Good morning everyone, or good afternoon, or good day, depending on when you're listening to this.
This is day eight of our journey, the joy of the Lord.
Restful one, I speak to your spirit in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
Listen with your spirit to the word of God for you.
Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared.
This day is sacred to our Father.
Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength, Nehemiah 8.10.
During the reconstruction of the broken wall of Jerusalem, Nehemiah wanted the people to experience the joy that the Father was experiencing,
because when they could tap into the joy that God experienced over what they had done so far,
they would have the strength to walk the next mile and press on.
There was a great deal of work yet to be done on the broken down city.
Much social woundedness needed to be healed, and there was much from God's word that they had not experienced.
Restful one, I bless you with knowing the joy of the Lord that is your strength.
I bless you with knowing joy in his fatherness in profound and life-giving ways.
I bless you with remembering times when he showed you his fatherness.
I bless you with enlarging your spirit to know profoundly and deeply that your father is pleased with you.
I bless you with receiving the truth of your identity, legitimacy, and birthright.
I bless you with knowing who you are in your father's eyes, and with drinking deeply of the joy that he has in who you are.
I bless you with absorbing with your spirit the great detail of God your father,
and sending an angel to one young woman to tell her that she had found favor with him,
and would give birth to Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Well, Jesus Christ the Messiah.
Before that moment, she had no idea of her favor in the father's eyes,
how much he enjoyed her, or how pleased he was with her.
The joy that the Lord had in her gave her the strength to walk through the difficult months ahead.
I bless you with knowing that kind of joy for difficult times and circumstances.
I bless you, restful one, with receiving truth from the life of Gideon,
who did not know that God looked upon him with favor.
Gideon saw himself so poorly that he was hiding.
He had no idea that God knew he existed.
But God saw him as the mighty warrior he had designed before the foundations of the earth
to deliver Israel from the hand of the Midianites.
I bless you with joy and a touch from God to seal in your heart and your spirit
that you have favor in his eyes,
and that he will communicate his purposes for you that cannot be defeated.
I bless you with experiencing the joy that your father has
when your spirit rises up and responds to the Holy Spirit.
I bless you with knowing the joy that your father has
when he sees that today you are different than you were yesterday.
I bless you with feeling the joy that your father has
as he thinks out into the future of all the blessings that he has prepared,
the surprises, the divine encounters, the unexpected treasures that he has prepared for you.
I bless you with experiencing the joy of your father
and his anticipation over the road you are going to walk.
I bless you with savoring your father's excitement over your design, restful one,
each thing he has placed in you to do your giftings.
As those divine encounters are positioned,
as you step up to the process to possess your birthright to be a life giver,
I bless you with experiencing the joy he feels
and knowing that the unique person that he has designed
is cooperating with him in the works that he has planned for you to do.
I bless you with fulfilling the joy of God
who is leading you to do right things at the right time,
in the right way, with the right people.
I bless you with knowing and being so tuned to the Spirit of God
that you know intuitively in your spirit what the right place is,
what you are supposed to be doing and how you are supposed to do it.
I bless you, restful one, with knowing the joy of the Lord that gives you the strength to press on,
go forward, to endure hardship as a good soldier, to accomplish, to fulfill,
to prepare thoroughly, and to face pain unflinchingly. I bless you with knowing so profoundly
the pleasure that he has in you that the opposition of other people means nothing,
that you rebound from disappointment and return quickly to your joy center and your Father.
I bless you with overcoming the pain, sorrow, shame, discouragement, and every sort of negative
emotion, and having to make a coarse correction. And I bless you to savor the joy that the Father
has in you as you come back to the joy, the high joy level he designed for you.
Restful one, your Father made you. He master-planned you, uniquely designed for his particular time in
history. He chose the time in history, the family that he placed you into, and all your days up to
now. His craftsmanship of you and his plan for you will stand before his throne for all eternity.
I bless you with having abiding strength to be where God has placed you, and to accomplish
what he has called you to do, because you are able to drink deeply the joy that God,
the Father, has for you as his beloved handiwork crafted for his pleasure and purpose.
I bless you in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
Oh, Lord, there's so much there.
I think for most of us, Lord, we look and identify so much with the things that we've done wrong.
I read somewhere that 80% of what is communicated and received is negative.
You told me one time that I needed to be careful what I identified with. Did I identify with you,
or did I identify with my junk, with my failure, with my sin, with my mistakes?
Lord, I pray for each and every person here that they would come to a peace of knowing that they're
right where they're supposed to be, that they are not on plan, that they are not on purpose,
that they are not on plan Q. You don't have plans in the sense of like with all the contingencies.
It's not a pick-your-own-path novel that we maybe get to the end, and maybe we don't,
that it is a place where you have plan A all the way through, that we can come to a place of
trusting you in that place, and that we can identify with you and who you are. In this case,
the joy is so hard to imagine that you find joy in us now, where we are, warts and all.
For so many, it's like once I get to blah blah place, once I get to here, once I change this,
once I accomplish that, then you'll be happy, then we'll be happy, and then most of the time
that does not happen. I heard many years ago, Lord, that once an Olympic athlete reaches gold,
oftentimes they'll go into a deep depression, because they've accomplished their life work,
they've spent their whole life training for this moment, and now it's happened, and now what?
Lord, I pray for each person here to get to have that experience, even if it's just by faith,
to believe you, to experience that place where the Father is pleased,
and not, I don't know how to describe it, that way in which you love all of us,
so we're in this just big pot, that you individually love each person here,
the person who's listening, you love that individual person, you love everything about
them, there's nothing that you don't know, you love them right where they are completely,
and there's an entire aspect of who they are, and who we are, that we just don't get,
we don't understand, we don't see it, but you do, and that we can trust, thank God,
that you are the one, you're the person we're talking about, you're the person we're talking about,
trainer, you're the one that is our God, you're our teacher, you
and you're the person we're talking about, and you're the person we're talking about,
are setting up everything that we need to prepare us for what
is next, including some of the trials that are in our life. I
remember the one time, it's not the only time, but a time that
comes to mind, I was, it had been a very long year, I was
pastoring some students, it had been wild. And I've been so
busy. I've been traveling a lot, I've been all over. And we were
a, I was, there was an outdoor leadership program, and there
was a very, called the final hike, 72 miles, and I went to,
I was asked to go and accompany some of the students, and they
wanted me to walk the last, you know, overnight portion with
them. And I was walking through the woods in the very back, and
we're trying to make our way to the camp. And, and I remember
the Lord for the first time, you know, in that trip, he really
started to speak to me, and I was so tired. He said, Ed, I'm
so thankful for what you did with these young ones. I'm so
grateful. You did such a great job with them. And I was a mess.
Well, the God of all the universe doesn't have to thank
me for a thing. The few times that, or the many that I've, I've
had the rare experience where I can feel and experience that
gratitude, that love, that appreciation, that approval. It
just undoes you. Lord, I pray for more of that. I pray for
each person here that they have some aspect of who they are. In
the midst of a trying season, the swelling pride of the
Father, oftentimes when I minister to people, I would feel
the swelling pride of you, our Father, over their lives. How
proud he was. And just by the speaking of those words, how
people would just come to pieces. Rest for one, God is so
proud of who you are. He's so proud of all that you've done.
He's so proud of the decisions that you've made in spite of
things. He's so proud to call you his son, his daughter, his
beloved one. You are cherished beyond measure. Lord, I pray
today, God, that you would stretch your hands over them.
And whether they challenged them as you did Gideon, where he had
to put out his fleeces because he didn't even believe, you
know, we're not all going to have the experience where it's
you know, Gabriel comes down and we challenge and he goes, I am
Gabriel, I'll stand in the presence of God, of our Father.
And then the other part of this, Lord, is that there's a
familiarity that was the word I'm looking for a familiarity, a, an
aspect of our relationship with you, that Jesus opened up when
he called you Abba. There was a, well, she's still alive, a
wonderful woman of God named Judith McNutt. And she's a co
founder of Christian Healing Ministries and a wonderful,
wonderful woman of God. And she, you know, oversaw a house of
prayer in in Israel and Jerusalem a couple of times in
their life. And there's one particular time where they
lived in an apartment in an Orthodox neighborhood and all
the children would come home one day, you know, at the same time
and the buses will come and, and you would, she would hear all
these children yelling, Abba, Abba. You know, Daddy, Daddy.
There's a, and that's why it was so shocking at the time when he
was using words like that. No one had expressed that kind of
relationship with you, Lord. So Father, I pray that Lord, there
be breaking down of barriers today.
that would stand in the way of anything that you want us to know of an aspect of who you are,
and join it in some mysterious way with that, is how we're known in heaven.
Again, I don't want to keep... he's just the face I see, Graham Cook again,
talking about our inheritance scriptures or talking about our identities in heaven,
that we have a name in which we're known in heaven,
and a way in which we're known in heaven that we are not known here.
But heaven is our reality, not this place.
Lord, that more and more we would be able to live from that place and not be defined by our lives
or what's happened to us or by the viewpoints of other people.
The longer someone has known us, the more entrenched their beliefs of who they believe us are,
we are, are established, the more intense.
It's like a tractor beam.
That's why it used to be said that if you want and you feel like you've mastered your life,
go home and spend two weeks with your parents.
It's the same reason why Jesus said a prophet is not without honor except for at home,
in his hometown or with his family.
He went to Nazareth and he could only heal a couple of people of some sickness.
Lord, I pray that there be some pivotal moment, a watershed moment for each and every person here
where there is a division, a chasm.
It is really to be a new creation into which the place of who we are is so separated,
so devoid of how we've been seen by other people and how we've seen ourselves,
that there is no going back, that there's a dynamic, there's a genetic change,
that there is no going back.
I pray right now, Lord, you place your hands upon the heads of each and every person here.
Lord, you would place your hand upon their heart and that there be this shift.
Lord, we bless you, Lord, and we love you in Jesus' name.