The prophet stood in front of me, an ecstatic glow emanating from his whole being. He had died, but he was alive again. His eyes wide with wonder, he exclaimed, “I saw Him!” He then wrapped his arms around me. This supernatural embrace was a living power encounter. In it, I felt God’s overwhelming glory, light and energy sweep through my being.
When I woke up from this dream, I knew it was a weighty one. The brother it featured had graduated to heaven a few weeks prior. I have come to understand that the Lord deposited something vitally important into me through this nighttime experience. Holy Spirit was further awakening in me His gift of seeing into the heavenly realms. This man of God proclaimed to me, “I saw Him,” and then symbolically passed that seeing to me through his embrace.
I’ve been sharing with you in my last six posts about partnering with God in intercession. Today, I want to delve into the practical “how to” aspect of this co-labor with Him in response to the groaning of creation. As Holy Spirit emphasized in my dream, we need to see Him. Central to effectively becoming God’s channel, releasing His purposes into the earth, is this crucial matter of seeing into the Kingdom realm.
Look at the Throne
Has it ever happened to you, that you set aside time for prayer, and ended up more discouraged by the time you were done than when you began? There is a reason for this. Our prayers will always follow the focus of our heart’s eyes. Frequently, our spiritual eyes are fixated on the problem instead of on the Solution (God!). As a result, we end up pointing our expended energy towards the dilemma instead of towards the Lord.
A particular prayer gathering I attended recently sticks out in my memory as an illustration of this principle. At the beginning of the meeting, an intercessor went through a long list of dire prayer needs. Each and every one of them was real, legitimate, and troubling. The result of reading them all out at length was that the atmosphere of the meeting began on a very low note. Trying to move from there up into a place of faith after that was like trudging through mud.
A much more effective way to start out any prayer time, whether corporately or alone in the privacy of your bedroom, is to purposefully focus on Jesus sitting on His throne. Fixing our spiritual eyes on Him is a discipline that take practice; however, if you keep at it, you will gradually find it coming more and more naturally to you. (For further insight into how to get started with this practice, read here.)
As you fix your gaze on Him in His beauty and His glory, your spirit lifts. I imagine you have heard the expression, “it lifted my spirits?” That’s a real dynamic in the invisible realm. We find its description in this verse: “To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul” (Ps. 25:1, NKJV). As we get our focus on Him, our soul begins to lift. We begin to operate out of the spiritual position He purchased for us with His blood: that of being seated with Him in the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6). This places us with Him, high above the troubling earthly circumstances that are needing attention in prayer. From this vantage point, we are able to connect effectively with His own intercession and release its power into the physical realm.
(To be continued tomorrow!)
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Have you experienced the lifting of your soul to a higher vantage point in spirit? If so, what were you doing when that happened?
Feeding On Jesus 