some thoughts from red moon rising...plus more

soo i was trying to organize all of the nuggets of wisdom from red moon rising by pete grieg...the result is this. plus some of my own thoughts sprinkled throughout. merry christmas!

a prayer room is...

1) a place just to be with Him, to be His friend. it is a place where you can study His emotions, find comfort in His love, learn to recognize His quiet voice, seek His advice, and pour out our childish hearts to Him.

2) a place to get blessed/helped/saved/sanctified and FILLED with the Holy Spirit

3) a place of direct encounter with the LORD

4) a prayer room is first and foremost a living room--a place where the Father waits for His children to come and climb into His loving arms. It's a place where we can experience peace so that we can make peace later; a place where we can accept forgiveness so that we can live our lives as priests at work; a place where we receive our Father's acceptance so that we can love even those who laugh at us later in the day. it is where we find intimacy with Jesus, which empowers us to continue to press in.

5) a prayer room is a place for non churchgoers to come

prayer is...

1) coming to rest in constant awareness of God's presence in our lives.

2) prayer isn't about changing things out there. it is first and foremost about changing something in your heart. the most powerful thing that can happen in the place of prayer is that you yourself become the prayer. you leave the prayer room able as Jesus' hands and feet on earth. This is what it means to pray continually, to see with the eyes of Jesus and to hear with His ears with every walking moment.

3) we plead His blood over our sins and over the sins of this nation. as intercessors we stand in the gap (ezekiel 22:30), and bridge the ravine between a hurting generation and a healing God. we take the stand and cry out to the LORD, asking for mercy on the behalf of ourselves and those around us.

4) prayer isn't some giant spiritual vending machine: just put in enough money and you're guaranteed a Coke. prayer isn't a magical formula that if we say the right words, or even if we pray 24/7 that everything will go our way and we are guaranteed the world will become a happy place. rather, we pray for his kingdom to come. with 2 things in mind: 1) His will is this: for heaven to invade earth. 2) His ways are always above our ways.

we pray because...

we have come to the conclusion that He is the only solution. He is the only resolution to the pain and brokenness in our world today. we realize that the church can do nothing to bring the fullness of restoration without the Holy Spirit. therefore, because we need Him so badly, we go on our knees and ask Him to come.

we are...

a generation of lovesick worshipers that seek His face.

a broken army that marches on its knees in prayer. prophesying life into dry bones. in our weakness, He is strong

24/7 prayer is...

to cry out for mercy. for "will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?" luke 18:7

for He delights in mercy. He is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He is a kind God. for mercy triumphs over judgment.

the beginnings are found in a room full of people coming in to participate in 24/7 prayer/worship.

it is learning to live our whole lives, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, in the grateful awareness of God's presence and with a desire to please Him always. prayer is not just about the contemplative moments or the moments when we consciously fire words at God.

the call to pray without ceasing is a call to remember Christ's presence continually in the subconscious as well as the conscious realms of life. the key is to maintain a rhythm, a heartbeat of disciplined prayer, in which we encounter Christ regularly, deliberately, and consciously.

the spin-off of these times, is that His presence thereby moves by a process of osmosis from the conscious into the subconscious mind. as we open the door again and again to Him he comes in day by day and eats with us, laughs with us shares with us until we acquire his mannerisms and know his very thoughts.

24/7 prayer brings Christ consciously back into the midst of our ongoing lives. it is an expression of God's only intention, which has always been to walk in continual communion with His people.

eric