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  I came before Father after one of these intense seasons asking Him to teach me how to fight, but to do so not always in the defensive position, but in the offensive one.  This is where I learned the second thing I want to share with you.  God’s Word is filled with battles that are intended for us to learn from.   We see the physical battles between the Israelites and their enemies, and it is through these events we can learn how to engage our enemy, which is not flesh and blood.  God reminded me that whoever we blamed as the enemy in the physical was not right, and choosing to be offended by others was a sin of unforgiveness.  I had to learn who my real enemies were and change my thinking in accordance with His Scripture.  Ephesians chapter 6 gives  a great understanding of spiritual warfare and a great teaching on the importance to daily put on His armor.. And if you are like me, I took the daily thing way too lightly, in fact I was in a sense lazy when it came to putting on my daily armor.  Father asked me one day as I was talking with Him if I was ready to let Him do the fighting for me and if I had enough.  I responded that I was so angry with the enemy for these attacks and was ready to do anything to let Him fight for me.  His response showed me how I was ignorant of how things work in the spiritual realm.  God taught me that spiritual warfare prayer was needed daily in my times with Him, along with my daily reading time and prayer times of petitioning for others and myself.  As I sought out Scriptures on how to pray spiritual warfare prayers and even asked others for their prayers they used, I made a commitment to daily labor in prayer with these prayers.  I soon began to notice that the enemy was not giving up so easily in his attacks.  Anything that I prayed against would be my attack for a couple of days, or weeks.  However, I kept on being persistent though and did not give up.  I realized that stubborn faith developed in me as a result of God’s grace.  He wanted me to be tired of fighting in my own strength and He wanted me to be bothered enough to do something about it, so He allowed these attacks to make me into a pillar of stone, for His glory.  I am now developing these prayers for those around me and for my family.  Using prayer as my battleground daily, I pursue the enemy over my family, my brothers and sisters in Christ, the lost souls around us, and the city I live in.  I wake up each morning with a new mindset, that although today is a new day, the enemy is still the enemy and won’t back off, and if you serve Him on any level trust me he doesn’t.  With this type of daily prayer I am able to keep at bay by His grace and mercy alone and in the name of Jesus, emotional and mental attacks, where the enemy likes to keep us locked up under his influence of lies till we rebuke him.  I daily pray against attacks on us physically too, claiming victory over our health and as we go along throughout our day.  I pray against any curses that have been spoken against us by the enemy, and I remember the strong idol worship in our city that needs to be destroyed by God too.  I cover our relationships we have in prayer, asking for protection over them and rebuking the enemy’s attacks on them.  I declare my complete and utter dependence on the Lord for everything, for Him to deliver and to fight for us.  Lastly, I have learned not to fear!  Not fearing the enemy, not fearing his attacks, and trusting in the daily deliverance of the Lord’s hand in these attacks has brought a sweet victory that I know well that Christ has already won for us.  Scripture tells us how to fight, we just need to learn to fight fiercely and stubbornly and in His strength and grace.  I continue to learn new warfare prayers as I study the Word and gain knowledge from other teachers, and now I am moving into territories in prayer that I have never ventured before.  Put on His armor daily.. please don’t take this lightly as I have done in the past.  Every morning I read out loud Ephesians chapter 6:10-20, and every morning I rebuke the enemy from distractions and attacks in my time with the Lord.. and then I proceed to pray the heavens down on him.  Keeping the enemy at bay begins with a faith that moves us to our knees.  Let us not wait till he is already attacking at our door step, because of our lack of prayer and our laziness.  Let us run full speed ahead in Christ and fight like we mean it, fight like warriors, fight like we know where the victory is!  Fight till our last breath for Him!  And always have hope in Him!