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Phaneroo Service 528
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Phaneroo Service 528
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Connected by scripture or shared themes.
I want to share with you from Psalm 23, a scripture many of you know well. David declares:
"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me besides the still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."
Today, I want to focus on one particular sentence that carries profound revelation: My cup runs over. This is not simply about having more than you need. This is about living in the overflow of God's presence.
When God decides to anoint a man, His purpose is clear: not only should a man be filled, but a man should overflow. This is the very end and intention of anointing—that you would be filled to such a degree that what comes out of you cannot be contained.
The overflow is a divine effusion, a super-abundance of God's glory—His manifested presence. We are talking about a glory that goes beyond the capacity of your human experience to explain, something that spills beyond the boundaries of your comprehension. It is that place where God fills you so completely that no human language has the power to put into words what you are experiencing in Him.
If what you are experiencing has language for it, then I am not yet talking about the overflow. This goes beyond the finite capacity of human ability, human language, and human understanding.
Not many people have had the opportunity to test or experience the overflow of the spirit. But I have met a few who have. And here is what I know for certain: any man who has been to the overflow carries a distinctive mark on their life and a certain pattern of results over them.
Years ago, I was so humbled to enter this blessed experience. After that, I realized something crucial: until a man gets into that depth of experience, you can never effectively serve God. You have to be filled to a place where you overflow—to such a degree that it is inevitable and unavoidable that what is coming out of your life will have an effect on those around you without much effort.
The anointing of the Holy Spirit given to you was not designed merely to bless you as an individual. Paul speaks of an experience where we commend ourselves to the consciences of men by the manifestation of the truth—by the glory of God in its full manifestation.
Many people say, "Oh, God is everywhere." Yes, that is true. But this is a short understanding of the full revelation of the degrees of the presence of God. Generally, God is everywhere—in the bars, in the hospitals, in the marketplaces. But if you are talking about the manifested presence of God, it is not sufficient merely for general divine omnipresence to get a dead body out of a morgue and give it life.
There is a degree of presence that is required to resurrect the dead. There is a degree of the manifested glory of God where a man functions in the overflow. Every man who lives or functions in that overflow has had an experience of the manifestations of the anointing around them.
Because of the spirit of religion, we were never taught to love the presence of God. The presence of God was presented as a duty to attend to, a routine that somebody had to carry out. That is why many people struggle to pray—including pastors and ministers of the gospel.
Our orientations on prayer were misaligned. We were told to pray out of duty, to protect ourselves from the attacks the enemy would send. Prayer was used merely for accessing what we wanted when we were in physical need. If somebody is in trouble, they will build a life of prayer. And when the trouble comes out, a life of prayer is no more.
When somebody has a problem with their marriage, children, or business, they set aside months of fasting and seeking God. When the trouble resolves, they return to factory settings. When believing God for a visa, you seek God; once the visa comes, you relax. When believing God for a promotion while your boss threatens layoffs, you pray urgently; once the company forgives you and keeps you employed, you relax again until the next trouble comes.
This is a generation that was never taught to love the presence of God. Perhaps those who introduced us to God's presence did not show us the journey, the pattern of worship.
I have met young men who asked me, "How do I become hungry for God?" They were genuinely asking. But there is something fundamentally wrong with that question. It is like a parent asking, "How do I love my child?"
It should be natural for every parent to love their child. A mother hen is protective of her eggs and her chicks. These creatures carry no spirit, yet they feel that love. How much more should a human being, created in the image and likeness of God, naturally love their child?
When someone asks me, "How do I love my child?" I realize the problem is deeper. The question itself reveals that something has killed their natural capacity to feel. It is the same when someone tells me, "I want to be hungry for God, but I don't know how."
How are you not hungry for God? Except that we are in a generation that has killed our spirits from the core. The Bible says that in the last days, men shall be lovers of themselves and not lovers of God. This is deliberate—the devil has taken us to a point where the things we are supposed to be feeling for God are no longer there. If you are at a level where you are not hungry as you should be, you are under a spiritual attack.
The Bible says in Psalm 36:7:
"How excellent is thy loving kindness, oh God! Therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings. They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of your house."
In the amplified version, it says: "They shall relish and feast on the abundance of your house."
There is a fullness that comes to a man who dwells in the presence of God that is almost inevitable. When you are in the presence, you are supposed to feel something, and that feeling should attract you to either stay or come back.
Listen to the living translation: "You feed them from the abundance of your own house, letting them drink from the river of your delights."
Now, if a man is fed and satisfied by the fatness of the house of God, how can that man not want to go into the presence of the Almighty? If he is fed, the only reason he would not feel drawn to go back is either because (1) he is not fed, or (2) he does not understand what it means to be fed.
You give them drink from the river of your pleasures. The praise of God is supposed to be a pleasurable place. It is not supposed to be a place you struggle to enter into. Yet I hear people say, "I tried to pray last night and I felt so weak, bogged down. My soul was so down in the dumps. Pray for me so I can pray as I ought." You are either under a spiritual attack or you have not yet tasted a certain dimension of God's presence.
The Bible says in Job 28:7 that there is a path which no fowl knows, which the vulture's eye has not seen, where the lion's whelps have not trodden and the fierce lion has not passed by it.
There is a degree in the presence of God where a man enters, and it is impossible by anything or any means to be enticed out of it. It is impossible. But if you have never been there, you might never understand this.
Consider the man Enoch. In Genesis 5:24, the Bible tells us that Enoch walked in habitual fellowship with God. In the extra-biblical book of Enoch, we find a remarkable story. Enoch was a teacher of the word, and he walked with God so distinctly. Every week, he would come to teach the things God had revealed to him. Immediately after instructing the people, he would separate himself and go be with God.
But he got so taken by the presence that he started coming every two weeks instead of weekly. He would teach and then return to be with the Lord. Eventually, it became so demanding for him to be in the presence that he appeared only once a month to teach. After some time, he appeared only once a year to teach.
I asked the Lord: At what level does this happen? I understand that place somewhat. There are times when I am praying that I feel so selfish. I feel like I want to stay where I am and I do not want to come and preach. But you have to understand this because it will change your life.
I asked the Lord, "These people need to be fed by your oracles. They need to receive your life. Would it not be better to have a scribe who taught every day if possible, because they need to know the wondrous things in your law?"
The Lord answered me with something profound. He said, "Enoch got to a place where the consecrations on his life by dwelling in my presence defined such authority in him that he carried a sufficiency of the spirit sufficient to instruct in one year what it would take certain men a whole lifetime to instruct."
Let me say that again: God can consecrate a man to a level where the authority on his life carries a sufficiency enough to speak once in a year what it might take other men a whole lifetime to achieve spiritually.
I learned by that wisdom that it is possible for a man not to teach every day but to teach once, and that one sermon would reverberate spiritually in the instruction of men for many days and many years. The Bible says that a scribe instructed in the kingdom is like a householder who brings forth his treasure things both new and old. When a man is instructed in the will of the spirit, his message becomes edgeless—a man would tune that sermon next year and listen to it and it does not sound like a recycled movie.
The scripture speaks of two kinds of people. In 1 Corinthians 1:22, Paul says, "The Jews require a sign, but the Greeks seek after wisdom."
Notice the difference in the language. He did not say the Jews seek for a sign—he said they require a sign. One requires; one seeks. One's positioning is simple: "I will agree with everything you say, but first manifest it." That is a Jew. The Greek does not wait for you to manifest anything. He is on a journey of seeking. Whether you show him or not, whether his teacher is ready or not, he is always on the road seeking.
Now, from ancient times, anybody raised under that philosophy can only understand what is manifested. They relate with what is manifested. The Greek does not wait—he is a seeker. He is always searching for wisdom.
But the Bible says that Christ is both the power and the wisdom of God. For the man who only requires and waits for manifestation, Christ carries the sufficiency to manifest Himself. But for the man who is always running and seeking after all manner of wisdom, he will find Christ at the end of it. God will not stop him.
But here is the problem: Through desire, a man having separated himself seeks and intermingles himself with all manner of wisdom. The problem with the seeker of wisdom is that because he carries no judgment, he sometimes opens himself up into wisdoms that are forbidden. He goes into forbidden territory. Fallen angelics start instructing. Nephilim spirits go over them. They can be very creative in the world. They can innovate. But because humanity is slow to discern what these innovations and inventions intend to achieve in the end, you never know.
It is only men with understanding, with a certain level of maturity or a certain knowledge of God, who can see and say: "Even though this thing looks good, when we look ten, twenty, or thirty years ahead, or if we study it from its core and source, we realize that this is not an inspiration from God."
Sometimes I think the sorrow of godly wisdom comes with the weight of the things that have been created through forbidden wisdom and are now tools in the church because we cannot tell the difference.
Do you know why the praise of God left our altars? Many altars, the church generally—I am speaking broadly—because there are wisdoms that crept in unawares. They came as forms of godliness, or perhaps the world showed us that these were things that were working. But these were not in the way of the spirit. They were not in the pattern of God. But because in our own sense we judged them neutral—and not because they were neutral in their own nature, but from our perspective—we accepted these things in the church.
Because God does not contend with man, He will always leave man to take his way. It is amazing with God. He does not fight us. He lets us say, "Okay, go your way, and let us see whether this will work."
If we are going to have a conversation about the move of God back in the church of Jesus Christ as it ought to be, do you know how much intellectualism you have to deconstruct?
Have you ever asked yourself why God left the wise and the prudent—the Pharisees and the Sadducees—and went to fishermen and said, "Let me work with these ones, who are not so wise. Let me work with fellows who only know how to talk to fish"?
Because if He goes to Jerusalem to a fellow who has spent twenty-four years studying, He needs to deconstruct so much to get him where He wants. Jesus says a powerful statement: "I thank you, Father, because you have hidden this from the prudent and the wise, and you have revealed it to babes." The only reason the babe has revelation is that he is not so wise and prudent in his own ways to be indifferent when God is speaking.
How can I be so wise and prudent that God no longer finds me viable for revelation? Are you following me?
Although we must be wise with the wisdom of God—messianic wisdom—there is a wisdom among us that could actually disconnect us from God. Some of these wisdoms are in our Bible schools. They are in our theology seminars. They are in our conferences every day. Yes, we are teaching; we are learning. But there is no results or glory that should pursue the wisdom of God.
You could get to heaven one day, and God says, "No, you were too educated for me to use. You were too beautiful for me to talk to. You were too connected for me to reach out. You knew so much that I did not know how to put or add to you."
The Bible says: "For after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God." In 1 Corinthians 1:21, the world by wisdom knew not God. These were not foolish people. These were people who by wisdom knew not God. They were too wise that they did not know God.
Oh, that a man can become so wise that he no longer feels the presence he is supposed to feel! That a man can be so wise that he no longer feels invited and inundated by the presence that should invite or inundated them. But again, if the world sees them as wise and by standard—these are the people we celebrate and build monuments for.
So He says, "No, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. They had to be foolish to believe." Do you know how many people look at us and think a born-again person is the most stupid thing they have ever seen? And rightly so, because that is how they see life.
But it is sad when a Christian becomes indifferent to the things of the spirit because they are as wise as the world has made them. Hallelujah.
The presence of God carries a certain fullness, a fatness, a certain pleasure. If you have never felt the pleasure of His presence, then you were never really taught about prayer. That is the beginning. That is the foundation of prayer: that a man must find pleasure in the thing that they do.
The psalmist says: "For with thee is the fountain of life and in thy light we shall see light." In Psalm 36:8-9, the rivers of pleasure precede revelation.
"They shall abundantly be satisfied with the fatness of thine house and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light."
Notice the order: fullness precedes pleasures. Pleasures precede life. Life precedes revelation. That is the order.
But a man wants to skip the pleasures of experience and jump to the revelation for manifestation. That is Simon the sorcerer. He gets born again. The scriptures tell us he follows the disciples along. He has not received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He has not tasted the overflow of the person of the Holy Ghost. But he sees them do miracles. He skips the pleasures. He skips the life. He jumps to the revelation that manifests, and he says, "I will pay you money. Give me that power so that whenever I lay hands on people, they too might be filled with the Holy Ghost."
He is seeking to give what he has not received. That is lust.
In Psalm 65:4, the psalmist says:
"Blessed is the man whom you choose and cause to approach you, that he may dwell in your courts. He shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, of your holy temple."
Notice: "cause to approach you." He cannot come except God draws them. God causes them to come near so that they may dwell in His courts. And in dwelling in His courts, they are satisfied with the goodness of His house.
In Psalm 36:8, we see that those that dwell in His courts are satisfied with the goodness of the house. But even deeper—in the New Testament dispensation, it goes further.
In Hebrews 3:6, Paul tells us something profound:
"But Christ is faithful over God's house. And we are his house if we indeed hold fast our confidence and our boasting in the hope."
Christ is the faithful one over that house. He is the one in charge of that house. By reason of the New Testament dispensation, we are His house.
Do you understand what has shifted? In the Old Testament dispensation, the presence of God was a place a man sought outside himself. In the New Testament, the presence of God is a place a man seeks within himself. The man draws it from within.
Now, do you know why people struggle to walk into the overflow? Because they still have an Old Testament mentality. They think it is their person approaching God. Yet in the New Covenant, God is already in them. What they really require is the wisdom to know how to draw from the God that is within.
Many people have a very Old Testament understanding of the secret place. They think of somewhere they can hide in the house and say, "I have my secret closet." They still carry the mindset of a people in the Old Testament where the presence was situated at a certain address. It was covered with a tabernacle, with a sanctuary, a tent. They had the Holy of Holies, then the Holy Place, then the Outer Court. The priest went into the Holy of Holies where the ark of the covenant was. The presence was there. That is the secret place. It is a situated address somewhere.
With this understanding, people think: "I am going to go a few days and just go to the mountain with my friends." They go to the mountain and seek God, saying, "Ah, now I have changed address and left my home and gone to a mountain, so at that particular point I am going to connect to God deeper."
But Jesus finds a woman at the well and says to her:
"A time will come where you shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall you worship the Father. A time shall come when they that worship me shall worship me in spirit and in truth."
As consecrated as Jerusalem is, it shall not be the address a man shall have to go to in order to connect to God. A time shall come when they worship in spirit and in truth. Truth, truth, truth—what is the truth? "I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. Nobody gets to the Father except by me."
If a man understands His person and knows that Christ is the Lord over that house, the secret place has shifted from a physical address and entered the man. That is why some of us—you might not find us on the mountain. If you find me on the mountain, it is probably because my daughters were screaming a lot, not because I feel that is a place I will seek God.
Do you know how holy Jerusalem is, how consecrated Jerusalem is in the mind of the Christian? God says, "Even as Jerusalem is consecrated, it shall not be sufficient enough to define the deepest dimension of my presence, because now it is not an address. It is in an individual."
Christ is Lord over the house as a Son, and we are His house. Now, when you go back to Psalm 36:8, where it says, "They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of his house," and Paul says He no longer dwells in houses built by human hands—you shall be abundantly satisfied by drawing from your inner experiences.
In John chapter 7, at the feast of tabernacles, Jesus stood and cried in a loud voice:
"If any man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, who cleaves to and trusts in me and relies on me, as the scriptures say, from the innermost being there shall flow continuously springs and rivers of living water."
But then the gospel writer explains: "He was speaking here of the spirit whom those who believe in him were afterward to receive, for the Holy Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus was not yet glorified."
Here is the end of this revelation: from the innermost being of themselves, rivers will flow. The overflow comes from the innermost being. So if you have not learned how to draw from within, you will never flow.
We no longer pray for power from on high. We no longer call fire from heaven. We call fire from within. In fact, one of the signs of the antichrist is that he shall call fire from heaven. Mature people have understood me. One of the signs of the false prophet is that he will call things from without—things that are designed for the children of God to call from within. Why would he call from without? Because he cannot call from within.
Do you know what it means to be a vessel with a consistent, continuous flow of rivers—plural, not a singular river? Rivers of living water, not a river. Rivers! An endless flow. That as long as you are still in the body, even after you leave the body, the expressions of your anointing will always flow to bless even those who never knew you in the flesh.
That is why Paul wrote letters hundreds and hundreds of years ago. But you can still open the book of Paul, a letter written by Paul, and it can take cancer out of your body. You can read a Psalm and it can heal your disease. You can read Isaiah and it can restore your business. These men are still flowing even now, long after they are gone. There is something on them that expresses relevance even when they are long gone.
Whatever will stay when you are gone comes from within you.
God is not asking you to do anything to get to the overflow. He is asking you to just open your heart to allow Him. Do you get the difference? He is not telling you to pay this much, do this. No, no, no. It is not a list of things to do. It is one thing only: to be positioned where He wants you. It is a place of yielding to what He has done, not trying to cause Him to do.
There are three things before I close that will help you to yield.
Dying spiritually is the most distinct and fundamental sign of a yielded vessel. You must die to the world. When I mean dying to the world, I mean death.
Katherine Kuhlman used to tell God, "Kill me." Sugossworth used to say, "Bend me." Evan Roberts used to say, "Break me." They all meant the same thing that Paul said: "I am crucified with Christ. Yet not I, but Christ lives in me. And the life that I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who gave Himself for me. I am crucified with Christ."
How do you tell a person who is dead? When nothing in the world fulfills them. Not every success you have in life is fulfillment, and to know the difference is judgment.
I wish some of you knew the things we left for the gospel. Some of us did not enter the gospel because we were poor. We did not start preaching the gospel because we were stuck and said, "Ah, this is our way through." That is why I pity people who only had that—because now when they start to test the world, it becomes so hard to maintain the relationship. The pleasures of this world draw them. The lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.
The Lord has to teach you that you do not have to be famous to be great, and to be satisfied with pleasing only Him. Paul says, "I am dead to the world and the world is dead to me."
When you are at that level, yes, your carnality will celebrate the new mobile phone you receive. But your spirit will not lose sleep because you have a new phone. Even if they gave you a billion dollars, it would not make sense if it does not fulfill your purpose.
Any man who is totally dead lives only for one thing: the fulfillment of the purposes of God. They only have one singular agenda in life—the fulfillment of the purposes of God. If you are that kind of person who is still swayed by what the world still offers, you are too alive. You are too untamed for the spirit of God to work through you.
I know this is not a common thing in this dispensation because we have venerated the successes of this world. And I am not saying do not be successful in the world. By all means, every child of God should be a success because He says, "I send you to be the heads and not the tail, above and not beneath." You are supposed to be the heads wherever you are.
But until you get to a point where even that position you have in life does not define you—except the bearing that you carry with God, the expressions of His conviction on your life—to not be moved anymore by the physical world, the present world. That is the mark.
When Paul was in ministry, there were young men whom he walked with and they saw God. They experienced God. Oh, they saw God. But towards his old age, the scriptures tell us they left him. In 2 Timothy 4:9-10, Paul tells Timothy:
"Do thy due diligence to come to me shortly, because Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia and Titus has gone to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me."
How can you imagine walking with Paul the Apostle? These young men were serving a man who laid the New Testament dispensation. They saw a young man, Eutychus perhaps, fall off a building, and Paul goes downstairs and raises him up while they are watching. They saw the lame walking. They saw the blind see. They saw the deaf and dumb speak and hear. They saw it with their own eyes.
They heard Paul speak and lay the mystery of the New Testament. He was a master builder given the authority to lay the foundation of the New Testament. Yet these young men left him because they loved this present world.
I am talking to these young ladies who are here every day seeking God. The day you get married, they will never see you in church. There is a young man fasting and praying, here on the grounds. But the day God elevates you to a certain position in life, the church will never see you again. The day you get that job, the church will never see you again. Because the care of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and you become unfruitful.
You cannot still be alive to the world.
No man can learn to meditate without the discipline of solitude. This is where the mountain becomes important. You do not go to the mountain because it is a deeper place. You only go to the mountain if it is the place you will be alone.
There is a place in God where God can silence your spirit. When your spirit is noisy, even if you are on a prayer mountain, you can fail to pray. But once God helps you tame your spirit to the stillness—there is a knowledge of God in that degree.
"Be still and know that I am God."
There is a knowledge that comes in the stillness of the spirit. There are people who have learned the secret of stilling themselves, of silencing their spirits to the point where even when on the busiest schedule, their spirit is in perfect harmony and fellowship.
Solitude is not necessarily the absence of people or noise. As you continue to grow in God, you get to a point where you could sit in a multitude of people screaming, but you are so tempted to plug so deep inside your inner being at the core that you find such a place so still that no amount of noise can take you or divert you from what God is doing at that hour.
If you can achieve that kind of life, your prayer life automatically changes. You do not only pray on a schedule. It becomes a lifestyle because your spirit is easily plugged. It is not a blind spirit. It is a spirit that is actively with sight. It can perceive. It can design.
Paul says, "Watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all saints." The place of prayer has a watching. Your eyes can see. You are not blind. You enter a place and you can discern every spirit in that place. You sit and you can negate this, negate that. And you know that now I am only with the Holy Spirit. Yes, there is a lot of activity around you. But the watchman also carries the wisdom to guard the territory.
No watchman appointed on a gate carries no wisdom to protect that gate. And the gate most important to protect is your mind. Paul says, "For with my mind I serve the law of God." The very thing that you think should divert him is the very thing that plugs him into the way of the spirit. For he says, "I myself serve the law of God." That is an important faculty when a man is connecting to God. You have to build your psyche. It has to be strengthened.
That is what we call the riches of His glory. That is why in Ephesians 3:16, Paul is praying for the church. He prays for the riches of His glory—that by them we might be strengthened in the inner man through the spirit.
"That He would grant according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with might by his spirit in the inner man."
The riches of His glory. What are the riches of His glory? We are talking about that presence, that overflow that comes with the presence, that power, that glory that comes with His presence. It is what strengthens you. It is what builds your inner man every day. It is what arrests everything around.
Do you know that there is a degree of presence that pauses everything around? It can pause everything around you. So when the Bible says, "Be still," it is not just a physical position. It is a spiritual place where nothing moves your spirit.
If you never tap into that, you can never walk in the miraculous, because the miraculous is a very distracting realm. The devil can sense when a man has plugged into the miraculous faculty. He knows. And what will he do? He will send every kind of thought. In fact, he can tire your spirit to a point where you say, "Father, I thank you," and the next thing you know, you are sleeping. Where did this sleep come from? Because you are almost entering a place of stillness, and the only place your body understands to be still is sleep.
So to tame your body to be subject to the man of the spirit—right now, that solitude, that stillness, that building of your inner man, the mind alert and aligned—is the beginning of meditation. Because meditation is as strong as a man is able to stay on a thing. It is not sufficient for your mind to visit a place. It is important for your mind to stay on a thing.
It takes so much spiritual tenacity and potency for you to keep a vision for ten minutes, thirty minutes, one hour, two hours, and your mind is not diverted. When you understand that place of meditation and through the word learn how to activate your creative faculties, it means that the physical realm will start obeying you instantly.
Because the things that are seen were brought about by things which you do not see. Everything our eyes can see was brought about by things which we do not see. For the things which are seen are temporal, and the things which are not seen are eternal.
Meditation plugs you in the places of things that are not seen, yet they exist, and it allows you by the word of God to import them to the realm that is seen.
When you master that, you realize that the Holy Spirit—never forget this—the Holy Spirit works with your place of meditation, because He is the inspiration behind that meditation. It gets to a level where every time you are thinking, you feel your creation. There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty gives understanding.
You get to a level where the Holy Spirit impresses things on your life, and as you meditate on them, you feel one with the things you are creating. That is a place of understanding, because understanding is an affirmation realm. Understanding is a place of establishment.
"With wisdom, a house is built. With understanding, a house is established."
After learning the place of meditation, the third thing is contemplation. Contemplation is not a creative realm. Contemplation is a realm of inquiry. It is a realm that digs so deep into the layers of truth and starts to ask the questions of the heart.
The Bible says, "Counsel in the heart of a man is as deep water, but a man with understanding can draw it out." In Psalm 27:4, the psalmist says:
"One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple."
Inquire in his temple. That is the place of contemplation. Contemplation stirs the teacher to speak, because the desire to learn is what invites the Holy Spirit to minister. He does not minister beyond your contemplation.
First, the willingness—the availability to the willingness to learn. Second, the availability to learn. And third, the boldness to ask those questions. Because you can frustrate His instruction by using your carnal mind to answer things only He should answer.
That is why if you are a preacher and you do not understand the place of contemplation, you are going to only teach the doctrines of men. Even when you sit down to study, you can only study from a fallen realm. But when you understand this place, every time you sit on your Bible, you are sitting before a teacher. Every time you open the scripture, the teacher is ready for you.
Contemplation prepares your spirit to learn. And as I have always told you, your teachers only appear when you are ready to learn. The teacher only appears when the student is ready to learn.
People sat under Paul's teaching, and Romans 3:8 says they went back falsely and slanderously reporting that Paul is telling people to do evil that good may come. They all sat in the same meeting, but one man had one thing and another man had another. They were all sitting under a man teaching by the spirit, but one was contemplative and understood, while another was so locked out of that world that everything spoken could only be interpreted by their carnal mind.
Have you ever asked yourself why Paul was stoned? Have you ever asked yourself why Jesus was crucified? Not by the Romans, but by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The people you expect to be closest to truth were the farthest. They were not contemplative.
That is what makes David special. Everything you are reading in Psalms that is blessing you were his songs. Can you imagine? The things we teach now as a message were inspirations that came to him through music. David's music instructs the church.
Today you hear artists singing and you ask, "What are these guys singing?" Their songs do not instruct. They are lamentations. They are places of regret, places of victimhood. Very few of them are able to get lay men out of wheelchairs through their worship because they do not write under the spirit of contemplation. They write from carnality.
We are a generation lured by rhythm, not revelation. Once it sounds good in our ears, it can take us to hell. As long as it is a good melody or symphony.
If you would get the total sum of everything I have taken trouble to share, the end of this is that the next few years, the next dispensation, if it finds a man who does not know how to live in the overflow, it will be a very, very tiring life of Christianity. That is why people are tired. You find Christians who are tired. Somebody tells you, "I am tired of going to church." The very presence that was designed to feed you is the very place that tires you. Yet you are not tired to go to work for fallen man.
God wants to put something on you that your human understanding will never explain. God wants to put something on you that your abilities will never carry. Something older than you, something bigger than you, something richer than you, something greater than you. And out of that, I tell you the truth: some people at the sound of my voice are going to be surprised where the spirit is going to throw you.
The spirit of God is a wind that blows. And when it starts to blow, for those of us who are carried by it, we might not explain where we land. I have a picture of locusts being carried by the wind. And you and I are those locusts.
Do you know why? Because locusts cannot fly by themselves. They must be carried by some wind. And the winds of the spirit, as they would in the physical, carry locusts. There are people here. This is the day God wants to launch you. He wants to launch you.
And you are going to land—in a few weeks, in a few months from now—you are going to land in purposes. You are going to land in glories. You are going to land in places, in addresses that you have never dreamed of.
It is about time you stopped moving and functioning without a glory on your life. There is a presence that is going to go beyond your education. There is a glory that you are going to command that is beyond your position in society. This is something the Holy Spirit is going to put on your life. It is going to put it on your tongue, on your lips, on your utterances and your expressions.
Listen to this. The spirit of the Lord has allowed me to say this. A pastor switched on one of those prayer sessions of mine. He went on YouTube and got one of those prayer sessions where I was speaking in tongues. He started praying as I was speaking. And the presence of God filled his car. As he was driving, he reached a traffic light and stopped. Thieves came and surrounded the car. A man got a gun at the window where this fellow was and told him, "Open the door."
This fellow was speaking in tongues. He turned to look at the man with a gun. The power of God hit the man. He fell about six feet away and he started convulsing. His eyes went into the back of his skull. The guys who had come to rob him ran to rescue their friend who was dying. That kind of power. That kind of power. You cannot buy it in a supermarket.
You either understand who God is and what He is able to do through you. Every expression that comes out of you will command the presence of God.
I want to share with you from Psalm 23, a scripture many of you know well. David declares:
"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me besides the still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."
Today, I want to focus on one particular sentence that carries profound revelation: My cup runs over. This is not simply about having more than you need. This is about living in the overflow of God's presence.
When God decides to anoint a man, His purpose is clear: not only should a man be filled, but a man should overflow. This is the very end and intention of anointing—that you would be filled to such a degree that what comes out of you cannot be contained.
The overflow is a divine effusion, a super-abundance of God's glory—His manifested presence. We are talking about a glory that goes beyond the capacity of your human experience to explain, something that spills beyond the boundaries of your comprehension. It is that place where God fills you so completely that no human language has the power to put into words what you are experiencing in Him.
If what you are experiencing has language for it, then I am not yet talking about the overflow. This goes beyond the finite capacity of human ability, human language, and human understanding.
Not many people have had the opportunity to test or experience the overflow of the spirit. But I have met a few who have. And here is what I know for certain: any man who has been to the overflow carries a distinctive mark on their life and a certain pattern of results over them.
Years ago, I was so humbled to enter this blessed experience. After that, I realized something crucial: until a man gets into that depth of experience, you can never effectively serve God. You have to be filled to a place where you overflow—to such a degree that it is inevitable and unavoidable that what is coming out of your life will have an effect on those around you without much effort.
The anointing of the Holy Spirit given to you was not designed merely to bless you as an individual. Paul speaks of an experience where we commend ourselves to the consciences of men by the manifestation of the truth—by the glory of God in its full manifestation.
Many people say, "Oh, God is everywhere." Yes, that is true. But this is a short understanding of the full revelation of the degrees of the presence of God. Generally, God is everywhere—in the bars, in the hospitals, in the marketplaces. But if you are talking about the manifested presence of God, it is not sufficient merely for general divine omnipresence to get a dead body out of a morgue and give it life.
There is a degree of presence that is required to resurrect the dead. There is a degree of the manifested glory of God where a man functions in the overflow. Every man who lives or functions in that overflow has had an experience of the manifestations of the anointing around them.
Because of the spirit of religion, we were never taught to love the presence of God. The presence of God was presented as a duty to attend to, a routine that somebody had to carry out. That is why many people struggle to pray—including pastors and ministers of the gospel.
Our orientations on prayer were misaligned. We were told to pray out of duty, to protect ourselves from the attacks the enemy would send. Prayer was used merely for accessing what we wanted when we were in physical need. If somebody is in trouble, they will build a life of prayer. And when the trouble comes out, a life of prayer is no more.
When somebody has a problem with their marriage, children, or business, they set aside months of fasting and seeking God. When the trouble resolves, they return to factory settings. When believing God for a visa, you seek God; once the visa comes, you relax. When believing God for a promotion while your boss threatens layoffs, you pray urgently; once the company forgives you and keeps you employed, you relax again until the next trouble comes.
This is a generation that was never taught to love the presence of God. Perhaps those who introduced us to God's presence did not show us the journey, the pattern of worship.
I have met young men who asked me, "How do I become hungry for God?" They were genuinely asking. But there is something fundamentally wrong with that question. It is like a parent asking, "How do I love my child?"
It should be natural for every parent to love their child. A mother hen is protective of her eggs and her chicks. These creatures carry no spirit, yet they feel that love. How much more should a human being, created in the image and likeness of God, naturally love their child?
When someone asks me, "How do I love my child?" I realize the problem is deeper. The question itself reveals that something has killed their natural capacity to feel. It is the same when someone tells me, "I want to be hungry for God, but I don't know how."
How are you not hungry for God? Except that we are in a generation that has killed our spirits from the core. The Bible says that in the last days, men shall be lovers of themselves and not lovers of God. This is deliberate—the devil has taken us to a point where the things we are supposed to be feeling for God are no longer there. If you are at a level where you are not hungry as you should be, you are under a spiritual attack.
The Bible says in Psalm 36:7:
"How excellent is thy loving kindness, oh God! Therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings. They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of your house."
In the amplified version, it says: "They shall relish and feast on the abundance of your house."
There is a fullness that comes to a man who dwells in the presence of God that is almost inevitable. When you are in the presence, you are supposed to feel something, and that feeling should attract you to either stay or come back.
Listen to the living translation: "You feed them from the abundance of your own house, letting them drink from the river of your delights."
Now, if a man is fed and satisfied by the fatness of the house of God, how can that man not want to go into the presence of the Almighty? If he is fed, the only reason he would not feel drawn to go back is either because (1) he is not fed, or (2) he does not understand what it means to be fed.
You give them drink from the river of your pleasures. The praise of God is supposed to be a pleasurable place. It is not supposed to be a place you struggle to enter into. Yet I hear people say, "I tried to pray last night and I felt so weak, bogged down. My soul was so down in the dumps. Pray for me so I can pray as I ought." You are either under a spiritual attack or you have not yet tasted a certain dimension of God's presence.
The Bible says in Job 28:7 that there is a path which no fowl knows, which the vulture's eye has not seen, where the lion's whelps have not trodden and the fierce lion has not passed by it.
There is a degree in the presence of God where a man enters, and it is impossible by anything or any means to be enticed out of it. It is impossible. But if you have never been there, you might never understand this.
Consider the man Enoch. In Genesis 5:24, the Bible tells us that Enoch walked in habitual fellowship with God. In the extra-biblical book of Enoch, we find a remarkable story. Enoch was a teacher of the word, and he walked with God so distinctly. Every week, he would come to teach the things God had revealed to him. Immediately after instructing the people, he would separate himself and go be with God.
But he got so taken by the presence that he started coming every two weeks instead of weekly. He would teach and then return to be with the Lord. Eventually, it became so demanding for him to be in the presence that he appeared only once a month to teach. After some time, he appeared only once a year to teach.
I asked the Lord: At what level does this happen? I understand that place somewhat. There are times when I am praying that I feel so selfish. I feel like I want to stay where I am and I do not want to come and preach. But you have to understand this because it will change your life.
I asked the Lord, "These people need to be fed by your oracles. They need to receive your life. Would it not be better to have a scribe who taught every day if possible, because they need to know the wondrous things in your law?"
The Lord answered me with something profound. He said, "Enoch got to a place where the consecrations on his life by dwelling in my presence defined such authority in him that he carried a sufficiency of the spirit sufficient to instruct in one year what it would take certain men a whole lifetime to instruct."
Let me say that again: God can consecrate a man to a level where the authority on his life carries a sufficiency enough to speak once in a year what it might take other men a whole lifetime to achieve spiritually.
I learned by that wisdom that it is possible for a man not to teach every day but to teach once, and that one sermon would reverberate spiritually in the instruction of men for many days and many years. The Bible says that a scribe instructed in the kingdom is like a householder who brings forth his treasure things both new and old. When a man is instructed in the will of the spirit, his message becomes edgeless—a man would tune that sermon next year and listen to it and it does not sound like a recycled movie.
The scripture speaks of two kinds of people. In 1 Corinthians 1:22, Paul says, "The Jews require a sign, but the Greeks seek after wisdom."
Notice the difference in the language. He did not say the Jews seek for a sign—he said they require a sign. One requires; one seeks. One's positioning is simple: "I will agree with everything you say, but first manifest it." That is a Jew. The Greek does not wait for you to manifest anything. He is on a journey of seeking. Whether you show him or not, whether his teacher is ready or not, he is always on the road seeking.
Now, from ancient times, anybody raised under that philosophy can only understand what is manifested. They relate with what is manifested. The Greek does not wait—he is a seeker. He is always searching for wisdom.
But the Bible says that Christ is both the power and the wisdom of God. For the man who only requires and waits for manifestation, Christ carries the sufficiency to manifest Himself. But for the man who is always running and seeking after all manner of wisdom, he will find Christ at the end of it. God will not stop him.
But here is the problem: Through desire, a man having separated himself seeks and intermingles himself with all manner of wisdom. The problem with the seeker of wisdom is that because he carries no judgment, he sometimes opens himself up into wisdoms that are forbidden. He goes into forbidden territory. Fallen angelics start instructing. Nephilim spirits go over them. They can be very creative in the world. They can innovate. But because humanity is slow to discern what these innovations and inventions intend to achieve in the end, you never know.
It is only men with understanding, with a certain level of maturity or a certain knowledge of God, who can see and say: "Even though this thing looks good, when we look ten, twenty, or thirty years ahead, or if we study it from its core and source, we realize that this is not an inspiration from God."
Sometimes I think the sorrow of godly wisdom comes with the weight of the things that have been created through forbidden wisdom and are now tools in the church because we cannot tell the difference.
Do you know why the praise of God left our altars? Many altars, the church generally—I am speaking broadly—because there are wisdoms that crept in unawares. They came as forms of godliness, or perhaps the world showed us that these were things that were working. But these were not in the way of the spirit. They were not in the pattern of God. But because in our own sense we judged them neutral—and not because they were neutral in their own nature, but from our perspective—we accepted these things in the church.
Because God does not contend with man, He will always leave man to take his way. It is amazing with God. He does not fight us. He lets us say, "Okay, go your way, and let us see whether this will work."
If we are going to have a conversation about the move of God back in the church of Jesus Christ as it ought to be, do you know how much intellectualism you have to deconstruct?
Have you ever asked yourself why God left the wise and the prudent—the Pharisees and the Sadducees—and went to fishermen and said, "Let me work with these ones, who are not so wise. Let me work with fellows who only know how to talk to fish"?
Because if He goes to Jerusalem to a fellow who has spent twenty-four years studying, He needs to deconstruct so much to get him where He wants. Jesus says a powerful statement: "I thank you, Father, because you have hidden this from the prudent and the wise, and you have revealed it to babes." The only reason the babe has revelation is that he is not so wise and prudent in his own ways to be indifferent when God is speaking.
How can I be so wise and prudent that God no longer finds me viable for revelation? Are you following me?
Although we must be wise with the wisdom of God—messianic wisdom—there is a wisdom among us that could actually disconnect us from God. Some of these wisdoms are in our Bible schools. They are in our theology seminars. They are in our conferences every day. Yes, we are teaching; we are learning. But there is no results or glory that should pursue the wisdom of God.
You could get to heaven one day, and God says, "No, you were too educated for me to use. You were too beautiful for me to talk to. You were too connected for me to reach out. You knew so much that I did not know how to put or add to you."
The Bible says: "For after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God." In 1 Corinthians 1:21, the world by wisdom knew not God. These were not foolish people. These were people who by wisdom knew not God. They were too wise that they did not know God.
Oh, that a man can become so wise that he no longer feels the presence he is supposed to feel! That a man can be so wise that he no longer feels invited and inundated by the presence that should invite or inundated them. But again, if the world sees them as wise and by standard—these are the people we celebrate and build monuments for.
So He says, "No, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. They had to be foolish to believe." Do you know how many people look at us and think a born-again person is the most stupid thing they have ever seen? And rightly so, because that is how they see life.
But it is sad when a Christian becomes indifferent to the things of the spirit because they are as wise as the world has made them. Hallelujah.
The presence of God carries a certain fullness, a fatness, a certain pleasure. If you have never felt the pleasure of His presence, then you were never really taught about prayer. That is the beginning. That is the foundation of prayer: that a man must find pleasure in the thing that they do.
The psalmist says: "For with thee is the fountain of life and in thy light we shall see light." In Psalm 36:8-9, the rivers of pleasure precede revelation.
"They shall abundantly be satisfied with the fatness of thine house and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light."
Notice the order: fullness precedes pleasures. Pleasures precede life. Life precedes revelation. That is the order.
But a man wants to skip the pleasures of experience and jump to the revelation for manifestation. That is Simon the sorcerer. He gets born again. The scriptures tell us he follows the disciples along. He has not received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He has not tasted the overflow of the person of the Holy Ghost. But he sees them do miracles. He skips the pleasures. He skips the life. He jumps to the revelation that manifests, and he says, "I will pay you money. Give me that power so that whenever I lay hands on people, they too might be filled with the Holy Ghost."
He is seeking to give what he has not received. That is lust.
In Psalm 65:4, the psalmist says:
"Blessed is the man whom you choose and cause to approach you, that he may dwell in your courts. He shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, of your holy temple."
Notice: "cause to approach you." He cannot come except God draws them. God causes them to come near so that they may dwell in His courts. And in dwelling in His courts, they are satisfied with the goodness of His house.
In Psalm 36:8, we see that those that dwell in His courts are satisfied with the goodness of the house. But even deeper—in the New Testament dispensation, it goes further.
In Hebrews 3:6, Paul tells us something profound:
"But Christ is faithful over God's house. And we are his house if we indeed hold fast our confidence and our boasting in the hope."
Christ is the faithful one over that house. He is the one in charge of that house. By reason of the New Testament dispensation, we are His house.
Do you understand what has shifted? In the Old Testament dispensation, the presence of God was a place a man sought outside himself. In the New Testament, the presence of God is a place a man seeks within himself. The man draws it from within.
Now, do you know why people struggle to walk into the overflow? Because they still have an Old Testament mentality. They think it is their person approaching God. Yet in the New Covenant, God is already in them. What they really require is the wisdom to know how to draw from the God that is within.
Many people have a very Old Testament understanding of the secret place. They think of somewhere they can hide in the house and say, "I have my secret closet." They still carry the mindset of a people in the Old Testament where the presence was situated at a certain address. It was covered with a tabernacle, with a sanctuary, a tent. They had the Holy of Holies, then the Holy Place, then the Outer Court. The priest went into the Holy of Holies where the ark of the covenant was. The presence was there. That is the secret place. It is a situated address somewhere.
With this understanding, people think: "I am going to go a few days and just go to the mountain with my friends." They go to the mountain and seek God, saying, "Ah, now I have changed address and left my home and gone to a mountain, so at that particular point I am going to connect to God deeper."
But Jesus finds a woman at the well and says to her:
"A time will come where you shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall you worship the Father. A time shall come when they that worship me shall worship me in spirit and in truth."
As consecrated as Jerusalem is, it shall not be the address a man shall have to go to in order to connect to God. A time shall come when they worship in spirit and in truth. Truth, truth, truth—what is the truth? "I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. Nobody gets to the Father except by me."
If a man understands His person and knows that Christ is the Lord over that house, the secret place has shifted from a physical address and entered the man. That is why some of us—you might not find us on the mountain. If you find me on the mountain, it is probably because my daughters were screaming a lot, not because I feel that is a place I will seek God.
Do you know how holy Jerusalem is, how consecrated Jerusalem is in the mind of the Christian? God says, "Even as Jerusalem is consecrated, it shall not be sufficient enough to define the deepest dimension of my presence, because now it is not an address. It is in an individual."
Christ is Lord over the house as a Son, and we are His house. Now, when you go back to Psalm 36:8, where it says, "They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of his house," and Paul says He no longer dwells in houses built by human hands—you shall be abundantly satisfied by drawing from your inner experiences.
In John chapter 7, at the feast of tabernacles, Jesus stood and cried in a loud voice:
"If any man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, who cleaves to and trusts in me and relies on me, as the scriptures say, from the innermost being there shall flow continuously springs and rivers of living water."
But then the gospel writer explains: "He was speaking here of the spirit whom those who believe in him were afterward to receive, for the Holy Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus was not yet glorified."
Here is the end of this revelation: from the innermost being of themselves, rivers will flow. The overflow comes from the innermost being. So if you have not learned how to draw from within, you will never flow.
We no longer pray for power from on high. We no longer call fire from heaven. We call fire from within. In fact, one of the signs of the antichrist is that he shall call fire from heaven. Mature people have understood me. One of the signs of the false prophet is that he will call things from without—things that are designed for the children of God to call from within. Why would he call from without? Because he cannot call from within.
Do you know what it means to be a vessel with a consistent, continuous flow of rivers—plural, not a singular river? Rivers of living water, not a river. Rivers! An endless flow. That as long as you are still in the body, even after you leave the body, the expressions of your anointing will always flow to bless even those who never knew you in the flesh.
That is why Paul wrote letters hundreds and hundreds of years ago. But you can still open the book of Paul, a letter written by Paul, and it can take cancer out of your body. You can read a Psalm and it can heal your disease. You can read Isaiah and it can restore your business. These men are still flowing even now, long after they are gone. There is something on them that expresses relevance even when they are long gone.
Whatever will stay when you are gone comes from within you.
God is not asking you to do anything to get to the overflow. He is asking you to just open your heart to allow Him. Do you get the difference? He is not telling you to pay this much, do this. No, no, no. It is not a list of things to do. It is one thing only: to be positioned where He wants you. It is a place of yielding to what He has done, not trying to cause Him to do.
There are three things before I close that will help you to yield.
Dying spiritually is the most distinct and fundamental sign of a yielded vessel. You must die to the world. When I mean dying to the world, I mean death.
Katherine Kuhlman used to tell God, "Kill me." Sugossworth used to say, "Bend me." Evan Roberts used to say, "Break me." They all meant the same thing that Paul said: "I am crucified with Christ. Yet not I, but Christ lives in me. And the life that I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who gave Himself for me. I am crucified with Christ."
How do you tell a person who is dead? When nothing in the world fulfills them. Not every success you have in life is fulfillment, and to know the difference is judgment.
I wish some of you knew the things we left for the gospel. Some of us did not enter the gospel because we were poor. We did not start preaching the gospel because we were stuck and said, "Ah, this is our way through." That is why I pity people who only had that—because now when they start to test the world, it becomes so hard to maintain the relationship. The pleasures of this world draw them. The lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.
The Lord has to teach you that you do not have to be famous to be great, and to be satisfied with pleasing only Him. Paul says, "I am dead to the world and the world is dead to me."
When you are at that level, yes, your carnality will celebrate the new mobile phone you receive. But your spirit will not lose sleep because you have a new phone. Even if they gave you a billion dollars, it would not make sense if it does not fulfill your purpose.
Any man who is totally dead lives only for one thing: the fulfillment of the purposes of God. They only have one singular agenda in life—the fulfillment of the purposes of God. If you are that kind of person who is still swayed by what the world still offers, you are too alive. You are too untamed for the spirit of God to work through you.
I know this is not a common thing in this dispensation because we have venerated the successes of this world. And I am not saying do not be successful in the world. By all means, every child of God should be a success because He says, "I send you to be the heads and not the tail, above and not beneath." You are supposed to be the heads wherever you are.
But until you get to a point where even that position you have in life does not define you—except the bearing that you carry with God, the expressions of His conviction on your life—to not be moved anymore by the physical world, the present world. That is the mark.
When Paul was in ministry, there were young men whom he walked with and they saw God. They experienced God. Oh, they saw God. But towards his old age, the scriptures tell us they left him. In 2 Timothy 4:9-10, Paul tells Timothy:
"Do thy due diligence to come to me shortly, because Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia and Titus has gone to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me."
How can you imagine walking with Paul the Apostle? These young men were serving a man who laid the New Testament dispensation. They saw a young man, Eutychus perhaps, fall off a building, and Paul goes downstairs and raises him up while they are watching. They saw the lame walking. They saw the blind see. They saw the deaf and dumb speak and hear. They saw it with their own eyes.
They heard Paul speak and lay the mystery of the New Testament. He was a master builder given the authority to lay the foundation of the New Testament. Yet these young men left him because they loved this present world.
I am talking to these young ladies who are here every day seeking God. The day you get married, they will never see you in church. There is a young man fasting and praying, here on the grounds. But the day God elevates you to a certain position in life, the church will never see you again. The day you get that job, the church will never see you again. Because the care of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and you become unfruitful.
You cannot still be alive to the world.
No man can learn to meditate without the discipline of solitude. This is where the mountain becomes important. You do not go to the mountain because it is a deeper place. You only go to the mountain if it is the place you will be alone.
There is a place in God where God can silence your spirit. When your spirit is noisy, even if you are on a prayer mountain, you can fail to pray. But once God helps you tame your spirit to the stillness—there is a knowledge of God in that degree.
"Be still and know that I am God."
There is a knowledge that comes in the stillness of the spirit. There are people who have learned the secret of stilling themselves, of silencing their spirits to the point where even when on the busiest schedule, their spirit is in perfect harmony and fellowship.
Solitude is not necessarily the absence of people or noise. As you continue to grow in God, you get to a point where you could sit in a multitude of people screaming, but you are so tempted to plug so deep inside your inner being at the core that you find such a place so still that no amount of noise can take you or divert you from what God is doing at that hour.
If you can achieve that kind of life, your prayer life automatically changes. You do not only pray on a schedule. It becomes a lifestyle because your spirit is easily plugged. It is not a blind spirit. It is a spirit that is actively with sight. It can perceive. It can design.
Paul says, "Watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all saints." The place of prayer has a watching. Your eyes can see. You are not blind. You enter a place and you can discern every spirit in that place. You sit and you can negate this, negate that. And you know that now I am only with the Holy Spirit. Yes, there is a lot of activity around you. But the watchman also carries the wisdom to guard the territory.
No watchman appointed on a gate carries no wisdom to protect that gate. And the gate most important to protect is your mind. Paul says, "For with my mind I serve the law of God." The very thing that you think should divert him is the very thing that plugs him into the way of the spirit. For he says, "I myself serve the law of God." That is an important faculty when a man is connecting to God. You have to build your psyche. It has to be strengthened.
That is what we call the riches of His glory. That is why in Ephesians 3:16, Paul is praying for the church. He prays for the riches of His glory—that by them we might be strengthened in the inner man through the spirit.
"That He would grant according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with might by his spirit in the inner man."
The riches of His glory. What are the riches of His glory? We are talking about that presence, that overflow that comes with the presence, that power, that glory that comes with His presence. It is what strengthens you. It is what builds your inner man every day. It is what arrests everything around.
Do you know that there is a degree of presence that pauses everything around? It can pause everything around you. So when the Bible says, "Be still," it is not just a physical position. It is a spiritual place where nothing moves your spirit.
If you never tap into that, you can never walk in the miraculous, because the miraculous is a very distracting realm. The devil can sense when a man has plugged into the miraculous faculty. He knows. And what will he do? He will send every kind of thought. In fact, he can tire your spirit to a point where you say, "Father, I thank you," and the next thing you know, you are sleeping. Where did this sleep come from? Because you are almost entering a place of stillness, and the only place your body understands to be still is sleep.
So to tame your body to be subject to the man of the spirit—right now, that solitude, that stillness, that building of your inner man, the mind alert and aligned—is the beginning of meditation. Because meditation is as strong as a man is able to stay on a thing. It is not sufficient for your mind to visit a place. It is important for your mind to stay on a thing.
It takes so much spiritual tenacity and potency for you to keep a vision for ten minutes, thirty minutes, one hour, two hours, and your mind is not diverted. When you understand that place of meditation and through the word learn how to activate your creative faculties, it means that the physical realm will start obeying you instantly.
Because the things that are seen were brought about by things which you do not see. Everything our eyes can see was brought about by things which we do not see. For the things which are seen are temporal, and the things which are not seen are eternal.
Meditation plugs you in the places of things that are not seen, yet they exist, and it allows you by the word of God to import them to the realm that is seen.
When you master that, you realize that the Holy Spirit—never forget this—the Holy Spirit works with your place of meditation, because He is the inspiration behind that meditation. It gets to a level where every time you are thinking, you feel your creation. There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty gives understanding.
You get to a level where the Holy Spirit impresses things on your life, and as you meditate on them, you feel one with the things you are creating. That is a place of understanding, because understanding is an affirmation realm. Understanding is a place of establishment.
"With wisdom, a house is built. With understanding, a house is established."
After learning the place of meditation, the third thing is contemplation. Contemplation is not a creative realm. Contemplation is a realm of inquiry. It is a realm that digs so deep into the layers of truth and starts to ask the questions of the heart.
The Bible says, "Counsel in the heart of a man is as deep water, but a man with understanding can draw it out." In Psalm 27:4, the psalmist says:
"One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple."
Inquire in his temple. That is the place of contemplation. Contemplation stirs the teacher to speak, because the desire to learn is what invites the Holy Spirit to minister. He does not minister beyond your contemplation.
First, the willingness—the availability to the willingness to learn. Second, the availability to learn. And third, the boldness to ask those questions. Because you can frustrate His instruction by using your carnal mind to answer things only He should answer.
That is why if you are a preacher and you do not understand the place of contemplation, you are going to only teach the doctrines of men. Even when you sit down to study, you can only study from a fallen realm. But when you understand this place, every time you sit on your Bible, you are sitting before a teacher. Every time you open the scripture, the teacher is ready for you.
Contemplation prepares your spirit to learn. And as I have always told you, your teachers only appear when you are ready to learn. The teacher only appears when the student is ready to learn.
People sat under Paul's teaching, and Romans 3:8 says they went back falsely and slanderously reporting that Paul is telling people to do evil that good may come. They all sat in the same meeting, but one man had one thing and another man had another. They were all sitting under a man teaching by the spirit, but one was contemplative and understood, while another was so locked out of that world that everything spoken could only be interpreted by their carnal mind.
Have you ever asked yourself why Paul was stoned? Have you ever asked yourself why Jesus was crucified? Not by the Romans, but by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The people you expect to be closest to truth were the farthest. They were not contemplative.
That is what makes David special. Everything you are reading in Psalms that is blessing you were his songs. Can you imagine? The things we teach now as a message were inspirations that came to him through music. David's music instructs the church.
Today you hear artists singing and you ask, "What are these guys singing?" Their songs do not instruct. They are lamentations. They are places of regret, places of victimhood. Very few of them are able to get lay men out of wheelchairs through their worship because they do not write under the spirit of contemplation. They write from carnality.
We are a generation lured by rhythm, not revelation. Once it sounds good in our ears, it can take us to hell. As long as it is a good melody or symphony.
If you would get the total sum of everything I have taken trouble to share, the end of this is that the next few years, the next dispensation, if it finds a man who does not know how to live in the overflow, it will be a very, very tiring life of Christianity. That is why people are tired. You find Christians who are tired. Somebody tells you, "I am tired of going to church." The very presence that was designed to feed you is the very place that tires you. Yet you are not tired to go to work for fallen man.
God wants to put something on you that your human understanding will never explain. God wants to put something on you that your abilities will never carry. Something older than you, something bigger than you, something richer than you, something greater than you. And out of that, I tell you the truth: some people at the sound of my voice are going to be surprised where the spirit is going to throw you.
The spirit of God is a wind that blows. And when it starts to blow, for those of us who are carried by it, we might not explain where we land. I have a picture of locusts being carried by the wind. And you and I are those locusts.
Do you know why? Because locusts cannot fly by themselves. They must be carried by some wind. And the winds of the spirit, as they would in the physical, carry locusts. There are people here. This is the day God wants to launch you. He wants to launch you.
And you are going to land—in a few weeks, in a few months from now—you are going to land in purposes. You are going to land in glories. You are going to land in places, in addresses that you have never dreamed of.
It is about time you stopped moving and functioning without a glory on your life. There is a presence that is going to go beyond your education. There is a glory that you are going to command that is beyond your position in society. This is something the Holy Spirit is going to put on your life. It is going to put it on your tongue, on your lips, on your utterances and your expressions.
Listen to this. The spirit of the Lord has allowed me to say this. A pastor switched on one of those prayer sessions of mine. He went on YouTube and got one of those prayer sessions where I was speaking in tongues. He started praying as I was speaking. And the presence of God filled his car. As he was driving, he reached a traffic light and stopped. Thieves came and surrounded the car. A man got a gun at the window where this fellow was and told him, "Open the door."
This fellow was speaking in tongues. He turned to look at the man with a gun. The power of God hit the man. He fell about six feet away and he started convulsing. His eyes went into the back of his skull. The guys who had come to rob him ran to rescue their friend who was dying. That kind of power. That kind of power. You cannot buy it in a supermarket.
You either understand who God is and what He is able to do through you. Every expression that comes out of you will command the presence of God.
