Eric, as we're talking about the prayer life, the devotional life let me ask you some practical
questions. Yeah.
What about the length and the frequency of prayer?
Is that important or is it just something you do as you feel, or what do you say about
that? Well the more the frequency of prayer
will increase, the ease, in a sense, and the longevity, the east of longevity.
So the more that we spend quality time with Him the easier it will be to spend time, quality
time with Him. Sustaining is the issue, the sustaining of
His presence. Psalm 36 has a great, uh, passage where it
says, "He will give you to drink from the river of His delights."
So when an individual wants to drink from a river first thing he's got to do is stop,
right? I mean you can't drink while you're walking,
you know what I mean? You've got to stop first.
And then after you stop you've got to get down because the river is always low.
So you get down. And then after you get down then you can draw
the drink in. And that's how we drink.
So first you have to stop, stop all your wandering, stop all your, you know, your moving around.
See, the natural man is motivated by activity. He moves around so much, so the nothingness
of God is deeply offensive to Him. So he's got to find that place of pushing
away everything else and then he can get on his knees and begin to worship the Lord.
That's why the symbol of getting on your knees is: so he first stops then he gets down.
You don't get on your knees before you stop; you stop before you get on your knees.
So you give all your attention to him and begin to draw from him.
So as that begins to take place, as a man begins to drink that wine, that living water
he will become, uh, addicted to it. And ease and longevity will increase.
So it's very important, I believe, to have extended seasons of time where we spend time
with him, blocked out time where everything is away and we're just with Him.
We see even Jesus doing this, the Son of God. He goes away to a solitary place; before the
sun gets up He's up. And He's spending time away from everybody
to be alone with God. You know, there's -- Paul was with the Lord
for three years, right, in Arabia, learning from the Lord Himself.
So we see that this is very important that we have time to get alone with Jesus.
And when the disciples came to Jesus they didn't ask how to work miracles, or how to
preach good; they said, "Teach us how to pray." So there was something about Jesus' life that
made His communion with God more attractive than all these glorious miracles that we had
seen. They didn't say, "Teach us how to walk on
the water," you know, they said, "Teach us how to pray."
"We know that that's the source of everything that You are."
And we do have a glimpse into His life, His prayer life when they went with Him to the
mountaintop. We saw that even Jesus found a place of transformation
in prayer. And our place of transformation will be the
same, being in communion with God. I'm asking you practical questions and I'm
asking your opinion. I realize that this is not going to necessarily,
be, you know, infallible gospel truth. But I am interested in your opinion because
this is something you live, and you have tapped into deep things in this.
And so people ask me these things all the time.
Right. You know?
How long do you pray? Or is that something that you even keep track
of? How long do you pray on a daily basis?
I, when I first started I, kept track of time, you know, I wanted to have a certain
amount of time. But, the bliss and the, the sweetness
of His presence began to draw me so much that my life is going to Him.
It's constantly -- if I don't have anything to do that's where I'll be.
Finn Alone said, "Give every spare second to God."
You can ask my wife, you know, if there's a moment where nothing's happening my chair
calls to me. You know, I just -- I would rather be with
Him than anything else. And so you don't really have to -- you don't
really have to, you know, unless you have a real busy life you don't really have to,
you know, push a, a time limit. You want Him.
So do, do you suggest having a, you know, devotional time every day that you've just
reserved and set aside? Yep, and I'm saying yeah, that should -- that
should be where it starts. But soon enough you'll be swallowed by it.
Yeah. The bliss of His presence will swallow you
and you'll say, "There's nothing else I want." You'll lose your interest in everything else.
You'll find out how wonderful He really is, and He will constantly be saying, "Come away,
come away," so that everything is based on coming away.
Your whole life will be lived coming forth from the secret place and returning back to
the secret place. It will come issue out of and return back
to. From Him, to Him, and through Him are all
things. And that's the way the prayer life is too.
So it's living constantly with Him. Yes, if a person is not praying they need
to make time to pray. As a matter of fact the greatest teacher of
prayer is prayer itself. Man has got to be with God.
He's got to block out time, push everything else away.
Jesus taught us how to pray and He said, "Go into the closet," that's get away from everybody,
"and shut the door." So don't just get away from everybody but
also shut out all the noise, so that your father can see you in secret.
And if a man doesn't go into the closet the father doesn't see Him and he actually asks,
"Where are you?" Just like He said to Adam: "Where are you?"
He sees in secret. So it begins with the discipline, but you're
saying that it should grow into something more than a discipline
Delight will swallow discipline. So what if you have somebody who's been practicing
the discipline for years, maybe for the last five years every morning they pray for half
an hour. Right.
Yet it's still a discipline as it was when they began.
Is there a problem, do you think? Yeah, I would say that the ease of the secret
place, uh, comes from the strength of the abiding place, and the strength of the abiding
place comes from the ease of the secret place. They feed into each other.
Some people get along with God and they find great delight there, and then they go in their
day and they don't live with Him. And so then when they go back they're like,
"Oh man, I've got to start from scratch." But if you're with Him and then you live with
Him it will increase the same; they produce one another.
The abiding place makes ease in the secret place and ease in the secret place makes ease
in the abiding place. So when, when you're talking about "abiding"
that's not something that just happens. Right.
That, that is also a spiritual discipline, right?
Right, yeah. So how do you do that? Do you just constantly,
all day, turn your attention to the things of God?
Yes, very, very simply: you know, Jesus says, "Abide in me, and I in you."
He never says, "I abide in you, so you abide in Me."
He said, "No, abide in Me and I will abide in you."
So it's like a hose attached to a spigot. Once the hose clings to the spigot then that
which the spigot dispenses can go into the hose.
"Abide in Me and then I in you." So yeah, it's clinging to Jesus and living,
clinging there. It's when we release our clinging to the Lord
that it's hard to cling again. It gets, you know.
But you have people that have really, really busy lives.
Right, yeah. I mean I'm one.
I have a pretty busy life. Sometimes I'll put my head down to work; I
look up and four or five hours have gone by. You know, and you've got one thing after another
after another. What do you say to those people who have those
kind of lives? And it's not that they're -- not that they're
not disciplined; they may be very disciplined people.
But just in the course of life things are so busy they forget.
Right, right. How do they handle this?
Well they'll, number one they'll begin to see -- you know this as well as I do -- will
begin to see repercussions in their lives. If we don't spend time in His presence we
don't have oil on us and we'll begin to get squeaky real fast.
You know, I know it in my own emotions, my own mind, the way that I deal with people,
the way that I speak -- everything is affected without oil.
And so first thing that will begin to happen if we don't make time to spend time, which
is when I say make time I'm talking about those individuals, you know, that are very
-- you know -- and you know this, you know, better than me, that if we don't make time
to be in the oil, allow His oil to come upon us we'll squeak quick.
And then we'll know by that squeaking sound, "I need oil in my life."
I remember when my heart broke; I remember when my heart was soft.
My heart gets hard real, very quickly. Smith Wigglesworth said that his heart
had a thousand parts that needed to be softened a thousand times a day.
And that's literally our life. We're constantly our hearts are constantly
crusting over. But the oil of His presence is everything
to us. So yes, we must make time.
Block it out. If you've got to wake up early or skip lunch,
whatever you've got to do, spend time in the sweetness of His presence and we'll find that
it affects everything. So, so what are you saying, that we should
be like a Muslim and pray five times a day or something?
Well, I mean that'd be great -- that'd be a great, you know, practice if you can do
it. But, it's more than that.
It's delight; it's living with Him. It's walking with Him.
It's being constantly aware of Him throughout the day.
And I'm saying that the strength of that awareness of Him in daily life will come from making
time to just rest. Does that get easier with time, like as you
practice that? Does it become natural to you?
Yeah, I mean the more that -- the more that you do it, the longevity and ease of longevity
increases, but it's always simple. You know, He's made it simple, so it's not
difficult. But I mean is it more -- become more of a
habit? Yes, yes.
You know, at the beginning maybe it's something you have to like set your alarm and -- but
does it become more just a natural flow of life that you constantly turn to Him?
Oh right, yeah, I mean but both of us fell in love, you know, in our lives, and you really
-- don't really have to remind yourself to think of her.
She's constantly there, you know? Because you, you love her, you know, her beauty
just has taken you, you know what I'm saying? I remember with my wife that's exactly how
it was. I was so taken with her.
I was thinking of her and then other -- everything else was thought afterwards, you know what
I mean? I didn't really have to push myself to spend
time with her; I was always going that way. So all my things that I had to do in my life
were getting done so that, you know, I could be with her.
And if I could be with her before them and after them I -- and being with her at the
same time is all that -- you know, so this a love relationship.
So, I mean I, I like the word discipline because we should discipline ourselves, but man, once
He's touched -- it's so much more. But what, what you're talking about, you know,
when you're talking about, you know, that infatuation at the beginning of a romantic
relationship that just always consumes your mind, when you and I have been married for
a long time now we know that that is not the case your entire life.
Right. I mean I was the same way the first couple
years, you know, that I -- that I met my wife and my girlfriend, my fiancée I was thinking
about her. But I've been married now for 12 years; it's
not like that every day. I have -- I think about lots of other things
too. So I think that's part of the thing is Jesus
called the Church back to the first love. First love.
But how do you make that happen? That's not something somebody can just say,
"Okay, uh, I'm sorry, I wasn't doing it, and now I'm going to fall in head over heels infatuation
again." I mean -- so if a person is not walking in
that, and you're saying what you're saying it can seem frustrating because I say, "Well
how do I get to that point?" If it's not discipline, it's just something
I have to feel and I'm not feeling it, then what do I do?
Right, right. Well the good thing about a relationship with
Jesus as opposed to a relationship with your wife is you come to the end of her quick because
she's a human. But Jesus is not this way, He's new every
single morning. He's a fresh love every day.
You know, you can't see all of Him at once; you can't get to the bottom of Him.
Your wife, you know her through and through. You know every inch of her, you know what
I mean? Jesus, you will never get that way with Him.
He will always be brand new. So first love is a state of a Christian life.
We can live there. He never gets old.
Women get old because they're humans, you know what I mean?
But Jesus , first love should be the way that we live.
So a person that has an issue in living with Him and desiring Him will go back to the,
the original thing that we said: "Seeing Him is the issue."
And that manifestation of Him comes through turning our heart to Him.
So a person who has issues, the issue is in the coming.
The coming is promised to be fulfilled with rest.
And that rest will permeate the whole of the being.
So if there's a problem with rest, if there's a problem with pleasure, if there's a problem
with joy and peace it all goes back to the coming.
Because it's not Him, it's our coming unto Him.
So what's the problem? The problem is this: you need to learn how
to come to Jesus. If you don't know how to come to Jesus well
this is where you need to learn. It is very simple, you've been deceived, you've
put yourself into having to jump through hoops, you've put yourself into a place of having
to be good before you come to Him, you have made a religious requirement upon yourself,
this is -- this is what happens to people. And all of that goes back to what we said
earlier: it is self-consciousness. It's very, very simple to live with and walk
with Jesus. He's made it this way.
It is -- it is very simple to remain in first love.
The problem -- the reason why people do not live in first love is because they made it
difficult. They added other things.
It was A.W. Tozer who said, "It's the A-N-D, the and that destroys us."
Besselia Schlink said, "To love Him means I must let go of all other loves."
And once those other loves come back in we push Him out.
And so this is how you stay in first love with Jesus: constantly beholding Him.
Michael Koulianos says, "If I will love Him constantly that means my heart must see Him
constantly." And that simply is the issue: looking unto
Jesus, He's enough. So when you say, "Looking unto Jesus," and,
"Coming unto Jesus," are these things synonymous? Yes, yeah, I would say so.
So, so define that for me, when you say, "Come unto Jesus --" come -- because you've used
that terminology; you said that's the key. Yeah.
how does a person come to Jesus, somebody that maybe doesn't really understand your
terminology, tell them how do they come to Jesus?
The same way that they got born again. When you got born again you were convicted
of your sins. And you said, "I have nothing in and of myself,
I need Him." And that's how you come to Jesus: "Lord, I
recognize I have nothing, and I need You, desperately."
"Without You I have nothing, and I am nothing," that's how a man comes to Jesus: the removal
of his attention on everything else and himself, and giving his attention back to God.
That aligns man with God is when he looks to Jesus.
Like I said earlier, David said, "I will lift my eyes to the hills," or, "To you, oh God,
I lift up my soul," or, "My soul waits in silence for God alone."
These things are very important. It is the soul which is the mind, the will,
the emotions all centered upon Him, the lifting up of the soul to God: "Lord, I choose, regardless
of what I feel, I choose to look at You and I worship you."
And that opens up the valve of receptivity, and that valve of receptivity floods the being
of a man with His presence, and makes easy everything else because His yoke is easy,
and His burden is light.