Prayer-School Course #5

A Spiritual Checkup For Intercessors

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/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.

Intimacy with God and worship go together. As we draw into worship, He comes and inhabits our worship.. for the bible says 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... a circle that goes on and on until we are transformed 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 and it is a "fringe benefit" that we are able to flow more easily in His anointing. Our attention and focus are on Him, not 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.

Finally, God told me that worshipping Him is our first and highest calling -- what we were created to do. Yes, it is good to share Jesus with the unsaved. Yes it is good to tangibly meet people's needs and so manifest the love of God. Yes, it is good to pray and intercede and do spiritual warfare. Yes, it is good to minister to the saints. Yes 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 ... our highest priority... is to minister to the Father.. to worship 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/hear/perceive more what His heart is and what He is doing/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's "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.)

He 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.. to stop clinging to them. He told me that 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... to help us release those things so we could go higher with Him. He said there would be times when we would find it easy to simply let go of what holds us back and go up into worship with Him. But when it was hard to let go, He would not be upset.. He promised to help us (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 and that transforms us from the sad-lands into His very presence where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.

Come there with me.... turn your eyes from your circumstances to our awesome and most powerful God and enter into worship... for He is worthy of our worship and praise... and in His presence is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.

[Please Note:

This is intended as a discussion series. Please feel free to send your discussion (comments or questions) to prayer-school@godspeak.net. We will have online discussion each week. These discussions will NOT be put on the course WWW page.]