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January Update Letter: Part Two (Son of Letter)The discipleship students had a class with Dan Sczebel (one of the pastors) and he talked about digging wells, and we thought of some wells that needed to be dug in our lives, the church and the city and we basically all chose one to pursue, I'm digging "The Word, the truth to be released", others have revival, healing, creativity, the prophetic...I may be forgetting one... hmmm...regardless, we spent 3/4 of the class praying for them. We all felt strongly it was something we needed to pursue. That night(Wednesday), I was coming up from the bathroom downstairs when I met Jeremy coming the opposite way. He told me he felt "heavy", so I said I'd pray for him (thinking I'd just say a quick prayer and continue on in my merry little way) but when I started to pray for him, I got about 5-10 seconds in when the Holy Spirit hit me like a truck, we both hit the floor so fast(in the process I accidently took out the closet door, I can't say I could really control it at the moment...), and James came out of his room from across the house because he heard yelling and thought we were fighting, pretty soon almost all the people from our house were in our room and for about an hour it was the most intense time of prayer I've ever been in, it was like a groundbreaking ceremony as we started digging the wells. It was new for me in the respect I've never really had the Spirit come so suddenly and with so much force with so little notice. At least when you go somewhere like a conference you half-expect something crazy to happen... God's been doing a lot, especially in the last week, some of our classes have even been thrown out last second because the spirit shows up when the teacher comes in so we just end up praying the whole time instead. Can't say any of us really mind though. We've been learning and have received so much in the last three weeks, it's just flown by. Today, Jeremy, Andrew, Joel, Jess and I went out for coffee with Kevin Kinney, he teaches us a prophetic course at the school, it was so good, we sat there for like 3 ½ hours listening and learning from what he said, we talked a lot about spiritual warfare, a key thing I learned from that was that when people tell you they have a need to be prayed for, say they feel they are being attacked in a certain way, you need to be very careful and listen carefully to discern what it is of. If they are in sin and it is an affliction of God, say they are operating in pride and God is humbling them, you don 't want to be praying against that and setting your will against God's. This is a huge reason why discernment is so key in our lives, it's major, we want to be lining ourselves up with God's will, it's like Saul, when God allowed evil spirits to afflict him because of his sin, David never tried to drive them out, that would have been him setting his will against God's plan. Instead he played his harp and worshiped God which brought God's presence which no evil can abide. Probably the safest prayer you can ever pray is probably the simplest, ready? "More Lord" and "Come Holy Spirit" The enemy wants to separate you from God and his presence, so if you invite the Holy Spirit to come and do his work, do what needs to be done, that is going to be most effective. You won't be setting your will against God's and you still will be making a difference. When we look in the Bible at people who came under tremendous spiritual attack, for instance David and Job, we should examine their reaction. What did they do? Did they run out rebuking the enemy, screaming Jesus name to drive out the enemy, no, instead they worshiped God. Instead of warring against every attack, David simply asked why it was happening, "God what's going on here, can't you see this isn't working out to well for me? What's the deal?". We need a revelation of who we are. We need to find out why we are being afflicted and instead of being drawn out to fight on the enemies territory when he sticks his head in the door, we need to ask God what we need to learn. We don't have to battle all our personal attacks, instead we need to seek God and find out what it is you need. Job didn't rebuke the enemy from attacking him, but he cried out to God, and he praised him in spite of hard times, trusting that God was teaching him something he needed. I'm still chewing on this myself, so I'll see if I can't write it more clearly sometime...I have some scriptures as well, so I'll see if I can't throw those suckers in as well. It's late and I can't think of them at the moment. God Bless Dustin Zupancic -Back- |