The key to experiencing more of what God has for you is prayer and delving into the Realms of Prayer everyday. We’ve kind of accepted in the church world that the voice of God is not to be heard with clarity. You can hear the voice of God with such confidence that when He speaks, everything within you says, “I know, that’s Him — this is God speaking to me,” and you move on it by faith.
As you enter into the deeper realms of prayer, you’re going to hear the voice of God more clearly, and the power of God is going to intensify in your life. Consequently, your witness and evangelism will transform lives because they are Holy Spirit-empowered prayer.
Testimony of my Prayer Life and Encounter with Jesus
a) My desire to know Jesus
As an 11-year-old kid who had just received Jesus, I was passionate and fascinated with the person of Jesus. I had made an ultimatum with God, “Lord, everything in me has to know the depths and the riches that are Christ. I am not leaving this room until you touch me.”
Matthew 6:6 “When you pray, go away quietly and close the door.”
I felt the anointing of the Holy Spirit when I started talking. I sensed His presence when I said, “Lord Jesus, I want to know You more.”
When you say that, that desire draws Him closer, because that desire is a form of worship.
My fan was on, my Bible was open, my light was on so I could read, and soft worship music was playing in the background.
One hour went by, and nothing happened. That first hour was so discouraging to me. Sometimes I would look up at the clock and realize only 10 minutes had gone by.
What I was doing was in the flesh — I was putting forth my own effort.
So, the second hour went by, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to reach for the melancholic aspects of my emotion, and I’m going to cry and weep.”
What we do is try to guilt God into a response. Sometimes, we try to sound emotional, “Lord, don’t You hear me? Don’t you see me? Don’t you love me?” We say it because we’re trying to manipulate Him. God doesn’t respond to emotions but to sincerity.
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When I get a phone call, and the call starts going bad, I’ll often tell the person, “Listen, you’re not coming in clear. The call is breaking up.” Most of the time, they start yelling so that I can hear them. I would say, “No, no, the problem is not the volume, it’s the connection.”
When we pray, we try to express emotion. You might be raising the volume, but the volume isn’t the issue—it’s the connection.s
b) My personal effort into His presence
The second hour had passed, and nothing had happened. Then I adopted a more aggressive approach. I had read books on spiritual warfare. If there was an adjective, I took that adjective, attached it to a demon, and rebuked it, “The spirit of that and the spirit of this, go out of my life.”
I was praying against everything I could think of. I would go back to when I was five and say, “Lord, if there was anything that I did when I was five years old, I rebuke it.” I was doing generational deliverance.
Finally, the third hour went by, and nothing happened, and I started to regret my ultimatum. The fourth hour went by, and then I got intellectual and theological. I started analyzing and assessing, and I applied the frailty of human wisdom.
If it were possible to enter the presence of God by emotion or human effort in that moment, I would have entered. I remember, in that moment, looking at the clock and realizing how much time had passed. I started to weep as tears came down my face. I said, “Jesus, I don’t know how to pray. Jesus, I don’t know what to do.”
There is no man on Earth, no matter how anointed they are, who knows the way into the presence of God. Only the Holy Spirit knows the way in.
God will wait till all of your effort has been exhausted. Often, we push for things to happen in our ministry, our lives, our family, and our business. God will wait until our human efforts are exhausted so that when the answer finally comes, we will not doubt who deserves the glory.
c) Submitting to the Holy Spirit
An impossible situation is the perfect setting for a miracle. You may be saying, “God, I don’t know how You’re going to do it.” Don’t be afraid, God will make a way.
I found out that He made a way. I began to weep, “Lord, all I want is Your presence. All I want is everything that you have to offer me. Lord, I want to experience the riches of Jesus.”
I’ll never forget, the Holy Spirit began to speak to me in that moment, “Turn off the light.” So, I turned off the light. He said, “Turn off the fan, close the Bible.” I said, “Lord, are You sure?” But I closed the Bible. He said, “Turn off the music.” I said, “Surely You can’t move without the music, Lord.” And I turned off the music.
We try so hard, don’t we? The Scripture says, “Be still and know that I am God.” But we often want to be still and know our troubles, be still and know everything that’s going wrong. But stillness precedes revelation. Before you can know, you have to be still.
In that moment, I remember just waiting on Him. All I did was imagine and meditate. The Scripture says, “Meditate day and night.” Who is the Word? It’s Jesus. When you’re thinking about Jesus, you’re meditating on the Word.
And so, I was meditating on Jesus, just thinking about Him in whatever way He has revealed Himself. If He has revealed Himself as a healer, I would think about what a wonderful healer He is. If He has revealed Himself as Savior, I would praise Him for saving me.
And the Holy Spirit took my revelation of Him and brought it to reality. In that moment, I felt like a gentle breeze — not physically, but in the spirit. A gentle breeze moved through my room, and I was calm and still. I remember feeling warmth on me, electricity moving through me, and that transformed my life. I sensed Him so real. I was frozen. I thought, if I open my eyes, I’m going to see Him. I was afraid to move my hand because I thought that if I moved my hand, I might feel it brush up against His robe.
That is the key to Spirit-led prayer— it’s silence and stillness. Silence is the easy part, relatively speaking, compared to stillness. Silence is the putting away of outer distraction. It’s turning your phone off. It’s letting people know, “You can’t disturb me for the next 20 minutes, I’m going to seek the Lord.” That takes discipline and human effort. That’s our partnership with God; you have to block out the day.
There are times we go all day, and the Holy Spirit is drawing us, “Come, and pray! Come and pray!” We say, “Later, later! Lord, later!” And then we get into our prayer closet, and we say, “Okay, Lord, I’m here.” Then we wonder why nothing happens. It’s because you missed the appointment.
I’m not saying you cannot talk to God whenever you want, but there are certain appointments that He has for us. He is the one who initiates everything and draws us in. If you’re asking to be drawn, it’s because He put that spiritual desire in your heart. When you sense the desire to move in, you’re actually sensing His desire to draw you in because you’re becoming one.
Silence is the putting away of outer distraction. Silence is that disciplined aspect of prayer, but stillness is the quieting of the soul. Stillness is when you go to pray, and all that’s assaulting your mind begins to attack you. What do you do when you go to pray, and there’s inner chaos?
Isn’t it funny that you don’t notice that until you pray? All day you’re fine, but the moment you begin to pray, things start running through your mind. It’s not that the chaos shows up when you start praying — it’s that you’re quiet enough to recognize it. A good measure of what goes on inside of you is how you feel when you’re in silence. When you get into silence, you get to judge what’s been in your heart all that time.
THE 4 REALMS OF PRAYER:
1) Requestings
Philippians 4:6-7 “Don’t worry about anything. Instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank Him for all He has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.”
This aspect of realm of prayer often gets a bad rap, because you hear people say, “I want to ask God for something, but I’m afraid because I don’t want to be hypocritical. I don’t want to be materialistic. I know God wants to bless me, but I’m too afraid to ask.”
That’s a poverty mentality, and we have to destroy it. God wants to bless you. Someone may ask, “Well, what about those starving people in third-world countries?” That’s exactly why God wants to bless you — so you can do something about it.
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God doesn’t need to curse someone else to bless you. God is rich, and there is much in Him that the whole world can access. He’s eternally supplied, so He wants you to request. In the Realms of Prayer, requests are not selfish; they are a way of releasing inner burdens.
Tell God what you need and thank Him for all He has done. Some people say if you’re asking God for something, you can’t possibly be thankful. But while you’re asking God for what you need, you can still thank Him for what He has already done. You can be requesting and grateful at the same time.
When you give Him your burdens, come to God and ask Him for what you want, then the peace of God will fill your heart. When you enter the realm of prayer requests, what you’re doing is collecting all of your needs, all of those things that trouble you, and handing them over to God.
That inner chaos in you — you’re taking it and leaving it in God’s hands. The prayer request is one of the keys to the soul’s stillness. When we give God the things that trouble us, when we give Him those things that are on our mind, it frees us to enter the deeper realms of prayer.
When people pray, unburden themselves of their earthly desires, and feel the peace flood them, they often say, “Thank you, God,” and go on their way. But God didn’t give you the peace so that you can walk away. He gave you the peace to move you closer to Him.
2) Referencing
John 4:23 “But the time is coming. Indeed, it’s here now. When true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth, the Father is looking for those who will worship Him that way.”
I was at a church that had one of those angry drill sergeant worship leaders — the ones who scold you if you’re not doing exactly what they want. They would say, “Oh, don’t you love the Lord? Come on, you can lift your hand.” They say the same things: “You can yell for a baseball game, you can yell for a football game, but you can’t yell for Jesus, right?”
This worship leader was yelling at people. The atmosphere was fear. It wasn’t God. It was the flesh, and it was very uncomfortable. She said, “Come on, you’ve got to get used to this because this is how it’s going to be in heaven.”
I said, “I hope not.” I recognized in that moment that you can’t demand worship. Nobody can demand worship — it is a long-term cultivation. It’s only by the Holy Spirit. All true worship comes from revelation, not from information. Information makes you think. Revelation makes you worship. And when revelation comes from the Holy Spirit, you don’t have to be coached into worshiping — it naturally overflows because of the revelation you’ve received.
Jesus says true worshipers are going to worship Him in Spirit and in truth, not in church, not by tradition, not by mandate, not by demands, and not by structure. True worship is going to overflow because of what the Holy Spirit does in our hearts.
Scripture talks about holy beings flying around the Father 24/7 saying, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord.” You often notice that whenever someone cries “Holy,” it’s because the Lord has revealed Himself. These beings, for all eternity, are flying around Him, saying, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” because each time they circle, they capture a new revelation of God, which elicits a fresh response.
People ask, “How can they worship for all of eternity?” It’s because for all of eternity, they’re receiving new revelations.
Worship shifts the focus. It shifts the focus from your needs to Jesus. When you’re looking at Jesus, the light of His face is so brilliant that everything else goes dim. So, the prayer request removes the inner chaos and allows you to focus on the revelation, which moves you into worship.
3) Resisting
Prayer is spiritual warfare. Anything that is sin and that the devil does on this earth, prayer can undo it. When you’re praying in the Spirit and enter those realms of prayer, you become an agent of God’s dominion and authority in the earth. When you speak, you may be over here, but someone over there can receive.
The thing about prayer is that it’s impossible to accomplish nothing in prayer. For every moment you are praying, you are growing. For every moment you are praying, you are accomplishing something, whether you see it immediately or not.
You might be praying for somebody, and when you talk to them, they seem so resistant to the gospel. But despite the facade they place before your eyes, because of the faith you have, you can know with certainty that when you’re warring for somebody’s soul in prayer, that person will surely come to Christ because prayers accomplish much.
4) Reading
Within the Realms of Prayer, reading the Word of God, it’s not just reading a book or a biography — you’re experiencing the Person, Jesus.
John 6:53 “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you cannot have eternal life within you. But anyone who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life. And I will raise the person on the last day.”
The last day here means resurrection. The bread that comes down means incarnation. The flesh and blood mean crucifixion.
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It is a journey, and we go on a similar journey when we receive Christ. The incarnation is when the Holy Spirit took the unknowable God — as far as the human mind can comprehend — the limitless God, the eternal God, the incomprehensible God — and made Him a man. Jesus was the fullness of God in the flesh, beyond even human comprehension. When you see Jesus, you see the Father incarnate — God becoming man, and Spirit becoming flesh.
Then Jesus said, “I live because of the living Father who sent Me. In the same way, anyone who feeds on Me will live because of Me.”
Jesus was aware that His disciples were complaining. They were saying, “What is He talking about?” Then Jesus said, “So does this offend you then? What will you say or think if you see the Son of Man ascend to heaven again?” In this chapter, Jesus spoke of incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.
Then Jesus said again, “The Spirit alone gives life. Human effort accomplishes nothing. And the very words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.” Jesus said, “I can’t send the Holy Spirit until I go to My Father.”
When I look at my iPad, I have a lot of sermons on there. But if I were ever to misplace my iPad, my sermons, my pictures, my audio — they’d all be gone. But something is amazing about the cloud. The information you have gets stored in the cloud.
Jesus ascended on a cloud. The Word became flesh, crucified, resurrected, ascended, and translated. The Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Christ became life-giving Spirit.
When Jairus’ daughter was dying, and they came for the Master, Jesus went to Jairus’ house. On His way there, the woman with the issue of blood stopped Him. If I were Jairus, I’d be angry and furious with this woman who stopped Jesus. He’s on His way to rescue my daughter, and you stop Him! You waited 12 years; can’t you wait a little longer?
Jesus was somewhat limited in His physical body, but after His ascension, He became the life-giving Spirit. The Holy Spirit is Jesus on the cloud. How then does Christ become one with you? When you read the Word, the Holy Spirit downloads from the cloud and puts it in you. When you read the Word, Christ becomes incarnate again in you.
Some Christians say, “I don’t believe in reincarnation.” Yes, you do. In you, Christ is reincarnate. So, prayer is not an upload, it’s a download. You are Adam 2.0. You got a software upgrade, and we experience that download when we read the Word.
When filled with the Holy Spirit, the presence of God becomes one with you, and everywhere you go, you become an atmosphere of heaven. When you walk into a room, the atmosphere changes. When you walk in, sickness goes out. When you come in, demons go out, and when you pray, you shake heaven and earth.
Inspired by David Diga Hernandez Sermon
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