My House Prayer

Prayer

Eunuch is service. The lust of the flesh does not pervert and cannot be acted on.

Many of us do not understand what prayer truly is. Many of us think that the extent of prayer is a reactive response to issues that arise or a blessing that precedes important events like dinner time.

However, while this is true, in Jesus is teaching about pray and shows us that that at the heart of genuine prayer is worship, adoration, presentation of the needs we have and that others have and most importantly, reconciliation (I want to come back to this in a minute)

Jesus teaches that we are to be audacious with our faith and let it translate in our prayer life.

He goes on to teach that we are to knock and keep knocking till the door opens and be specific when you pray!

Even in understanding this there are still some that think prayer is about getting the desires of our hearts but what we don’t realize is is that the more we pray the desires of our hearts ! changes and becomes the desires of the fathers heart! While our needs are important, the will of the father is more important!

This brings us back to reconciliation. tells us that Reconciliation is about bringing an unholy, unworthy people before a holy and righteous God and being made right before him through a relationship with Jesus Christ! We cannot take the bait of spiritual warfare where we concentrate on the present evil. If we do we miss the opportunity to be the Church that God has called us to be!!!

This is not just spiritual reconciliation! We should be the ones who lead the way with racial reconciliation, talking peace with those religions that seek war, reconciliation in the craziness that we know as the public school, reconciliation for those in the prisons, marriages and the list goes on!!

In order to get to the place where we are seeing this as a reality in our lives as well as our church we need to do a few things:

1. We do not need an amplification of prayer, we need a seismic shift to seeking the Lord!

We learn to pray by praying. It is more caught than taught.Teaching how to pray is simple. START PRAYING!! We must catch the spirit of prayer by seeking the LordIt is important to pray as individuals but just as important to pray together!Prayer from our prayer closet infiltrates the corporate prayer times. Fire from the corporate prayer times fuels our private prayer lives. This is catching the spirit of prayer and creating a culture of prayerSeeking the Lord will also begin to shift us from a place of seeing God as simply love but seeing God for the way he is portrayed in scripture…..HOLY! Don’t dumb God down he is holy and deserves reverence when we approach him!! This is a huge shift because many of us have no problem with a loving God but we have huge problem with a Holy God!How could God want me to be different, doesn’t he want me to be happy? Why would I have these feelings if God didn’t want me to act on them? It’s easy when it’s about love but difficult when we realize this love involves change and sometimes discipline. However, As we see God as holy we begin to desire him as holy and our lives begin to shift in the direction of holiness and reverence! When we simply pray for needs we move our hearts to a familiarity with God that creates contempt when we don’t get our desires. However, when we seek to know the heart of God his desires begin to become our desires!!! Holiness is the essence of wholeness. We cannot have the Love that God calls us to have without the wholeness of God! So we see that the love of God is driven by the wholeness of his Holiness!When we seek the Lord to know his heart, to know his wholeness or Holiness, this produces HUMILITY!!It is out of this humility that we will begin to see God Move!! - if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

Prayer will bring us from a focus on a church to a focus on the Kingdom!This starts with HumilityThis is bigger than one church body, it’s about the body of Christ!!We all want a move of God and our problem is not whether or not God is moving. He’s moving!!Our problem is a lack of humility that keeps us focused on us and how we feel and what we want and how we want it and we miss what God is doing right in front of us!What we want is a move of God where the Shekinah Glory or the sustained dwelling of his presence that hovers over the Westend. That bring change to the Poconos and NEPA.In order for us to see this there must be those who are praying the heart of the father. This will develop a community of like-minded believers but for this to happen there must be unity and in order for unity to happen there must be humility. There will never be a sustained move of God without healthy community which demands us to be grounded in a Kingdom mindset!We need to learn to realize that this starts with humilityLuke 11 Jesus tells us to pray for the Kingdom of God to come! In order to for this to happen we have to be willing to allow the Spirit of God to lead us away from being a place where the needs of the saints are prayed for and the community turns for prayer so that they don’t have to pray to a place where we are taught to pray. Where we teach the community what it means to pray.To lead the community in understanding the love of God through the Wholeness of God! We must be the example!!!The enemy knows this and he will work in the hearts of those who do not have a strong prayer life to break down humility, disrupt unity into order to destroy the community and ultimately cause us to move away from the Glory of God!

We must stay focused on the Kingdom and it’s mission!

A strong prayer life will move us from centripetal force to centrifugal force. We all want to see a church grow!Growth comes when people are sent. People are only sent when they respond to drawing of the Holy Spirit