In praying about tonight, I felt the deepening of the Spirit’s heart over something I was told last night. The Lord told me that He wanted me to start teaching more on love than I have in the past and encourage you to learn to walk in the love of Christ. Those who learn to walk in that love are allowed to participate in the greatest measures of authority in the earth. The simple reason being that when we walk in that love, we are disciplined, we have the boundaries that we will not pass over so God can trust us with these much higher levels of authority which, in turn, allow us to get far more accomplished than being without that authority. The Lord Jesus loves to answer our prayers—He loves to do it! It isn’t because He feels, “Oh, I’ve got to do this again!” It is not that kind of thing. He simply loves to answer our prayers.

When our prayers come up before His throne, it brings Him so much joy. Sometimes our prayers require more authority* and we can either have the authority that accompanies every prayer we pray because of the love of God that we walk in, or we can pray many times over to accomplish the thing we are bringing before Him. Why? Because it takes time to build up the necessary authority for that foundation of our intercession. And so it is really a great invitation to the Lord and from the Lord for Him to say, “Let’s double-yoke ourselves under the yoke of Divine Love.” He is with us and we with Him. When we can operate in that place, everything changes, and it changes so quickly.

So, let’s turn in our Bibles to Mark 12:29.

Prayer: Father we thank You for teaching us Your ways, we thank You for the beauty of Your invitation, we thank You for the grace, we thank You for the fruits of the Spirit that evermore help us to develop the nature and character of Christ. We yearn to know you as we are known. We yearn to please You as You please the Father and we understand that if we walk with You and You walk in and through us, then we are always pleasing to the Father because You are pleasing Him through us. We thank You for that tremendous gift, that tremendous blessing. We know that all that You promise, the high calling to which You have called us, is absolutely, utterly impossible except You bring it about, so we know then that Your call leads us to greater dependency than we have ever known before and for that, again, we can only thank You, Lord. Teach us Your way, in Your precious Name, amen.

Mark 12:29 says, “The first of all the commandments is, Hear O Israel. The Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. You understand that this is the first commandment and the second is like it, Thou shall love thy neighbor, as yourself. There is no greater commandment other than these.”

The call is to literally, “Love the Lord thy God” with our whole being. Years and years ago, maybe thirty years ago, perhaps even longer than that, the Lord came to me and He took me to a mountaintop. Now, in California we have mountains and we have foothills and some of the foothills are even grand. That is the kind of mountaintop He took me to; it was more like the top of a great foothill. We were up on this mountaintop and the Lord was looking at me, in the eyes. We were meeting eye to eye and these feelings started stirring deep within my heart. The question came to my heart, “How can I please you Lord?” and finally I got the courage to actually ask Him, “How can I please you Lord?” He just looked at me and He said nothing that I can remember; He just looked at me. That was such an eminent feeling, having the Lord Jesus Christ in front of you, up on a mountaintop where there is no one else anywhere close and He is just looking at you, refusing to answer your question. He was not smiling; He was intense.

I started looking around me and as I searched, I found two of the ugliest rocks I think I have ever seen in my life; they were just ugly. I picked each one up, putting one in my right hand and one in my left and I thought about what I was going to say to Him, with these ugly rocks. I went back to Him and I realized, at that time, that there was an altar there beside Him, so I laid the rocks, both which were large enough to fit into my hand, on the altar. I said to Him, “Lord, I give You my will and my rights as exemplified by these rocks,” and for the first time, He smiled. He smiled and the fire of heaven came down and consumed those rocks. Well, the Lord can say more with a smile than some people can say with ten thousand words and I knew that I had pleased Him, number one. And number two, that I had given Him exactly what He took me up there to give Him: my will and my rights.

To be continued next week…

In Him,
Nita Johnson