Ministries
January / February 2006
Lynne Hammond
Dearest Friend and Pray-er,
Do you expect something supernatural to happen every time you pray? Do you go to your prayer closet believing not just for miraculous answers to prayer but for the Holy Spirit to move miraculously upon you as He helps you to pray?
If not, I believe you will by the time you finish reading this. I believe the Scriptures and the remarkable experiences I’m about to share with you will stir within you such a heart-felt hunger for the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in your prayer life that you simply won’t be satisfied anymore without it.
Why am I so committed to awakening that desire in you?
First, because it’s been awakened in me this past year and, as a result, I’ve seen God do extraordinary things in prayer.
Second, because we’re living in dangerous and complicated days. We’re living in times when we don’t know exactly what to pray as we ought—for our families, for the protection and progress of the Church, and for the nations. If we’re going to pray out God’s will so it can be done on earth as it is in heaven, we must increasingly pray beyond our own understanding and into the very mysteries of God.
How can we do that? There’s only one way. We must make more room for the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in our prayers. We must purposely use our faith to perceive and follow His promptings every time we pray.
“But Lynne,” somebody might say, “I’m not certain I can do that.”
Yes, you can. I know you can because before Jesus went to the cross, He spoke to those who believed on Him and said:
…I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever; the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you… The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you, (John 14:16-18, 26 NKJ).
Building a Room for the Supernatural
Think about that! Jesus Himself promised us not only that the Holy Spirit would live inside us but also that we would recognize His leadings. He promised us that the Holy Spirit would teach us all things.
For those promises to be fulfilled in our lives, however, we must have faith in what Jesus said. We must dare to believe the Holy Spirit will do for us exactly what those verses tell us He will do. We must expect the marvelous Holy Spirit to work powerfully and miraculously in us and among us simply because of our believing! (See Galatians 3:5, The Amplified Bible.)
Many times, we get so focused on what we’re praying about that we forget to do that. We fill up our prayer time with our own thoughts and our own words and forget to make room for the Holy Spirit to move. As a result, we miss out on the supernatural things He wants to do for us.
Now more than ever, I am purposing in my own prayer life not to do that anymore. I’m determined to become like the Shunammite woman in the Old Testament. Second Kings, chapter four, tells us she was so committed to making room for the Spirit of God to move in her life that every time the prophet, Elisha, came to her town, she practically dragged him to her house for dinner. She so desired and valued the presence of Elisha (and, more importantly, the presence of the Holy Spirit who worked supernaturally through him) that she eventually said to her husband:
“Look now, I know that this is a holy man of God, who passes by us regularly. Please, let us make a small upper room on the wall; and let us put a bed for him there, and a table and a chair and a lampstand; so it will be, whenever he comes to us, he can turn in there” (verses 9-10 NKJ).
Actually, the Hebrew word translated chair in that passage could also be translated throne. So you might say the Shunammite woman enthroned the Holy Spirit. She gave Him the highest place in her house and in her life.
That’s not just an Old Testament concept; it’s a New Testament teaching. Jesus told us in Luke 14:7-11 that when we’re invited to a feast or a gathering, we shouldn’t sit down in the highest place. We should sit in the lowest place and make room for the more distinguished guest to take the place of honor.
When we apply that principle to our prayer lives, we quickly realize that the Holy Spirit is the most distinguished guest in our prayer closet (or our prayer group, as the case may be). So we always ought to give Him the place of honor. We should defer to Him and give Him the most exalted place.
When the Miraculous Comes Looking for You
That’s exactly what the Shunammite woman did. She exalted or enthroned the Holy Spirit. As a result, she began to experience the supernatural in her life. She didn’t really go looking for the miraculous but because she honored the Holy Spirit who is the miracle worker, the miraculous came looking for her.
Elisha started asking what he could do to bless her or help her. He offered to put in a good word for her with the king or with the commander of the army, but since she didn’t really want any special honor for herself, she declined. Elisha, however, was determined to bless her.
So he said, “What then is to be done for her?” And Gehazi answered, “Actually, she has no son, and her husband is old.” And he said, “Call her.” When he had called her, she stood in the doorway. Then he said, “About this time next year you shall embrace a son.” And she said, “No, my lord. Man of God, do not lie to your maidservant!” But the woman conceived, and bore a son when the appointed time had come, of which Elisha had told her, (verses 14-17 NKJ).
Notice that the Shunammite woman wasn’t asking for a son. She wanted one but she didn’t even think to ask because having a son was above what she could ask or think. It was actually the Holy Spirit (through the servant, Gehazi) who brought up the subject. In essence, the Holy Spirit made the request—and then He granted it!
That in itself was a supernatural work of God. It was a miraculous move of the Holy Spirit. But the story doesn’t end there.
We find out in the next few verses that a few years later that little boy got sick and died in his mother’s arms. “What a tragedy!” you might say. And it would have been, except for one thing. The Shunammite woman hadn’t changed. She was still honoring the Holy Spirit and still expecting the supernatural. So without even telling her husband what had happened, she saddled her donkey and went to Mount Carmel to find Elisha.
So it was, when the man of God saw her afar off, that he said to his servant Gehazi, “Look, there is the Shunammite woman. Please run now to meet her, and say to her, ‘Is it well with you? Is it well with your husband? Is it well with the child?’ ” And she answered, “It is well,” (verse 26).
We find out in the following verses that the Shunammite woman was in great distress of soul but even so, she refused to give up her confidence in the miracle-working power of the Holy Spirit. In the midst of her darkest hour, she kept making room for Him to move. She kept expecting the supernatural.
Of course, God didn’t disappoint her. Elisha went to her house, stretched himself out over the dead child, and the Holy Spirit resurrected him!
I love that story because, as 21st century believers, we’re living in times where we need that kind of supernatural power at work in our lives. We need the resurrection power of God to move on us and through us when we pray. We need the Holy Spirit to work miraculously in us to pray the kinds of prayers that will resurrect spiritually dead cities and nations and quicken them again with the glory of God. We need Him to pray through us for things that are beyond what we can ask or think.
He wants to do it. He is able to do it. But we must give Him opportunity to do it. We must make more room for Him by expecting Him to work miraculously through us when we pray.
Prayer Uncovers Satan’s Plots
I determined to do that myself this past year, and I’ve been amazed at some of the things I’ve seen the Lord do as a result. In January of last year, for example, I led some prayer meetings in a church in the southwest that happens to be located near a place where the U.S. government keeps nuclear weapons. One of the people who attended the prayer meetings was a U.S. Marshall. A few months before the meetings, this Marshall had received some information about a suspected terrorist who had taken up residence in a local apartment complex. The suspect, however, had not yet been found.
During the Sunday night prayer meeting as I was praying in tongues, the Marshall along with the church pastor and his wife heard me praying about a white building and an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell. At the same time, the pastor had a vision of a white two-story apartment building with a certain kind of fencing around it. When the meeting was over, the pastor shared what he had seen and the Marshall decided to start watching for the building the pastor described.
Sure enough, shortly thereafter the Marshall saw an apartment complex that exactly fit the description the pastor had given him. He called the authorities who handle terror threats in that area and, consequently, the suspected terrorist was found and removed from the area.
Some months later, I was leading prayer in a church overseas and a similar thing happened again. As I prayed in tongues, a white-haired gentleman began frantically writing on a piece of paper. Afterward, I found out he worked for the central intelligence agency of that nation and he was responsible for investigating Islamic terrorism. His government had known there was a terrorist training camp for children in the area for a long time but they’d been unable to locate it.
The white-haired man told me that when I prayed, he heard me pray out the name of the camp and then identify the specific mosque and park where it was located. The very next day, the police raided the place and the report was in the newspaper!
Pray Like a Salmon
Looking back, what amazes me most about those prayer meetings is this: They didn’t seem very supernatural at the time. No angels sang. No fireworks went off. We didn’t have spiritual goose bumps a mile high. We just prayed and expected the Holy Spirit to work supernaturally through our prayers. We just made room for Him to move by releasing our faith and following His lead.
That sounds simple, and actually, it is simple. But it’s not easy.
On the contrary, if you’re going to enthrone the Holy Spirit in your life and continually expect Him to move miraculously through your prayers, you’ll have to be like a salmon sometimes. You’ll have to swim upstream against the downward pull of the flesh, the interference of circumstances, and the tide of other people’s opinions.
You’ll have to be like a salmon and swim upstream. I heard one minister say that a salmon will swim two thousand miles to find the river it was born in. It will jump rapids and avoid bears because it’s driven to lay its eggs in the exact stream where it was spawned.
That’s the way we, as pray-ers, must be. We were born again by the glory of God. We were born in and by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, and we have an inward drive to get back to that place. We have an innate desire to find the stream of the supernatural so we can give forth the life God has put within us.
So follow your heart to that stream. Go against the fleshly tendencies that keep you naturally minded, and release your faith for a supernatural move of God. Start expecting to experience the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit every time you pray.
And as you do, be sure to remember that…
You are loved by,
Lynne
TESTIMONIES
USA
I first heard Lynne speak in 1999 at a church in Little Rock, AR and at a Billye Brim Prayer Conference four years ago. I also receive the GPAN daily and look forward to it as I pray right along for my church, city, etc. It is such a blessing to feel connected to pray-ers and it is truly a source of life and encouragement to me. Lynne’s messages have fueled a passion in me for prayer. I am forever thankful and changed.
–L.S.
