I FIRMLY BELIEVE we are living in the last days. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And we’re seeing prophecy being fulfilled nearly every day.
Things are winding down for the devil but winding up for the Christian. The Body of Christ has a great work to do before the Lord returns. It’s not time for us to sit in our church pews and say, “Glory hallelujah! I’m on my way to Heaven.”
No. It’s time to gear up! We must be about our Father’s business because our time is short. To take our place, we must prepare ourselves. We are God’s hands and feet and His voice. He can’t do anything on the earth except through us.
Our mission is to bring in the great end-time harvest. How are we going to do that? We find the answer in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.
1 CORINTHIANS 2:4–5 (NIV)
4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power,
5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
I grew up in the Pentecostal movement and I saw everything—the good, the bad, the real, and the unreal. I saw the Spirit, and I saw the flesh. I saw a lot of fire, but I also saw a lot of wildfire that was not Spirit driven. I believe we have to come to a place in time where everything we do is Spirit driven, not flesh driven. And I believe we’ll come to that place through worshipping our Heavenly Father.
We are in an era that will take more than shouting, praising, and being joyful. We are in a spiritual war. We are on a mission for God to win souls, and that mission will take some intensity. It will take intensity in prayer and intensity in reaching the heart of God through worship.
Our worship and praise are reaching new, mature levels. They are reaching levels where we say, “God, we trust in You. Our hope is in You. Our confidence and faith are in You. We believe that You will be with us and help us with the mission You have for us in these last days.”
The Universal Assignment to Pray
God has a mission for each of us. Some of our missions are different. But one mission we all have is to pray. First Thessalonians 5:17 says, “Pray without ceasing.” The Amplified Bible, Classic Edition says, “Be unceasing in prayer [praying perseveringly].”
It’s time that we stop getting on our knees and praying, “God, bless my family. I thank you for this, and I thank you for that.” Praying that way is like saying, “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.” Prayers like that are about as powerful as . . . nothing!
There’s no dynamite in that kind of prayer because we have not been praying perseveringly. We’ve only been doing our duty.
It’s like telling your child to clean their room. Instead of cleaning, they hide stuff underneath the bed or push things into the closet. They don’t vacuum or dust. Yet they come out and say, “My room is clean!”
Their room isn’t clean. They may have made an attempt at cleaning. But there’s a big difference between half-cleaning something and thoroughly cleaning it. We may clean our house every week. But once a year we give it a spring cleaning. That’s when we get the cobwebs out and clean rooms from top to bottom.
I think many of us have been praying like that. We’ve been just half-praying. We’ve prayed only enough to fulfill what we think is our obligation to God. Then we wonder why our lives are the way they are. But it shouldn’t surprise us that our lives don’t go the way we believe they should. We’ve been praying only halfway.
When we start praying perseveringly, some things in our lives will have to change. They may not be sins, but we really don’t have time for them. We have only 24 hours in each day, and we have to prioritize. We have to ask, “What is important for me to do today?”
Praying Always
Many years ago, I decided that the most important thing I would do every day was to worship and commune with my Heavenly Father. I committed to devote my entire day, every day, to that.
You may think that’s impossible, but it’s not. We can pray every hour we’re awake and do other things while we’re praying.
To accomplish that, we must first create an atmosphere that is conducive to prayer—an atmosphere in which God can speak to us. I do that by constantly surrounding myself with praise and worship music. Christian music is always playing in my house, my car, and my office.
I go from getting up in the morning praying to getting showered and dressed praying. I go out the door praying and pray while I’m driving to work. I’m building myself up on my most holy faith (Jude 1:20), yet I’m doing natural things as well.
Romans 12:12 talks about us “continuing instant in prayer.” Whatever we do consistently will eventually become easy and automatic to us.
My mandate in life is not necessarily to teach Christians different methods of prayer. It’s to teach believers to pray. I want to get them so excited about praying that they will want to pray continually.
As I said, I believe we are living in the last days. And what better time than this will there be to develop the habit of “praying without ceasing”?
Author
Lynette Hagin
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