Breaking Through To The Heavenlies # 3

Breaking Through To The Heavenlies # 3

"Hallowed be Thy name." Thy name be set apart and not reduced to my world of miniatures. We need to pray that. We need to pray, "God be Your name hallowed in my life, set apart from every earthly influence, and power, and concept and feeling. Be Your name put up there so that I start to find a God who is above it all, a God who is over it all. A God who is finally the Lord of lords and King of kings. It starts with His faithfulness, it starts out with His reality within, but it goes on and on with His fullness and omnipotence. God over and above and beyond it all.

"Thy Kingdom come."

Over against the kingdom of the enemy, "Thy Kingdom come." After we'd been in Argentina for a number of years, different areas of the country, different meetings, seen a measure of God's blessing, God's moving, God's anointing, we went over to another country. A bunch of people had come over from Argentina to help. The same kind of meetings, the same people in a different place. We'd sing the same songs. We'd preach and we'd pray with the same intensity, the same faith. Yet every prayer, every song, would seem to hit the wall and bounce down on to the floor. I remember once in a meeting we were singing and it just came to me - it wasn't a vision, it wasn't a voice, but just as clear as if it had been - that 

Every sickness, every sin,
Every sorrow, every wrong,
Every hurt, every pain,
All the suffering of that nation multiplied by the thousands and millions of people,
Multiplied by its generations, 
Multiplied by each individual decision in wrong
And each temptation, 
Every single crooked thing,
Every hurt against God 
had somehow, in the invisible world, taken on substance and become material. And in the spiritual world, as though things had turned into bricks, the enemy had built a fortress.

Have you seen those pictures of castles in Europe? Walls that go on and on, tremendously high, tremendously broad, towers, turrets, courtyards, moats, that whole tremendous dimension of an impregnable fortress. Well, it's somewhat like that. It seemed in that meeting as though in my mind's eye I could see the devil up on top of this tremendous fortress. And he was saying, "As surely as I exist you shall not enter in." As the Bible says about Israel, we were like a little flock of goats in front of the forces of the enemy. A tiny insignificant group of people. Yet, at the same time, there was a sense of another Voice coming and saying, "in My name you shall go against this and you shall go in." Two realities.

And so the prayer is: "Thy Kingdom come." Because the other kingdom does exist. The other kingdom is real and so powerful. It's not an abstract kingdom.

I remember a lady that thought she could help on the mission field in a bunch of natural, physical things. I talked with her. I mentioned the sense of darkness, the enormous oppression, the spiritual opposition. She said, "Well, yes, but it can't touch you unless you believe it." Well, it can. It can!

It doesn't matter whether I believe it or I don't believe it. It exists. It's real. God wants to get us to see this. We know it mentally yet many times we act as though it weren't true. Many times you see Christians that are like a yo-yo. They seem to be at the end of a string of feeling that go up and down, up and down - Now they are condemned, now they aren't, now they are. Only a contact with God, with the eternal dimension of God, will get us free from this. "Thy Kingdom come" - it starts with us - it starts with this comment:

"Thy will be done."  His will, not ours, be done on earth. The apostle says, "He who labors must be the first partaker of the fruits." As I pray, "Thy will be done on earth," It starts with this earth that I am - the earth I am made out of. It's a prayer that I pray first of all for myself, "God, Your will be done on this earth which I am." "God, in Your way. God, in Your time. God, at whatever price You ordain."

~Paul Ravenhill~

(continued with # 4)