Good morning, everyone. Let's try this again. I thought I did this before and stopped recording.
I am recording this a day early. We're going to be traveling tomorrow, as I assume a lot
of people will be for this holiday. I just pray safe travels for you all and grace, grace
to everyone. I'd like, ideally, for you to be able to start your mornings with ease.
So I am hoping that this is Monday, the 21st. And this is day two of our journey. Day two,
knowing your purpose. Restful one, I call your spirit to attention in the name of Jesus
of Nazareth. Listen with your spirit to God's promise and his word. We are God's workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2.10. Your father has a purpose for you. I bless you with knowing your purpose
as God has seen it in his heart. I bless you with being everything that God has designed
you to be, because as you experience the joy of fulfilling your purpose, you will benefit.
Others will benefit and the world will be blessed. Restful one, I bless you with fulfilling
the call of God on your life and living out the fulfillment of his will. I bless you with
being in your father's time, not running ahead and not lagging behind, but knowing his will
and doing his will in the right time, the right place, and the right way with the right people
alongside you. I bless you with knowing the things your father has called you to do, to know,
and do the things he has called you to do. I bless you with being able to carry out God's
work with honor, with peace, with joy, doing God's work God's way. He has uniquely designed
you as an instrument of a particular set of good deeds. You can do them better than anybody
else can do them, because your father has uniquely positioned you. I come into agreement
with God and with his word, and I bless his design of you. I bless the good works that
have your name on them for you to do, and I bless the way your father has designed you
to do them. I invest in you. I care for you. I love you. I nurture you, for you are a treasure
and a blessing to the world. I bless you with a life-giving community to fit into. You have
a piece to put into a mosaic, and I bless you with fitting together with other people,
because you can't do what God has called you to do alone. I bless you with finding
like-hearted, like-visioned, like-spirited others. I bless you with being a part of a
family of ministry where you can enjoy your greatest fulfillment as you fit with other
people who are finding their fulfillment in God's purpose, and each of you is doing what
God has designed you to do. Your father will bless you, restful one, with the right closed
doors, because your enemy will try to get you to do things that God has not designed
you to do. Good things, legitimate things, profitable things, honorable things, but your
father has not designed you to do them. I bless you with not wasting time or effort
and doing things that God has not called you to do, but being able to invest fully
where God has positioned you and be fully present to today's grace and today's assignment.
Your father will bless you with open doors to walk forward in his time and his calling
for you to experience the joy of fulfillment of being everything he has called you to be
at the right time and in the right place. Your father intends for you to have beauty
of spirit. I bless you with fulfillment, grace, elegance, and the wisdom and beauty of heaven.
I celebrate the beauty that God has nurtured in you. You are God's craftsmanship, his masterpiece,
his poem. You are not just a piece of a puzzle or a tool designed to function to do good
works just because the world needs them done and the kingdom of God will advance.
I bless you with obeying him one day at a time with beauty of spirit.
an ease of effort, and the favor of His making a way.
Your Father intends for you to carry the fragrance of Heaven,
for people to be attracted to you.
It will not happen because you are effective, or competent, or secure,
or have a holy boldness about you, but because you have the perfume of Heaven.
I bless you, I bless you, restful one, with being a fragrant offering
as you do the work God wants you to do.
I bless you in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
Father, as I pray this prayer for the second time, so to speak,
we may know in part all that you have.
I have a sense about some people here, I have a sense about where people are,
maybe where they may be going, but from the grand sense of things, I know nothing.
Lord, I pray that there be a confidence to be instilled upon each and every person here,
that you know the plans you have, and that you know their purpose,
and those things will be revealed at the right time,
and that, Lord, your desire for them is so much greater than their ability,
than our ability, than Ed's ability to blow it, to miss it.
That, Lord, that we can really come into a place of resting,
that our purpose is hidden in you, our identity is hidden in you,
as you and the mystery of your life in us is a mystery,
just as a marriage in the union, one of the two great mysteries in the Jewish mysticism,
number two is marriage, the mystery of the union where two become one.
There's a mystery in that with you, Lord.
I pray, Lord, that you would really guard, by opening and closing doors,
Lord, I pray that you would put a tone and a resonance on all of the invitations that are from you,
and a different one on all the things that are not, to help us to discern your voice, Lord.
Something that really stuck out to me, Lord, was the passage here about
doing all of these good things that are coming our way,
the good, in quote, things that will exhaust and burn us out.
Lord, I was reminded, reading that, of a former director of a school that I was a pastor at,
and I was breaking all of the rules that I had been taught,
and I had been raised up in a ministry, and people, Lord, they would, well,
Lord, you know this already, but would come, and they didn't know me, and I didn't know them,
and they would come and get ministry, and I would leave, and they would leave,
and never, ever the two should meet.
And now I was living in the same single-floor community
with the very young people that I was ministering to, and boundaries, I was boundaries.
And I was talking to the former director, and he was like, you know, Ed,
I used to have, my definition of boundaries has changed.
My boundaries used to be, look like, here's a line, don't cross it.
And now my boundaries are a little more like,
this is what I'm willing to do, and this is what I'm not willing to do.
I could do them, but I'm not going to do them.
And he said, and what is my model for this? He goes, well, it's Jesus.
Jesus had one guiding principle.
He said he only did what he saw his Father do.
Now he could have done those things, but he did not.
He only healed one person at the pool.
He went away regularly, so there are all kinds of things that the Lord could have done,
but he only did what he saw his Father do.
So Lord, I pray today that you would cut off...
way all of the extraneous things that we're doing that you haven't called us to do.
It's like a former pastor used to he said the only thing he remembered
from seminary from this one professor was him saying son if the devil can't make you bad
he'll make you busy. Lord that today that lord all of the things every yoke that we have taken
your yoke is easy and your burden is light. Every yoke that we've taken on lord that today you
would break them under the sound of my voice. Lord you would throw them and burn them in a fire as
Elijah had done with the yokes of the oxen that he slaughtered. The lord every weight that we've
taken on that you haven't given us anything lord that we are carrying that was only for a season
or a day a burden you gave us to do or just a weight that you never asked us to take.
Weights that are really yours to carry any outcomes that we are holding ourselves beholden to
that really are none of our business but really yours. I ask that you would wipe them away this
very day lord god and the lord that you would really help us to recognize when the offer is
your offer versus a distraction. Lord you're endless in your resources but we are not.
Yes in theory when we're operating in alignment with you we're sourced from another place we are
operating 100% through the spirit etc. etc. Yes that's true we are supposed to be a conduit of
heaven but in general we only have so much time so much energy so much focus they say that we
can only make a certain number of really good decisions every day. There is something called
decision fatigue. So lord everything that we are doing that we're not supposed to be doing lord
let it cease. Help us lord to really come into a restful place of doing more isn't doing more.
You don't really want our effort you want our attention.
I should probably write that down. You don't want our effort lord you want our attention.
It's not perspiration but inspiration.
I pray lord that you would make everyone here that we are carried the aroma of heaven.
That lord that you would as Bob Jones used to say that you would make all of our senses golden.
So that we can see hear smell taste and experience the realm of the spirit to experience heaven to
experience you lord through all of our senses. These are just other gateways and ways to be able
to experience you and that this very day lord that people would smell the perfume the aroma
and that we'd be so imbued with you. That lord you said that you know if people have seen me
they've seen the father. That lord there be such a fullness of you in us that people would see you
that they seen you they see the father that they would see the father through us.
They would experience it lord and I again I'm thinking of the funny story of Bill Johnson where
he was he was shopping in a department store and a woman walked up next to him and just fell out in
the atmosphere and he said oops I leaked. That lord that we would leak heaven that we would leak you
and that there be an incidental way of us disrupting this society of us imbuing environments
and shifting things when when there's no way that we could have done it on our own volitional accord
and that you get all the credit.
Lord I I bless those under the sound of my voice with rest and knowing that they're exactly what
they're supposed to be. Lord I pray that you minister to any one of us that has ever struggled
with feeling that there's somewhere else that they're called to be. That they'll they'll rest
they'll rest or they'll like themselves if they can only get to this place if they can only
do this thing. If there's a place where there is like this plaguing feeling that has chased
them through their life, that they are not where they're supposed to be, that they're behind,
that they have to catch up, or that they've blown it. I used to say that I didn't feel like I was
on God's plan Z, where we're going to have to go to some numerical scale, but I was like Q.
That, Lord, that we are, we are, there is no plan B or C or D or Q. There is plan A from the
beginning. And I pray, Lord, that you would, you would imbue people today with your love
in a tangible way for them to be able to encounter you, Lord,
to be immersed and marinated in you this day. We bless you and love you in Jesus name.