When many people pray they wonder if God has heard them, but if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.
1 john 5:14 And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: 15 And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.
God listens differently than we do, he doesn’t listen to the words that we say; he listens to the spirit that is behind those words.
He doesn’t listen to the image that we give out, he doesn’t listen to the things that we say when we try and make ourselves look good, those things that boost our ego. Those things we say when we are trying to defend ourselves. I am right and they are wrong.
He doesn’t listen to the woe is me, self centered language, I am no good, I can’t do it, I hate my life.
He doesn’t listen to the swearing and cussing and language we use when we are angry and things are just not going our way.
He doesn’t listen to all the help me, rescue me, I am a Christian, get me out of here prayers when we are dying to self.
The God who ever lives to make intercession for us, he listens to something else, He listens to the longings, the hunger, the cries of our spirit reaching out to him.
When we delight ourselves in the lord, he gives us the desires of our heart. When we seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, all the other things are added to us.
Once our spirit is made alive to God and we have experienced him inside of our life, we can never go back to the world. There is nothing there. The things that we once had pleasure in can no longer satisfy.
And we cannot go on into the fullness of what God wants for us until we finish dying. And we have to learn how to die quietly, nobody wants to hear us screaming.
We like that idea of the manifestation of the sons of God. But oh, this thing of dying out—we don’t like that.”
But it is necessary. Sometimes two processes are going on simultaneously. There are things of the spirit that are coming alive in us and things of the flesh that are dying.
One aspect of our life will be dying, and another aspect of our life has already died. Life comes up in that one aspect that has already died, but the other aspect has to die a little more.
God is purifying our hearts; he cannot occupy the parts of our self-life that have to die. But once they die they open up more space. It is in our dying that we are becoming more alive.
If we hold on to our soul-life we will lose it, if we lose it for his sake we will keep it into eternal life.
In dying there is an important principle that we have to grasp we have to come to the place where we hate the restrictions, the relationships, the appetites, and the desires of the self life so much that we want them crucified. And how do we know that we want them dead? If we would rather be dead, literally, than to live in those things any longer, we have reached that desire that God works in us for the cross to be accomplished in our life.
We have all reached that place completely in certain aspects of our life. We would rather be dead than to be a slave of them or restricted by them. What comes out of it will be the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus Christ. Unless we go this route we are not going to move into the glorious life and liberty that belongs to the sons of God.
There will be a progressive dying out to our own life, so that more and more we will be living in the lord. When we first come into a walk with God, in our immaturity we draw a great deal from the Lord for our own ends. Our self-will is still very much alive. As we go further and further into the love of Christ, it begins to control us, and we experience identification with Christ in His death.
We begin to die too many interests and desires. It is not that we are losing interest in life, but we are becoming completely dedicated to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Our other interests may have been enjoyable and legitimate, but now we have one focus. Before, the Lord was preeminent; now He is everything. He is not just the top among many rivals and interests, but He is the only interest. We are coming into one central motivation: to live wholly for the Lord. Not another thing in the world matters to us except living for the Lord. Consequently, Jesus becomes the total absorption of our life.
To come to the place where the love of Christ controls us, there must be a death working in us. This means that certain things will have to change. Our fellowship with one another may be somewhat spiritual, but it is still too much on the human plane. We cannot allow anything to distract us from intimacy with the Lord.
When we go through the cross experience, we are dying. We are dying to an area of sensitivity to the flesh and to familiar spirits, to the powers that have held us captive and the way they maneuver. We will have no immunity as long as we are alive and sensitive to areas of oppression.
The work of the cross causes us to die to oppression and makes us ready to enter into the exposure of life in Christ—the life that belongs to those who have died to the responses of this world.
If the enemy can prolong the process of death interminably, we will never reach a state of resurrected life, because we have to die before we can be resurrected. Unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it abides alone. So if the enemy keeps us dying, dying, dying a little bit every day, he is very happy while we are very miserable; and resurrection never occurs.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” we take dominion over the working of our mind, which often interferes with the opening up of our spirit to the lord.
We change by exposure to the Spirit of the Lord, but there are still areas of our soul life that he wants to possess.