Interview Dr. Miranda: What are the 3 most important prayers for the year?

For me one of the most fundamental verses of the Christian life is the word of Jesus Christ who says "seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice and other things will come in addition." Another verse that I believe is related to that word is the one in the Old Testament that says that "it is not with the sword, nor with armies, but with my spirit," says the Lord.

These two verses have something in common and that is that they invite us to keep our eyes fixed on spiritual things as the basis of everything else. If our spiritual life, if our level of spiritual anointing is where it should be, generally the other things are going to fall into place little by little.

That is why one of the most important requests that I always have for the Lord and for my church is that our church can always keep its perspectives and its priorities correctly ordered. May our church not fall so in love with its programs or with its resources or with the people who come, or with its reputation, that it forgets that the most important thing is my relationship with God and with the Holy Spirit.

My great desire is that our church can always maintain a high level of spirituality, that we remain faithful to the word of God, that it be a congregation where the word of the Lord runs freely, where there is a sound doctrine, a doctrine that is in line with the values and teachings of the word of God because that is the level, that is the point of reference for everything else.

If a church stays close to the word of the Lord then that means that its priorities, its programs, its mission, its vision, its strategies are going to be governed and determined by the content of that word and if a church is in affinity with the values of the Kingdom of God, that church will prosper. So my request, always for my congregation and myself is “Lord help us to stay centered in your word and in your spirit with a high temperature spiritually”.

That reminds me of the word of the Apostle Paul who says that we have to be fervent in spirit and the word in the original Greek is covered in fever, the idea is that we stay passionate about the Kingdom of God, that we don't get used to it both to the blessings and the language and the images of the Gospel that we already take it for granted, and that we stop seeing it as something new, beautiful, interesting, exciting.

Therefore, this idea that when we pray, we always pray because the Lord maintains our church at a high level of spiritual life, full of the gifts of the holy spirit, also evidencing the fruit of the holy spirit, because one thing is to have the anointing and power of God and another thing is to have the character of Jesus Christ.

Those two things are complementary and very important, the power of the holy spirit but also the fruit of the holy spirit, that there be a high level, a sense of holiness before God.

God demands that the church live differently than the world lives. The word says that we do not conform to this century, to this culture, but rather that we be transformed through the continuous renewal of our understanding. In other words, there is a call to live in a different way from how those who do not know the Lord live. All this has to do with the area of the spirit, the spiritual life.

Another thing that seems very important to me to pray for our church, is that our church can be a model for other Congregations and this is not in a proud way, nor as wanting to show Lion of Juda because something that I always try to confess is that we are a church like any other. in need of the Lord's graces, with our great imperfections and great needs that the Lord is always touching us, and transforming and forgiving and tolerating.

I like to confess that because it is the truth and it keeps us protected from the attacks of the enemy who is always looking for pride to use as an excuse to attack a congregation or a ministry. But if because of our desire to bless the Kingdom of God. We have that desire to be an example for other churches.

There are many Hispanic churches that do not have the resources that we have received and, praise the Lord for that, and that need modeling, they need to see how God is moving in certain ministries. I believe that in each city there should be a certain number of ministries that serve as reference points, just as there are "Teaching hospitals", hospitals that are used for medical students to come and learn to practice medicine in a context of excellence and great professional height, so there must also be Teaching churches, mother churches, teacher churches that exemplify the best values of the Kingdom of God and that can transfer their anointing and endowment to other ministries and for their quality of life, because that is very important , for their love for the Lord, for their administrative excellence, for their ability to embrace different sectors of the community and be a visible and active presence in the community, that they can inspire other churches, and other ministries to do the same. There are many pastors, many churches that are isolated and are learning to be a church or to be a minister on their own, discovering things, experimenting, failing, stumbling, hitting dead ends and going backwards to find the way and how good it is when they find resources, models, 'disciplers' that help them walk that path of ministerial learning more quickly. So one of the things that we can ask the Lord is to always help us in relation to being salt and light, not only in the world but also within the Kingdom of God.

A third thing I would also like us to ask is that the Lord help us to be an active presence in the community by which I mean that the world out there can see our church as a church that people are not only busy entering the church and taking their money, and entertaining them with a program every Sunday, but that they see the church as an institution that is involved in the life of the community and its crises, in its challenges , in their day-to-day struggles, in the social problems of the community and that is contributing in a significant way to the improvement of those problems, in areas, for example, such as youth and their educational problems, and their moral, social problems; in the housing area; in the political arena promoting people to vote, getting involved in the social and political processes of the city, relating to mayors and councilors and social agencies, being a resource for those agencies that are also trying to help our community.

In other words, God has given authority to the church, He has given it access to thousands of people, He has given it a voice that is heard and those resources need to be contributed, not only to get people into the Kingdom of Heaven eternally , but also to help them while here on earth to live productive lives and that the church can be a resource for those people who, perhaps from a secular perspective, are trying to do good, but who are important elements nonetheless. blessing to the community.

There must be cooperation between the church and those secular agencies, so it is important that God help us and that is a process in which we have launched and we have had certain levels of achievement, but we still have a lot of ground to walk.

And it's also very dangerous terrain because by collaborating with the world many times the world wants to use our resources but it also wants us to change our way of seeing things, and to give up our values. The world and the secular community see things very differently from how the church sees them, so many times the world comes to the church and says help us and give us, but on our terms and according to the values that we believe are legitimate, and many Sometimes the church, in its healthy desire to be a blessing to the world, tends to sacrifice many of its distinctive values and gradually erode its commitments to the values of the Kingdom of God.

We must be very careful because we have to let the world know that we are willing to be a blessing but we are not going to let ourselves be cut off, we are not going to let ourselves be changed in our understanding of human reality, on the contrary, we have an understanding that the world needs, which is the understanding that the word of God and the holy spirit give us. So there's always a tension there, having to cooperate with the secular world there's a siren song trying to pull us into the world and we definitely have to resist it. The church of Christ through the centuries has not been totally successful in keeping that attention but we have to try to do it.

Again, to summarize, the prayers of our church should always be directed first that God help us to stay in close affinity with the values of the Kingdom of God, always putting the spiritual as a priority. Secondly, may God help us to be a model in the most positive sense of the word, an example and a source of resources and blessing for other members of the Kingdom of God, churches and ministries; and thirdly, that our church can be a help, a resource, intimately involved with the challenges and with the struggles and the problems that our community faces and be seen as a friend, a friend of the community.