Your prayers influence regions and nations. Your prayers influence unbelievers toward God encounters. Your prayers motivate masses of people toward what God wants. Your prayers affect countries.
The Bible reveals how the principles of prayer join with the policies of Providence. The Bible introduces us to God, so we recognize Him when we encounter Him. The Bible reveals how God does what He does so we recognize His involvement in history.
Providence is “God is involved in human history.” He is not “out there someday, somewhere, far off.” In spite of the famous 1991 Bette Midler song, God is not “watching us from a distance.” God is right here and now involved in details of your life and destinies of nations. Providence means God is close, near, engaged, and intimate in the details.
Because God is involved, you can agree with God in the ways He involves Himself in making non-believing people willing to respond to what He wants.
What We Learn from Paul’s Encounter
God motivates people toward a personal showdown with Him. A man named Saul became an apostle named Paul. He wrote a considerable portion of the New Testament. Acts 9 records His encounter with Jesus. It is intense!
Jesus knocked Saul down and yells at him in front of all his friends. Jesus makes Saul blind for three days with the intention of healing as part of a prophetic word about his intended future. Jesus so overwhelms Saul that he does not eat or drink during this three day period.
Later in life, Paul shares more of the story not recorded in Acts 9. Paul says that Jesus spoke to him about the process that directed him to this encounter and prepared him for his response to Jesus. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me? It is difficult for you to kick against the goads of the Spirit,” Jesus says.
What are the “goads of the Spirit?” They speak of the long stick that cattle herders carried to motivate the herd.
One end was flat for various applications in caring for the cows. The other end was sharp to motivate the cattle in a particular direction. The point applied to the south end moved the cow toward the north, so to speak. To stop this painful piercing point, the cow would kick at the stick.
Jesus is saying that Holy Spirit was painfully pursuing Paul toward a moment of encounter. Even while he fought Jesus as His enemy, Jesus was motivating an unbelieving Saul toward a moment of faith and an introduction to transformation. Persecutor Saul became Representative Paul.
You can agree with God in this same Providence of pursuit. You can ask God to goad enemies of the King to places of encounter if you have the stomach for the confrontation. God may not do things the way you would think He would, but He will be God while doing what God does, and the end result will be godly.
Do you have an assignment to pray for someone who acts like an enemy of Jesus? Do not stop praying! Declare the goads of the Spirit make that person uncomfortable with his own way so he will move God’s direction even when he has no desire to do so. God won’t make anyone believe, God will direct someone unwilling to go His direction. Turn up the heat! Agree with God for an encounter! We learn from this story that God motivates unbelievers with spiritual influence. He can do this with more than one person at a time.
What We Learn from Hosea
Prophets live prophetic pictures. In one extreme case, God asked a prophet to marry a prostitute to reveal a spiritual condition. The marriage of a prophet to a prostitute was a prophetic picture of the spiritual reality.
God was married to His people, Israel. Israel was selling herself in unholy covenants with other nations for money and protection. She was a prostitute culture. So, God revealed both the condition and how to pray about the situation to Hosea. “Go marry that prostitute, Hosea,” God says.
This is not a prophetic principle. It does not point to believers marrying unbelievers. It reveals how God deals with nations, how He motivates masses of people. (We have other Bible principles for believers that explain what to do if you are already married when you come to Christ, and who to marry if you are a believer.)
God told Hosea to pray for his prostitute wife who continued to sell herself for money. He told him to build a hedge of thorns with prayer. This hedge of thorns would create a way for her to walk by removing all other ways to travel. She could go wherever she pleased, but she would have to push through a hedge of thorns to go anywhere other than where God wanted.
You can agree with God for your region and nation just as Hosea did. You can pray that God will build a hedge of thorns for regions selling the covenant purposes of God for money or protection. You can create a hedge of thorns with intercession that will move unbelieving people toward those Divine purposes even when they have no intention of going that direction.
People may still cut themselves to ribbons pushing through the thorns, and that may look pretty bloody. It may be hard to see that behavior. However, people are already tearing apart personal purposes, and masses of people are certainly shredding the highest of God’s intentions for them. The blind do get scratched. They learn that it is easier to walk God’s direction than reach for the ways of God’s enemies.
If your region is victimized by sexual slavery or drug traffic, agree with God to build a hedge of thorns that those enemies of God’s purposes cannot cross without the entire process becoming unprofitable and too troublesome! Tell them to go somewhere else for their victims because your place of assignment is protected by a hedge of thorns!
The God of Hosea is the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is your God. The God who built a hedge of thorns through prayer for Hosea will make one around your region or nation for you. Your prayers partner with God’s way of turning people selling out their purposes for money or protection.
God’s Hornets
When Moses and the people of Israel started to pursue the future as God’s people, Moses said, “If You do not go with us, we will not go.” God heard Moses and the people he represented, and says, in so many words, “As you advance to claim the inheritance, confront My enemies, and I’ll send My hornets against your enemies.”
We love our enemies. We fight God’s enemies. God takes care of our enemies.
In this promise to Moses and God’s people, the God of the Bible reveals how He brings confusion to cultures opposed to His kingdom culture. He sends His hornets to terrorize them. He makes them willing to do things they are not willing to do.
In this prayer, I declare the words of an older spiritual:
If a nest of live hornets was brought to this room,
And the creatures allowed to go free;
You would not need urging to make yourself scarce;
You’d want to get out, don’t you see!
He just makes us willing to go!
He just makes us willing to go!
God makes our enemies willing to do what they are not otherwise willing to do. We agree with this strategy of God by praying a release of God’s Hornets to bring confusion, division, and terror to people working at odds to kingdom purpose.
After praying more than twenty years about the prevailing spiritual condition in our region, God brought the battle into a significant shift in July of 2017. The change opened the spiritual arena over our nation to God’s Hornets.
My good friend, Clay Nash, had a prophetic dream. In the dream, he was watching a news report. The announcer said that President Trump had sent the aircraft carrier, Gerald R. Ford, up the river into downtown Jacksonville, Florida. It was now stuck at the narrowest point where we were meeting and carrying on our warfare against the Leviathan.
On the newscast, someone asked, “Why would President Trump send the aircraft carrier there?” The announcer answered, “He sent it because Apostle Don Lynch asked for it. And, it will stay there until Apostle Don Lynch says it can leave.”
When Dutch Sheets stood up to preach, he said, “God informs me that He has now given us air superiority in this nation to change the judiciary.”
The aircraft carrier was the launching table for God’s Hornets. As we released them, President Trump appointed more judges than any President in our nation’s history. President Trump shifted the balance on the Supreme Court with two appointments and set the stage for a more significant historical shift with the next two. The court shifted for the next forty years because God sent His hornets.
The enemies of God’s purpose lost their collective political and cultural minds during this process. The shift continues.
God said to me just last week, “Agree with Me to send My hornets in this election process. I will drive two existing coalitions into collision. The collision will cause the third coalition but empty the two of strength. This will shift the definition of “the margin of victory.”
He said, “I will also send My hornets to the passive, uninvolved believers who rest upon their blessed assurance instead of participating in the advance.” That will motivate them to vote and further redefine “the margin of victory.”
The point is that agreeing with how God motivates masses of unbelieving people or even His own people, as the Bible reveals He does, comes by prayer. You can release God’s Hornets against the enemies of His purposes through prayer!
Remember, the God of the Bible is your God. The Bible reveals Him and how He does what He does so you can recognize Him when He involves Himself in your life or in human history. Your prayers of agreement with Him and His ways release and establish Providence in your life and the regions and nation assigned to you for prayer.
