If it's fire, it's got to look like fire, feel like fire, smell like fire or something.
A burning fire in my chest.
Wanting to love and caress.
Welcome to another Raising Home Fire Secret Place training session.
Those who dwell in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
And our prayer and our vision for this time is that you would be further equipped,
that you would be taken into a deeper experience of the secret place,
into a deeper personal connection with God,
and that you would experience what it's like in a deeper way to come under the overshadowing of God.
Bill Johnson says whatever overshadows you will come out in your shadow.
And the book of Daniel writes this, he says,
those that know their God shall do great exploits.
And so our prayer is that you would grow in your knowledge,
not just your knowledge about God, but your intimate, personal, experiential knowledge of knowing God.
And so enjoy this session. God bless you.
And we're going to talk about another principle today
that is a foundational principle or a core belief
that undergirds a powerful and fruitful prayer life
and a thriving connection with God.
And that's something I know that we all want to grow in,
is our connection and our relationship with God.
And so today I'm going to give you the principle
and then we're going to break it down a little bit more.
But here is the principle.
It's that God hears you.
God hears you.
So I'm going to read a couple of scriptures
and then I'm going to share the principle with you.
I'm going to share something that God spoke to me about.
I'm going to share some stories and some practical things.
And then we're going to pray.
So here's some scriptures.
First scripture is 1 John 5.14.
It says this,
This is the confidence we have in approaching God,
that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.
John 9.31 says this,
We know that God does not listen to sinners.
He listens to the godly person who does His will.
Now if you're listening to this and you're a Christian,
you're a follower of Jesus, you are a godly person.
1 Peter 3.12 says this,
For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous,
and His ears are attentive to their prayer.
But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.
Now if you're a Christian here, if you're a follower of Jesus,
you have received the righteousness of Christ,
and you are what the Bible calls righteous,
and God is attentive to your prayers.
Here's another one.
1 John 5.15,
And if we know that He hears us,
whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of Him.
So He hears us, and He acts on what He hears.
And John 16.24, this is the last one, and it says,
Until now you have not asked for anything in my name.
Ask, and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.
And the principle or the core belief that I want to talk about today is this,
It's impossible for you to pray and not be heard,
and it's impossible for you to pray and nothing happen.
So one of my daughters came to me, and she asked me this question.
She said, Dad, how do you hear God's voice?
She'd just been watching me prophesy over some people,
and watching me pray for people,
and she was just watching me and the way that I was hearing God,
and she was inspired.
She just said, Dad, how do I hear God like you hear God?
And so I started to share with her some things,
and she already does hear God so well, to be honest,
but I was trying to share with her some of the things that I've learned over the years,
and some of the ways that I hear the Lord's voice,
and some of the way I hear God.
And I don't know, it just didn't seem to be going as well as I was expecting it to go,
and so I was asking the Lord afterwards, and I said,
God, how do I teach my kids?
And an even bigger question is, how do I teach people how to hear your voice, God?
Because hearing your voice is so crucial and so critical to building a relationship with you,
and getting to know you deeper.
And my greatest desire for my children is that they would be children,
that they would be daughters, that they would be women that know God well.
And so how do I teach them to hear your voice?
And he said something to me that, to be honest, I was not expecting to hear.
He said something to me that was completely out of the blue for me.
It was not something that I would have thought of at all.
It may be something that you would have thought of,
but it definitely was not something that I would have thought of.
He said this to me.
Lord you teach them to hear me, first of all teach them that I hear them and once
they know that I hear them, they will be able to hear me. And that statement just
blew me away. That statement is a statement that I actually haven't fully
unpacked yet, but I want to begin to unpack with you today and the scriptures
that I read just now are scriptures that share with us and show us and prove to
us that God in fact is a God who is attentive to us. God is a God whose
attention we have and God is a God who hears us. He doesn't just hear us, he's
also for us, he loves us and he's a God that acts on our behalf. And he's a God
that when we pray to him it's impossible for us to pray and not be
heard, it's impossible for us to pray and nothing happens. And something powerful
happens in our lives when we're living in the reality of the truth and in
agreement with the truth that we have God's attention. And with this core
belief and with this principle it's important for us to not just know about
this, but to truly know this. To not just know this in our head, but to know this
by experience. And this is something I believe that you grow in over time, this
is something I believe that deepens in your life over time, that matures in your
life over time, like a muscle, it's something that grows bigger and grows
stronger with use. And this truth has deeply impacted my life, it's caused my
relationship with God to grow so much deeper and it has absolutely
blessed me from the inside out. And there are some practical things that I've
done in my life that have really helped this truth go deeper in me and this
revelation become more of an experience to me, have really caused this principle
and this core belief to transform me from the inside out. And so here are some
of those things, those practical things that I've done. One of them is
journaling. I've gotten into the habit and the practice of writing down
my prayers so that I can look back on what I've written down and see where my
prayers have been answered and where God has heard my prayers and of course
God hears all my prayers. But it's one thing to know that in your head and it's
another thing to experience that through your life. And so often I will
look back through my prayer journal and I will look back at prayers that I
forgot I prayed. But one of the amazing things to me about prayer is
that God remembers the prayers that I forget. And my prayers are more precious
to God than my prayers are to me. And what I have to say to God is more
precious to God than it is precious to me. And so one of the encouraging and one
of the impacting things for me has been to look back in my prayer journal to see
these little prayers that I've prayed that maybe even at the time feel
completely insignificant to me but have been significant enough to God that
He has answered those prayers even when I've forgotten that I've prayed them.
And I'm going to share one of those stories in a second but let me
just share a couple of other things. Another one of the things that I attempt
to do is I try and pray very specific. I pray general prayers like
everybody but I try and keep my prayers also specific and I hone them in and I
get specific enough to the point where I will know when they've been answered.
Another thing I do is I look for answered prayers and I build memory
stones. So when I look back through my journal when I become aware that a
prayer has been answered and a prayer has been fulfilled then I actually take
note of that. I keep a list of that. I talk about that and I build a memory
stone or I put them in a place where I can come back to that and refer back to
that. And that's important because there are seasons in our lives and there are
seasons in my life where sometimes it feels like God are you listening to me?
God are you hearing me? God I'm praying but I'm not sure if you're listening. And
one of the encouraging things for me is to be able to look back at some of those
memory stones of answered prayer and to realign my heart with the truth
that well God you are a God that hears me. You are a God whose attention I have
and it's impossible for me to pray and not be heard and it's impossible for me
to pray and nothing happened. One of the moments in my life where I first
realized some of the power of this was the moment where my wife and I
we bought our first home and the story goes like this. We went to the bank and we were
newly married and we wanted to buy a home in Auckland New Zealand and our
income wasn't so great and we had no deposit and basically all the criteria
the bank look at in order to borrow money from the bank to buy property we
we met none of the criteria. So we went into the bank we spoke to the bank
And basically, long story short, she laughed in our faces.
It was the opposite of encouraging.
We, in fact, especially me, I was deeply discouraged.
And so we got back home, and I remember talking to my wife Renee,
and we just said, well, let's just dream into this, and let's pray.
And we had a big whiteboard in our office, and we got into our office,
and we just started to pray, and we started to praise God.
And then we just started to write down our audacious dream,
which was audacious at the time.
And we just wrote down, we believe in you, Lord, for this.
And I wrote down in the corner of the whiteboard,
we believe in you for a three-bedroom house on the North Shore of Auckland.
And I wrote down these details.
And we were just praying through it, $320,000.
And I wrote down that we will move in before the, and then we'll move in,
sorry, we'll move in by the 5th of May.
And so, and that was about six months from the time that,
from that time, the 5th of May was.
And so, anyway, I wrote that in the corner of the whiteboard.
It was our dream board.
It was covered in all sorts of dreams that we had written on that thing.
And that little corner of the whiteboard had just got lost
amongst everything else that was written on there.
And to be honest, I had totally,
I had totally forgotten that we had written that on there.
Until about, I don't know, some months after that,
we decided, and really actually felt from the Lord to just go back to the bank.
We actually called a mortgage broker, sorry.
And long story short, went to the bank, and the mortgage broker went to the bank.
And they came back to us and said, hey, listen, we actually can do something now.
And a lot, you know, it's a way longer story than what I'm sharing.
But basically, we will lend you up to $320,000,
which of course was the figure that I put on the whiteboard.
And I got that figure because Ephesians 3.20.
God will bless, God is a God that blesses us exceedingly,
abundantly beyond anything we could ask or imagine.
And so I just put that up there.
And they came back with that figure.
Of course, I had forgotten about writing it on the whiteboard.
And we ended up finding a house.
And we're moving into the house.
And my friend, Andy, is helping me move the whiteboard into the house.
And he looks at the corner of the whiteboard and he says this.
He says, oh, did you just write this on here today?
And I was thinking to myself, write what on where today?
Because I'd totally forgotten.
And he says, it says, move into first home 5th of May.
And today is the 5th of May.
And in that moment, I realized,
because I was moving into this house thinking,
man, I've done such a good job.
Me and Renee have done such a good job at getting ourselves a house.
This is awesome.
And I was patting myself on the back.
And in that moment, looking at that little prayer
that we'd prayed six months previously,
in a place of feeling completely hopeless about ever being able
to attain this dream or step into the reality of this thing that
was a desire of our hearts.
I realized I did not get myself this house.
God, you have got me this house.
And of course, you have used other people who have blessed us.
And different people have been involved in this.
But ultimately, God, you have got us a house.
You have moved us in here.
And you have listened.
You have heard my prayer.
You have acted on my prayer.
God, truly, it is impossible for me to pray and not be heard.
It is impossible for me to pray.
And nothing happened, God.
You heard my prayer six months ago.
And I'm moving in literally on the date
that I wrote down on the whiteboard
that I'd forgotten that I'd written down.
But you never forgot, God.
And in that moment, it really marked me.
And it showed me just how much God
is a God that cares about the things that I care about,
even more than I care about them.
And what that experience did in my heart
is my trust in the Lord grew in that moment.
My experience of His faithfulness
grew in that moment.
My knowledge, not about God, but my knowledge
of God grew in that moment.
My relationship with God grew in that moment.
And that moment caused me to wonder.
It caused me to ask the question,
I wonder how many prayers I've prayed that God has answered
that I'm unaware of.
And I wonder if I was aware of the moments
that God had answered my prayer, how much deeper
my connection with Him would be at this moment.
Because realizing our prayers are answered
does grow our connection with the Lord
so deeply and so strongly.
And so my prayer for you today is
that this principle would become a living revelation
within you, transforming you from the inside out.
I pray that you would know that your Father loves you
and that your Father is itching to act on your behalf.
I pray that this revelation will go so deep in you.
That it is impossible for you to pray and not be heard, and it is impossible for you to pray and nothing happen.
And I pray that that revelation deepens your experience in prayer with God.
What about this baptism of fire though?
And what does that mean?
Because like, if it's fire, it's got to look like fire, feel like fire, smell like fire.
Well, thank you so much for tuning in to that session.
Guys, we are now in our time of activation.
I've got a short activation for you today.
Our activation times are the times that we take the information,
we dwell in the information until it becomes revelation,
and then we take the revelation and we dwell in that revelation for long enough
until it becomes within us personal transformation, until the revelation transforms us,
because we know that transformed people transform the world.
And I just have a short activation for you today, like I mentioned,
and then a little bit of homework.
So here's the activation.
You're again going to need something to write with, a pen and paper or a device or something of the sort.
Once I've asked this question, I'm going to give you maybe five minutes.
So I want you to press the pause button and take some time with the Lord,
maybe put some music on, maybe just find a quiet place,
and just take some time with God to process what I'm about to ask you.
And here it is.
I want you to take about five minutes,
and I want you to write down as many specific prayers as you can remember specifically praying.
Not general prayers, specific prayers.
I just want you to make a list, as many as you can.
They can be silly prayers, not that there really is any silly prayers,
but just a list of prayers that you remember praying that are specific prayers that you specifically prayed.
Okay, so you can press pause and do that now.
Okay, awesome. Thanks for making that list.
Right now, what I want you to do is I want you to go through that list,
and I want you to look through it, and I want you to highlight all the things that you've prayed
that you know have been absolutely answered already.
I want you to make a list.
Sorry, I want you to highlight the ones in the list,
and I want you to take a moment just to be thankful to God for His faithfulness in answering your prayers.
Take a moment just to be thankful to God for His faithfulness in answering your prayers.
You can just take a couple of minutes to do that.
Okay, the next thing is maybe there's some prayers in there that you've prayed,
and God hasn't completely answered them yet,
but you can see that He's begun to answer them.
So I just want you to take a note of those prayers,
and I just want you to be thankful to God and just give God thanks for beginning to answer your prayers.
Just take a couple of minutes to do that now.
Okay, and the last thing is looking through that list again.
I want you to look through if there are any things on that list,
and there probably are, where you can see it doesn't look like God has answered that prayer yet.
And I want you just to take some time to ask God,
God, how are you working on that prayer?
Have you begun to answer that prayer?
Can you just give me some revelation?
What are you doing in regards to this prayer that I've prayed?
Because we know that God hears us, and we know that it's impossible to pray and nothing happens.
So God is doing something, and it's good for us to ask the question,
God, what are you doing?
And then within that too, ask Him if there is anything that He would like you to do
to activate an answer or to activate progress in the answering of that prayer.
Just ask Him if there are any specific practical things that you should be doing
in response to the prayer that you prayed.
And then this week, make a plan to do those things.
So just take a few minutes now to answer those questions and to process that.
Awesome.
Well, guys, that's the end of our activation.
Thank you so much for doing that with me.
I hope that really helped you.
I'm going to give you one last piece of homework for this week, and that is this.
I want to encourage you to begin a journal this week,
whether it's a file on your iPhone or you go and buy an actual paperback journal,
a blank book to write in.
And I want you just to start documenting some of your prayers down
in a way that you can keep record of what you prayed,
and then you can therefore know when God has answered your prayers.
Faith is something that happens within a person when they are exposed to faithfulness.
When you're exposed to the faithfulness of someone else,
towards you, what is produced within you, what grows within you is something that we
call faith.
And so one of the primary ways that we can grow in our faith in God is by learning to
become and being intentionally exposed to the faithfulness of God.
One of the ways we can do that is by keeping record and by keeping track of our prayer
life and realizing that God hears us and He always acts on what He hears.
So God bless you, have an amazing week.