Priscilla Shirer – My Eyes Can See

“If I were your enemy, I’d disguise myself and manipulate your perspectives so that you’d focus on the wrong culprit—your husband, your friend, your hurt, your finances, anything or anyone except me. Because when you zero in on the most convenient, obvious places to strike back against your problems, you get the impression you’re fighting for something. Even though all you’re really doing is just . . . fighting. For nothing.”
― Priscilla Shirer, Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan to Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer

With me 1st baptist and received Prisa Shire and God bless.
Yeah, I’m grateful. Good morning.
Good afternoon. It’s a privilege to be with you. You may take your seats.
I’m so grateful. So grateful to be at the First Baptist Church of Glenarden. It refreshes my soul.
It feels like coming home. It feels like coming home. I’m so grateful.
Thank you for allowing me the privilege to be a part of this particular day because I know it’s not just us Sunday.
It is your anniversary. And so I celebrate you today.
I celebrate the years of faithfulness and all of the work that God has done through you.
And it feels special to be a part of it. I want to celebrate your pastor and first lady.
I cannot not celebrate.
Yes, After and 1st Lady, right?
Let’s see. I celebrate them because, oh man, for so many reasons, but because they have integrity.
Let me tell y’all, it’s sad to say, but it is a rare thing these days when you find church leaders who are actually the same people when nobody’s looking and the fact that you all have that is something you ought to thank God for that.
He entrusted you to people like this. Such a blessing.
So much of the way Jerry and I have patterned our marriage and the way we have raised our Children is directly connected to the influence of these two people on our life.
I’m so grateful I do want to greet you with, from my husband.
Um We were all planning on coming, had a little hiccup with um his mom who’s not doing well right now.
So he stayed home with the bigger boys. But I’ve got my youngest son with me, Jude, Jude.
You want to just stand up and say hi, this is Jude Shire right there.
I’m excited to have him with me in the house of God today.
Let’s pray and see what it is that the Lord would say to us.
Lord Jesus, put a guard over my mouth, father unveil our ears, Lord, so that we can hear and Lord would you open our eyes so that we can see it is in the mighty matchless name of Jesus, the name at which every will bow and every tongue will confess the name at which demons tremble.
It is in that name that the church of God said. Amen. Amen. Amen.
As I mentioned, I have uh three sons, Jackson is 16 years old.
I’ve been a bit nostalgic and reminiscing while I have been here with you today because the very first time that I came to first Baptist Church of Glenarden Jackson was six months old.
He was in my arms like this. Now, he is 16 6 ft two inches tall, towering over me.
His brother is 14 years old Jerry Junior and then Jude, he’s our surprise baby.
We still don’t know how you got here. 10 years old.
Now we named him Jude on purpose because that’s as close as I can get to revelation because it is finished.
That’s it. That’s how you got your name, Jackson Jerry Junior and Jude.
One of the things that I have done with my son since my oldest was five is when I started it.
I got them each a journal.
I went to Ross Dress for less on the left hand side, back corner for about $4.99.
You could buy a journal and I bought one for each son.
I have kept a journal for each of them for all these years. I planned to write in it.
I don’t write every day or even every week.
It’s just when I see something, I don’t want to forget that’s happening in their lives or I see the handy work of God maneuvering things that I want them to be able to recount and recall later on.
So I’m just kind of writing love letters to them.
I think I’m going to pass it on to them when they’re old enough to appreciate it. Or better yet.
I might just give it to their wives so they can see what they’re getting themselves into.
That’s what I might do. But I’m writing these journals, keeping it for them safe keeping.
I was looking through the oldest one’s journal recently because he just turned 16 a couple of weeks ago.
And so I was just sort of looking back through his journal and I was reminded of something that happened on a particular day in his life.
And I remember this particular because I recall that after it, I was particularly spent something was going on with the boys.
They were all little at the time.
So it was diapers and, you know, just full on and full time when they’re little like that.
And I remember being very tired after that incident and I will never forget it because I had to get on an airplane and travel to Memphis the next day.
I was so excited about this particular trip.
Things had been so crazy and so chaotic and I don’t know how it worked out that I was traveling by myself.
Usually we all kind of traveled together, we home school our boys for quite a while so they could just travel with us.
So usually we were all together, at least somebody was with me.
But on this occasion, I was by myself and I was glad I was so tired, I could not wait to get into Memphis.
I was picked up from the airport and we uh went to the hotel, the sweet woman from the church that came to pick me up, took me to the hotel.
She said, hey, do you wanna stop for dinner first? I said, no girl take me to the hotel.
I’m looking so forward to being in the room by myself, being able to sleep in the bed by myself.
I was so excited about all of that, just getting some rest and I fell into a deep sleep about 8 30 PM.
Really early, excited for a full night before the conference the next day.
But it was about three o’clock in the morning that I was jarred awake out of my slumber.
And I, I went and looked outside the window to see what was making all this noise and not too far outside of the back of the hotel, there were train tracks and a train was roaring by at three o’clock in the morning, the conductor was sitting down on the horn the entire time that he roared by.
And it wasn’t one of those short trains. It’s one of the ones that never ends.
It just keeps going forever and ever.
And so I waited for the train to go by and then I tried to get back into a deep sleep, but I really wasn’t able to sleep really well after that.
And the conference started early. So the woman from the church came and picked me up early and I didn’t say anything about the, about the train at all.
I just went through the day. Looking forward to one more night, I had one more night in the hotel.
I planned to get a good night’s sleep. Fell into a deep sleep at about 8 30.
And you guessed it about three o’clock in the morning. A train went roaring by the back of that hotel.
Jarred me awake out of my sleep.
I looked out the window, there was a train again and this time I tried to get back to sleep, but really, I just couldn’t wait for the sweet woman from the church to come pick me up so I could ask her about this train.
And so early in the morning when she came, I sat down in her car and she said, hey, how did you sleep?
I said, well, since you asked, there is a train that has gone by not just tonight last night, but the night before as well, this train roared by both nights waking me up.
What’s the deal with this train? As I spoke to her, her eyes got wider and wider.
There was a look of apology on her face. I felt so bad for her.
She just said, Priscilla, I’m so so sorry.
She said, I have to be honest with you, those of us who have lived in this neighborhood for so long, those of us who are used to this community and have been here for years and years we have gotten so used to the sound of the train that we don’t even recognize it when it comes through anymore.
It didn’t even cross my mind to prepare you for the train because we are so used to the sound that we’ve become desensitized to it when it passes through.
It occurs to me that those of us who live, particularly in this part of the world, in the western part of the world where we have been so blessed by the presence of God where you can go on almost any corner and find a Bible teaching church like this one with a pastor who is proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ where you can turn on Christian radio and turn on this station.
If you like temporary Christian radio or if you want to hear gospel, you can turn on this station, you can go in a Christian bookstore and pick up any Bible in any translation in any language that you like.
We have been so blessed by the presence of God around us.
That could it be that when the train of His glory wants to fall in a unique way in your life, you don’t even recognize it anymore.
Have we become so desensitized to the goodness of God that when he wants to speak to us, we don’t even hear his voice when his fingerprints are to be recognized in our circumstances.
We call it coincidence. We don’t even recognize that it’s him making himself apparent in our lives.
Lord help us to wake up out of our spiritual slumber and hear you when you speak and see you when you are near because I don’t know about y’all.
But listen, if he’s speaking, I want to hear his voice. If he’s moving, I wanna see his fingerprints.
I wanna see his footprints in my life, guiding my path.
If he is near, I don’t want to miss him when he comes.
And it is at least in part to this end that I believe Luke gives us a passage of scripture, a story of Christ coming into the world that was already read to you earlier in the service.
So I won’t take the time to read it all verse for verse.
But this is the occasion when Jesus is coming into the temple almost for the very first time.
He is about 40 days old.
The time for purification, which is what it was called was over where the mother kind of kept herself in secret with her new baby.
But then after 40 days, they would bring the son into the temple to be presented to the Lord.
And on this occasion, Luke gives us details about the Messiah coming into the temple.
I love the gospel of Luke. I like Luke as a writer.
In fact, he is a physician, he’s a doctor. So he’s into details. I like juicy details.
I like the thing, the words that can put flesh on the story so that we can get a full picture.
I like how Luke writes throughout the entirety of his gospel.
He wrote his gospel and recorded stories and encounters with Jesus.
Not only to show us that Jesus encountered other, but also to encourage us to know that we can encounter him, that our eyes can be open, to see him in the details of our life.
And listen, this really should be our goal. As believers in Jesus Christ.
We must not just meet him on the pages of the Old Testament as a pillar of cloud during the day and a fire at night.
We must not just meet him in the New Testament as he raises Lazarus from the dead.
We are supposed to see him throughout the scriptures and the encounters he had with those people and realize that not exceptions to the rule.
They are examples for us as to how we should anticipate seeing God in our own circumstances.
He didn’t just show up for them. He shows up for us and we can see him. He meets us.
We can encounter him when we’re spent and empty and no longer to provide for ourselves.
We can expect that when we’re blind, he makes us seed.
We can expect that when things are dead, he still raises Lazarus, we can expect that he still turns water into wine.
He didn’t just do it for them. He fully intends to do it for you.
And this is why Luke writes and he writes during a time of national decay, you need to know that the Children of Israel were in a time of de of oppression.
When Luke writes, they are underneath the thumb of oppression.
This is a time of more moral and social decay and decline, like never before in the nation of Israel.
And I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but our nation is in a time of moral and social decay like we have never ever seen before.
Our God is marginalized and pushed to the periphery of society.
The more y’all we’re going to see the influx of chaos and destruction and disaster of every kind.
Luke writes to people who are in a nation that is in need, but he doesn’t just write to people who are in a, in a nation that, that, that is in need.
He writes to individuals that are in need.
He writes to people who don’t just want to know about what God can do in the white house, but what God can do in their house underneath the roof of their own home where their marriages are fragmented, where their bodies are broken, where their minds are fissured, where their hearts need mending.
He writes to people who need a savior, not just out there but in here individuals who are struggling.
He writes to us, he writes encounters about broken people who met up with a great God.
And I believe that somebody might need to hear this today in this service.
I didn’t say this in the previous two services.
Sometimes sometimes your difficulties, they are less about the enemy being against you and more about God showing you what it looks like for Him to be for you.
Sometimes when things are chaotic, they provide the backdrop that is the backdrop for Jesus to show up and your eyes to finally be primed.
So that when he comes, you will not miss him.
So these people have been waiting on a savior, the nation is in trouble.
They personally are in trouble. They have been calling out to God for centuries asking Yahweh to send a deliverer, to send a messiah, to send a savior.
They need a hero to rescue them for the struggle.
And when Jesus arrives, they do not realize that it’s Him.
They’ve been calling out for for years and centuries asking God for an answer.
And when the answer comes the package in, when in which he comes is so much different than their expectation that their expectation has blinded them to the reality of God’s answer to their prayer.
They expected a champion on a white horse with a sword in his hand.
They wanted all of the dignity and all of the authority that would come with the king that they had pictured in their mind.
But when Jesus comes, he doesn’t come as a king in a chariot. No, he has put on humanity.
He has closed his deity. He has come descended and he comes packaged as a baby.
And when he arrives in the temple, they do not even know that God has answered their prayers.
I want to suggest to some of you that the answer you’ve been praying for God has already answered.
I want to suggest to you that the invasion of holiness that you’ve been needing in your marriage or in your finances or in your health.
I want to suggest to you that possibly the answer has already come.
It’s just packaged in a way that you do not prefer.
I want to suggest to you the possibility that sometimes when we pray for oak trees, God answers in acorns.
When we pray for growth, sometimes God answers with rain, sometimes the answer looks different than what you anticipated.
So then the prayer becomes Lord. Would you open up my eyes?
Lord, would you heighten my spiritual sensor sensors so that my radar is up so that when you are near, even if you’ve come differently than I’ve expected, I do not miss sight of you.
So the text tells us, Luke writes and he says, listen, Mary and Joseph, they come into the temple and they bring the baby Jesus, the messiah, the one on whom everyone has been waiting and they come into the temple.
It says in verse, it says in verse 22 that they came according to the law of Moses and they brought him Luke chapter two, verse 22 they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.
That’s an interesting concept, isn’t it?
They were presenting the Lord to the, to the Lord And they bring him into the temple.
And it says in verse 24 that they had a pair of turtle doves with him.
I’m gonna open up a little parenthesis uh right here if you don’t mind because you know this is the 12:00 service.
So pastor Jenkins said I had a little time on my hand.
I’m gonna open up a parenthesis because Luke with the details wants us to know that Mary Kane, as all parents of first born sons would have come to the Taber or to the temple rather to perform two different sacrifices.
It was like two different layers in the sacrificial system, the burnt offering and the sin offering.
They were required to bring with them two animals for this sacrifice.
One for each Leviticus gives us details about the sacrificial system. You don’t have to turn there.
I’ll just tell you that in Leviticus chapter 12, all the details are given as to what they were supposed to bring and how the system was supposed to be outworked on this specific occasion.
And Luke chapter 12 tells us that they needed a pigeon for one of the sacrifices, but they also needed a lamb.
That was the requirement that they needed a pigeon or a turtle do and they needed a lamb, which is why it’s interesting that Luke wants to make sure we understand on this occasion that Mary came.
But she didn’t come with a lamb.
She had two turtle doves, two pigeons that seems to go against the levitical law in Leviticus chapter chapter 12.
But there is a little caveat, a little nuance in verse eight of chapter 12 of Leviticus, that tells us that if someone was not able to afford their own lamb, if they did not have sufficient funds to be able to purchase for themselves, a lamb, they could buy the lesser expensive sacrifice, which was what was another, they could come with two pigeons if they could not provide for themselves enough to purchase the lamb.
Scholars say that Joseph had a job, he was a carpenter as we all know.
But he was really more like a stone mason, an architect, he had money.
But the thing is they had to travel to Bethlehem.
You remember for the for the census, they had had to stay in and around Bethlehem for 40 days.
Scholars say that he had probably just come to the end of his resources And by the time the 40 days were up and it was time for him to go to Jerusalem, they no longer had enough to be able to buy for themselves a lamb.
So when they came into the temple with two pigeons, folks would have looked at them and turned their attention away thinking that these people are poor.
They are meager, they are insufficient.
They would have had all of the signs of people that were living in poverty.
I wonder how many people would have looked away.
I wonder how many people would have turned their noses up at the poor couple who just came in with the toddler.
I wonder how many people because they lacked the signs of affluence would have disregarded the people who were holding the messiah that they prayed for.
I wanna speak to anybody who was in the room and you’ve got insufficient funds.
I wanna speak to anybody who is in the room and you’ve ever been marginalized or outcast or ignored or somebody has turned their noses up at you because you don’t have the signs of affluence that everybody else has and maybe your insufficient funds are not just financial, maybe it’s emotional.
You are depleted. You’ve given everything you’ve got emotionally or relation or creatively, you’ve done everything you can and now you don’t have enough.
Here’s the good news while they were looking down at Mary and Joseph because they didn’t have a lamb.
What they didn’t realize at the time was that this couple had takes away the sins of the world.
Listen, it is when you are in times of lack that the lamb can be carried most beautifully in your life.
Sometimes we don’t experience the lamb of God as he is meant to be experienced because we got too much stuff.
As long as we are able to provide for ourselves, as long as we have our own sufficient funds financially, emotionally, spiritually, as long as we think we can buy our own lamb, we don’t experience the lamb in close intimate fellowship the way he is meant to be experienced.
So if you’re in the room and you are depleted and spent and lacking in some area of your life, get ready.
The lamb is on the way.
Emptiness makes room for the fullness of God.
Weakness is the platform for the strength of God to be displayed in your life.
I remember being with some people in a hut y’all in Africa, dirt floors, thatched roofs when it rained.
They lived in squalor as the floor became mud and I walked into the house and the peace of God was almost tangible.
They didn’t have no stuff, just the lamp and I walk.
You could feel the presence of God as you walked in the room, the smiles on their faces the way they gave their last little bits to be able to be a blessing to me, the foreigner who had come over from America and she sat me down to tell me about her life.
And she said, Priscilla, you need to know that we here in this village.
We pray for y’all over in America.
She said, we need you to know that we pray for you.
Because when we hear you pray, when Americans come to us and we hear you pray your prayers, they’re so self centered.
She said, you’re already blessed and yet we just hear Americans praying for more blessing.
She said your prayers. Sometimes they’re so weak and anemic and feeble.
We are asking God to allow you to experience him in the way.
We have no choice but to we can’t afford our own lamb. So we get him in a way.
Y’all have not gotten him. And so we’re asking the Lord to make you desperate enough to experience him the way we’ve experienced him.
So if there’s some lack somewhere in your life, financially, spiritually, creatively, you’ve run out your text in your relationship.
You just don’t have it in your own natural resources.
Expect that the reason why is because He wants your arms empty so that you can carry him more closely to yourself closed parenthesis.
The couple comes in with Jesus.
Please do not let it be lost on you that they bring Jesus into the temple.
They are at church and folks don’t see Jesus y’all.
They, they’re in the midst of doing religious stuff and don’t see him, which means you can be in church every single Sunday.
That means you can be waving at the service and saying amen and participating in religious activity and doing your little quiet time reading a verse a day to keep the devil away and saying your prayers because your grandmama said you’re supposed to, you can be doing all the religious and be around people who are also doing it.
But on this day, there was a temple full of people in the presence of God and only one man notices later on Anna will as well.
There are only a couple of people who are seeing Jesus, even though he’s right in front of them.
Lord, open up our eyes so that we can stop playing church and see you.
Verse 25.
Luke says, and behold, somebody say, behold, come on say behold in the original language.
When a writer would write the word that is translated to our English.
Behold, it was a powerful word, it was pregnant with possibilities in our language.
It just says behold, and we consider it to be a transition from one part of the text to the other.
But when a writer would write that in the original language, it was very, very intentional.
Behold is designed to spark your attention. It’s designed to spark your interest.
If for some reason, you’ve kind of fallen asleep or you’ve been bored with all the details of what has been written before.
The writer wants to make sure that now you sit up straight and you lean in and you put your chin in your hands and that your ears are heightened and sensitive so that you do not miss the person that he wants to introduce you to.
He says, behold, there’s a guy who sees Jesus and his name is Simeon.
He says in verse 25 behold, there was a man in Jerusalem. His name was Sim.
And, and here’s the kind of guy he was, he was righteous, he was devout, he was looking for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was upon him.
I’ve been thinking about CIA and what made his eyes primed his spiritual eyes primed to see something that everybody else could not.
What made him different. What attributes about his experience and his life made it so that his heart was sensitized to the sight of Jesus, the presence of God in his midst.
Even though he was packaged in a way that nobody had anticipated.
There are many of them that I could pinpoint to you, but there is just one that I want to focus my attention on for the next few minutes.
The last line of verse 25 says and the Holy Spirit was upon him.
Yeah, the Holy Spirit was on him.
The spirit of Almighty God rested on sin.
If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you have received the Holy Spirit.
Ephesians chapter one verse 13 and 14 says that the moment you place faith in Jesus, you received, you were sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise.
You are not waiting on the Holy Spirit, all the Holy Spirit you ever go get, you got the moment you were saved.
Now, we need to be filled by God’s spirit as we yield to him and yield in obedience to the conviction in our life that he gives us.
But you have received the Holy Spirit.
If you’re a daughter or a son of the most high God through Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit comes to live on the inside of you.
And just in case you didn’t know he is not a ghost or a wind or a fire or a dove, he is often symbolized by those things.
But y’all that ain’t who he is. He is the third person of the Trinity.
Not third because he is at least in value just third because he’s the last to be revealed to us in the pages of scripture.
But all of the fullness, all of the power, all of the glory, all of the grandeur of God, the Father is in the person of the Holy Spirit.
So if you’ve received Jesus and the Holy Spirit lives in you, that means that all of the power, all of the grandeur, all of the greatness, all of the authority, all of the glory of God.
The Father now lives on the inside of you. He lives with you.
He talks to you, he walks with you.
And the reason why is so that you don’t have to wait to get to heaven to experience heaven.
God said, I’m coming to you right now on plane so that you can know what it’s like to have a little piece of heaven right now.
He says I came that you might have life and life more abundantly. That’s the Holy Spirit.
So he walks with you, he talks with you. He lights up your steps so that He can guide you.
He makes it so that you are comforted and encouraged in times of discouragement. He is your guide.
He is your advocate. He is the Holy Spirit of God, nor will he forsake you.
There is nothing that you can do or can’t do to cause the Holy Spirit to no longer indwell you.
He empowers you to make it so that you can be what you cannot be in your own power and in your own strength.
He gives you fruit so that when your patience has run out, he gives you an extension of patience for that with which you have no more patience.
He gives you gentleness when your gentleness has long since God, he gives you self discipline so that you can restrain yourself.
When in your flesh, you are not able to restrain yourself, but He doesn’t just give you fruit.
He gives you gifts so that those things which might just be natural talent.
Now, they edify the body of Christ.
They build people up, they break yo, they loosen shackles on people like because you have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit of God.
But the text does not tell us that God’s spirit was in Him.
It tells us that God’s spirit was on.
Yeah, which means y’all, there is a difference between God’s spirit being in you and God’s spirit being on you.
Oh, I’m so grateful that God’s spirit is in me.
But I want the presence of God on me.
I want to live the kind of life that is a magnet that calls down the presence of God on my life.
I want him resting on me gracing me with his favor on my life.
So that when people see me, when they see you, they don’t see us, they see something they can’t quite put their finger on, but it sets us apart from everybody.
God’s presence on you.
His presence marking you is why your boss when it comes time for promotion, looks at your resume and the other person’s resume and they are far more qualified than you.
But they about you, the, it’s the presence of God on your life.
When you are marked by God’s presence, that’s the difference choir that when you sing the song, it’s not just a song that tickles folks ears.
Now, the lyrics reach down into the souls and the hearts of people and redeems them and delivers them and shakes the shackles off the presence of God on us is what takes a message like this one help me Lord and changes it from a motivational speech to a message that is the power and the very palatable presence of God that sets us free.
It’s what makes you a woman or a man on whom God’s presence rests and listen, you can buy it.
I don’t care how much money you have. You can’t buy it.
And I’m so glad you got all them degrees, but you can’t study for it.
God’s presence on us is a gift of God himself.
And I want God’s presence on me. I want God’s presence on.
I want that intangible quality. It’s God’s favor. That’s what it is. It’s favor.
Y’all favor is what opens up doors that can’t nobody shut favor is what puts you in positions where you know, you ain’t got no business being there.
Favor is what aligns you in the right places with the right people in the right season to accomplish the right task.
It’s God’s anointing that marks you.
And when you have been marked, you do not have to mark it yourself because you’ve already been marked by the Holy Spirit of God.
I want the presence of God, my, this is what sets you apart and what it’s what makes you distinct.
This is why Moses prayed in Exodus 33.
He said, Lord, listen, if you’re not going with us to the promised land and we ain’t going, Yahweh had been so upset with their grumbling and with their complaining, he said, y’all go ahead, I’ll meet you there later.
Moses said, uh not today. If you’re not going to the promise land, we ain’t going to the promised land.
Here’s why he says, because what will make us different?
How will they know that we’re a different nation than all the other people?
If we are not marked by your presence, we gotta be marked by the presence of God.
And if there is one thing, gosh that invites and magnetizes the presence of God on your life.
It is holiness.
Listen to me.
You gotta be holding, I’m talking about old school flat footed holiness.
I’m talking about the kind your grandmama used to talk about your great grandmother, your great grandfather before we became tolerant and sensitive and accepting anybody, any old kind of way to come and, and yes, you should come as you are, but don’t stay as you are.
We’ve been called to I flew over from Dallas Texas to my family at first Baptist Church of Glenarden to employ you brothers and sisters by the mercies of God to walk worthy of the calling by which we have been.
I came to encourage you to lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily entangles us so that you can walk free.
Galatians. 51 says that it is for freedom that you have been set free there for stand firm and don’t be subject again to a yoke of slavery.
He paid too high a price for us to still be shackled by every sin and every addiction and every habit and every lifestyle.
You don’t have to live that way anymore. You can have victory in Jesus name.
Living holy is not a call to perfection.
It is a call to walk away from a lifestyle where you have planned to sin.
I mean, where you scheduled it, it’s in your calendar who you’re going to see where you’re going to go, what you plan to do.
It means that you choose as a lifestyle to align your behaviors and attitudes with the truths of God so that you can honor him and also so that you can invite the favor of God on your life.
Why do you think that the enemy tempts you dangles a carrot of just the right thing.
It wouldn’t bother her or him, but that’s your carrot that lures you away.
The reason why is because if you and I are pulled away into a lifestyle of sin and rebellion, he knows that that resting presence of God will no longer be ours.
And if He can take full advantage of us every single day, holiness, you gotta live holy.
You gotta decide to lay it down, you gotta decide not to go back.
You gotta decide and trust the Holy Spirit to take the taste for it out of your mouth, to change your desire to change your want so that you can align with the truth of God.
Ye ye holy Lord.
Would you forgive us for wanting to impress people more than we want to impress you?
Forgive us father, for wanting our selfies to be perfectly lit more than making sure that our lives are full of the light of God.
Lord. Forgive us to be silk from being so lured in to friends and likes and Instagram followers that we’ve forgotten that all we need is the applause of heaven.
Help us Lord to be the same in the light as we are in the dark, help us to live lives of integrity, that honor God that have character that are the same through and through lives.
I came to tell you to lay it down, lay it down.
It’s not worth it. The spirit of God can’t wait to lay on your life and give you the favor that you were made for that you were redeemed for.
But you got to lay it down if you are in this room today and you need to lay it down.
Listen, there is something you know right now, the Holy Spirit is beckoning you to lay it down.
It might actually literally be a physical thing you have with you and you need to come and let it go or it might just be a secret sin of the heart that you know, you’ve been holding on to and harboring it.
Today is the day when you want to lay it down and walk in freedom and fullness and the favor of God.
If you need to lay it down, don’t think twice about it.
Run to the altar tonight, run to the altar and come and let’s do business with holiness.
Today. You choose to live holy.
He’s gonna open up your eyes so you can see Him.
He’s going to open up your eyes so that you can experience Him.
Come on, lay it down, whether it’s in your heart and you just need to lay it down or whether it’s a physical thing you have with you.
That’s symbolic of it. If you need to lay it down, do it?
Come in Jesus name, come be free in jesus’ name.
Victory is yours in jesus’ name. Thank you.
If you’re in the balcony, we’ll wait for you. Just come on two.
Mhm. Lay it down. Let it go.
Come on, y’all move forward just a little bit.
Move forward just a little bit. Wow, man. Yeah.
Come on y’all. Anybody else? This is it.
This is, this is the time today is the day. Tomorrow is not promised.
He’s calling you to holiness.
He’s calling us to be a church that lives, right? Help with father.
Listen, if you do not know Jesus Christ as your personal savior.
If you’ve never placed faith in Jesus, you come to come down just by you coming.
I’m telling you shackles are being broken off of your life right now.
Off of your life right now.
He’s going to take the taste for the drug out of somebody’s mouth right now.
In Jesus name, he is going to take the taste for the alcohol out of somebody’s mouth right now.
In jesus’ name. He’s getting ready to change your desire so that your 12 wants to do what he wants your, want to, to do.
He’s getting ready to break ties with that illicit relationship that you haven’t been able to shake free from.
He’s getting ready to break that soul tie right now in jesus’ name so that you can be free.
He’s going to give you the names of the people that you need to call into your life to be an accountability circle to hem you in so that you can walk in holiness and get your footing in this freedom in Jesus name, freedom in Jesus name, freedom in jesus’ name.
You don’t have to go back the same way.
Lay it down. Tell him right now, whatever you’re offering to him, offer it to him right now.
Anybody else, the shepherd of this house is about to pray over you.
Pastor Jenkins is gonna pray over you.
You don’t want to miss this if you need to lay it down. Come, don’t wait.
I see you. God’s got you. He has got you. That’s ok.
It’s ok. Just a couple more minutes.
Come on holiness. That’s what he’s called us for holiness.
Lord Jesus.
I pray right now for every sister, every brother who has gathered here.
I pray first for those who may not know you as savior.
Lord, I ask that right now, even now in this moment, they would confess with their mouth and believe in their heart that you indeed are Lord.
I thank you Lord, that you came to save, not just to deliver but to provide ongoing impact power and victory while we’re still here.
So father, I pray right now in jesus’ name that you would not only redeem but that you would deliver, you would set free.
You would loosen shackles or that you would cause us to live in a way that is different than how we’re living now for anyone under the sound of my voice who has come forward.
Lord, I pray that power of your spirit, you would loosen shackles off of their life.
Lord, so that they literally go home different than when they came today. Father, help them to have the courage.
Lord, I pray a holy courage, a holy boldness right now in jesus’ name that you would lay it down every sin, every hindrance that you would not, that you would no longer push that button, that you would no longer sit in front of that screen, that you would no longer smoke that substance that you would not participate in that illicit relationship, that your lifestyle would be changed.
The name of Jesus and by his power that has been shed on Calvary.
Father, we’re gonna walk home late today. Lord, I pray for accountability in jesus’ name.
I pray that you would send the right mentors, the right friend to stand around, to stand guard, to help them to be measured in their, their activities, father, so that they will have a sounding board as they walk worthy.
Lord help them as Colossians three says to put off the old things and put on the new things of Christ in jesus’ name in Jesus name.
We thank you for freedom today. Lord, we thank you for freedom.
Now listen to me, look at me. It is yours.
Now walk in it, walk in it, walk in it.
Yeah.