God is not as interested in your comfort as in your holiness.

We are talking about the role of prayer, the role of prayer, the role of prayer with respect to emotional health, the healing of our wounds, and the proper processing of stresses, pains, wounds, traumas of life. How to prosper, how to live an abundant life despite the attacks and the struggles and the negative experiences that are, as we have seen, natural, are a part of human existence in this fallen world that we inhabit. But even within these difficult experiences the people of God can prosper and can say, where the spirit of God is there is freedom. If God is with us, who can be against us? Before in all these things we are more than conquerors. Hallelujah! Through him who loved us and gave himself up for us.

We prosper in spite of everything, in the midst of everything, we can be stronger every day and use the negative experiences of life to grow. I was talking to a sister, let me introduce myself like this, this week in a counseling session, I don't know if she's here, but if she is, I'm not going to say anything bad about her, don't worry. Going through a period of much adjustment in her life, from one country to another, from one social status there to another here and all the struggles, and when we began to explore her situation it was evident that God was using the social descent perhaps that she had experienced and the stresses of feeling in a different, unfamiliar homeland, even though he has to be here with his family.

But that God was using all of that to make her, break her, expand her emotional reach, her range, expand her emotionally, make her more like Christ. And it was evident that everything she was going through was like a message that God was giving her, it was like a spiritual exercise for her to grow in certain dimensions of her life, to make her more humble, more realistic, simpler, more tolerant and so that she would die to things that are deep within her and could rise to a new life in Christ, richer, more powerful, more spiritual.

And that's what happens, we Christians can prosper in the midst of any situation, no matter what it is, we can use life's experiences as a stepping stone to ascend in our spiritual growth, because after all that God cares about most What matters is that we are configured according to the image of Christ Jesus, that you look more like Christ every day.

I say that God is not so interested in your comfort as in your holiness. Write that down before you forget, please, it even rhymes. There is a title for a song. God does not care so much that you are happy and comfortable and rich and then that you stay like a child. What helps us to grow even in childhood, for example, if a baby did not have conflict, it would not develop cerebrally, because conflict is what stimulates your brain to process new, different things, and that is what happens with spiritual growth. If everything went well for you, if there was no resistance of any kind in your life, you would be totally useless because your muscles would not develop. One has to be perpetually lifting things, making efforts, moving because otherwise the muscles atrophy when they are not used. If you're in bed lying down all the time, don't complain afterwards that you don't have energy.

Many people believe that the more they are in bed, the more energy they have. It is quite the opposite. Your muscles turn to spaghetti. If you want to have energy move. There's another thing, that's free, I'm not going to charge you for that.

God wants us to be healthy in everything and one of the ways, we have already seen different tools and instruments, one of the ways is through prayer. I have given you many spiritual principles, but ultimately there is a dimension that we have to use to be healed, strengthened. There are tools purely and purely of a spiritual nature, of interventions that we have to make, like the one we did here, the positive confession this morning.

Sometimes you are depressed and sad and what God wants you to simply get out of that depression, get out of bed, put on the most beautiful clothes after taking a bath and perfume yourself well, put on a little lipstick, yes you are a woman, and put on good worship music, sing to the Lord, shout, celebrate, dance, even if your bones crunch. And you are going to see how that crust of depression will go away because you are using a weapon of spiritual warfare, positive confession. That is important.

Many times what the devil wants is for you to simply go into the closet and close the door and not come out because you are depressed, or play a funeral song by Bach, or a solemn mass of... I love them but not times when i'm depressed. When I'm depressed what I need is Marcos Suito or a merengue, a Christian cumbia or whatever. Because what it does is that it strengthens the evil that is in us.

There are spiritual weapons, prayer is one of those spiritual weapons. I am going to talk about spiritual warfare later as well. The prayer, I began by speaking... we saw how a prayer from a mother could free this young woman from a demon of homosexuality, although I always say, not all homosexuality is caused by demons, I am cured in health, no one goes out there in the newspaper, 'Pastor Miranda says that everyone…' No. Sometimes, in this case, it was obviously something demonic and she was released by the declaration of authority of a desperate mother and that moment was very, very beautiful and it strengthened this idea a lot that the prayer...

Therefore, this week we have been praying and crying out to the Lord, looking for that power of God in our lives, it is very important that you live a life of prayer. The Apostle Paul says, 'pray without ceasing,' we have to be praying at all times, the word of the Lord also says, praying with all prayer at all times.

In First Chronicles chapter 4, I don't know if I'm going to even get to this point, but if I'm not going to make it a sermon itself. First Chronicles, chapter 4, verse 9 and 10. There is one of the most mysterious and beautiful segments in the entire Old Testament. Years ago I preached about Jabez, it says here that Jabez was more illustrious than his brothers whom his mother called Jabez saying, "because I gave birth to him in pain. "Because the word Jabes means pain, it is born from a Hebrew word, jausev, very long to explain how it is related because it does not sound the same but it does have an explanation, pain.

Imagine spending your life there with the name of 'pain' I would change my name immediately when I turned 18, I don't know about you, even if they took away my inheritance. His mother called it pain in memory of the terrible experience she had when she gave birth to him, because when I gave birth to him in pain.

And in verse 10 it immediately says, that Jabez called upon the God of Israel saying, 'Oh, if you would give me blessing and enlarge my territory and if your hand were with me and deliver me from evil so that it does not harm me.'

And the beauty of this passage is that it says that 'and God granted him what he asked for.' Say with me, what he asked for. The Bible says ask and it will be given to you. The Apostle Santiago says, you do not receive because you do not ask. If you don't ask, you won't receive. God said, if you ask you receive, well then, do you want to receive? Ask and bother the throne, knock on God's door continually. God likes to be disturbed. God likes to be woken up very early in the morning, not that he is sleeping, but he likes that the first thing you do in the morning is go to him and bless him and say, "Dad, I wanted to say hello," with your cup of coffee

I have told you before that one of my most beautiful memories of my childhood some 10, 15 years ago, is my mother in the morning, when she converted to the Lord, my mother gave herself to the Lord with everything and shoes, she gave herself in the Pentecostal church, in the Dominican Republic and we were little and I remember in my bed hearing my mother sitting in the kitchen singing, 'In the morning the birds sing their praises to Christ the Savior,' and for me that memory brings me joy and joy, because as a child I loved to hear the voice of my mother singing in the morning, because she took her time to pray, her time to meditate with the Lord, and she was a woman who dedicated herself to prayer and reading the word. I have his last Bible, because he used several Bibles and used them all up, and full of notes, pages all battered because he had used them so much. In fact, if your Bible is brand new, there is something wrong with it. I love to see Bibles abused.

Yesterday I had to ask Meche to help me because I had to glue this Bible everywhere and it is a fault of his pastor, but for my justification I called to bind it but it takes 6 weeks for them to bind it and I did not I can separate from it because this is my study Bible, my preaching Bible, so I'm praying to the Lord to do a miracle somehow, because I don't want to change it, there are my notes, there are so many things, this spiritual bibliography in a sense . I love this Bible. But the Bibles have to be worked on, they have to be used. Use your Bible. Don't keep it open in Psalm 23 like the spiritualists do. Use it, eat it, eat from it, let it into your life because we have to ask…

Javes asked and God granted him what he asked for. We have to continually pray, insist before the Lord. Our first instinct when we are in trouble should be to immediately go to the throne of God. That is the first thing, before going to the psychiatrist, before going to the doctor, go to the Lord, ask him and present your case before him.

Brothers, we cannot change our defects or resolve our painful or deforming experiences by ourselves. We need a power that comes from without, an additional force that joins our efforts and that contributes the crucial energy that we need to complete the force that is required to push back the evil that has wanted to settle on us, our mind, our spirit, our family, our finances, our health, our environment. We need the power of God to make a difference. We need that divine intervention.

Prayer refers our cause to the Lord and attracts his favor and his mediation. When we surrender our problems to the Lord we sacralize them, we add a different dimension to them. The image of a king from the Old Testament comes to my mind, I don't remember if it was Josiah or Hezekiah, the fact was that he received a letter from a very powerful enemy king threatening him to come and make an invasion if he did not hand over all his land to this king. And what this pious king did, he took the letter, the Bible says, from this evil king and took it to the temple and put it at the foot of the altar. And that image of bringing our problems, bringing our situation, our need, whatever it may be, and entering it into the holy precinct of God's presence, that is prayer.

Prayer is what makes you take your problem out of the simply human environment and enter it into the divine realm and through prayer then you make God your partner, your colleague, your collaborator in the battles that you are fighting. That is why it is so important. The first thing that prayer achieves for me is that, it is to transfer the need to the divine zone, where it should be.

And another thing I say about that is that this is applicable to all dimensions of life. That happens with our emotional situations, there are struggles that all of us have in our lives, there are ties of all kinds. Who does not have any deformation in their life, except me perhaps, but all the rest of us have ties, emotional problems, pain, situations that deform us, bad memories, complexes of all kinds, and all these are things that we have to transfer to the zone of the spirit and we have to present these situations to the Lord continuously.

If you are afflicted or persecuted by some negative thought, something that brings pain into your life, an affliction, an attachment that you do not want in your life, something that brings you shame or a sense of guilt or that takes away your confidence when you appear before the throne of God, present that before God and make it a subject of continual prayer before the Lord. Apply divine energy to that problem so that God will reduce it little by little in size.

You have heard of spiritual radiotherapy, I say that sometimes we just have to send radiation to the emotional and spiritual tumors of life, day by day gradually reducing them until they disappear. Maybe I'll talk a little more about that later.

Prayer, number 1, mobilizes the resources of the Kingdom in our favor. It then intervenes directly in any threatening situation and changes it. Ultimately that is, you are asking for the power of God to come into action and destroy that presence, that bondage, that strength that is within you. The word of the Lord says that the weapons of our militia are not carnal, that is, they are not human, they are not material, but powerful in God for the destruction of fortresses. And strength means those powers, those presences, those influences that have installed themselves within us like a detachment from hell and that from within exert control over some aspect of our life and the weapons of God, including prayer, are powerful to Destroy those fortresses.

Because for spiritual presences within us we need spiritual weapons to expel them. The word of the Lord also says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, it says, against the darkness of this century and against hosts of wickedness in heavenly places. Simply, if you are struggling with past experiences, with someone who did you harm, with your poor environment, with the government that doesn't want to give you any more welfare money, whatever, that's not your enemy, the enemy at all. Ultimately it is those powers that are underneath all of that.

Do you believe that ISIS in the Middle East or Al Kaeda that is destroying and killing and cutting off heads in public, do you believe that this is purely a political, geopolitical or regional phenomenon? No. behind that there are powers, there are totally demonic principalities and powers that take pleasure in beheading a person and slitting their throats and exhibiting them. I believe that part of what is happening in the world right now, this world that does not believe in spiritual things, there are spiritual powers now that are leading modern man against a rock and a hard place, having to abandon many of his claims. rational and there are spiritual powers that are being installed in the very center of the world environment.

Those are demonic powers, the same powers that beheaded people and that sacrificed them to idols with fire and killed them and sacrificed them on altars, the Mayans, the Aztecs, in Africa, in all the countries of the world they have practically had human sacrifices, and today there are many different types of human sacrifice. Abortion is one of them, also all these things that are happening, these demons are displaying their power using the internet nowadays, but the demons are always seeking the attention of the world. They are spiritual powers.

Unfortunately, politicians and governments only fight with the symptom, but they do not fight with what is underneath, which is the spiritual root, and that is why Paul says, our fight is ultimately not against geological or geographic or economic or political principles. No, that is just the superficial outcropping of something far below, the real cause is principalities and powers.

And the same thing happens, we have gone very far, but the same thing happens with our emotional and deforming situations. There are situations in our life that are like a detachment of the devil inside our psyche and prayer is the power that enlists the grace of God to cast out these things. Send reinforcements to change our minds and that war must be fought in the spirit because they are spiritual enemies.

I'm going to talk a lot about it because it's more complex than that. But then one of the uses of prayer is that it mobilizes the resources of the Kingdom of God in our favor.

Number two, prayer also brings insight and wisdom into our lives about how to act in a situation of pain or crisis. There are situations in your life, for example, marital situations, or emotional situations and you have looked for a solution in many different parts and many times while you are praying, God will give you an answer, an illumination on how to approach that problem and how to get out. of the problem. It may be advice that comes to your mind. It may be through someone who comes and enlightens you, tells you what you have to do. It may be that God will reveal to you the true origin of what you are going through. An image, a mental impression may come into your life, but prayer is a great resource to attract wisdom, discernment, advice, strategy on how to proceed in life.

I depend a lot on prayer and the illumination of the Holy Spirit for all this construction. There are so many things, so many problems that we have faced through almost 20 years of building buildings and radically renovating them and it is wonderful how God, if you ask him, he gives you wisdom, strategy on how to improve your marriage, how to get out of your problem. , how to manage your finances, how to heal from the wounds that are in your past. Prayer sort of loosens up those things that are tangled up inside of you and petrified. God is releasing them and goes with prayer... and God brings understanding to our life, strategy. God is a giver of strategies par excellence, brothers. I depend on God for any strategy that I need, any problem that I have, any situation that I have to face, the first thing I go to is the God of strategies.

For me, one of the names of God is the God of strategies because I continually see him giving me strategies on how to guide my life, how to guide the ministry, how to solve situations. Right now while I was here formulating this, okay, give me a picture, Lord, of an example of how you give wisdom to deal with problems and while I was here talking David came to my mind, when he was going to fight one of those enemy groups and David said to the Lord, “Lord, where do I attack them? This way or that way?" and God told him, “No, when you hear the wind move the trees, when you hear the wind move the trees – it seems that he was in a forest – when they start to move, attack, because I will hand you over to the enemy.” He had to wait for that particular moment. God sent his strength and when he saw that wind, which was a symbol of the spirit of God, he said, now reach out and attack because I am with you.

Strategy. God gives strategy. For me prayer revitalizes your mind, it gives you wisdom. Ask God for understanding. The Bible says that if someone lacks wisdom, what should he do? Ask God who gives abundantly and without reproach and it will be given to you. People sometimes ask themselves, “Pastor, how did you – not me – how did you make this sanctuary?” They always put one in front, how did you do this…? People think that this multi-million dollar church…did that kid say amen? From the mouths of children and those who suckle, glory to God. God is strengthening me. I already told you to ask the Lord for wisdom.

People wonder how our church… brother, is God giving wisdom and providing people. I see here my brother Mario, sitting there who I respect and love so much. When we were here renovating that first sanctuary, I asked the Lord for wisdom and strategy to do that and God gave Mario, he gave me, several of the people who worked in that first sanctuary, wisdom. We had the crazy architects already to change the plans and all the things. They already wanted to get out of us as soon as possible because God gave us better strategies than themselves to do things.

I specifically asked the Lord for the wisdom He gave Bezalel and Ahaliav in writing. You say what you eat that with. They are two characters from the Bible. Read your Bible so you don't have to wonder those things. When the tabernacle was to be built God gave these two men, he says, wisdom and knowledge how to make pots, how to make perfumes, how to make cloth, how to build the tabernacle. And I said, Father, we are going to build, we need that wisdom.

And I tell you, brothers, I believe that God gave it to us and has given it to us throughout all this time and he gave it to Mario, and he has given it to Javier and others who work in the sanctuary. And that's what God does. God gives wisdom through prayer, because I assure you that I continually bathe it. Every day without fail I have to go before the Lord and I give him the same prayer until he gets tired. My desire is to make God so fed up that he says, okay, I'm going to give it to you, leave me alone.

That is why there is the parable of the widow that annoyed the judge so much that the judge said, okay, so that I don't get overwhelmed, I'm going to give him what he asks for, I'm going to do him justice. It's an illustration. God is not like that. God is not such a bad judge that you have to tire him out, but he loves us to come and knock on his door until he says, okay, here you go, take it.

For me, prayer is a very beautiful source of spiritual wisdom and for the strategy that I need for my problem. So, mobilize the resources of the Kingdom, bring discernment and wisdom.

A third thing that prayer does is that it changes our perspective. Sometimes everything, as I was telling you this morning, all we need is a change of perspective and that makes everything, it makes a difference. Because many times God is already with us, God has already changed things, but our eyes are so tired and so frightened and terrified by the problem that we do not see that God has already changed things and so we continue to be entangled in the problem but not because God has not changed it except because we do not know that God has already changed it. And there is an illustration of that in scripture is when Elisha and his servant are surrounded by an enemy army, Syrian, surrounded. At the moment they were in the forest and the horses begin to come out around and they are surrounded. And Elisha's servant begins to tremble and panic. "Oh, what's going to happen? The enemy is all around us."

And Elisha says, “Lord, open their eyes so they can see the spiritual reality around them.” And it says that the Lord opened the eyes of Elisha's servant and Elisha's servant realized that the army was surrounded by an immense camp of angels. They were protected. But of course, they are things on the level of the spirit. This man was not a very pious man, but Elisha lived in the presence of the Lord and could see the angels around him. And then they saw those angels, they saw that camp of God's army much more powerful than any other army, I imagine that brought rest.

And in fact God says that he blinded the Syrian army and Elisha practically took them by the hand and led them and put them into the very center of Israel and when their eyes were opened they were surrounded by the Hebrew army. And look how far the power of God goes when it intervenes that the king of Israel said to Elisha, “Lord, shall I kill them, execute them?” "No, don't kill them, how are you going to kill the ones you already captured?" and they just took them and took them back and put them in their land so they could get out of there and go back to their land. In other words, what was a situation of captivity and death became a situation of lordship and authority and mercy over the enemy.

Wow! How God changes things, right? And everything was that prayer and this man, Elisha, full of the power of God, dwelling in the presence of the Lord, could continually see things that could not be seen in the flesh. And many times this is our spiritual situation, our emotional situations, our marriages, our children, sometimes the only thing we see is the problem but we do not see how God can be working to bring that situation to something glorious and that many times God already gave the word and now what is missing is simply for that problem to fall apart. It can take a while but the root is uprooted and that leads me to another thing, that many times we pray and God has already responded, but it takes time to see the response at the level of reality of time and space.

Because when God works, many times He works at the root and of course, then when God cuts the life of an evil tree in our life, He takes time for it to be something effective and manifest in the world of time and space.

When the Lord was walking with his disciples one day towards Jerusalem, he saw a fig tree like this one, so pretty and leafy, and a fig tree is supposed to have figs and it was so pretty, so green, so pretty, and he put the hand to see if he could find it and the only thing he found was leaves and he was upset, because that bush reminded him of the infertility of the Hebrew people, which the Bible says was like a fig tree that did not bear fruit. With all the gifts and all the word that God had given him, but it was totally fruitless. It seemed very pretty, very religious, a temple that was a world wonder, an incredible religious apparatus, but there was no fruit.

I think that was what caused the Lord to get upset with that bush, prophetically the Lord was making war against the fruitless religiosity of the Jewish people that was going to crucify him, having him in the very midst of them. They were as blind and as infertile as that bush and he said, "Never grow fruit from you again." And he continued on his way and nothing happened, the plant was as green and beautiful as at the beginning, and the disciples said, what could have happened to the Lord? It seems that the eggs he ate and the banana were wrong, he was too salty, he is in a bad mood. And they followed the path, well, they didn't say anything and continued. The Lord continued ministering during the day and in the evening they return by the same part and that plant that they left all leafy and beautiful had dried up. And Peter was surprised, "Lord, look at the bush that you cursed has withered."

What had happened? When the Lord said, never again grow fruit from you, the root withered. But what happens if you take out a bush, a flower and put it... it's not like it dries up immediately, it has water still inside it, it takes a few hours maybe for it to wither, right? That was what happened. The Lord cut the root, when he said that, and that plant, its capacity to renew itself was neutralized, the only thing that remained was the energy that it still had in its petals and in its leaves, a little moisture but it was going to dry up because it had no power to renew itself.

This often happens with the problems of our lives. There are situations in our life, there are struggles, there are ties, there are things that if we pray to the Lord and make it a subject of prayer and war and confrontation, God will dry up the source that feeds it because the devil always needs to be feeding and casting fire to the wood of his wickedness within us. And many times when we sanctify a problem, the Lord immediately cuts off the power to renew itself and then with time we see that the problem is giving way, the bondage is giving way, and our anxiety is not as strong as it was before. Already the periods of depression become less frequent and less intense and one day we wake up and say, “wow! I haven't been depressed for six months,” because the Lord dried him up little by little.

God sometimes kills things at the root and sometimes our reality has changed around us and we don't realize it. We have prayed, so what we need is to keep persevering and believing until it completely disappears. It is that the world of the spirit is very mysterious and it takes time.

God works supernaturally within nature many times. And there are different ways that he works in your life, but definitely one of the things is that he has to change your perspective. And for me many times prayer is what allows me to begin to feel like a new force. As that chorus says, 'when I raise my hands my burdens go away, you give me new strength, all that is possible when I raise my hands.'

Stand up. We are going to sing that chorus because many times when you declare, brothers, when you have problems and difficulties look, do not wait for the problem to go away before raising your hands. Raise your hands so that the problem goes away. Sometimes you have to praise the Lord and that changes your perspective. Sometimes your prayer of faith transforms the situation.

I ask the Lord, Lord, help me every day to see things more through your eyes, through your perspective, change my perspective. Ask the Lord, when you pray, to fill you with strength, because sometimes when your perspective changes and your confession changes, your reality also changes. We have to stop seeing ourselves as little ones, like the Jews in the promised land, who saw themselves, he says, like ants and locusts before these giants on earth. But God had given them the land. They had a document that said, that land of Canaan belongs to my people and no longer belongs to you, and therefore their strength had already dried up.

Those giants had no strength against the people of God, what they needed was to see themselves as giants, bigger than the giants that were on earth. I ask the Lord, Lord, help me to change my perspective and to see myself as the powerful giant that I am that you are in the power of God. The devil respects those who respect themselves.

If you look like a tadpole, the devil will see you the same. But if you see yourself as a prince of God, a priest, a priestess, a prophetess of God, the devil will have to respect you, he will scare you. Ask the Lord, Lord, change my perspective, change the way I see myself and see you and your promises. Change your perspective and your reality will change. You are going to become a magnet of God's power and grace in your life. Stop declaring negativity in your life. Change your vocabulary. Declare the goodness of God. Speak positively, declare verses from God's word. Call yourself a renewed, strengthened, preferred, uplifted being by God and the world is going to have to adjust to your self-image.

We're going to declare that this morning and we're going to raise our hands in the name of the Lord and believe that God is fighting for us. We adore you.