“Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed.”
(Mark 1:35)
As you read this, would you pray with me? That the Lord would open our heart up to hear and receive the awakening of love and hunger:
Lord, I open my heart to you right now, speak to me now, Lord as I read this…
It’s a glorious thing to be a “Body”. It’s a joyful thing to see God moving in our midst in such an orchestrated fashion as He gives each of us our parts to play, renewing our thoughts and reviving our hearts. We desire, more than anything, that the fullness of what God is doing could find a home in us, so His sound could be heard. And that the sight of what He’s doing would be the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.
Lord, as I read this…allow the “sound” to come that You want and then the substance of God that You want to release. In Jesus Name, I pray.
We all have “smart phones or tablets”. Today is August 24, 2014, if you have one, take it out right now and pull up your calendar and go to “October 8”, click the date and create an “event”. Title it, “Highway 35” (Which is an upcoming conference event for us). For location, we would write, “Jubilee”. On the start time, enter “all day”, and that it ends the next day. Then click “done” and it will show up on your calendar. Right?
What we just did was to “synchronize” our calendars, via our little smart phones. It’s amazing what we can do with these smart phones. We can even invite friends. If we wanted, we could send this event to our entire contact list.
The funny thing about life now is that there is so much communication happening, that we are free now, not to respond to anything we don’t want to. The friends that would get our event date can keep or delete it, because this is the power that these phones carry. We could text people any time, even when we’re in a church service. We could get on-line and tune in anytime.
Smart phones have capabilities of doing much; it has pictures, ability to record moments or videos and send them. It has global positioning. It now has satellite GPS capabilities and everything in our cars can be Blue-toothed to our phones.
There are apps for all our interests. Schools now have apps where their data can go to our phones. A doctor can use it as an EKG reader. You can also google anything—dictionaries, concordances, etc. It is unlimited.
So, let’s make a connection right now in Ephesians 3:14-21
14 For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,[c] 15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
20 Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, 21 to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
The Father told me that creation was about to resemble to Creator’s ability. We are beginning to see what is actually coming from the mind of the Creator.
The Smart Phone, or the smart tablet, is the inner man. Your inner man is the communication device that God installed in you. It is far beyond what man has designed, and has yet accomplished. It is even where people are storing their lives—where they’re going, what they are doing. It has become a tool.
The inner man in us, which is not the outer man. It’s not the things we possess, it’s not the resource of our natural mind or flesh. It is the inner man, the hidden man of God—the spirit, soul, heart. It’s the place God resides. The inner man is God’s smart phone. It’s our smart phone to heaven. It’s our ability to have apps, design, and communication, to find our way, to have contacts, to connect, to discern, to grow and develop.
Like the smart phone, it takes time to learn and discover all its ability.
Here are two scriptures as they describe Jesus:
Luke 5:12-16 – 12 And it happened when He was in a certain city, that behold, a man who was full of leprosy saw Jesus; and he fell on his face and implored Him, saying, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.” 13 Then He put out His hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing; be cleansed.” Immediately the leprosy left him. 14 And He charged him to tell no one, “But go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as a testimony to them, just as Moses commanded.” 15 However, the report went around concerning Him all the more; and great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed by Him of their infirmities. 16 So He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.
In Mark 1, Jesus comes into Capernaum, preached a message in the synagogue, delivered a man from a demon, gone to Peter’s house and healed his mother-in-law, all the town showed up, after lunch and He prayed for them and healed them, all day long and then says in vs 32: 32 At evening, when the sun had set, they brought to Him all who were sick and those who were demon-possessed. 33 And the whole city was gathered together at the door. 34 Then He healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and He did not allow the demons to speak, because they knew Him.
Wow…what a day.
35 Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed. 36 And Simon and those who were with Him searched for Him. 37 When they found Him, they said to Him, “Everyone is looking for You.” 38 But He said to them, “Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also, because for this purpose I have come forth.” 39 And He was preaching in their synagogues throughout all Galilee, and casting out demons.
Here is Jesus, again, in a solitary place, up early—praying. The more ministry increased, the more Jesus had to pray.
This wonderful smart phone or tablet has a battery. And, the battery carries a power that was given to it by having plugged into a power source. The more we use the phone, the more apps we run, or if I run Netflix, the battery will drain it really quickly.
You can get a quick charge and keep it in your car, that this is an awesome idea, or it’s a better idea to plug it in overnight. Most of us have a routine with our smart phones of when we ought to plug it in. We’ve learned that its better that we always have it charged to get us through a day, rather than think that we can go an extra day, than get wiped out in the middle of the day. It happens to us all.
If we don’t charge our smart phone, it becomes as useful as a paper weight or a door stop. Right? There is no value in it. Because, all its value is intrinsic within; and it is dependent on multiple things. It has to have a functioning operating system, it has to be connected to a carrier, it has to have WIFI to operate, or a carrier that we subscribe to, it has to be turned on, responded to, and it has to be used. And, the more we use it, the more we drain the battery.
So, if our inner man is God’s smart phone—our smart phone to heaven, and we are strengthened with might according to His riches in glory through the inner man. Our inner man becomes charged with Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes, and by filling me, the first part of my operating system is Jesus Christ abiding in my heart. And, He is the way, the truth and the life.
With Jesus, He says, we are to be rooted and grounded in love. The language of the operating system, the smart phone inner man, is love.
Love is the language; love is the app. everything flows out of and with, the sound of love. It’s unlimited. It’s like games that can go to level’s upon level’s, upon levels. It’s like stories, where you can read chapter after chapter and book after book. It is never ending love. Yet, no one who has ever lived, has yet discovered the substance of love—the width, length, height or depth. It is beyond knowledge… but it is experiential.
Within you and me, there is a fullness of God that comes through the “full charge”. There is the unlimited ability of never being able to out ask God, or out think God. He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above all that we could ask or think, according to the POWER that is working. No power-no working. It has to be functioning.
Jesus teaches only two times about prayer; and one time was at the request of His disciples. The only thing that the disciples wanted, to have insight on, was, “Lord, teach us to pray.” They had observed Jesus. On the other hand, the record of Jesus’ time in prayer is expansive.
Before Jesus chose His twelve disciples, and before He preached the Sermon on the Mount, He spent the entire night in prayer. When He had the miracle of the multiplication, when the people were so enamored with the sound of the multiplication that they wanted to make Him king, He sent everyone away and He went up and spent the night in prayer. Jesus said, “that He only did what He saw His Father doing and He only said what He heart His Father saying”. Jesus’ life was a life of prayer.
It’s as simple as this, if my battery is not charged and if I’m not connected to a service, then I carry a limited amount of storage. I can’t text message, or I can only use what I have stored in there. But, if I can connect, it is unlimited where I can go.
I was gloriously saved in 1976. I went from a dead man to a smart phone—a genius phone—it was an overwhelming conversion. I was swept into the kingdom. My mom had been praying for 6 years and when I got saved, it was explosive.
A young man had led me to the Lord, then the next day I was led to a discipleship house in Thousand Oaks. I moved there two weeks later and began to become immersed in Christianity and faith. Prior to this, I knew nothing at all. As I did, I found that the operating system that had been installed in my new birth was immense. It was a sense of awareness. I could read the bible and it made sense.
I learned to pray. I watched my friend get up and pray every night, kneeling by his bed. So, I got up and kneeled at my bed. Like a child, we just emulate what we see being done. The whole thing about the Son of God is Jesus said, in John 4, “the Son can do nothing of Himself but what He sees His Father doing.”
I would watch my son Nathan who was a year old at the time, and would get so excited at what he was learning to do. The Lord said, “Look at him. He’s learning everything, simply because he’s imitating you. Because, in him is the capacity to become you. So, he’s just imitating you and the more he’s with you and see’s you, it awakens who he is inside.
That’s how we grow up.” And he said, “That is the exact same way it works in My kingdom. The more you see Me, are with Me, feel Me, experience Me, are around Me, the more of Me becomes awakened inside of you. And it really was happening!
At this time, I watched Danny Miller, a friend of mine. He was the leader of the house and he would go around just worshipping. So, I was being bookended by a man who likes to praise and one who likes to worship and the Lord starts marking me.
Once you start using any of the apps God give you, they start growing; and they develop; and it took off from there, very quickly.
Within a month, I was so activated, I would be brought up to the front of the stage and people would say, “Look at this guy”. I would smile like an idiot and tell people I was saved for about a month. I was leading people to the Lord.
When worship played, I couldn’t stand, I had to be on my knees. I couldn’t be still when praise was sung, I had to be dancing. I covered my car with bumper stickers that said things like, “You’d smile too if you were going to heaven” or “I found IT”.
I got baptized in the Holy Spirit while driving on Thousand Oaks Blvd. This is where I was led into the prayer. I opened my eyes just before I crashed into a car because I didn’t know you didn’t have to keep your eyes closed when you prayed. It was all new to me! I was ecstatic about the Spirit and I was singing in tongues while getting lost and still driving.
The first thing I did, the next morning, was to leap up out of my bed to see if I could do it again. And I COULD! I was a music major at Ventura College and I told my professor, (who helped me know about Jesus but himself wasn’t serving Jesus), “I understand where Gregorian chants come from…these guys are singing in tongues!”
I was so filled with God. I failed out of college. I went from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s. I would read the bible and another book…then, within a week, I stopped reading anything except the Bible. I asked my professor if I could write my papers about books in the bible. So I would write about books in the bible and would make sure that he would know how to get saved by the end of it. At the end of the semester, he said, “I don’t know what happened to you with your faith, but your grammar is getting better.”
This went on for six to eight months. But, something started happening…I started overusing my smart phone. I wasn’t charging it to the point where it needed to be to stay alive.
I was practicing prayer. I was practicing worship, memorizing scriptures. But, I was more in the company of “everyone doing it”, rather than understanding how I needed to plug myself in.
So, low and behold…I’m in a backslidden state. To me, a definition of “backsliding” is found in proverbs. A backslider in heart “will be filled with his own ways”.
Simply put, whenever I am full of myself, I’m backslidden. Whether I’m full of myself, in the biggest and best of ways, or full of myself in the “Woe is me” ways, it is when I am self-aware, not God aware.
God is like AT & T. He understands that if He’s going to keep us and if He is going to stay our Provider, He needs us to sign a new “two year contract”. So, right about the time when we are ready to say, “I don’t think I need this smart phone, this communication devise”, He comes in with a deal, and we sign up.
For me, my “deal” was to go to Idaho. I was young and just saved. A small group of us were going to go and work with an Episcopal priest to help start a youth ministry in Sun Valley, Ketchum, Idaho.
I sold my ’61 Bug to gain the money required. We arrived the day after Thanksgiving. We stayed in a guest house with electricity… but no heat, in winter.
I had an epiphany. I suddenly became aware of one thing…I am backslidden. I can’t find God! I had no signal. Out of this, I got rebooted. Like a smart phone that gets stuck, gets a virus or something, there is a setting that says, “Restore to original settings”. I remember crying out to God. “What am I doing here? How did I get here?” This was primal prayer.
I was spending every waking hour, when I wasn’t working, praying. I walked snow covered streets praying, and telling God, “What I knew of You in California isn’t working here. I need connection!”
…And, little by little, because of the intensity of my need, I couldn’t stop going in that direction. I began to find the Lord afresh and anew. Finding Him afresh, I started to get support in my journey. I started reading Brother Murray’s’ and Brother Lawrence’s books. I read, “Praying Hyde”. I devoured these books. I was being pulled up—my vision was expanding. I didn’t know it, but I was getting a new operating system. I was getting downloads on how to live.
I started discovering that this Jesus, this One that I said, “I want to seek Your face”, was beckoning me to find Him. And I HAD to find Him, because nothing else worked. The only thing that really worked was HIM. I was learning.
I experienced that we don’t learn certain things unless we are in this compacted, crushing experience and we have to go off and find our way.
I was learning to pray. Everything started growing on this journey. I didn’t realize that the crisis that I was in was a gift from God, to access the calling of God that I had exhausted because I hadn’t been plugged in anymore.
I had gotten into the motions. I could do church. I could look like the “wonder kid” that got radically saved…but I didn’t have this cord that was pulling and reviving me. I didn’t know how to plug in. I learned in those 3 ½ years how to plug myself into God.
To whatever level you are given invitation, and you accept, to know God, will be the level that life works from for the rest of your life. And, to retreat from the level of knowing Him from the level you were invited to—that you said “Yes” to, will be a level of defeat, of a fashion. It may be emotional, soulish. But, once you download the app…Once you put all your context into that system, it’s where you are supposed to operate from. That is a truth.
Here is another truth: The higher you go, the more you are required to be charged by God. You have to have more of Him. The higher we go, the more of accessing the operating system of heaven we experience; and we begin to live by the spirit and not the flesh. This is the realm that we are to live from. We may have times where we fall back, but it’s not our place. The more we are there, the more we’ll drain our battery—our inner man. And, once more, we will have to get plugged in. This really comes by practicing His presence, coming into prayer, into worship, having the quiet time, the alone time, studying His scripture.
Our corporate gatherings are not where our batteries get charged. For uploading new systems, improving functionality, clarity, and mapping—we get our batteries charged in our quiet times. We get a quick charge when we gather together, but the Lord wants to imprint and open us up.
The beautiful thing about an uncharged battery, in our phone, is that if we plug it into a power source, we can immediately use our phone—while the battery is still being charged.
Right now, God wants to supernaturally plug us in. Plug us in to Him, so that we can become aware again of where we are called to live. What is the place that God gave us invitation to, where we responded, where we now have place?
And with this, Holy Spirit will give a sense of how we now, keep our battery charged. What is our alone process? Where do I quiet myself into His presence? How am I to develop the plugging in? And, how do I hold the place of living?
Beloved,
Would you close your eyes and receive Him? He’s more than able. You are so loved and valuable. You have to know how much He loves you. The very essence of God is love. This will take the fragmentation and brokenness and starts reviving and renewing. By the blood, you hear that you are saved and loved and delivered. Holy Spirit, Come.
Ask Holy Spirit to upgrade everything, systems restored, even back to the place we started if necessary. If our files have been corrupted, Holy Spirit will expunge the illegal data. Where anything has come into our soul and is binding us or stealing from us, we command it to loose us now. We say, the blood of Jesus go through and work out our systems of our conscience—cleanse us, purge us. Stay open! Holy Spirit has great ability to the rebooting with upgrading and updating! Wherever we have lost our way, God is restoring the GPS system back on line! We are in God’s time and in His plan—we are not lost of forgotten! Where communication has become static or hard—we command in Jesus Name, Communication – Be restored now!
We are alive in Christ now and forever!
Upcoming Events
Wednesday, August 27, 6PM: Discovery Group – I will be sharing “How to plug into the Power Source of God” The inner man (our smart phone) needs to be strengthen with might.
Wednesday, 7PM: Glory Service – I will be sharing “Beginning Anew in Prayer” What are the common factors that enable us to enter into a new season of prayer? What are the hindrances that prevent us?
Sunday, August 31, 9AM: Brian Rogers will be sharing, “The Love Journey” The new season is here.
Sunday, 10:20AM: Nations Prayer – Join us as we join our intercession for the nations, peoples, and kingdoms of this world calling them into Revelation 11.
Sunday, 11AM: I will be sharing “The Pivotal Point in any Battle”. When a battle rages against our soul, (or in any place of responsibility and assignment) what shifts it from defeat to victory? What is our part and what is God’s part?
If you would like to practice finding the “sound”, please come to Practicing the Presence of God-Today, a 5 week series, which starts next Wednesday, September 3rd from 6:00PM to 6:50PM. This series is designed to equip the believer to live in the Spirit. How to hear the voice of God, how to entertain the presence of God, how to develop a rewarding quiet time with God, how to grow is scripture, both the largeness of the word (growing in foundational truth) and the intimacy of the word (experiencing revelation and encounters behind the veil). How to develop the multiple dimensions of intimacy, learning His delights, and the special place Jesus has prepared for you. There will be skills taught, that should be practiced during the week for optimum benefit from this series.
Registration is required, please register here.
