Wounded, Bleeding, Bound and Gagged, We Limp Into a New Year.

Well, sure, of course I WISH us all a happy 2022 but ... but.

Why aren't our prayers being heard? They aren't, you know. I don't think it's for lack of effort or passion, I continue to think that we aren't meeting God's conditions. We're under judgment. Sometimes prayer can divert judgment, but sometimes we're past the point where it can be diverted. I don't know in this case for sure. Is God saying Stop trying to escape, go to Babylon and dig in and make the best of it, or is He telling us He's about to judge the earth and e should prepare for th Second Coming? Or is He saying identify the violation of My will and rectify it and Then pray. Or what?

Maybe not enough of us recognize that we are under judgment and we could start there. Michele Bachmann did a nice job of spelling this out in a talk she gave a few months ago at a conference:



Plenty of people missed that 9/11 was God's judgment on America. I remember wincing through days of silly statements by Christian preachers about how God doesn't do such things. I remember cringing through Bush's prayher gathering in the National Cathedral which included a Muslim leader, a Cqatholic leader and a Jewish leader knowing that such ignorance of the nature of God was only going to bring more judgment on the nation.

Bachmann describes how things have been getting worse intead of b4etter since 9/11. This isn't for lack of prayer, this is because we're under God's judgment and until we RIGHTLY repent, repent of the right violations, there is no hope of turning these things back.

It may be too late anyway, but I don't know that for sure yet.

It's not going to be a very happy year if we don't get it right. Not here on this planet anyyway. If we get rapturexd out of it, hooray, but we may have to go through a lot more than we usually impute to that scenario.

Merry Christmas 2

This is such a good sermon by John MacArthur I had to make another Merry Christmas post for it. He imagines the feelings of Mary and Joseph when they hear that they are to be the parents of a child who will be the Son of God. He inclues a long long list of lines from various Chrfistmas carols which is very inspiribng.

Merry Christmas!

It's become a Christmas traditioj for me, The Star of Bethlehem. With an astronomy program Rick Larson smakes a good case for the time of Christ's birth as marked by the brightest heavenly object ever. But more than that, his researches identify the likely date of His conception on Rosh Hashanah of 3 BC and the likely date of the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem when the "start" stood still over the house Jesus was living in. He also shows what was going on in the sky at the time of the Lord's death on the Cross.

Here's the Puzzler About Why Our Corporate Prayers Fail

Steen Lee's talk was about how we don't pray with enough fervor or desperation. He played clips from others who see the problem the sqame way. His talk was a call to protracted committed fervent prayer in this time of worldwide destruction of society. The puzzler is why he had a group praying daily for a year and as far as anyone can see so far there is no fruit. Things continue to degenreate.

Does qa lack of fervor explain it?

Leonard Ravenyhill exhorted us to pray for revival for years and years. I know people followed him. Nothing came of it that we could point to. No revival.

I wondered why. I speculated that maye the fact that he accepted the charismatic movement as genuine could have been an impediment. Lack of fervor? Doesn't seem likely.

Kay Arthur called for prayer by her Bible study leaders and members across the ation. There was no fruit we could point to there either. Again why not?

There was a huge prayer gathering in Washington D.C. I thik in the sujmmer of 2020 though I may be misremembering. No fruit to report from that one either. I don't know enolugh about it to speculate on the reqasobns myself, but I don't hae any problem exdplaining the lack of success of the prayer breakfasts in Washington and George Bush's prayer in the Natiobnal Cathedral after 9/11, It's simple. God isn't going to honor ecumentical prayer. Believers and unbelieers cannot pray together and expect success.

I've prayed my heart o7ut for revival from time to time. Nothing has come of it that I can see.

I do think the abandonment of women's covering our heads in prayer is likely to be a big factor, but there may be other factors.

Just as we can ask why these efforts have failed we can also ask why some succeeded. Jonathan Edwards called for extraordinary prayer for the revival of religion in his day and the Great Awakening was the fruit of that. How long did it take between his call and the fruit? I don't know.

The last real revival I can think of was the one in Saskatchewan in Canada in the 70s that was set in motion by Pastor Bill McLeod. HYe got his church members to sign up to pray for revival at particular fifteen minute intervals around the clock, and he himself prayedd fervently for his church and for revival every morning. It was't long before people came under Holy Spirit conviction for tvarious sins and the revival was underway. Over the next few years it grew to thousands. It seems to have been a genuine revial.

I do't count the charimastic "revivals" such as the "TAoronto Blessings which was the Laughting revival, or the Brownsville revival. Certainly not Lakeland.

Why did Saskatechewan succeed? Why are we not able now d3espite what seemes to me to be some sincere and fervent efforts having any success at all?

That's the puzzler. That's the question. The first things wee need to pray for is an ansswer to that question. Is it anyt of the rasons I'vve suggested abover,. Is it the lack of fervor Steen Lee talks about> Is it that we've gone too far and now have only God's judgment to face?

It's a question that needs to be answered.

Well, he got ME praying more.

UPDATe: I listened to this post with the "read aloud" function so I know there are some horrific typos in it but my eyes are too bad right now to do anything aout it. Sorry. I hope I may be able to fix it later.

I want to add here though thtat I've been praying all day whenever I've had a free moment and and SO grateful for this inspiration that came from Stev3en Lee's talk < Thinbgs are so bad in this country it's not possible to run out of things to pray about but mostly I've been praying that God would inspire more of us to pray, that He would bring about the prayer meetings Lee calls for in his talk, or that individuals would be inspired to pray on their own. Less tgave the examples of Jacob wresting with the angel and Hannah who prayed alone although corporate prayer is the ideal.

O rend the heavens and come down to Your people, Lord, set us on fire of the Holy Spirit, guide us to praya as we should.


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Yes, I strongly believe we need to return to the head covering bu5t again, I don't want to detract from the call to prayer. I've prayed without the head covering and received answers. I even prayed years ago with a prayer partner for revival and we received wonderful experiences of the presence of the Holy Spirit. I hadn't yet given any thought to the passage about the head covering so I'm sure neither of us had anythihng on our heads. We were praying over the phone every morning for months. Then she moved out of town and I lost touch with her. we didn't really know each other, weren't friends, we'd met in the church library over the book about Revival and agreed to pray together. It was a nice time of prayer but it didn't bring revival or even inspire others to join us.

After writing my last post I've been praying more myself. Yes with tears. As Lee's talk emphasizes, we need to be praying with desperation, and the times we are living in certainly are desperate. SWe feel it so why don't we pray it?


"Why isn't there overwhelming prayer in the face of this pandemic?:" Pme pf tje c;o[s [;aued bu Stevem :ee at tje emd pf jos ta;l was am Aistra;oam wjp asled tjat qiestopj/ Ot dpes see, tp be trie tjat we jave mpt ressponjed with prayer as we should have, as the dire circumstances we are living through call for. Why indeed?

tHAT WAS OF COURSE THE THEME OF lEE'S TALK. We need to be praying, why aren't we? Why on earth would we look to political solutions when what we need is God's power? Why on earth would we be spending so much time on biblical prophecy of the coming destruction of the planet when we should be praying our hearts out for God's intervention. Perhaps we've fallen into a fatalistic state of mind?

I'm very grateful for Steven Lee's talk, I think I will be praying a lot more as a result. I've also resumed covering me head though, which I don't always do when I'm alone. I think I should so I'm doing it again.

I want revival. I want God to come upon His people inj ppower as He has done in past revivals. those revivals are enormously inspiring to read about, but I want to HAVE a revival, I don't want to read about revivals any more. I am no longer going to listen to the naysayers who are sure it's all over, no more revivals, all we have to look forward to is God's judgments. It may be so but we don't know that for sure. Not yet. Lee is right. The churches need to to be praying their hearts out now,k they need to be organizing into prayer groups.

Yes I still think women need to be covering our heads in prayer. I hope God will convict us of that and whatever else He wants us to be doing to bring Him closer to us.

GHelp, Lord. https://www.sermonaudio.com/solo/misc/sermons/122021225375961/ t sermonaudio.com/solo/misc/sermons/122021225375961/

Will God Ever Again Bless Us with a Revivall? I Pretty Much Gave Up on That Some Time Ago but Here I Am Hoping Yet Another Time.

Something always eventually brings me back to this theme. This time I heard a very good talk by the founder of Sermon Audio, Steven Lee, on the importance of prayer:

A CALL TO UNITED PRAYER

He's lamencing the lack of fervent desperate prayer in this time of worldwide chaos and calamity. At the end he plays some short clips of others expressing the same lament. The churches aren't pratying enough or aren't praying with enough passion.

Leonard Ravenhill had a similar take on the situation. Here we so desperately need God to act and He isn't acting and it must be because we are not praying enough or praying in the right way.

He plays a clip of Dr. Alan Cairns, a very inspiring preacher, lamenting the fact that we don't have the personal experience of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Again this is laid to a lack of prayer or rigyht prayer. <>
I've wanted to see a real revival for a long time. times when the Holy Spirit comes in power and transforms our lives and transforms the culture around us. Wy is it not happening? I've talked about this many times in this blog. I don't think it's a simple lack of prayer.

I think it's like the situation at Ai when Joshua was defeated and sought the Lord for His favor. The Lord told him to get up and find out about the man who had stolen thinhgs from the city of Ai. That was the reason for Joahua's defeat. When that problem was recognized, the guilty man brought to justice, then God tgave them victory.

God isn't blessing our prayers because we aren't meeting some condition He requires for us even to pray to Him at all. I think that is our abandonment of the head covering for women. In 1 Corinthians 11: 2-16 Paul says women are to pray with our heads covered. TAhis passage has been twisted by modern interpretation to deny that a literal head covering was meant, and I've argued this at length in my blog Hidden Glory. The head covering signifies God's order of headship of Christ over man, man over womaan. It's a creation ordinance. Marriage is another creation ordinance we've violated recently with the legalization of gay marriage.

It starts with the churches. If we're ignoring god's creation ordinance it will impact the Christian life in many ways, and there's every reason to think that this is the cause of the deterioration of the culture around us too. The head covering is no trivial thinjkg though people often try to dismiss it as trivial. It represents God's created order, His ordering of the sexes, the family, everything that relates to that basic structure.

I always come back to it though usually in a state of despair because it is not taken seriously by the churchesw. The best preachers have accepted the false interpretation and don't seem to notice the spiritual weakness in their churches. Some hardly have any idea that a great move of the Holy Spirit is even possib. Topo many churches are accepting a tepid spiritual life as normal.

I do hesitate to be as empphatic about this as I am. Who am I after all to suggest such a sweeping explanation for such a broad lack in the churches? Well I'm nobody but I nevertheless strongly propose that if the churches resumed the practice of women's covering our heads we would very likely see an increase in our influence in the culture through our prayers, and an incrase in our spiritual life.

I dare to say it. I wish I had a way of making people see it.

There are other problems too. "Ecumenical" prayer meetings are an abomination in the sight of God and yet that's what occurs at the prayer breakfasts for the nation in Washington D.C. Our National Cathedral is a disgrace of an excuse for a "Christian" church. Would Elijah have had a prayer meeting with the priests of Baal? I'll even mention that Jewish Messianic believers who pray with a yarmulke on their headsw or with a prayer shawl pulled up over their heads are also violating 1 Cor. ``.
None of that is likely to be a problem with the Sermon Audio prayer group. I just mention it because it does interfere with prayer in this country in other groups. I wrote to Steven Lee about this. How nice it would be if I'd succeeded in persuading him. It would be my only success but he's got a huge website soit could have a big effect through him. It's up to God but as usual I guess I can still hope though it gets harder all the time.


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Added Later: I listened again to Steven Lee's talk and thought maybe I didn't give him enough credit. He did do a great job of making the case for prayer and it's hard to disagree with the charge that we are slow to pray when it is needed. Anything that gets us praying is a good thing. So maybe I spoke too soon about the problem beintg something that precedes prayer instead. I go there because of what does seem to me to be real effort at fervent prayer that has simply not borne fruit. That is what suggests that something else needs to happen first. I still think that is probably true but at the same time I don't want to say anything that woujld discourage people from praying. Just put a cloth over your head and see if it makes a difference. If you're a woman of course. And take off your headgear of any sort whatever if you're a man.

https://www.sermonaudio.com/solo/misc/sermons/122021225375961/

Is the Mary of the Apparitions An Ancient Babyloniahn Goddess, the Original Queen of Heaven?

The more time I spend exploring the apparitiions of Mary the greater their influence appears to me. You can of course ignore these things or know just a little about them and brush them off as just another Roman Church weirdness, but even if you regard them as significant in the context of the last days into which we seeem to have entered some time ago, you can underestimate their importance. It took the recognition of the huge importance of the Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico to wake me up to the global significance of "Mary" although I've more or less kept tabs on the phenomena for decades now. "Her" influence is staggering. . The film "Messages from HeaveN" ought to be enough to get across the global reach of these phenomena but even that is too easily dismissed. You turn away and forget about it. But it's hitting me now how huge this is. The Marian apparitions alone set the stage for the last days. There couldn't be a greater spiritual deception yet to come. Is it "Mary" riding the first horse of the Apocalypse?

Perhaps the most interesting of the apparitions of "Mary" is the one called The Lady of All Nations. The most interesting thing about it is that it calls itself the "former" Mary, as if she is trying to shed that identity and become something she really is -- perhaps an ancient Babylonian goddess? The goddess called in the book of Jeremiah "The Queen of Heaven," a title the apparitions began to assume though I didn't catch which one used it first.

Jeremiah says God's people Israel have provoke Him to anger with their attentions to this Queen of Heaven goddess. VComkmentaries suppose her to be the ancient goddess Ishtar but she went by many different names in the nations of the ancient world.

Jeremiah 7:18 The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger. Jer 7:19 Do they provoke me to anger? saith the LORD: do they not provoke themselves to the confusion of their own faces? Jer 7:20 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched.

This Lady of All Nations, like many of the other apparitions, warns of callamities to come, recommending of course praying the rosary and other Roman Church superstitions, as if their adoration of her were not the major reason for such calamities, as Jeremiah makes clear.

Here's an article detailing the messages of this particular apparition, The Lady of All Nations:

ARATICLE ABOUT THE LADY OF ALL NATIONS

Interesting that among the apparition's lies is a prophecy (this was given in j945) about the establishment of the state of Israel which occurred ihn 1948, with a warning about how Israel would supposedly mistreat the Palestinian people as they attain statehood. This bit of propaganda coming from a highly revered "Mary" is wrenchingly portentous, likely to be all too influential. mbr>

The visionary gets a vision of the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt, and hear the words: “Israel will rise again.” Indeed, in 1948, the new independent state of Israel is proclaimed. This prediction, however, continues with a warning about the manner in which the Jewish people obtain possession of the land by ignoring the rights of the Palestinian people: “And Yahweh is ashamed of His People.” Today, this has become recognizable.

Shall I review the bare bones of the history here? Maybe I have to:

There was never any Palestinian people. Ever. When the first Jewish settles came from Europe the land was a wilderness, attested to by Mark Twain who had visited there in the latter part of the 19th century. He was astonished at the desolation he encountered there. Scattered farms, nomads, a few Jews who had been there forever, no national identity whatever, or even any coherent settlmenets. the arriving Jews settled a barren land. They bought land where necessary, they stole nothihng from anyone. What later because the "Paelstiniqans" who never were Palestinians at all, were Arabs from the various surrounding nations who came to work for the Jews as they developed the land. When the state of Israel was finally established, Arab nations plotted an attack and warned the Arabs living yhere to flee so as to escape harm. They became the refugees who became the Palestinians who should have been helped by the Arab nations but never were. They became a tool for the persecution of Israel.

That is a digression in this context but I couldn't let "her" get away with it. Too often the Roman Church gets away with its work in this world, fomenting wars, even inspiring Hitler's Holocaust, being the main perpetrator of the pogroms against eh Jews, even the inciter of genocides such as Stalins and Pol Pot's and Rwanda, when you study the background of these things. So here'a the Roman "Mary" promoting one of the lies about Israel that is a constant lying attack on Israe. the role of the Jesuits in the current efforts to desroy America, all too successful I'd appear, never gets noticedThere are old books galore revealing these things but who reads old books? Richard Bennett, Ronald Cooke, Christ Pinto and others talke about it but what is their reach in this world where a false "Mary" can command the attention of millions upon millions Put it this way, the Antichrist has already turned the world upside down in preparation for the Grand Finale..

WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ON THE LADY OF ALL NATIONS

Here's the film :Messages from Heaven" again. The apparitions' identity as the Queen of Heaven is discussed starting about 1:08:00