Intercession and Worship

The teacher's name was Cliff. I looked at him and immediately saw there was nothing impressive about him. He was a mid-height, balding, skinny man entering into early middle-age, his voice a little too soft and a little too high for a man. On top of that his last name was Wiener. But he, nonetheless, was one of the most powerful teachers I have heard speak. He was an exhorter, speaking to us last week on Intercession and Worship with the energy of a high school quarterback. He was in our face, jumping from each side of the classroom, using his hands and body language to do half of the talking, teaching well and making humurous comments, and most of all getting us to participate, not letting us just sit there with our eyes glazed. He was calling us to action.

I've been looking over Cliff's notes from the past week and I can't help feel that we would all benefit from some of the thing we have learned. I wanted to summarize some of those notes so that we can all be blessed from them.

The most important section of Cliff's teaching was on hearing God. Cliff used the example by taking a basketball and asking us, "When you're playing in the NBA and you want the person to pass the ball to you, what do you do? What do you do with your hands, with your body language?" He then showed by using two of us how the right posture is when you have your hands wide open. You're ready to catch that ball and you're probably calling the person's name who has the ball to pass it to you. "Jeremy! Hey Jeremy. Jeremy! Pass me the ball! Pass me the ball!" You don't have your arms crossed looking cool and not really interested. Cliff then makes the connection with this and hearing God.

We can all hear the voice of God, Cliff explains but the posture of your heart has to be right. You have to keep your heart in a state of openess, of eagerness, ready to catch that ball. When we go to God we shouldn't have this indifferent or bored attitude. The people who hear God the most are those who are eager to hear Him, who are in a state of constant readiness to hear Him and this is an everyday, every situation kind of thing, where we go through our day in the posture of someone who wants the ball. To those of us who haven't heard God much or at all, it isn't that God doesn't want to speak to you or would rather speak to others. It's all about the position of your heart. Are you eager to hear Him? Do you want to hear Him? Do you want to catch that ball?

The first reason why we listen to God is because He is worthy! I can't tell you how many times I wanted to hear from God just to get my questions answered. The most important thing in prayer is not getting our questions answered but listening to Him. Intercession is not just prayer but it's prayer with a purpose. In Intercession we listen to God and get specifics from Him about how we are going to pray for an individual, a group of people, or a situation. We hear God's heart and we pray it back to Him, and we stand in the gap between Man and God and Man and Satan.

It's like in movies where we see the special ops soldiers. They come in quietly into enemy territory. They are in constant communication with the command center who can see from their satellites the bigger picture. The command center gives specific commands to these soldiers, "Go to your left. Turn right now. Ok wait here for one minute. Now see that door in front of you. Go and open it. That person to your right, take him!" We are meant to be connected to God in this way and we're given leadings to help, serve, and tell others the Gospel in this way. The Holy Spirit leads us and every day we come to Him and ask, "Ok, what do you have for me?"

But now there are things that can cause "static" in our connection with God. Things like fear (of what He will say or ask us to do), unbelief, apathy/indifference, self-idolatry (being too worried about what others think or placing what I think and what I want to do too highly), and false-comfort. False comfort is a huge one I think especially because it goes the most undetected. You know what it is? Instead of going to God's voice for comfort, God who can genuinely tell us how much we're really worth and make ourselves feel better, we go to something else to make ourselves feel better. Maybe it's food like chocolate and ice cream, or watching tv, playing video games, or even other people. What do you use to replace the comfort of God?

If you want to hear God you need to have a soft heart. The Bible speaks in Hebrews 3 about not hardening your heart like Israel did in the desert. The way you develop a softer heart is by being eager to obey God in the little things. You know, when God gives you a tap, tap, on the shoulder to go help someone or to go encourage somebody, or even from refraining from doing something. It may not make sense to us but whatever God is asking us to do it's better just to do it. We like to require more information from God because we're afraid of obeying. We don't want to look weird or we're afraid of what the person/people will think. But when we obey God without requiring more information we bring a softness and a tenderness to our hearts.

God wants this kind of relationship, where we hear from Him, with everyone. Unfortunately we can get caught up in thoughts like, "Hearing from God is only for certain Christians" or "I don't think God would really want to talk to me." You need to understand that God has no reluctance to speak to you. You're His child, how could He not want to speak to you? Hearing from God, however, is a discipline. It's something you can only benefit from when we get in the habit of everyday assuming that posture of, "I want the ball God," being eager and ready to listen to Him.

Well there's heaps more. One more things is that we should all keep a record of what God has spoken to us. It's a great discipline to have especially when we fall on hard times we can look back on what God has spoken over us.

Thanks Cliff for all your teaching!