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While We Slept

I was awakened this weekend to the sound of the trumpet’s alarm, and immediately this scripture came to my mind: Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the LORD cometh, for it is nigh at hand. Joel 2:1

Let’s examine the use of trumpets in Scripture: We see them used for music, processions and ceremonies, holy convocation, dedications, proclaiming kings. They are used to awaken, to call to battle, to sound a memorial before a battle, to send a warning, to call back from battle, to regulate journeys (when to start and when to stop), to call meetings, to announce the latter day judgments, and to raise the dead ‘incorruptible’.

Trumpets are required to give an intelligible and understood sound. It is a certain sound for a certain message. Yet ‘if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?’ 1 Cor. 14:8 ‘Uncertain’ in the Greek is adelos, meaning ‘indistinct, uncertain, and obscure.’

It was revealed to me as I was awakened by this trumpet’s alarm, that a deep slumbering lethargy has come upon the Body of Christ – and most specifically – upon God’s intercessors – those who have been given to stand in the gap, to make up the hedge, to protect, guard, watch, and stand as sentries to protect the work of God from dullness and sluggish stagnation.

This lethargy has taken this once observant and vigilant post and has mesmerized it, rendering it numb and stupefied. The intercessor who has been entrusted to see first, to discern first, to cover first – is now distracted, abducted, and removed.

It is a spirit assigned specifically to intercessors and looses an array of manifestations:

  1. The intercessor is spiritually depleted and physically exhausted.

  2. They have to constantly forge, fight, contend, defend, and cover that which has been given to their charge. This constant warring leaves them little room for using their intercession toward the building up and spiritual advancement they know God wants to bring to their assignment.

  3. They have to stand in the gap and make up the hedge alone, while others feel entitled to receive the benefit of their sacrifice without any of the labor or ongoing backlash. Many are laboring in prayer now in houses and ministries, while their own leadership will not model or blueprint the same sacrifice to the people. Leaders must be first to fast, first to pray – they must provide the kind of example and precedence that catalyzes the people toward spiritual activity. There are not just a ‘few people’ who pray – everyone prays because the leader prays.

  4. They are not being restored, supplemented, or poured back into.

  5. Often no one is covering them while they are covering others.

  6. Intercessors have not availed themselves to conferences and symposiums on a national or international scale that would elevate them to a higher level of globally–applicable revelation, presence, and scholarship. We see and know only what we experience – and it is limited and contained.

Let’s look at natural sleep before we begin to understand this spiritual slumber.

What the purpose of sleep is as God has designed it:

  1. Physical restoration

  2. Identifying and storing memories

  3. Restoring brain cells

  4. Saving energy

What are the stages of sleep?

NREM Stage 1:

  1. It occurs after you have decided to go to asleep and have closed your eyes.

  2. It lasts between 1 and 10 minutes.

  3. You are lightly asleep and can quickly become fully awake.

  4. Muscles are not yet inhibited; your eyes roll a little.

  5. Breathing slows down and your heartbeat becomes regular.

  6. Blood pressure and brain temperature decrease.

NREM Stage 2:

  1. Lasts around 20 minutes.

  2. Characterized by a slowing down of the heart rate and a decrease of the body temperature.

  3. Your body reduces its activity to prepare you to go into a deep sleep stage.

NREM Stage 3:

  1. Merger of the previous 2 stages.

  2. Starts 35-45 minutes after falling asleep.

  3. Brain waves slow down and become larger.

  4. Move into REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage.

  5. You sleep through most of the potential sleep disturbances (noises and movements) without showing any reaction.

REM Sleep

  1. This is the final stage of the sleep cycle.

  2. The first Rapid Eye Movement sleep lasts around 10 minutes and usually happens after having been asleep at least 90 minutes.

Now let’s examine how the enemy has introduced a comatose lethargy into God’s natural occurrence of sleep and its restorative function!

In Galatians 5:20 ‘witchcraft’ is mentioned as one of the works of the flesh. In the original text, this word is ‘pharmakeia’ or ‘to administer drugs’. The carnality referenced in the scripture has literally opened its apothecary and we have drugs that have been designed to alter the sleep patterns, and affect the divine function and operation of the mind.

These pharmaceuticals induce sleep, but they also dull the senses, blur perception, atrophy the body (where the equilibrium in the ear is affected – balance and hearing), speech is slurred, and motor skills are delayed.

Satan has summoned his anesthesiologist and in so doing, attacked the mind gifts that are so essential to the intercessor’s rendering of their gift’s function and operation. Their gift has now been relegated to a near-death state, paralyzed, incapacitated, incarcerated.

The gift of the intercessor has regressed into this state right before our eyes – literally in the last 10-15 years – because of the prevalence of religion, tradition, ignorance, and fear in the Church – accompanied by the onslaught of novices whose fledgling, amateur practice has wrought chaos and confusion in the heavenlies.

And while the true intercessors sleep, the enemy has abducted their gift through the work of mediums, satanic prognosticators, fortune tellers, and false prophets who are making money, filthy lucre, while the Church struggles to do something that is ‘decent and in order’.

So this is the impotence the world is seeing from the Church – slumber and sleep – while intercessor’s counterfeit is featured on networks the world over with a kind of pin-point accuracy that should be relegated solely to the purview of the Church.

Because the things that are seen are not made of things that do appear, often things have manifested in the earth realm, but they have actually been there and had established residency far before they were actually recognized. Hebrews 11:3

Yet when they appear, we are caught off guard and overcome by surprise. Terror and panic ensue and we respond from our emotive and intuitive perception.

A watch and observance in this hour is imperative to prevent this slow slope and measurable regression. Ascension gifts must be mature, seasoned and experienced intercessors. Prophetic and apostolic intercessors must sit fully awake upon their towers as seers, sentries, guards, and gatekeepers, to be apprised of the enemy’s schemes and plans. They need to know things that are spoken in the enemy’s camp; they need the ability to see even into the bedchamber – so that the Church has the singular advantage.

2 Kings 6:8-12 Then the king of Syria warred against Israel, and took counsel with his servants, saying, In such and such a place shall be my camp. 9And the man of God sent unto the king of Israel, saying, Beware that thou pass not such a place; for thither the Syrians are come down. 10And the king of Israel Asent to the place which the man of God told him and warned him of, and saved himself there, not once nor twice. 11Therefore the heart of the king of Syria was sore troubled for this thing; and he called his servants, and said unto them, Will ye not shew me which of us is for the king of Israel? 12And one of his servants said, None, my lord, O king: but Elisha, the prophet that is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel the words that thou speakest in thy bedchamber.

Apostolic Warning: The sight given by the Spirit is often overcome by the adversary because our minds haven’t been submitted to the Spirit and our senses are not exercised by reason of use.

We must have the revelation of immediacy, of urgency, of the importunity and imminence we are experiencing in the now.

God’s plans for His Church are often temporarily intercepted, prevented and abbreviated because of:

  1. Our gross neglect.

  2. There is an invasion of carnality.

  3. Our disobedience

  4. Our laziness and selfishness – we have used prayer as a way to amass for ourselves only, and not the sacrifice of laying down our lives and our time on behalf of others.

  5. We can’t be trusted with the secrets and mysteries of the Lord because we are too loquacious – we talk about everything.

  6. There has been a practiced avoidance to the promptings and the awakenings of the Holy Spirit. They usually come at an inconvenient time, and we are practiced at ignoring them.

  7. Prayer has not been accompanied with fasting and therefore lacks the power necessary to penetrate the realm of the heavenlies where real answers, solutions, and strategies exist.

This results in:

Time has been wasted because our days are consumed and overtaken by the frivolity of activities that literally take us out of the required realm from which we are to live. It is what I call the ‘illegitimate, legitimate thing.’ It seems necessary – even required – but it has wrenched us from our first love, and seared us from our ability to be sensitive and perceptive to the Holy Spirit.

Our instruction then is, ‘Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light!’ Eph. 5:14

There is a blessing and a reward – individual and corporate – that we have glimpsed at and seen only in part – that will never be made available to us until we, as intercessors, press into, inhabit, and occupy a new place of maturity, growth, and responsibility. And when we do, we will begin to experience the residential blessing – the blessings that are permanent not temporal, lasting not fleeting – the blessing that maketh rich and addeth no sorrow to it.

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