Imperial Valley Christian Center

If You Want Life To Be Different, Pray This Prayer

        Papa Hagin always recommended that people pray for themselves this prayer that Paul prayed for the Ephesian Christians.

“Cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers; That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him: The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, Which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” Ephesians 1:16-23, KJV. 

In a recent installment of his, much recommended, email devotional, Mark Hankins related what Papa Hagin had said about praying the first of these prayers at his dad’s church, 

“If you are not happy with your life, if you want life to be different for you, then pray this prayer for at least six months. Don’t pray it one week and then skip a week. Pray this prayer at least once a day, every single day for six months. Pray it over and over again. Just stick with it until something happens. If you do that, life will be different for you. The first thing that will happen is that the Bible will become a different book to you.”

 

        I’d prayed the first of these prayers quite a bit over the years, but six or seven years ago I began praying it on a regular basis. I became a little obsessed with it. I’d pray it first thing in the

Another Answered Prayer

I like this one because it played out over an extended period of about two years. Too often we call it quits when the answer doesn’t show up right away and we end up missing out on what God wants us to have. I’m relating this from our point of view, D and family were believing God and praying on their own as well, but I’m relating this testimony just from our point of view.

Sometime in January/February 2010 at the end of the Sunday morning service D asked us to pray for favor during an upcoming meeting or review or something like that at work. D wanted it to go well and work out to D’s benefit. Now D is extremely faithful, tithes, helps us at Church, rarely misses a service. As I began to pray an anointing came on me and it seemed to me that I was speaking the words of God, it was pretty strong. I was pretty sure it was from God and this is what I said, this is what I knew in my heart God was saying to D (I’m doing this from memory so the words may not be exactly right but they’re pretty close.):

Because you have been faithful to me I will be faithful to you. You think that your faithfulness is great, but it is nothing compared to my faithfulness, stand back and watch the faithfulness of the LORD.

In my heart I knew that good things were getting ready to happen for D.

The Lost Secrets of Christianity

A few years ago now, Sensei Erik, who is now a 6th degree black belt, and Sensei Jamie who is, I believe, a 5th degree black belt, returned from Renshi Tom Ward's Karate camp in Indiana. They said they had a great time and learned a lot from some of the higher level Senseis who were there.

Sensei Erik mentioned that a few years after he started studying Karate he heard someone say that some of the more powerful secrets of karate had been lost over time. Occasionaly he would ask a high level sensei something about this and would receive a less than satisfactory answer. He apparently assumed that the secrets had in fact been lost. But at this camp those same high ranking senseis began to share with him some of the "lost secrets" of karate…

Righteousness Doesn’t Even Necessarily Mean Righteousness

            The Bible word “righteousness,” and the related words “justify,” “justification,” etc., are the most important words in Western, i.e. Roman Catholic and Protestant, Christianity, but it turns out, “righteousness” doesn’t even necessarily mean “righteousness.”
 

            The problem shows up most clearly in 2 Corinthians. In chapters 8 and 9 Paul is writing to the Corinthians about raising money to help the Christians in Jerusalem. Paul finishes by telling them that the more they give, the more they will receive:

The Art of Starting a Business, Ministry or Whatever.

 A wonderful online talk by Guy Kawasaki about how to be an entrepreneur. Guy Kawasaki is very well known in Macintosh Computer circles as the Mac Evangelist. He began working for Apple Computer when they were first developing the Macintosh computer and his job was to "evangelize" programmers to write software. Since then he has gone on to start a "venture capital" firm which invests in technology companies.

This talk is apparently based on his book, The Art of The Start. He covers 10 points to starting your venture. I think these points apply to any kind of venture, a for profit business, a non-profit business or even a ministry. Here are the 10 points with brief comments in parenthesis by yours truly:

 

Even More Answers To Prayer

Nitz shared a beautiful testimony of answered prayer with us yesterday at church. A friend was in the hospital with a blood clot in her lung, a very serious condition, the friend couldn’t even get out of bed or move around. Nitz felt led to lay on the bed with her friend as she read her some scriptures about healing. She said that when she had finished reading the scriptures there was an explosion of God’s presence and they then prayed that the clot would disappear.

The next day Nitz went to visit the friend and  the friend was able to get out of bed and walk around and was feeling much better. While she was there the doctor came to see her friend. The doctor said he wasn’t sure what had  happened. He was pretty sure there was clot when they did the original scans but they couldn’t find it now. The doctor was going to ask a different technician to review the scans to see what he thought. Nitz told her friend, We know what happened to the clot. The friend was released form the hospital a couple days later.

God is good.

God answers prayer.

God wants to answer your prayers.

 

HELP FEED THE OX

If this website has blessed you spiritually then help keep it going by donating some food for the ox.

1 Timothy 5:17 NLT Elders who do their work well should be paid well, especially those who work hard at both preaching and teaching. 18 For the Scripture says, “Do not keep an ox from eating as it treads out the grain.” And in another place, “Those who work deserve their pay!”

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More Answers To Prayer

Some more testimones of answered prayer from the last couple church services.

- N.’s friend, an elementary school teacher, was quite distraught about being moved to a different grade level. N. told her not to be upset, let’s pray, God will help you. They prayed, N. said there was a very strong anointing of God present while they prayed. N. later asked the friend what had happened and was told that she was allowed to stay with the grade she wanted to stay with.

- M. Had applied for a job at a certain company, she liked the place, and they seemed to like her so she was believing God the job was hers. She returned to the company on another matter and was told that the job had already been filled.  M. said it was like we say in church, in her heart, she knew the job was hers, so she left saying the job was hers. They later called and gave her the job. In another matter M. said that a claim she had filed had been denied. Friends advised her to file an appeal but she decided to leave it in God’s’ hands and later received the $1,000 dollars she had been expecting.

- S. badly injured her knee during a high school basketball game. On the way to the hospital her mom told her to laugh, “Ha, ha, ha…” at the devil because he wasn’t going to be able to steal from them. Later, at church, S.'s mom asked us to agree that the devil would not be able to steal from their family. Last week, at the end of the church service S., a teenager, stood up and asked for prayer. When asked what she wanted God to do for her, she said, “That there would be no tears in her knee.” S.‘s friend, who also injured her knee during that game though not as severely, had undergone and MRI which reavealed there were tears in the knee ligaments(?). We all agreed with S. that there would be no tears. Later that week, after the MRI, the Doctor said he couldn’t see any tears but thought that there might be a little one. Let’s keep believing and saying, “There'll be no tears.”

These are from memory so if there are any corrections let me know.

God wants to answer your prayers. God wants to help you. God wants to help others through your prayers. God is a good God.

HELP FEED THE OX

If this website has blessed you spiritually then help keep it going by donating some food for the ox.

1 Timothy 5:17 NLT Elders who do their work well should be paid well, especially those who work hard at both preaching and teaching. 18 For the Scripture says, “Do not keep an ox from eating as it treads out the grain.” And in another place, “Those who work deserve their pay!”

Donate Here.

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How To Pray Without Ceasing

Another nice blurb from Prof. Marvin Wilson, this time from his book, Our Father Abraham, Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith, pg. 157-156. This time dealing with the Jewish practice of offerring blessings to God, short prayers of thanks to God for everything, rainbows, thunder, the ability to urinate. Praise God for his goodness to the children of men. Pray without ceasing, stay connected to God in everything and at all times.

Prayer is the means by which Jews-—both ancient and modem- have stayed attuned to the concept that all of life is sacred. Jewish prayers tend to be short because the entire working day of an observant Jew is punctuated with sentence prayers. More than one hundred of these berakhot, "blessings," are recited throughout the day (cf. Mishnah, Berakhot 9:1-5). They customarily begin, Barukh Attah Adonai, “Blessed are you, O LORD." As King and Creator of the universe, God’s presence is acknowledged al all times and in every sphere of activity within his world. Moses commanded the Israelites to bless the Lord for his goodness (Deut. 8:10). Building on this and other texts, the rabbis taught, "It is forbidden to a man to enjoy anything of this world without a benediction. and if anyone enjoys anything of this world without a benediction, he commits sacrilege“ (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 35a). Hence a Jew recites a prayer upon hearing bad news and good news, when smelling fragrant plants, and when eating food or drinking wine. A Jew offers a prayer in the presence of thunder, lightning. rainbows, and comets. There is a prayer on seeing strangely formed persons, such as giants or dwarfs. A Jew is even instructed to offer a prayer (several times each day) to bless God that one is able to urinate. The prayer reads: “Blessed is He who has formed man in wisdom and created in him many orifices and many cavities. lt is fully known before the throne of Thy glory that if one of them should be [improperly] opened or one of them closed it would be impossible for a man to stand before Thee" (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 60b).

It is, therefore, not pure faeetiousness when, in Fiddler on the Roofi the rabbi is asked, “ls there a blessing for the Tsar'!", and again, “ls there a blessing [i.e. To God] for a sewing machine?” These Jews, in their Russian village. are reflecting the ancient Hebraic belief that everything is theological. This is the way one stays in touch with the Almighty and keeps a divine perspective on life. lt means constantly praising God for all things, with sentence prayers, throughout the day.  Abraham Heschel poignantly describes this Jewish mind-set as follows: “Saintliness was not thought to consist in specific acts, such as excessive prayer . . . but was an attitude bound up with all aaions, concomitant with all doings, accompanying and shaping all life's activities" Indeed, today ‘s Christians will fail to grasp Paul's admonition to “Pray without ceasing," that is, “Pray continually” (1 Thess. 5:17), unless they understand that a main feature of Jewish prayer is its pervasiveness.

HELP FEED THE OX

If this website has blessed you spiritually then help keep it going by donating some food for the ox.

1 Timothy 5:17 NLT Elders who do their work well should be paid well, especially those who work hard at both preaching and teaching. 18 For the Scripture says, “Do not keep an ox from eating as it treads out the grain.” And in another place, “Those who work deserve their pay!”

Donate Here.

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What does "salvation" mean?

Love this discussion of the word “salvation” by Marvin Wilson, a professor at Gordon College, and author of, Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith,  in his talk, Understanding the Sabbath, the audio of which is available as a free download from iTunes.  The talk primarily deals with the blindness Christians have to the Biblical message as the result of the influence of anti-Semitism, Gnostic thought, and platonic philosophy on early Christian theology.

 

I’ve transcribed, to the best of my ability, a few minutes of the talk, dealing with the meaning of the word "salvation," "yeshuah" in Hebrew.

Starting at about minute 48

…what is salvation? We talk about God’s redemption, his rescuing, his liberating, his saving of Israel at the waters of the Red Sea… We have this strain in the history of Christianity that salvation is escape. There was that popular belief in the middle ages that salvation meant to be lifted out of life, to be delivered from this world, to escape this vale of tears. You have it again in hymnology, “When all my labors and trials are o’er and I am safe on that beautiful shore.” This idea of escaping this life, this view of salvation, was especially attractive in the middle ages due to a desire to escape a corrupt world. Violence, poverty, immorality, hunger disease abounded, so it was escape to another world.  

How did Biblical men and women view salvation? Not escape but rather to experience God’s presence and power to transform their lives and society…

 

About minute 50

What is the meaning of the Hebrew verb yasha. Isaiah’s name comes from this root, means salvation is of Yahweh. Jesus name was Yeshua… The noun in the OT is Yeshuah, translated “salvation.” In the OT this root means to liberate, to deliver from evil, to free from oppression. Hence it is to bring welfare or security or victory or wholeness to others. That is to do the work of salvation. To rescue people from themselves, from societal evils. To break the bonds of oppression and set people free.

So salvation is very much this worldly. I can’t show you five places in the Hebrew Bible where the word salvation is used for the other life. It’s concrete this worldly. Relief. Rescue. Deliverance. In fact, even in Luke, in the prolog in chapter 1 to the life of Jesus, Zacharia prophesies  the salvation Jesus will bring includes the rescue of Israel from the hands of its enemies. You will call his name Jesus because he will “yasha” save them from their sins.

 

51:50

Now Jesus’ salvation he offers is salvation from sin, but when you only pick up this theme in the New Testament and don’t go back to the rich OT background for this word, then you eviscerate that word from its deep this worldly meaning. 

In short, God’s salvation was his liberating power that breaks the bonds of earthly oppression and sets people free. When God brings Israel out of the reed sea, or red sea as it was later translated, that is yeshuah, that is rescue, that is deliverance, that is salvation. God may do it directly or he may do it by human instrumentality…

The word yeshuah is used of deliverance from disease in the OT… It’s used of delivering from trouble. God saves the poor and needy when they have no other helper. So Salvation then is very much this worldly as God takes charge in human lives through his liberating power. Yes he breaks the bonds of sin but he also can break addictions. He can also break people (free) who have psychological limitations where there not able to be freed up as human beings and relate socially. He can break people out of environmental things that have them incarcerated. There are many ways in which yeshuah can be understood to free people from self, from sickness, from oppression…

 

54:12

…But when you understand what his name means it’s more than dealing with the issue of deliverance from sin. It also brought relief, it also brought healing and deliverance from things of this worldly nature. So salvation then is primarily involved with life not escape from life. And if you have a holistic view of salvation and the possibilities of what that can be as you work with people, within your profession. You’re dealing with people who are bound emotionally, psychologically, physically. Intellectually, they don’t believe in themselves, they can’t do it. Environmentally.  When you begin to see them delivered or set free from what restricts or binds them, or what has taken them captive, you are doing the work of salvation.

 

HELP FEED THE OX

If this website has blessed you spiritually then help keep it going by donating some food for the ox.

1 Timothy 5:17 NLT Elders who do their work well should be paid well, especially those who work hard at both preaching and teaching. 18 For the Scripture says, “Do not keep an ox from eating as it treads out the grain.” And in another place, “Those who work deserve their pay!”

Donate Here.

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Miracle Valley Christian Center

We had so many great testimonies last Sunday I thought I’d share them with you. What blesses me most is that all of them, except the last, are the result, not of mine or Becky’s prayers, but of the prayers of other people in our church. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see the people we have taught doing the work of the Kingdom of God. These are all from memory so if there are any corrections please let me know.

D… testified that last Sunday, while Becky and I were at the Army/Navy Game visiting Jeremiah, and Dan and Connie were running the service, she asked for prayer for an apartment she wanted to rent. She said that all week she knew it was going to happen and finally on Friday they allowed her to move in and didn’t even require a deposit.

M… testified that the teenage son of a coworker who had injured his back, asked her to pray for him, before he went to the doctor. This all happened at M…’s job, so they went into the break room to pray so as not to disturb anyone. M… prayed and the boy began to loudly exclaim that something was happening, that God and the angels were in the room. M… said he was really moved by the experience and was apparently healed.

N… said that she was talking with a mormon friend of hers who’s husband was sick and the friend began to say something like, if it’s God will he’ll be healed. N… told her no and pulled out her Bible to show her that it was God’s will for her husband to be well. They then prayed and she later learned that the husband was well.

N… also mentioned that an older person whom she didn’t know that well, came and began speaking to her about the regrets and sadness she had about life. N… showed her some scriptures and then prayed for her. N… said the anointing was very powerful and the friend was encouraged. Later the woman asked her to pray again when she became discouraged.

J… said that the previous Sunday she had, had a lump on her leg for several days that was very painful and fear tried to come on her that it might be cancer. During praise and worship, the week we were gone, the lump disappeared. She also testified about prayer for a cousin she was concerned about. She had lost touch with him and his phone had been disconnected. She and another cousin prayed together about it. Later he unexpectedly showed up at J…’s house for a visit though he’s from the Pomona area. All was well.

T… testified that she had woken up in the morning having difficulty bending her knee. She came to church and during the praise and worship was healed. Glory!

C… testified that she’d been believing God for two end tables they needed for their apartment and she didn’t want to spend more than $50 each. While shopping for something else she pulled up in front of a furniture store that she didn’t usually go in to, but she felt lead to go in and look around. She found the two tables regularly priced at $249 each on sale for $49 each. Whoo hooo!

After church when Becky and I were at Costco a man I had prayed for in the hospital came over to say hello and told me that after I prayed the internal bleeding he had been experiencing stopped and he was released from the hospital.

God is good. God answers prayers. God is interested in you. God wants it to go well with you in every area of your life. Miracle Valley Christian Center…, as Becky says, Whoo…Hoooo.

HELP FEED THE OX

If this website has blessed you spiritually then help keep it going by donating some food for the ox.

1 Timothy 5:17 NLT Elders who do their work well should be paid well, especially those who work hard at both preaching and teaching. 18 For the Scripture says, “Do not keep an ox from eating as it treads out the grain.” And in another place, “Those who work deserve their pay!”

Donate Here.

Thanks