A Spiritual Checkup For Intercessors
(2nd Edition)

Did you know that there is a relationship between your worship life and increased hearing in the prophetic and effective intercession?

God wants us to be instant in season and out of season to worship Him. "In season" is easy, that is worshipping when we feel like it. "Out of season" is a bit harder -- that is worshipping when our world seems to be falling apart, when we are burdened down with the cares of this world, when we are sad, etc. David understood this and in the Psalms we see a constant pattern of David taking his eyes off of the circumstances (and boy did he have some get-me-down types of circumstances) and focusing his eyes on God. Here is the secret: as we focus our eyes and attention away from the circumstances to God, God meets us and lifts us up to the Heavenlies, into His presence where there is "fullness of joy".

I was going through a situation that in the natural is very hard for me. If I was to focus on this situation, I would become overwhelmed and sad, alternating between wanting to give up and crying out to the Lord for His intervention in it. But God showed me that He has a better way. He wanted me to focus on Him instead of on the situation. He wanted to saturate me with His presence and reveal Himself to me. As I looked to Him instead of to the problem, I was drawn to Him and my heart spilled out into worship. The problem became small and insignificant in the presence of almighty God who can do all things and who works all things together for good. God became so big and so real and so tangible and so awesome.

Worship and intimacy with God go together. As we draw into worship, He comes and inhabits our worship. The Bible says that God inhabits the praises of His people. When He inhabits, we are in His presence and there is an increased intimacy with God. As His presence increases, we cannot help but respond to Him with increased worship and as the worship increases, His manifest presence with us increases. It is like a circle that goes on and on until we are transported from our circumstances into His very presence. And as God's manifest presence with us increases, there is an increase of anointing, where we can flow more freely with God and what He is doing, where we can move more easily in His gifting.

It becomes easier to hear Him speak. It becomes easier to flow in prophetic intercession. But our goal is NOT to worship so we can flow more and move more in prophetic intercession. Our goal is to worship to draw closer to Him. The increase in prophetic worship is a "fringe benefit" that comes as we are able to flow more easily in His anointing.

Our attention and focus are on Him, not on ourselves, and we desire to do with Him what He is doing to please Him. We are drawn into new depths of closeness with God. And incredibly powerful prayers can come from that place.

God told me that worshipping Him is our first and highest calling. It is what we were created to do. We have another important short-term task while we are alive on this earth. Jesus has made us His witness, and He has given us the responsibility to tell others about Him. But that is not what we are created for, it is not our ultimate destiny. You can think of being His witness like a temporary job. It only matters while we are alive on this earth and before Jesus returns as the Second Coming King. The "time of decision," when people can accept or reject Christ and His salvation, is very short-term compared to all of eternity.

Right now witnessing is a very important job, one that many of Jesus' followers fall short on. It is much more important to be His witness than it is to get a good education or a good job or a nice home and a comfortable life. Many Christians have their priorities wrong, they don't realize that their thinking is based on the world's values and all this still will pass away. Right now, in this life, we have an important short-term job to do: we are to be a witness for Jesus. This is very important and we must not slack off on that job. If we slack off now, that means that some people who were created to worship God will go to Hell and will not be able to fulfill their eternal destiny, and God won't get all the praise and worship He deserves.

It is very important to bring people into a personal relationship with Jesus, to introduce them to their Savior. But it is only a temporary job, not our eternal calling and destiny. We have to do our short-term job assignment while we are on this earth. We must e effective witnesses for Christ.

But at the same time, we also have our eternal job to do. That eternal job is to worship God. Fortunately, one does not exclude the other. We can both worship and be a witness here on this earth. When we die or if we are taken to Heaven without dieing -- at that point there won't be any need to witness anymore. That job will be over and done. But there will still be opportunity to worship God. We will be able to do that for all eternity.

There are lots of good things we can do on the earth that we won't do in heaven. It is good to share Jesus with the unsaved. It is good to tangibly meet people's needs and so manifest the love of God. It is good to pray and intercede and do spiritual warfare. It is good to minister to the saints. It is good to breathe His life through the prophetic, to set captives free and empower believers through renewal prayer. We are to do all of these things, because our Father is doing them and we am to do with Him what He is doing.

But our greatest ministry and our highest priority is to minister to the Father by worshipping Him. This is what He created us to do. And as we minister to Him and come deeper into His presence, we am able to see and hear and perceive more what His heart is and what He is doing and saying. And then we am able to flow more easily in His anointing (e.g. with His Spirit to do what He is doing). And He does delight to use us like this, to let us do with the Father what the Father is doing. Yet our highest calling and priority remains to minister to the Father in love by worshipping Him freely with our whole heart, our whole being. For when we worship God, it blesses Him, it ministers to Him, it makes Him happy.

God wants to teach us how to worship Him. His "school of worship" is incredible. We can go through circumstances that should be overwhelming, that should really get us down. Yet our spirit is soaring and we am filled with His joy. (This is because we have chosen to focus our eyes on Him and to look to Him instead of to the circumstances.)

God once told me that we have a choice.. we can choose to look to Him and be transformed into His presence or we can choose to focus on the problems and circumstances and be dragged down by them.

God told me that to go up "with Him" in worship, we must let go of the things that hold us down. We must stop clinging to them. If we are willing, He will help us, even to the point of prying our grasp off of those things that we are holding onto. Then He showed me a picture of a child's hand tightly grasping a stone. A parent's hand came along and began gently prying the fingers back one by one until the child could not cling to the stone any more and it fell out of his hand. God said He would do this for us, He will help us to release those things so we could go higher with Him. There will be times when we find it easy to simply let go of what holds us back and go up into worship with Him. But when it is hard for us to let go, He will not be upset. He promises to help us (even to pry our fingers loose from what we am clinging to) if we will choose to look to Him and focus on Him instead of on it.

A friend of mine put it this way: "Where we focus our attention is where we will dwell. We have a choice. We can live in the sad-lands, or we can live in God's promised land. It is up to us."

God desires that we focus our attention on Him and worship Him. And that transforms us from the sad-lands into His very presence where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.