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PRAYING IN THE
SPIRIT SERIES
GRASPING OUR FUTURE
FROM THE SPIRITUAL REALM
Heb. 11:1, how faith is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen. One of the most important thing that
take place as you pray is what we see when we pray. The language of the spirit
world is pictures and visions. The language of the spirit is dreams and
visions. What we are going to talk about is the more detailed area of what
actually takes place within those visions and dreams. In an overnight vigil, we
pray that all that we see are visions and not dreams so that you understand the
things that you are seeing and the perspective of seeing. There are different
levels that you go into the realm of prayer. As you start your mind may be
distracted. But as you go deeper and deeper all the distractions die off. And
you reached a point when it seems that God and you are in communion. And God is
imparting upon your spirit images, images of your future life. What it should
be. God is seeding to you what He wants you to become in the future. And that’s
the aspect we want to talk about.
So in order to launch into that, let’s understand from
God’s perspective. In the Bible it talks about how God sit in a place where He
calls the wheel within a wheel. And God exists like in a place where time does
not exist. Where there is no past to Him. There is no future to Him. Everything
is present. Imagine God in your mind as dwelling in a wheel within a wheel. And
the meaning of a wheel within a wheel is a description of time from God’s perspective. God's existence is in the middle of the wheel.
And far out from that wheel away from the centre is a circumference that we may
call the time dimension that surround God. So as far as God is concerned, the
past and the future are no different. He could reach out and touch the past or
the future. All of eternity has already been laid out as far as God is
concerned. He knows the beginning and the end. That’s why His name is called
the Alpha and Omega. So as far as God is concerned the time dimension is only
outside of Him, experienced by His creation. So God could reach out to all
levels of time equally. The future and the past are the same to Him. He could
see all at once. But we live in the outer rim of the spokes where time exists.
So God is in the centre of it and the external is the time dimension. From
God’s perspective He can see all things, past, present and future. We are
experiencing a little bit of time at a time. And we are experiencing bit by
bit. God can easily unfold to us any part of the future that He sees from
whichever time realm. The authors who wrote Genesis was not alive when the
creation took place but yet how did he know the details of God’s creation? How
did he know all those things that took place in Adam’s time? I believe part of
that knowledge was given when Moses was with God in the 40 days and nights the
he was experiencing with God. God showed him the videotape, if you can express
it that way, of all the things from the past. And Moses had an accurate account
of all those things that took place from the creation of the world and
preserved that account for us today. God took Moses into the centre realm where
He was where time doesn’t exist. And Moses could see as it really happening. It
was what God showed from the past the reality of it happening except that Moses
was in the spirit and he could see all those things that took place.
Paul experienced that when he said in 1 Corinthians11: 23, For
I have received from the Lord Jesus that which I also delivered to you: that
the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when
He had given thanks, etc.’ You and I know that Paul was not there. As far
as the gospel is concerned, he was not a follower of Jesus Christ. But here
Paul says I received. So what Paul experienced was when he was in the
spirit. God took him from the external circumference and placed him in the
spirit realm where God dwells. The spirit realm has no time dimension. And in
the spirit realm God showed Paul exactly what happened in the Lord’s Supper.
And Paul said I received from the Lord Jesus that which I also deliver to you.
He even knew the exact words Jesus said even though he was not there. He spoke
of it as if he was there. And in a sense he was there in the spirit. And as we
move into prayer, what God does is many times He takes you from the outer
spokes of the circle and brings you to where He is to give you the perspective
that He has. Now this takes time. You cannot do it in what I call a 5 minutes
kind of prayer. Those prayers are lifting your request before God for the
moment. But to really enter into the realm that God lives, we need time where
you could spend hours with God seeking to move into God’s Presence.
I love to pray about
6 hours. God did something that was relevant to the message today. In the
Spirit, he took me from the outer circumference into where He is. And he showed
me my future. He showed me things that will happen in 5 years time, he showed me things that will happen in 10 years time,
in 15 years time. I saw precisely what I was supposed to do. What was supposed
to happen? Where I was supposed to be. Then He showed
me the very end of my ministry. He showed me right towards the zenith of the
ministry, right at the peak. Now I am still in the embryo stage compared to all
those things.
I can tell you it
does something to you after you go through all these things. Then you come back
to the present, you feel different. You feel like you have a mission. You feel
that all those things that you are doing and all those things you are seeking
to accomplish are just peanuts. It does something to you when you have an over
view in your life in the future. It changes your attitude of life. It changes
your value of things. It changes your value system. For example when we were
small certain things were very valuable to us. But when you grew up in your
late 20s, other things take precedent. Then when you grew older still maybe you
are in your 40s other things will take precedent. So the value
you have on things when you are in your 40 years of age, 30 years of age are
different. What you have an experience of going so far into the future and when
you come back to the present, your value and perspective are so different. You
sort of have an understanding of the perspective of where you are. And what you
are doing and how it has a role to play in what is to come. You sort of have an
understanding of the timing of how many years and how long you have in each
sector of your work. So it gives you an urgency of how much time you have in
each section to complete. I believe that when we move into deep prayer.
In Heb. 11:1 From the above understanding, we may paraphrase what faith
is. Faith is moving into the realm where God moves in to see things from His
perspective. In speaking from our circumference at the spoke, all of us
have a past, a present and a future. The interesting thing about how faith
operates is that God always has to show you the future. In Heb.11: 1, `Faith is
the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ What is
the substance of thing hoped for? What is hope? Hope lies in the future. Hope
is what you see in the future, what is supposed to come. Something positive in
your future is the definition of hope. The Bible says faith is the substance of
thing hoped for. Now if faith is the substance of hope, then hope is quite
important. If faith is the substance of hope, then you need hope before you can
have faith. We need a glimpse of the future before we can have faith.
It seems that man is
made to live on faith. Man is made such that if he had not the future, he had
no desire to live in the natural and in the spiritual. The only reason for our
existence and the desire to press on is two ways. Either we are just satisfied
with life as it is in the present or we have something that we aspire to in the
future. Any human being that looses the desire or loose hope has a suicidal
tendency. The moment you loose your hope, you loose your desire to live. Human beings are made to function on hope.
That hope must exist. And that hope is brought into existence by another force
call faith. You need plenty of hope for plenty of faith. Little hope, little
faith. So we need to know what to do with our past and how to get into our
future. How much faith potentially you can have depends on how much hope you
have. How much hope you have depends on how much of your future that you can
see.
For example if our
country is short of metal and there is a worldwide shortage of metal, then we
will start running out of certain materials for the car. Manufacturers will
have to think of other materials or reduce the production. So
one lack will affect the other. And all through the Bible when God works
through His people in Genesis to Revelation everything He said was a seed of
hope and faith. Everything He said produces an image of the future. When He
created Adam and Eve before they fell, He said, `Be
fruitful and multiply.’ He told them what they were supposed to do. And all
through the Bible God always tell His people their future. One of the things
the Holy Spirit is supposed to do is to tell us what is going to come. Jesus
said in John 14 –16, `When He the Spirit of Truth has come, He will show you
things to come.’ So we must realized that we must know
to how to relate to our past, our present and our future.
Those who live in their past are living in dead monuments.
There are many ways you can live on your past. The moment you start living on
your past, you are dead. You have stopped everything in your process. And there
are many times when the past eats into the future. For example if you have a
bad past. Maybe you did things that are wrong. Or maybe these were crisis in
your past. Do you notice something? The past enters into the present. It
affects your life now. It affects your thoughts now. It affects your
imagination now. Its from the past but its eating into
your future. It is like an old debt that has not been repaid. It’s eating into
your time. It’s eating into your future also because by destroying your
present. It destroys your future. And there are a lot of people who keep on
living in their past. 90% of their past
is affecting their present and its affecting the future. They have a very faint
10% hope that keeps them going. If that disappeared they would just desire to
die.
God made man in such
a way that we must face the future in order to continue living the way we want
it. God has made us in such a way that we are creatures on the circumference of
time walking forward in time. And there is a way that we must learn to deal
with the past. And that is by considering it gone, considering it past,
considering it dead. Which is what Paul meant when He says old things are
passed away, behold all things are become new. Phil. 3:13, `Brethren, I do
not count myself to have apprehended but one thing I do, forgetting those
things which are behind. He learns how to drop off the past. He learns to
lay them down and keep reaching for the future. That is the way he exists.
In the stories of the heroes of faith found in Hebrews 11,
every man of God who lives in God has always lived more for the future than for
the past or for the present. Heb. 11:13, These all
died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar
off.’ They came into the realm where God is. And they were able to see into
the future. God made man to live for the future. Man is made with a soul and a
spirit that needs to feed on what he can see for the future. And if you want to
live to the 100% of what God wants you to be and bring out the potential in
your life that God has placed, you need to see 100% into the future. If you
have10% of your past still retained in your present, you will only be able to live
up to 90% of your potential. It takes a renewed mind and a re-education of the
way we view life and the way we view ourselves to adjust to 100%. If you allow
50% of your present to be taken up by your past, you straight away
automatically take 50% of your energy that you could use for the future away.
And you can only achieve 50% of what you are actually designed to achieve in
this life.
When the Lord showed me my future, I began to realize that
God wants me to just focus mainly and live on the future. There is no such
thing as living in the present without some past coming in. The only way to
eliminate that is to look into the future. If you keep living in the present
before long the task that you have looks so huge. The task that is before you
looks like Mount Everest . But when God really
began to take you into where He stays, where time doesn’t exist, you will begin
to see your own future. Sometimes He will show you other people’s file. And as
you look further out, you realize there are so many things out there. God takes
you on a tour in the spirit world. By the time you come back you realize that
this Mount Everest looks like a molehill.
Think about the time you graduated from school and started working. The first
time you get $1000/-, it looks a lot. In fact the first time you got $500/- it
looks a lot. But now some of you have been in life long enough and having dealt
with larger sums, you realize that was nothing.
God designed us to
live of the future like our body is designed to live on oxygen; it’s not design
for carbon dioxide. He has designed us to live of the future. And every time
you have achieved something, He will show you some more. You begin to have a
different value and a different perspective. There was something that has been
placed inside what I call the image, the vision that God implants into your
spirit when He shows you the future. It changed my value of things. It changed
my perspective in certain areas. Then I began to examine the Bible and realized
that all those times that God showed and talked to His people, He wanted them
always to forget the past and look to the future. If there was anything He
wants them to remember, it was only things that will help them in the future.
Even the Lord’s Supper if you notice, the focus is on the coming of Christ, and
not just on Jesus' death. He purposely repeats that. I have examined scriptures
after scriptures. Every time God spoke to His people He spoke of the future. He
spoke it as if it was present. But He spoke of things to come. In 1 Corinthians11:
26, `for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the
Lord’s death till He comes.’ The
remembrance of the cup is anticipation also of His coming. He keeps the future
alive.
Faith is the substance of thing hoped for. So there is a
process here. God first produces faith by producing hope in us. He puts future
events and things in the future into us. He puts hope in us. Then when we read
the word of God and sees how these people could do it
in the Bible. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word. We see how those
days God was faithful and achieved great and mighty things in these heroes of
faith. By meditating on this hope, faith reaches out to begin substantiating
the things that are hoped for. What happens when you go into long hours of
prayer, don’t ever miss it, is that God begins to take you from the
circumference into the centre of the spoke where He is. And He keeps showing
you those things over and over again. He takes delight in showing you like the
people who live by faith and who have seen from afar. And they live for a
future. He talks about Abraham looking for a place. God wants us until He could
tune our very soul and our spirit like Paul saying forgetting those things that
are behind. I press to the future; the he could reach into the realm of the
Spirit. By having a long session of prayer, we are taking a bus ride into the
future. Praying long hours with God is like getting on the bus with the Holy
Spirit as your driver and tour guide the bus passes by the future in many
places as if it is on a sight seeing tour of the future.
But there are
certain conditions before we move into that realm. You have to clear the screen
first for it to be projected into you. Some of us still have the mist in our
eyes when we get on the bus. There is evidence of something from the past. It’s
an evidence that you have experienced. If you have
been in a crowded place with a lot of smokers, and you
walk into a hall of people and you smell of smoke. It is evident that you have
been in a place where there are a lot of people who are smoking. So these are
evidences from the past. Sometimes when you get on the bus.
You are looking on all the scenery and your past comes into your mind. Some
places remind you of good old days. Some places bring memory of bad old days.
And you go into a kind of mood and it looks like you are lost by yourself.
Thank God that’s not what the He wants us to do. The only time that He deals
with our past is when there is disobedience. The reason why He deals with our
past is to remove it to give you the future. If there were something in your
life that has been blocking His work, you would have no doubt that every time
you pray it will come right before you. Or it is something that is weighing
heavily on you in the present so that you cannot see the future,
the Holy Spirit will start dealing in your life in that way.
What you need to do is to go through the first gear. The
first gear is the most powerful gear but gives the slowest speed. You need that
power to create momentum. You need that strong force. So when you start in your
prayer, it may look like your bus is to go on first gear, especially if you got
a lot of weights. God wants to clear your past to leave your present. The
purpose why you move into the depth of prayer is like all the previous men of
God are to see into your future is to allow the Spirit of God to show you
things to come. As long as you don’t have a glimpse of your future, your energy
to live in the present is dying. Perhaps you are occupying 90% with the past
and the present. And it looks like you are running out of energy to go on. Your
only cure is a dose of the future. Not a future that somebody gives to you. Not
a future that you look up yourself. Not a future that somebody impose on you.
But the future that God planned for you. Right now God has on His file the
exact person you are going to meet 10 years from now. The exact place you are
going to be and even the exact words you are going to speak.
Roland Buck was amazed when after he went to God’s throne
room, God pull out his file and showed him the things that will come to pass in
his future. And among some of them was when he was going on a plane. The person
sitting next to him has a certain name. He said is your name this. The guy said
yes. Now how is it that God will know in the midst of
all these air travel business? That God knows exactly on which day at which
time he is going to sit next to somebody by that name. God knows our future
precisely and what we do because the way He has made us is to show us our
future. Learn the secret like Paul who learnt to keep his eyes on the future. If you don’t you will immediately get bogged down. As long
as you are moving, you need to keep the future in mind.
When you drive a car. You don’t just look at the front wheels. If you are
driving slowly, you only look a certain distance. The faster you drive, the
further you have to look. The further you look in the spiritual realm the more
energy and speed you can move in the present. The further you look in your
future, the more energy you have in the present and the more strength you have
in the present to just pass those things that are at the moment with you.
It’s one of the spiritual laws of God. There are a few
spiritual laws that are quite close to natural laws. Newton
There is a similar operation of that law in the social
realm. When Jacob fell in love with Rachel, he had to work seven years for her.
The Bible did record a statement that at the end of the 7 years, which were
actually quite long, it seems to him a short time because he was expecting
Rachel. Natural time moves in a
systematic way. But soul time is the past that causes you suffering. Soul time
is your experience and perspective of time. When you enjoy something it is over
very fast. When you don’t enjoy it, it looks like a long time. Same, you
measure it 1 hour by the clock. But it looks like a long time. Have you ever
waited for somebody who was late? Those extra few minutes look extra long. On
the other side when you are occupied with something, you get so absorbed by
your work you don’t realize that its night already. Time pass by so fast when
you are absorbed. There is a different perspective with soul time. Natural time
is constant. Soul time in experience wise fluctuate. Time in the spirit realm
is timeless.
Soul time is very
important to faith. Doubt arises from your soul. A double-minded man cannot
receive anything from the Lord. And what happens in your soul and its
perspective or circumstances that determines how the time passes. So when your
soul is going through an experience that you cannot see the future, the futrure looks longer. But the moment you could see the
future and what is after and what is to come, like Jacob, even seven years
seems like a short time in perspective. And in the same way if you began to
pray, you enter the first stage. You have to get rid of the past and pray
through until it just got over the past. That is only the first stage. In your
prayers you could drive pass your past and move on and put the object of your
desire into the future and allow the Holy Spirit to began
to shift you to second gear.
In the second gear
He began to show you a lot of things in your future. Then He can show you right
up to the third gear, the fourth gear and bring you into the deep realm of your
future until you are so caught up with it. That when you come
out of the end of the prayer session, it looks like you have just been
somewhere. It is just like coming out through the time tunnel where you
come back with a different perspective. And you come back with a changed
attitude, with a different life perspective. This is what God wants to do in
your life when you pray long hours. As we go through in a long season of prayer
just be opened and trust the Holy Spirit. As you start praying you have to put
yourself on free gear. At first it’s difficult but it may mean that you got to
build up first. You have got to pray until you reach a point when there is an
inner stillness in you. Then after you reach that point, you are just clearing.
The first part of
prayer is just clearing. Then the main part of prayer, which is the most
important, and that is where you need concentration. It is during this time
that you have to allow the Holy Spirit to implant the future in you. If you can
just see it clearly, faith has a chance to take root. If you can see it clearly
and open yourself to it, it will be encoded into your spiritual gene. A code is
something you cannot alter but will have its own product. If you want to alter
the product you have to alter the code. Right now every cell in your body has a
code that tells your body to produce the colour of your eyes, the colour of
your hair, the colour of your skin. There is a code in
every of your cell. All your cells do not have the same code. That is why a
scientist could take any cell in your body and know it belongs to you. Nobody
has the same code. In the same way what God is doing when we pray is that He is
encoding the future into us. There has to be an
encoding process taking place in us. As long as that code is written in you,
from the subconscious level that affects your life. And you know the
sub-conscious is very powerful from the soul perspective. It’s your
sub-conscious mind that causes a lot of your reactions that you are feeling.
And what God does is from the spirit realm, which is deeper level than the
sub-conscious. He places into us the code for our future. And if you could
allow Him to write it properly in you, it will have its own course. You don’t
have to struggle anymore.
I believe that once
upon a time, men function primary on intuition. For
example birds know what they are supposed to do and where they are supposed to
migrate. Animals have a certain amount of that. As they are born they know
naturally what they are supposed to do by natural intuition. When we get to
heaven, things done in heaven are by intuition. You could go to heaven and know
nothing about music. And sit in heaven and have a heavenly musical instrument.
And you would intuitionally know how to play it. We lost that when man fall.
That will be restored. But the strange thing is this that the spiritual realm
operates on intuition. If you study Watchman Nee book, he divides the spirit
into intuition, communion and conscience. Your spirit man has three
perspectives almost like the soul, which are the intellect, the will and the
emotion. The major part of what God
wants to do, He has to encode into our intuition. The marvellous thing is that
it takes our cooperation in prayer.
In Eph. 1:18, that the eyes of your understanding being
enlightened that you may know…. The Greek word eyes of
your understanding is the word dianoia
which has to do with the corridors of your imagination. It has to be encoded.
It has to be enlightened, flooded with God life.
Eph.3: 16-18, that he would grant you, according to the
riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the
inner man. That Christ may dwell in your heart through faith; that you being
rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what
is the width, and length and depth and height. It has to be something taking place in what we
call the inner man. What is taking place is verse 17, `Christ dwelling in our
heart, rooted, grounded in love.’ Notice the word in verse 18, may be able to
comprehend. The word comprehend is a very powerful word in the Greek. It
talks about a joining and looking into the perspective of God. Again I point it
to us moving from the circumference into the centre of the spoke. How can I
comprehend with all saints? There is only one comprehension: the comprehension
of God. So as all the saints move to have the mind of God, to have the mind of
Christ we will all see in perspective. What God shows you will be what you are
to do in your life. And all of us are like intricate
parts of God’s creation fitting together.
Eph. 2: 20. ` Having been built on the
foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the
cornerstone.’ Why are the prophets and the apostles the
foundations? In chapter 3: 5, which in other ages was not
made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His
holy apostles and prophets. They were the foundations because they
had the revelation. What is revelation? Revelation is imparted knowledge and
not acquired knowledge. Acquired knowledge is which we do from our perspective.
But revelation is imparted, is dropped into your spirit man by God. It is the
work of God’s spirit imparting into our life. And revelation has to do with
revelation of God’s will, God’s kingdom, God’s purpose on this earth. The whole
purpose of revelation is revelation about the plan of God. What else can God
reveal to us? What else does God reveal? The very process and element of
revelation is to point to God working in us. Unless God reveals to you, His
work cannot be founded upon you. Only when God revealed through the apostles
and prophets, then He says they were the foundation. Why were they the
foundation? They have become the underlining work by which God use to build the
whole structure.
That’s what God wants to do in a long season of prayer and
that is to let us see. When I am talking about seeing the future I am not
talking about the open vision although God may give you an open vision if He so
desire. But most of the time, He works with the eyes of your
spirit. And it causes you to see things. Write them down. There is
something He shows in the future that are so intricate that every time I pray
it keeps coming up. And I said, `Lord, why does it keep coming up?’ The Lord
said, `because I want you to see more details.’ Unless you see in detail it
cannot be framed. The worlds were framed by the Word of God. And it looks like
God is doing details into our life. And there is something that you see blurry
that the more you pray the clearer and the greater detail it becomes. Its just
like you look at a butterfly, generally you see them as butterflies. But if you
take one of them and examine them, you will realize that there are so many
details you have missed out. Studying in detail and studying in general is so
different. What God is giving and coding is detail codes into our lives in the
prayer realm. Prayer is the walk in the spirit realm. Walking with God in the
spirit realm is moving into the depths of God. And some of the most precious
moments are when you go into deep prayer and when you are quiet with God where
you do not want someone to disturb you as you are getting all those details.
You are praying through on something. You are seeing more details. Every
problem you have is a lack of revelation. It’s never a money problem. It’s an
idea problem. It’s never a mountain problem. It’s a vision problem. It’s never
a giant problem. It is an image problem. In your life the only way to change it
is to get it encoded into us properly. May God remove all the past from our life. May God remove traces of our past in our life. There are traces of your past that are hindering some
of you in the present now. Hindering your relationship with
others. Hindering your effectiveness in your present
work. Hindering your effectiveness in your present
work. Hindering your Christ like character from coming out. Why should
the past kill and murder our future? Get it cut off. Reckon it gone, dead. If
you are already someone who walks on 70% in the future I challenge you to press
on like Paul until you are 100% on the future. If you talk to a person who is
living 100% for the future, the person is different.
Heb. 12:2, Looking onto Jesus, the Author and the
Finisher of our Faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the
cross, scorning the shame, sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
For the joy that was set before him. Now you got one of the secrets of Jesus.
How could Jesus go through the cross? It is because He saw the future after the
cross. Some of you may be going through the cross. That’s no way you can go
through it if you don’t see the future. We are not above our Master. We can
only be like Him. If He needs to keep His eyes on the future
to get through the cross, how much more you and I. If you lose the
vision of your future, you will die at the cross and never resurrect.
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