A place of seeing
Friday evening at the prayer meeting, as we were worshipping the Lord singing a simple spontaneous melody ‘We worship your majesty’, I fell face down, prostrate, and all I could see was the astounding purity of God, the light of His Person, the absolute cleanness. Shaken and sobbing, my one cry was that He would purify us and make us holy, as He is holy. I heard myself say ‘holy, holy, holy’, overwhelmed by the consciousness of what we call His ‘holiness’ and which we understand so little.
Grace gives us access to a holy God, but does not do away with the need for us to be holy. Grace is an open door to transformation. We can stop where we are, many do it, at their own expense; many receive salvation by grace and continue to live without the fear of God, in the same mud as before. Greater consciousness of God, of His nature, will cause us to hate, to see the gravity of, and renounce things that we would otherwise consider acceptable. It enables us to see the separation these cause between us and God. Truly our great need is to see.
The is a place of seeing in Read more
Keeping God company
Prayer works. Last week I was meeting with my team leaders to organize and plan; early one morning, one of them went into a room to pray; I was at my desk in my office and could hear them. They were disturbing me because they were praying loudly with great intensity. For one fleeting second it occurred to me to tell them to be quiet or should I say, in charismatic parlance ‘the devil told me to stop them’; but I could not bear the thought of doing so. Absolutely not. They are living proof that prayer works.
Two years ago when they arrived we had to endure their silence prayer meeting after prayer meeting, they could barely pray, and that was not their only problem. They were depressed and were chronically late for church, as in one hour, one and half hours late. Once, they told us last week, they were so late that by the time they arrived, the service was over. And when I ventured to try to give them a job to do in the church, their response was ‘Pastor, I am not a dependable person’. It made me sad that someone would have such a diminished view of themselves.
But as they kept coming to prayer, gradually Read more
Celebrating the things that are
As we in Abba House continue our week of prayer, I meditate on the grace that we are; I meditate on the awesome miracle of our very existence. We don’t usually marvel at what is, we simply accept that it is and project our hopes and aspirations on it, disappointed when we feel it has failed us, elated when it satisfies us. But we must learn to draw back and celebrate the existence of those things that we often consider to be a given. For instance, I marvel that God is, I marvel that God is the kind of Person that He is; were He to be the opposite of what He is, life would be unbearable. I marvel that faith exists, that we have the capacity to believe in God, that we are not condemned to vacillate in a dark, no man’s land of spiritual uncertainty. And I marvel at each of His works.
I marvel that Abba House is. I know better than anyone that it is an absolute miracle. I know better than anyone that no conceivable reason can account for it’s existence save that Father God in His infinite knowledge said ‘be’. And when He said ‘be’, it scared me, it terrified me, and I played dumb for a while. We do not exist because we have a great visionary leader, nor because we have a bold courageous leader, nor because a team of awesome, gifted individuals gathered and said let us…..Sometimes sanctimonious saints walk in and find fault with us, we encourage them to go where they will not have to tolerate the people and we are glad that we will not have to tolerate them. If only they knew. These diamonds used to be even rougher than they are right now. I think of the years, the close calls, the temptation to go another route, the siren calls of worldly success, and marvel at the persistence of God. Read more
This is our 5 to 6 week
This is a happy week for Abba House. It’s our 5 to 6 week. Beginning last Sunday and up to next Sunday, as a church we are getting up every morning and praying from 5am till 6am. We are asking God for our nation, we are praying for specific people to be connected with God, so we give up some sleep and why not?
I am thoroughly enjoying it, my prayer times have been more dynamic than before. It gets me up an hour earlier than my normal 6am wakeup prayer time and it feels like three hours earlier but it is soooo good. Funny thing i always wake up before the alarm, in fact sometimes, most of the night i am not sleeping, praying out of my spirit. It makes me think, something is definitely up.
I love to pray. After receiving the baptism in the Holy Spirit as a new believer, i went home and spent the whole afternoon alone and spoke in tongues for hours, it was a brand new world of spiritual dynamism that i had not previously known. I was elated. Then i joined a church that held daily prayer meetings, people could go any day of the week and pray, and i did. Prayer has since become a strong part of my life with varying degrees of intensity over the years. Read more
AUTHOR
pastor bola olivia ogedengbe,
The Theophilus Company,
ABBA HOUSE, Paris,
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