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Dear People of the Northstate Vision:
This is just a quick reminder of the upcoming launch service for the Paah-ho-ammi Project of targeted prayer in Shasta County . For those of you who live in Shasta County , I hope to see all of you in Room 204 of Simpson University’s LaBaume-Rudat Building at 7:00 PM on Friday, September 24. For those who cannot attend, please be in prayer for us over the last one hundred days of the year – and please join with the many ministries around the nation who will pray for our country during the forty days of prayer and fasting known as 40DAYSUSA. At Simpson we will worship God, listen to His Word and Vision for us, and share His sacred supper across the breadth of the Body that is represented in that room. We will then choose which of three prayer teams we will join and commit ourselves to daily prayer – of whatever length each day that God ordains for each of us – for the rest of the year.
I want also to share with you a crisis in our state and what I believe God is calling forth from it. There are about a dozen families in the leadership core of Pray California – including board members, regional facilitators, and senior pastors for the regions. In the weeks leading up to the recent statewide prayer summit one of the leaders was killed in a traffic accident, the nephew of another took his own life, still another suffered a serious heart attack, close relatives of three others suffered heart attack, and the mother of still another was diagnosed with a rare and life threatening disease while one of our primary intercessors underwent tests for what could have been a cerebral aneurysm. The sister-in-law of still another died after a long bout with cancer. This disproportionate concentration of health crises in such a small group is mute tribute to the effectiveness of Pray California in making a positive change in the spiritual atmosphere over the state; it is also evidence of a major spiritual (with physical manifestations) backlash as the enemy of all life tries to maintain his hold on the politics and culture of California. This period of atmospheric change over the state can be dated to the January onset of the I-5 Project and subsequent prayer projects that we have undertaken, although its roots go back much deeper to the intercessory activities of many ministries over many years.
As I waited to preach the Gospel in a Shasta County church on August 29 I was in prayer asking God why He was permitting such havoc to be wreaked in the people who were stepping out as His ambassadors in the state. He immediately brought my attention to Acts 8 – which opens with the death of Stephen and continues with the persecution of the Jerusalem Church and its subsequent scattering. Surely the disciples must have wondered where was their covering, just as I was asking that same question of God that Sunday Morning. The next event in Acts 8 is the taking of the Gospel to Samaria and to Antioch , from which it spread to the rest of the known world – by those same apostles and disciples who had been scattered from Jerusalem in the persecution.
A crisis is always a combination of danger and opportunity, and I believe this is what God would show us now. It is crushing news that people we love are dying and suffering as the enemy has his way with them for a time. It is cry-out-for-joy news that God is making His plans prosper in us through this hard time. He showed us both realities in Acts 8. But we must not limit ourselves to either grieving or giving glory. God’s miracles are rarely – if ever – performed without human participation and when we fail to show up He has little incentive to show off. I am urging – no, begging – each of us to be hard charging in our prayer to bless the state in the Name of Jesus until we see the victory God is hatching. Please be especially careful to pray blessing and protection on every leader in the state – sacred and secular – those whose names you know and those you do not. Please read Acts 8 as you pray and declare verses from that chapter in prayer.
A dear friend of mine used to say that we had been living in apocalyptic times since the day of Resurrection two millennia ago, but that these are unusually apocalyptic times. He was right then and he is all the more right now. Please pray daily. |
