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Ask At Night
00:07:51
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| The Lord woke me up last week, and this was just a few days ago. | |
| And whenever he woke me up, the Lord said to me, There's been a famine of the word of the Lord, and that's not talking about sermons necessarily. | |
| You know, when we talk about the word of the Lord, we're thinking about sermons. | |
| And it's not even necessarily talking about totally the word of the Lord, the written word of the Lord, but it's talking about a famine of receiving the word of the Lord. | |
| And so the Lord said, I want you to tell the people, they have asked me for things, they have prayed, and praying is petitioning God for divine intervention. | |
| That's what prayer is: petitioning God or soliciting God for help. | |
| That's prayer. | |
| Every Christian knows how to pray, every one of us. | |
| We go to God, we know exactly how to ask Him, and we pray, and we're passionate about it. | |
| But the Lord said to me that night, He said, I want you to tell the people that I hear their prayers and I will answer their prayers. | |
| But He said, I also want you to let them know that I want them to ask me things. | |
| And if they will ask me things, not just for things, but if they'll ask me things, I will answer them. | |
| And the Bible says in James, You have not because you ask not. | |
| You have not because you ask not. | |
| And so the Lord wants us to ask questions. | |
| There's a scripture that I just like to give you real quick as I'm talking about this. | |
| The Bible talks about Jesus whenever he went into the temple, he was 12 years old. | |
| And it said they went up to Jerusalem, him and his parents, after the custom of the feast. | |
| And it came to pass after three days, they found Jesus in the temple sitting in the midst of the doctors. | |
| And here's what the Bible says: he was both hearing and asking questions. | |
| And all that heard Jesus were astonished at his understanding and his answers. | |
| But the Son of God was asking questions of these doctors at 12 years old. | |
| He was asking questions. | |
| The Son of God, the omniscient one, was asking questions. | |
| I have a question for you. | |
| If Jesus asks questions, why do you think he would be offended if you ask him questions? | |
| He wants to answer you. | |
| He said for me to come and tell the people of God, the body of Christ. | |
| People are inquiring of me, or people are soliciting my help. | |
| They're asking me for things. | |
| But how many are inquiring and asking me answers to their questions? | |
| And so the Lord is now in the process of beginning to answer questions. | |
| Now, the other thing I want to talk about is, real quickly while I'm on this subject, is when do you ask God your questions? | |
| And the answer to that is at nighttime. | |
| If you go back in your Bible and you break everything down, you're supposed to ask the Lord your questions at night because when you go to bed, that's when the Lord speaks when you're on your bed in the night seasons. | |
| And the Bible says that David made this statement. | |
| He said, I will bless the Lord who has given me counsel and instructed me in the night seasons, as in Psalms 16 and verse 7. | |
| I will bless the Lord, David said, who has given me counsel and has instructed me in the night season. | |
| Daniel, when Daniel was upon the earth, he was friends with Nebuchadnezzar. | |
| Daniel, of course, was Jewish. | |
| Nebuchadnezzar was Babylonian. | |
| And Nebuchadnezzar was asking questions on his bed. | |
| You see, the questions need to be posed at nighttime. | |
| Why? | |
| Because you're about to go into sort of a semi-consciousness. | |
| That's when God speaks, when your mind simmers down, when your mind is not so chaotic, when the chatter begins to die down, that's when God begins to speak. | |
| And he will bypass your mind and he'll answer right directly into your spirit. | |
| And it says this: He said, Daniel said to him, You asked these questions upon your bed, and he said, As for thee, O king, here are the answers. | |
| Your thoughts came into your mind upon your bed, what should come to pass hereafter. | |
| And he said, The Lord has sent me here to reveal these secrets and to make known to you what should come to pass. | |
| Here again, here's an ungodly king. | |
| He's not Jewish, he's not God-fearing, but he's laying on his bed. | |
| Daniel told him, He says, You asked these questions when you were on your bed. | |
| He said, While you were on your bed, you asked what will come to pass. | |
| What's going to happen? | |
| And Daniel said, I have come to give you the answer. | |
| Then Nebuchadnezzar responded when Daniel interpreted his dream, and he said, Surely your God is a God of gods, a Lord of lords, and a revealer of secrets. | |
| What is it about asking questions at nighttime? | |
| It says in Psalms 4 and 4, stand in awe and sin not. | |
| Commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still. | |
| So there's something about communing with God on your bed and asking God when you're about to go to sleep. | |
| I would recommend when a person goes to bed, everybody, when they get ready to go to bed, they say many times, you know, when people get ready at night to go to bed, they'll say, Honey, I'm about to go to bed. | |
| I'm getting ready for bed. | |
| And then the women will go in and they'll take their makeup off. | |
| They'll put on their lotions. | |
| People will brush their teeth. | |
| They'll comb their hair. | |
| You know, they're getting ready to go to bed and they put on their pajamas. | |
| They get out of their street clothes. | |
| They put on their pajamas. | |
| They lay down. | |
| They cover up and they're going to bed. | |
| They're getting their body ready for bed. | |
| But what the Holy Spirit said to me last week is, tell my people that we have now entered into a season where the Lord is saying, don't just get your body ready for bed, but get your spirit man ready to hear from heaven. | |
| Ask your questions while you're still in the bed before you go to sleep. | |
| Ask the Lord the questions, and the answer will come. | |
| But the answer usually comes in the morning. | |
| And the answer will usually come, maybe not that morning, the next morning. | |
| Many times it will, but the answer will come in the morning. | |
| And so here's what God said to Job. | |
| And Job is the oldest recorded book in your Bible. | |
| Job made this statement. | |
| He said, God speaks once, yea, twice, and man perceives it not. | |
| Why? | |
| When God tries to talk to you in the daytime, you're so busy. | |
| You've got people on your mind. | |
| You've got cooking meals on your mind. | |
| You've got taking care of your kids on your mind. | |
| You've got studies at college and school on your mind. | |
| You've got your boss on your mind. | |
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God Seals Instruction
00:02:58
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| You've got all kinds of distractions all day long from the time you leave home till the time you get ready for bed at night. | |
| All kinds of distractions, all kinds of distractions. | |
| But the Bible says that God speaks once, yea, twice. | |
| Man perceives it not. | |
| Why? | |
| Because he's in his waking hours. | |
| But it said in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep, see, there it is again, deep sleep falleth upon a man. | |
| It says, in slumberings upon his bed, God will then open the ears of men and seal their instruction. | |
| Now, here's what that scripture means when it says he'll open the ears of men and seal their instruction. | |
| What that means is this. | |
| Everybody has ears. | |
| I have ears. | |
| You have ears. | |
| Jesus said, he that hath ears to hear, let him hear. | |
| He's not talking about these ears. | |
| He's talking about the ears of the inner man. | |
| And he said, when you're at sleep and you're going to bed and you're asking God questions, the Lord will open up your ears. | |
| He will seal the instruction. | |
| What does that mean by sealing the instruction? | |
| Well, I'm not a drinker. | |
| I don't drink. | |
| And I wouldn't promote drinking or advocate drinking. | |
| But when they seal a bottle of wine, they put a cork in there and they seal that bottle of wine. | |
| You can pop the cork on that bottle of wine 10 years later, 25 years later, and that wine is aged and matured, and it's still fresh, and it's still a very powerful bottle of wine because it's been sealed. | |
| What the Lord is saying here is on your bed, when deep sleep falls upon men, that's REM sleep. | |
| Slumberings upon the bed, that's not REM sleep, but that's when you're coming out of a sleep and you're arousing in the morning. | |
| Then he opens the ears of men, but he seals the instruction. | |
| What does that mean by sealing the instruction? | |
| It means that God seals the instruction in your spirit so the devil can't steal it. | |
| If God opened your ears and told you something and gave you the answer, the devil would steal that before you woke up if he could, but God seals it. | |
| He just seals it like that wine bottle, like that olive oil bottle. | |
| He seals it. | |
| It's sealed. | |
| And when you wake up, that answer is in your inner man, and you may not hear a voice. | |
| You may not have had a dramatic experience, but when you wake up, you've got the answer and you know that you've got the answer. | |
| God sealed it while you were asleep. | |
| And it said he does that that he may withdraw man from his purpose and hide pride from men. | |
| In other words, you don't have the wherewithal and you don't have the ability in yourself to come up with that answer. | |
| It's going to take God to give you that answer. | |