 let's open our Bible to Ephesians chapter 6 verse 12. Ephesians chapter 6 verse 12 says, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day. And having done all to stand, stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, having shot your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace, above all taking the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Praying always, and I want to highlight these last few verses, verses 18, 19 and 20, praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to the end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints. And for me, that utterance, I love how Paul is not praying for his amnesty. He's not praying for asylum. He's not praying to get freed from his jail. He's not asking for the relief of his problems. He's not asking for comfort. He's not saying, and I'm asking you, please guys, pray that they will just set me free from jail. He says, and for me, that utterance might be given to me, that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that in it I may speak boldly as I ought to speak. We must understand that principality is the spiritual class of spiritual beings. There is power, authority, throne, dominion, world rulers, and evil forces in the heavens. These structures of the Kingdom of Darkness did not originate in the Kingdom of Darkness. They are a copy of the Kingdom of God. Satan, when he rebelled against God, he simply took the structure that God already had. Satan is a copycat. He has his own Trinity, the false prophet, the false teacher, and the Antichrist. He has his own synagogue, it says in revelations. He has his own mark because Jesus has the seal of the Lamb. Satan has his own false teachers, false preachers, false miracles. He pretty much takes what God has and he copies and pasted except with his own evil agenda. And here we see that he has his principalities. Few things we must understand about principalities. These are not every day roaming around on the earth demons. These are spiritual, territorial spirits. The Bible talks about the gods of Egypt that God executed judgments on. These are not idols. God didn't need to do a plague to hurt a piece of wood. These were spiritual, territorial spirits controlling the nation of Egypt. The Bible talks about a prince of Persia that the angel of God took 21 days and was withstood by the prince of Persia. The angels of God with the snap of his fingers could wipe populations. How could they be withstood by the prince of Persia, a mere human being? It's not a mere human being. It's a territorial spirit that was controlling a region which explains why those territories were successful in destroying nations. Then it talked about the prince of Greece that will come and all so forth and so on. We must understand one thing about principalities. They are given a rightful status in the heavenly realm by the people and their sins. Therefore, we can't bind principalities. Now, we Charismatics, we love to bind principalities. We do prayers. We're like, I bind principalities over pascoe. I bind principalities. But honestly, not only it's not scriptural, it's actually not practical. That's like us saying, I bind Joe Biden. Why? Because I don't like Joe Biden. Well, you can like him or not like him. He just doesn't change the fact. He's your president. Oh, he's not voted legally. Well, we can disagree with that, but he's the president. Now, the only way to overthrow an election is to entice the people not to vote for the person that you don't like. That's exactly how principality works. That's why Jesus, when he explains the issue of principality, he says, pray and preach. Why? Because when we pray for people and we preach the gospel, we have less people serving the principality that has a rightful status over the region, and we weaken the stronghold of their principality over our region. You don't see Daniel going in and binding the principality of Persia. Daniel was fasting and praying, and as he was fasting and praying and praying and praying and Paul says, because there's principalities, he doesn't say bind them. He says, pray in the spirit, supplicate. He says, ask God to open my mouth. Why? Because if I can get more people to switch sides from the side of the principality to the side of Jesus, we will weaken the grip of the principality over our region, over our country, and over this world. Come on, somebody. I feel like preaching in this house this morning. The Bible says that principalities cannot separate us from the love of God. Even though they control regions, they do not control Christians. The Bible says Jesus has triumphed over the principalities, Colossians 2 verse 15. But the Bible also says Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. It does not say he destroyed the devil himself. The devil is still ruling. The devil is still in control, and there will be that final battle where he will overthrow all of those principalities. Until then, we are on enemy occupied territory. We are rebelling right now against the enemy that is ruling this earth, and the way we lead this rebellion is now with the sword, it's now with the grenade. As Christians, our position is first and foremost spiritual. We fight with our knees, and we fight with our mouth. I'm not talking about that we get all political, I'm talking about that we get all gospel. Paul is saying, because there is a spiritual war taking place, he says, I want you to stand your ground, watch this. He doesn't say fight, he's a stand your ground. Because there is a war going on, the first responsibility we have to do in this war is stand our ground. Stand in who we are in Jesus Christ. Stand in what he did on the cross. Stand in what he says about us himself and this world and the future of this world. Come on, somebody, stand your ground. Touch your neighbor and say, you got to stand. The second thing I want you to notice is Paul is saying get suited, meaning put on the armor of God. He didn't say get a grenade. He didn't say, hey, make sure you get your weapons and practice your second amendment. He says, I want you to get spiritual weapons. I'm not against the physical weapons and those of you who have it, God bless you, make sure you know how to use it. But God wants us to put on spiritual weapons, especially in America, a lot of us gun loving people, love our guns more than we love the spiritual armor. We got to know and we got to put on the spiritual armor. You don't earn, you don't get it, you just simply apply the spiritual armor upon your life. Get suited spiritually. The third thing I want you to see what the reality of the spiritual realm does to us is this, is that we have to create a prayer. We have to pray. We have to pray. And Paul tells us what to pray for. He says to pray with all prayer and supplication in the spirit, being watchful to the end with perseverance. And then he's like, I want you to pray for all the saints. And then 19, he's talking about praying for opportunities for the gospel to be preached. It's very important. Let me reinstate it again. We don't fight principalities by directly conflicting with them. We fight principalities by weakening their hold, by praying for the people under the influence of principalities and preaching the good news to the people currently in the enemy's territory. Bible doesn't give, there's not one instruction in the Bible where Christians are given the right to take trips upstairs, meaning the second heaven and begin to mess with the principalities. That looks more like new age as to projection than actual spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is interceding for the lost people, for the scales to fall out of their eyes, for God to grant them repentance. I'm crying out for the world, for God to extend mercy. I'm asking God to release and dispatch angels to begin to war on behalf of God's kingdom. We're praying your kingdom come, you will be done. Let it be on earth as it is in heaven. We're declaring Jesus as the king. We're proclaiming Jesus as the prince of peace. So we're praying these prayers and then we're praying, God open our mouth. God give us opportunities to preach the good news. God send people to the people we're praying for to preach the gospel. God anoint us with signs and wonders. So when we preach there's a demonstration, not just an explanation of the good news. And then we're advancing in the kingdom of God through our prayer and through our preaching and we're pushing back the kingdom of darkness. The church did not conquer Rome by binding the spirit over Rome, but by loving the poor, loving their enemies, preaching the good news, praying and fasting for people who don't know Jesus. The devil is going to hell. There's no redemption for him, but the people under his sway that is redemption for them. And those are the people we are after. And those are the people that we want to have them on our prayer list. We want to have them in our hearts and say, God have mercy. Lord bring salvation to our generation. Somebody give us some praise right now. And so our approach to spiritual warfare is not just us screaming at the devil. Now we do scream at the devil. We're not going to let that off the hook, but we drive out demons out of people, not out of the air. Jesus gave us right commandment to drive our demons out of people. When we drive demons out of people, we weaken the stronghold's principality over people. But then we pray for a region, we pray for Jerusalem, we pray for, we pray for our cities. The spiritual entities are there because somebody put them in there through the sins of people. Our strongest position is prayer. I understand right now people are saying, even what's happening in Ukraine or sometimes when the tragedy hits, you know, home and people are saying, my prayers and my thoughts are with you and a lot of people will respond, oh, that's not enough. The only person who will say that's not enough is the person who does not understand spiritual world in the first place. Now most of people in the world, when they say I'm praying for you, they simply means I feel bad for what you're going through and I hope you're going to get better. A lot of people actually are not praying, can we just be honest? How many times you've said to people I'm praying for you and this was just your way of being nice and that's all you did. The only prayer you did is you had some good thoughts toward them that you released in their direction, hopefully they don't get lost. But I still love the fact that even in the world, people use the word I'm praying for you because that indicates they believe in supreme power and you can't believe in supreme good without knowing there's also supreme evil. So the fact that our culture is even using the terminology, it benefits us because we can use that to go a little bit further. I want to talk to you about push. Pray until something happens. In this verse, I love the fact that Paul, at the end of the spiritual warfare, putting the spiritual armor, the principalities and the powers, he's talking about prayer, supplication, all kinds of prayer, prayer in the spirit, prayer with perseverance. He begins to kind of pretty much go in into this intensive, urgent, fervent, on fire. This like Pentecostal Holy Ghost like passionate and I'm going to make some of you uncomfortable. Come next Sunday, we'll sort that out. But today, we're just going to talk a little bit about the passionate, the pushing kind of prayer. The prayer that doesn't take no for an answer. The prayer does not leave things to a chance. The prayer that pretty much says, no, God said it, it settles it and I'm going to stand on it. That kind of a prayer. It's a push prayer when you're praying until something happens. If you take your notes, write this down. Prayer attacks sin. Therefore, sin attacks prayer. Since the beginning of this world, when man committed sin, he was hiding from God and men have been doing that ever since. One of the reasons people don't pray is not because they don't have time, it's because they have sin. Because the first thing that sin does is it goes after your prayer. Why? Because if you allow prayer in your life, the first thing prayer does is it goes after your sin. Because prayer will begin to tackle your sin life. A sinning man will stop praying and the praying man will stop sinning. First Samuel chapter 12, verse 23 says, More over as for me, fought it, be from me, that I should sin against the Lord in seizing to pray for you. But I will teach you the good and the right way. I want you to notice that Samuel is saying that prayerlessness is sin. Sin leads to prayerlessness and prayerlessness leads to sin. Church, our only way to begin to combat sinful tendencies and desires and passions over flesh is to begin to get to prayer. A lot of us are saying, well, I'm going to wait, Vlad, until I get better and then I'm going to go to prayer. It's like me saying, hey, I'm going to wait until my hair stops growing and then I will go to a barber. You don't go to a barber after you got a haircut. You go to a barber to get a haircut. You don't go to God after you get your life cleaned up. You go to life because he's the only one who's capable of cleaning your life. And therefore, you got to go to prayer. You got to come to prayer. You got to go to your secret place, even if you're struggling with sin because sin wants to squeeze the prayer out of your life because prayer will squeeze the sin out of your life. Praying and sinning will never live together in the same heart. Prayer will consume sin or sin will choke prayer. J. C. Ryle. Prayer will make a man cease from sin or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer. John Boignan. The second thing I want you to write down is prayer attacks the enemy. Therefore, the enemy attacks prayer. Prayer is a direct assault. It's a specific strategic position against the enemy. Even if it doesn't conflict, doesn't prayer, even if it doesn't direct against the devil, you're talking to God about what devil is doing and God is going to get involved and therefore it's an attack against the enemy. And guess what the devil will do? He will try to attack your prayer. If you remember the story of Daniel, there was a law that was made that people cannot pray to any God because the enemy was trying to squeeze prayer in Daniel's life. And I love Daniel. He did not care. He did not care. I know they kicked prayer out of schools, but my friend, the government did not stop prayer in your house. The government cannot stop prayer in our church. Jesus says, my house will be called a house of prayer. I don't want to wait until the government lets us pray in school because the government is not stopping us from praying here. Why don't we pray here? Why don't we pray in our homes? Why don't we pray on the streets? Why don't we use every opportunity to pray? Why? Because the enemy hates prayer, because prayer attacks him. The devil cannot stop God from answering our prayers. Therefore, he will try to stop you and I from praying them. The devil knows once God hears our prayer, there's nothing he can do, so he will do everything he can to make sure you don't pray. I'm too busy. I don't have time. I don't know what to say. Prayer is for religious people. Prayer is like a for, like a crutch for the weak people. Whatever the lies you believed in, they've been planted by the devil. Because guess how benefits from your prayerlessness, the devil, not God. The world doesn't benefit from our prayerlessness. The world changes because of our prayerfulness. Until you know that life is war, you cannot know what prayer is for. John Piper said that. Until you know that life is war, you will not know what prayer is for. Number three, prayer attacks the flesh. Therefore, the flesh attacks prayer. So not only prayer attacks sin, not only prayer attacks the kingdom of darkness, but prayer directly attacks the flesh. And the flesh attacks prayer. One of the reasons many of us don't pray is because we don't feel like it. Can we just be honest? It's not because we don't know what to say, because the moment if you're in the airplane and the airplane is going down, you're like, God help! So we know what to say. When you get pulled over, your prayer language comes out. Father God, in the name of Jesus, I bind the police officer. I bind the Lord. I repent. And you just, you're literally going through Mary, Joseph, whoever's out there. You're like, you're praying your best prayer. So we know how to pray. We just lack the motivation for it. Pray when you feel like praying for it is sin to neglect such opportunity. Pray when you don't feel like praying for it is dangerous to remain in such a condition. My friend, pray when you feel like praying. And when you don't feel like praying, get up and pray still. Why? Because you don't want to give the flesh a place of reigning in your life. The flesh is after your prayer life, because prayer is after your flesh. The moment you begin to pray, the flesh begins to go in subjection to the spirit. But the moment you live a prayerless life, your flesh begins to get spoon fed and it gets stronger. And the defeat in our life is not the direct result of the devil, but the direct result of the prayerlessness that it created. Number four, prayer attacks bad circumstances. Therefore, bad circumstances attack prayer. A lot of people don't pray. Some people don't pray, not because they're lazy and not because they don't know what to say. It's because they experience they had with prayer that's so disappointing that they gave up on prayer. Meaning, I prayed, but it didn't happen. I asked God, but mom still died. I asked God, but the child did not get better. What's the point of prayer? Prayer did not change things. Look, prayer produced bad circumstances. I prayed, I didn't pray. It wouldn't make a difference. So what happens is the devil now, he can't use your flesh. He can't use the sin. He's using your bad negative experience to try to attack prayer. Because he knows if you will step over the negative experience and the mystery of the unanswered prayer, you will still experience change in your circumstances, because prayer changes things. Don't let the bad experience stop you from prayer. Jesus prayed three times, God let this cup pass over me. God didn't answer it. Yet Jesus still prayed on the cross. Why did you forsake me? He's still prayed on the cross. God, I forgive them. Sometimes God answers exactly how you want it. And sometimes it does not happen. And when he doesn't answer your prayer, he still gives you his presence. When he does not answer your prayer, my friend, he still changes things in your life, whether you realize it or not. Don't give up on prayer, because God wants to move in your life. God wants to move in your family. And we shift the spiritual climate through the prayers we pray, through the fast things that we exhibit. And we have to overcome negative experience. Every one of us will have a negative experience with prayer. A lot of times we don't know what we're praying for. Sometimes there are things in the spiritual realm we don't fully understand. And that's why prayer and trust is the key to living a prayerfully successful life. Are you with me? In numbers 2319, it says God will never change his mind. This means that God never gains new information. But on the level of interacting with humans from our perspective, he does change his mind. He knows what will happen before it does. He reacts to us in a real time. And when situation changes, God changes his actions and his responses to us. Abraham prayed for Sodom. King of Nineveh prayed for their city and God spared that city. Hezekiah prayed when there was opposition and invasion and God intervened. No, God will not change God's prayer will not change God's mind. But it will change things. And therefore pray. Let's pray. Number five, last one is prayer attacks passivity because passivity attacks prayer. Passivity, this passive, whatever happens, God is sovereign. He's going to do whatever he wants to do. There's nothing we can do. That's a passive stand. And as Christians, we don't have passive stands toward life. The Bible says since the days of John the Baptist, the scripture does not say Christians have become passive. I name it, claim it, blabber, grab it, confess it, possess it. God said it, it settles it. I'm going to do absolutely nothing. I'm just going to eat Doritos and watch Netflix. That is not the position of a Christian. The position of the Christian is that we, the violent men, take it by force. That means we preach. That means we love. We help the poor. We go out. We do stuff. Passivity is dangerous. Passivity is I pray nothing happened. No, but the Bible says to pray with perseverance. Well, I just asked one time, God didn't do it. It must be God's will. Jesus uses a parable of a friend who came during the midnight and persistently asked by saying intimacy has to lead to intensity. Jesus talked about a widow who was pleading with the unjust judge. We're not a widow. We're the bride of Christ, but still perseverance, intensity, fervency is expected if answers are to materialize in the physical world. A lot of us, we birth things in prayer, but we miscarry them because of our passivity. We pray one time and we give up. We ask God for our children. Ah, they got worse. I'm just going to stop praying. It's like having miscarriage right after you got pregnant. You got to carry that prayer. You got to keep on praying until this thing births into an answer. This thing births into a breakthrough. Go all the way till the end. Pray until something happens. Push. You got to preach until something happens. You got to practice your faith until something happens. Don't be this spineless Christian who simply just like, well, we'll see what happens and give stuff to chance. We've given too many things to chance. The world is waiting for us. God says, my people, if they're called by my name, I will heal their land. God is not waiting on NATO. God is not waiting on Biden. God is not waiting on the White House. He's waiting on your house, on my house, on this house. Come on, somebody. Miles Morose at prayer is the earthly license for heavenly interference. In May 1940, a French and British troops were surrounded. Hitler's army was rolling across France to assure their victory. Churchill was trying to create a rescue plan, but had little hope that even 20,000 soldiers will be saved. Reese Howells and his college students prayed into the night in Europe that tanks would stop, and right after that, King George VI declared a national day of prayer on May 26th. Hitler ordered that the tanks would stop only when they were 10 miles away from the troops, giving troops enough time to retreat to Dunkirk, and some of you watched that movie. Weather changes suddenly, leaves Germans airstrikes with little effect. Tiny boats came from everywhere to aid in the rescue, and normal choppy waters of the English Channel were said to be like bathwater. Churchill himself said this was a miracle because 300,000 people were rescued, and it changed the course of war. And I like what this intercessor said. He says, you don't have, you don't leave anything to chance in this. Don't allow those young men at the front to do more than you are doing here. And he said this, he says, the praying church is the only thing that can affect that unseen dimension. When prayer fails, intercession begins. Intensity begins. I want to encourage you today that our advantage against the enemy's tactics in our family, in our business, is prayer. Don't let the world fool you and say things like, it's not enough to pray. No, prayer is not the only thing, but prayer is the main thing. Prayer leads to preaching, prayer leads to practicing our faith, prayer leads to work, prayer leads to that. But if there is no foundation in our church, no foundation in our family, and in our marriage, and that foundation, if it's not laid by prayer, everything else we're doing is doing it in flesh, because we're fighting spiritual battle with physical methods. And I want to encourage you, those of you watching us online right now, those of you here, when it comes to even to the country of Ukraine, I've been in conversation with pastors and bishops in Ukraine, and when I tell, you know, we want to send some donations, and he says, whoa, whoa, stop. He says, we need first and foremost your prayer, not your donation. He said, whatever you're about to send cannot stop what's coming against this nation. He said the dollar is too weak against the regime that has spiritual power behind. And these are people on the ground that are saying that he says that this war has broke so many Ukrainian people, even they're saying right now over 100,000 people are on the border of Poland. All you have to do is come and shake their hand and says Jesus loves you, and they will ready, they'll be ready to accept Jesus Christ right there and then. And that's why I want to encourage each and every one of us to begin to pray right now for this situation in Ukraine. I want us to pray for the situation in your own home, because while Russia is invading Ukraine, for a lot of us drugs are invading our own home. Unbelief and atheism is invading our own children. Maybe cancer is invading your own body. Maybe right now some other depression is invading your own mind, and what you're watching on the news, you're living in your own home. I want to encourage you to do this hope for you. God says, call upon me, and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things. God is waiting for the call. God is waiting. Will you call me? Will you get on your knees? Will you humble yourself and say, God, I need help? God is saying to pray. God is saying to cry out. Pray the way you know how to pray. Pray with passion, pray with intensity, pray with tears, pray with brokenness, pray with every fiber of your being being involved with that, and God will heal your prayer. Your prayer doesn't have to be professional to be passionate, but God will heal that prayer, and God will pull out the balls of prayer as a revival and an answer to that prayer by touching this world. Hey, thanks for watching this video. 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