Prayer changes destinies

I want to mark your spirit here concerning prayer and the power of prayer to change destinies, the power of prayer to impact the heart of God and evoke, elicit from your heart a word in response to our needs, radically change our situation. Prayer changes destinations.

I want to put in your heart through an event, an episode in the life of King Hezekiah, I want to encourage all of us to a life of prayer, a life of clamor. And we want to frame what we're doing this week with an image that burns in our hearts about what we should pray for.

Congregations need to bring out times like these, because activities like this, times like these underscore our dependence on God. The Bible is continually encouraging us to pray.

In First Thessalonians, chapter 5, verses 16 to 18, the Apostle Paul says to pray without ceasing, to pray continuously because praying is like breathing, praying is an essential function of the human spirit of a believer. Prayer is the atmosphere that allows the miracles of the Christian life to take place.

The Lord Jesus Christ in Luke 21:36 says that we are always watching and praying, when he was ready to go up to the cross and had been arrested he was in the Garden of Gethsemane, he told his disciples, 'pray and watch so that you do not enter in temptation." Prayer, spiritual vigilance is an incredible preventative, it not only solves problems when we have them but also strengthens our spirit, prepares us. It's like exercise, exercise is not only when you are already in crisis and your muscles are already worn out from lack of exercise. No, you exercise while you are healthy, while you have strength to maintain health, to keep your muscles strong and agile. It is something preventive and it is also something remedial, but they are both. Prayer is like that.

Fasting is the same, not only do we do it when the devil wants to break down the door of the house to enter and we are in crisis, but we also do it to protect the foundations of our homes and our spiritual life. If we look through all of scripture we see images and stories of men and women who in difficult situations prayed and cried out to the Lord and the Lord responded in absolutely amazing ways.

Prayer is the source of our vitality, without the continuous practice of prayer there is no energy, there is no effectiveness in the realm of the spirit, there is no authority. The gifts of the spirit are cultivated through prayer. Prayer is the means, the platform from which we launch ourselves to carry out the operations and transactions of the life of the spirit.

I tell you, my brothers, for me prayer is essential to maintain my sanity. My wife can tell you that without prayer I become a monster that has to be put in an asylum or something like that or put in a straitjacket. Prayer keeps me healthy, prayer is what renews my mind, my perspective, what reminds me that there is a spiritual world around me and eternity that is around me. Prayer is what reminds me that God is with me. Prayer is what reminds me that I am a mere human being and that without the grace of God I cannot take a step forward. Prayer is what connects me with the spirit world and with divine energy.

Sometimes we reduce prayer to a mere list of needs, a shopping list, where we say to the Lord, I want this, I want that, but prayer is much more than that. Prayer changes us first. Prayer strengthens us. Prayer renews our perspective, that's like picking up your cell phone and after a lot of charging, what I'm going to have to do with my Ipad. Today I have used it and since I got up I have been using it, and you plug it in and there is a transaction. The Ipad has no conscience but the technology that encourages it knows that when you connect it something electronic mathematical is given, there is food that it receives directly, blindly, unconsciously and that happens with prayer.

When you invest time in prayer, divine energy is immediately transmitted into your life and you receive strength, you receive vigor, your perspective is renewed. When you spend time with the Lord and when you verbalize your needs, when you throw yourself on the sofa of the divine psychiatrist and you trust him and release your needs, your confessions, there is something therapeutic that is given purely by the act of expressing yourself. In front of God. It has nothing to do with what you are going to receive or not. When you verbalize before the Lord and submit your life, your spirit to the presence of God there is a direct impact that occurs immediately.

Let's learn to enjoy prayer as a treat. Just like a glass of wine that you drink for encouragement and rest and relaxation. Do it spiritually. The Bible also says not to get drunk with wine but to be filled with the spirit. Prayer is the instrument that makes this possible.

We see that in the Bible the great men and women of God prayed. We have Elijah's prayer when he cried out to the Lord for fire to come down from on high. We have Nehemiah's prayer that I greatly admire when Nehemiah realized that the walls of Jerusalem were broken down and decayed and Nehemiah took the situation of his people to heart and cried out to the Lord. There is that beautiful prayer of confession from Nehemiah. And that changed and prepared the situation so that Nehemiah would appear the next day as he was the king's cupbearer, and the king's wife herself asked him, what's wrong with you? They opened the door for him to then submit his request to leave and go with help and resources from the kingdom to restore the walls of Jerusalem.

We have Esther's wonderful prayer that when she wanted to appear before the king but did not have the authority to do so because it required a miracle, she had her maidens pray and fast for several days. He told them, tell my maidens to pray and fast. And when she entered the king's chamber without authority at the risk of death, the king was ready to extend his scepter to her and tell her, up to half of the kingdom that you want, I will give it to you.

We have Paul's prayer when he was about to be shipwrecked towards the end of the book of Acts and Paul told all the crew to pray and fast and Paul was fasting and praying and the Lord gave him all his crew and the one who was a prisoner ended up being the savior of those who guarded him.

And we have the prayer of Peter himself when he was... Peter was not dancing in a disco when he had that vision of that great canvas coming down, which changed the history of Christianity and Judaism, because there, in prayer and fasting, Peter received a fundamental revelation from destiny of the church, which was not only for the Jews but was for all the Gentiles and for all the people of God. and as a reason for that, Pedro had the strength to go to meet Cornelio and his relatives.

And Cornelio, on the other hand, was also praying and fasting when the angel appeared to him and said, get ready, send for so-and-so because he has a word for you too.

And what shall we say of Jesus? Who spent nights praying. The Bible tells us that when the disciples were in the stormy sea thinking that they were going to perish in the waters, rowing all night and could not get out of that stormy whirlpool where they were, the Lord says that he was up in a high place and the I saw from where he was and was praying for them.

And what about the Lord who prayed so much in Gethsemane that the Lord would strengthen him for the great test that awaited him on the cross, and he also prayed while he was on the cross, reciting psalms, says the Bible.

So we see that prayer is everywhere. One of my favorites, Jehoshaphat, prayed when this great army came to destroy Israel and that wonderful prayer, Lord, we don't know what to do and we turn our eyes to you. And the voice of the prophet was heard who gave them very clear instructions and while the people prayed and praised the Lord, God turned the swords of the enemy against each other and a great victory was given for the Kingdom of God.

And we could spend hours and hours pointing out all the moments in which prayer made a big difference in the people of God, and fasting. The Lord Jesus Christ, as we were saying a little while ago, told his disciples that spirit did not come out because evidently the idea was… the implication was, you do not pray and fast enough. Do you know that there are ties in your life? Do you know that there are struggles in our lives? That they will only react to crying out and fasting.

Fasting is a weapon of war. Fasting is nuclear weapons. Fasting is the marines of the resources of the Kingdom of God. fasting is what you get when the giant is ready to cut off your head and you shoot that stone directly at his forehead. Fasting is something that violates all the principles of logic, that by weakening you become strong, that by refraining from enjoying yourself you receive gifts and blessings from God, that through a vacuum you create things that are important to life.

And it is one of the most important paradoxes of the Christian life, that when we become weak we become strong, when we are crucified we are exalted like Jesus himself. Fasting is not something that comes naturally to anyone, I have to fight for every hour of fasting. What happens however is that the longer you fast, the easier it becomes.

By the way, I tell you for those who want to take this week to fast and pray for a while, you can partially fast as it says in that pamphlet that we have. You do not have to fast for the whole week, nor do you have to completely abstain from food. For those who do not have much practice in fasting, you can start one morning until 12 noon or until 5 in the afternoon, drink juices, have something light and that time, you would tell the Lord about that abstention.

Fasting is something that when you practice it, remember that you are praying with your body. Every beat of your heart, every time your heart pumps blood and that blood runs through your veins and you are abstaining from food, your very body is crying out. The abstention itself, which is a continuous state while you fast, is saying to the Lord, Father, I prefer your blessing and your pleasure than the food itself. And you are praying and crying out to the Lord.

One can pray in any way. You can pray, stop eating chocolate for a week. I know that for many of you that is the last thing. I can ask many of you not to eat for 10 days, but leaving chocolate for a week or a day is a tremendous danger. But we can fast from desserts, we can fast from many different things, we can fast from television. Now don't come to me with, ah, well I'm going to fast from television. No, also fast from food and from the television, from both.

But there are many creative ways to fast. I suggest that you enter into a life of fasting and prayer. Fasting frees, eases the mind, lightens the spirit and all things are important for one to grow. One cannot be truly vital and effective in the Christian life if one does not pray, if one does not cry out to the Lord, if one does not make time for a devotional life.

I think I have told you in the past and later I am going to touch on Hezekiah lightly, but many years ago I was in Maine on vacation with our family and I had a dream, but it was a very palpable dream, very real, where the Lord He introduced me to a Volkswagen from the '60s, Love Wagen or something like that, the fact is that this van had 4 wheels but the 4 wheels were bicycle wheels instead of car wheels.

And the Lord told me… in the dream I received that word from the Lord, I do not identify how it was, but clearly what he told me, Roberto, you carry a lot of burden on your life as a pastor then your ministry, but the foundations are weak. And those bicycle wheels were like a sign of the spiritual weakness that I was in. And the Lord in the dream, I had been given one or two of the wheels, what it meant, but He spoke to me that one of those wheels had to be prayer, the other fasting, the other holiness and fourth I don't remember right now.

But in other words when one as a husband, as a mother, as a director of a Department, as a housewife, worker, person who carries out a ministry in the church, who is in charge of children or other things, or simply in the family, that many times is upon us or struggles, are loads that our physical and spiritual vehicle brings to our lives and if the foundations of our spiritual life are not solid we are going to suffer, there is going to be a collapse and what strengthens us, what It gives wisdom, what gives us spiritual discernment, what allows us to receive revelation from the Lord is that prayer, that cry to God.

Prayer, brothers, must be continuous in our life. I'm going to tell you something interesting, I'm not going to reveal too much, but I had a load last night and I felt the Lord praying that the Lord would do something in this service and it seemed very unlikely that it would happen. I said, Lord, since I am saying that you do strange things in response to prayer, give me the ability so that I can testify that you do it with an illustration. The Lord gave it to me, I'm not going to tell you so much detail because I don't want to reveal too much, but something that seemed inevitable, that's why I ask the questions, occurred at least in this service, which was what worried me the most.

But it's minimal in a sense, but God changed. I asked him, Lord, do that as a sign of what I am preaching that prayer changes things that seem irreversible. That I didn't feel comfortable with something... it's nothing special, but brothers, prayer... I pray to the Lord for everything, for every detail and I tell you that I have learned that prayer breaks down walls, destroys the devil's ties . Get in the habit of praying about the little things and the big things.

Breathe prayer continually into your life. Bathe your marriage in prayer, bathe your health... I was saying to a sister this morning, a lady who is here, my dear sister Gloria, who has been with us for 30 years, Sister Gloria Nabas, and Gloria is a woman who does not seem The years she is, she's going to bury us all, I tell her in the best sense of the word. Gloria spoke to me about how the Lord answered a prayer for her health, her need, and I told her likewise, sister, pray for every muscle in your body, pray for the heart, pray for the lungs, pray even for the the intestines, pray for everything, pray for your veins, pray for your back, for your brain, for your spine, bathe it in prayer point it before God, saturate your body part by part in the power of prayer and grace.

We have to pray like this so that later the disease does not... Lord, free me from this, free me from the other. No. Pray when you are healthy for more health. Pray for your finances when finances are good that the Lord will continue to bless them. Add vitamins to that earth. Don't wait to just pray… No, pray to keep the devil at bay and to drive him away and to surround your land with strong walls in the Lord.

Hezekiah, this story is interesting because it says that at that time, in chapter 20, he says: "In those days Hezekiah fell deathly ill... We know the story, Hezekiah was a pious king, a man of God, he came from a very bad family but when he entered the kingdom he served the Lord and God delivered him in chapters 18 and 19 of that book Second Kings, God delivered him from a terrible invasion. An evil Assyrian king wanted to destroy the Hebrew nation and Hezekiah was a man of prayer and cried out to God, when he received a letter from the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, telling him that he was coming to invade and to surrender because their God did not He was going to release him, what Hezekiah did at that moment was take that letter and took it to the temple and threw it to the Lord on the floor of the temple and cried out to the Lord.

And the word says that God gave him a great deliverance and killed 185,000 soldiers, he says, the angel of death. Because the offense of this man Sennacherib was so great, cursing God, tempting the Lord, speaking ill in an emphatic way of the God of Israel and the Lord gave Hezekiah a great victory. But the test came.

That is why he says, in those days the Lord allowed a disease to come to Hezekiah's life and Hezekiah found himself in a terrible test where God himself sends a prophet to give Hezekiah a death sentence. The prophet Isaiah goes to where Hezekiah is on his deathbed and tells him, prepare your affairs because you are going to die and so that there is no doubt, and you are not going to live. In other words, so that you don't have any doubts about what is going to happen.

And then Hezekiah, says the Bible, who was filled with great terror and great fear and turned, it says, his face to the wall and cried out to the Lord, cried out with terrible pain. And it's interesting, I think that God chose this passage to point out something very important and that is that no matter how definitive a sentence seems in your life, no matter how irreversible a situation seems, God can change your destiny. You can affect the heart of God, you can do something different. And in this case the situation seemed irresolvable, it seemed that there was no answer. And the Lord nevertheless gave a word.

Look at what Isaiah did, first he says that Hezekiah turned his gaze towards the wall and I see something very important here and it is the fact that when we are in a situation of great urgency, of great need, we have to concentrate on only one thing. thing, we have to ask the Lord to intervene in our life and we have to isolate ourselves so that our prayer is clear before the Lord.

One of the things that I always do in my prayer time is find a place apart, a place where I can put my head against something, put the cell phone aside and just cry out to God. We need to take time apart. Find a space, find a place where you can pray to the Lord with ease. Take the cell phone, if you can turn it off. You know that when I am praying is when the cell phone seems to ring the most, when the people I have to call or the things I have to do come to mind the most, and it is truly a spiritual struggle. I believe that part of it is something human but part is also something purely spiritual. The devil doesn't want you to pray. And you have to turn your face to the wall in a figurative sense of the word. You have to ask the Lord directly. I look for the time early in the morning because it is the only time that I can pray quietly. You have to make sacrifices.

Hezekiah turned his gaze to the wall. Hezekiah cried out bitterly to the Lord and spoke to the Lord with all his bitterness. What would you do? What would I do if we received a decree of death and disease directly from God? because it is one thing when you do not know what is going to happen, and you do not know if it is from God, if it is from the devil, if it is a biological situation, simply a disease, but when God himself sends his prophet and tells him, prepare your matters because you are certainly going to die and you are not going to live.

I believe that this paradigm that God presents to us through this text was left there to show us in a graphic and dramatic way that no matter how irreversible a situation seems, how closed the walls of a situation are, your prayer can affect the heart. of God, your prayer can change a destiny. And Hezekiah decided to cry out to the Lord, to negotiate with the Lord and Hezekiah developed his prayer in this way. He told him, Lord, you know that I have served you faithfully.

And it is a very important thing, brothers, prayer is not disconnected from the other events and other practices of our lives. We have to strengthen our prayer with a life of holiness, with a life of service to the Lord, as Pastor Jonathan said, with a life of surrender to the Lord and search for God. We have to have a commitment to the Lord.

Why did Hezekiah feel that right and freedom to come before the throne of God? because he had served the Lord, he had broken with his family, his family tradition, he had gone against the religious traditions of Israel at that time. He had decided to be a man of God and when the time for the test came, Hezekiah had all this accumulation of spiritual authority and was able to tell him, Lord, look, I have done everything possible to serve you and to defend the interests of your kingdom.

And I believe that it is important, brothers, it is not that our righteousness makes us more deserving of the grace of the Lord, but I that when we are faithful to the Lord and honor him against all odds, then we can come with authority before God and the Lord breaks the ties of the enemy and gives us the answer that we need.

I believe that the church of Christ needs more men and women like Hezekiah who go against the tide, go against the cultural and spiritual currents and do the will of the Lord so that when the time of war comes they can have the authority that is required to face the enemy.

So we see here that Hezekiah deals with God. Don't stop arguing with the Lord in a reverent way, because God likes it when we bring our arguments to him. Hezekiah brought his own to the Lord. When the Phoenician Syrian woman came before Jesus Christ, she said, Lord, my daughter is seriously affected by a demon. The Lord came to her with an argument to test her and told her, it is not lawful to give children's food to dogs. And then what did she do? He gave him an argument from the Lord's own word in a sense and said, Lord, yes, it is true, but even the little dogs eat the crumbs that fall from a table. And the Lord said, great is your faith, woman, let it be done according to your faith. And her daughter was immediately healed at that moment.

And for me that has always been an example that in prayer we have to take time to develop our arguments before the Lord. We have to take time to fill our prayers with support from the spirit.

That is why prayer must also be linked to the study of the word of God, because through the word you have knowledge of the judicial arguments that you can come before the Father and say, Lord, your word says such and such. stuff. You have promised in your word, Lord, that you are going to do this, you are going to do that, you have said, cry out to me and I will answer you and I will teach you great and hidden things that you do not know, so, Father, I come to ask you for wisdom. Your word says, if you lack wisdom, ask God who gives abundantly and without reproach and it will be given to you, so Father, I come before you, advice for this marriage situation, for this family situation, for this economic situation.

Lord, you say in your word, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you. Father, I am knocking on your door right now. Answer my cry and answer my prayer. Your word says, Lord, that if our sins were red like scarlet they will become white like wool, so I ask you, purify me and heal me, Lord, and forgive my sins and cleanse me. Create in me, O God, a clean heart and renew a spirit within me.

How good it is when we pray and bring our arguments before the Lord. The Lord hears our cry. And how good it is that when, like Hezekiah, we cry out to God with passion in our hearts, when our prayers are not mediocre and lukewarm and mentally absent, but have been aroused and cultivated through repetition, through vigilance, through of continually knocking on the Lord's door until he answers our prayer. It's like a snowball that keeps getting bigger, bigger, getting more focused, thinner, stronger, more powerful and then when we finally shoot it it's like a laser beam that goes straight to the heart of God and elicits a response from the Kingdom. of God.

Hezekiah cried out bitterly to the Lord. Brothers, let us passionately cry out to God, let us not be lukewarm Christians. That is why prayer is one of the things that helps us to be ardent in the spirit. God loves hot. God does not like lukewarm. And sometimes to warm things up we have to cultivate them in the spirit until they become a reality in our life.

And that's why I believe that passion... when Hezekiah cried out to the Lord and cried bitterly, united with his passion and his fidelity to the Lord, God heard his prayer. And Isaiah hadn't walked a little way when he heard the voice of God and the prophet heard, go back to where Hezekiah is and tell him first that I'm going to protect his city. Hezekiah did not ask for that in his prayer, but God said, I am going to bless you in more ways than you have asked me for, I am going to give you strength and I am going to give you protection from your enemies. I will protect your city, I will protect your land. And not only that, but I am going to add 15 years to your life so that you can go to my temple and worship me in the temple.

Brothers, how important that we in our spiritual life can receive more than what we ask of the Lord. The Bible says that God gives abundantly and without reproach. Sometimes we pray to the Lord for one thing and God gives us 10 times more than what we ask him for. When we are continually in prayer and practice and cultivate prayer, let us not be surprised that God is continually blessing us in ways that we do not even suspect. There are times that God has blessed me in ways that I say, Lord, is that how you work?

As David said to the Lord when God promised him endless offspring that would come through Jesus Christ, from David's lineage, and David, surprised by God's mercy, said to him, Lord, is this how you work with men? And sometimes when you live a life of prayer and search, the Lord God will surprise you with much more than what you asked for.

Hezekiah was surprised with years of life, with national prosperity, with protection from his nation, when all he wanted was perhaps a little more time to live. And I believe that these are the blessings of the Lord for those who cry out to him, who seek in prayer, who do not allow themselves to be defeated by the urgency of a situation.

We are going to be a church of prayer and clamor, brothers, I ask you that in this week of fasting and prayer, I want the musicians to come here. In this week of fasting and prayer you learn what it is to experience God's blessing in your life, that you learn what it is to snatch blessings from heaven for you, for your family, for your home, for our community, for our church .

We are going to ask the Lord that this week be a week where he marks us as a congregation for the rest of the year, for the rest of our history. That like Hezekiah we can also experience our own miracles before God and see the Lord open the windows of heaven and pour out blessing until it abounds in our lives. Amen.

Let's stand up, brothers, we are going to cry out to God this afternoon, we are going to tell the Lord, Lord, we want more from you. Leave here with a determination in your spirit to be a man and a woman of prayer, to learn what it is to pray before God. I encourage you, I urge you, in the name of the Lord this week to come to our meetings, come to our services, take time at home to seek the face of the Lord. We are going to mark the history of this congregation.

Last night the Lord while I was meditating in the service of this day I stumbled for some reason on the church page with 2 things that reminded me that we had to go back to the foundations of this church and that we had to go back to look for the anointing that many times has marked this congregation because I believe that we are in a time of change, as I said in the service on December 31 at night, I feel that there is an inertia that we fear to break and that God wants.

These 2 videos, the first I had seen years ago and the second I had never really seen, it was a video of about 4 or 5 minutes of a time of worship that we had in 2011 in the original sanctuary. Sister Laura was directing, in fact, and it was a time of great excitement in worship and I don't remember right now what chorus we were singing but it stopped in that chorus for a long time and there was a beautiful excitement in the air at that moment. of worship. And I could see people hugging each other and looking at each other with smiles of joy at what God was doing in the service at that moment.

The spiritual energy that was in the service at that moment was palpable. And it was as if the Lord was telling me, Roberto, that is the goal, that our church be a church with that type of anointing in adoration, in search of the face of the Lord, that there be that spirit of exaltation and surrender to the Lord. . And God rebuked me that we have to do everything possible so that our services always have as much as possible that sense of commitment and surrender to the Lord and that God wants a revival among us, brothers, that we have to seek that revival, we have We have to fight for it, we have to fight for that revival to happen and that will happen through these spiritual exercises.

The other video was of the inauguration of this sanctuary, a video was made of the construction trajectory and the background of the choir that was chosen was Great things God will do in this city. And I saw how the building was rising through the video that was made. One day we will show it. I told Meche, we have to show that video again, because we often forget the miracle that God did and how the skeleton of this building was being assembled and assembled from the different aspects of it until we had one of the services. initials of inauguration of our sanctuary and the joy that was between the people and the adoration.

And those two videos that are on YouTube and on the church page reminded me that periodically God's children have to go back to basics. Revival is something that has to happen continually in the life of a church. You have to fall in love with the Lord again periodically because it is easy to fall into the routine, it is easy to plunge into being church and we come on Sundays and we do what we have to do and we go home and until next Sunday…

God wants love. God wants passion, God wants delivery. God wants spiritual fire in his people and it is necessary from time to time to refill the batteries of the spirit and reconsecrate ourselves to the Lord and revisit the ancient places. We must return to Bethel where the Lord once revealed himself to us. We must return to those places of the ancient foundations.

A church has to be in perpetual revival, brothers, because revival is lost in a moment. Thank the Lord our church has always been able to discern when those moments of need arrive and this is a moment right now that I tell you, my pastoral instincts tell me that we need, we are in spiritual warfare and we are in need of a visitation from the Holy Spirit .

And I want you to commit to me and that we pay the price. As Pastor Jonathan said, you have to pay the price. That means we are going to have to cry out more during our services. We have to seek the face of the Lord in prayer. May God allow it to be so, my brothers. Raise your hand now to the Lord and cry out to God.

In the spirit of Hezekiah and in the spirit of prayer to the Lord and cry out to God we ask, Father, visit us and immerse us in your waters, Lord. Immerse us in your waters. Immerse us in your spirit, Lord, we want your glory to fill this congregation, Father, we want to be an instrument in your hands to bless this city and even this nation, Father. But it will be because your spirit descends on us and visits us and fills us. So Holy Spirit serve us Lord and thank you for the privilege of serving you to whom we give all the glory and all the honor in Jesus name. And the people of God say amen. I bless you my brothers.