Read:
17"So now, our God, listen to the prayer of Your servant and to his supplications, and for Your sake, O Lord, let Your face shine on Your desolate sanctuary.
Have you ever just felt like giving up on praying for the church and nation? You see the mess out there, and its humiliating to the body of Christ. You pray and pray and feel like God as forsaken you. I know I have and still do at times. Here in Daniel chapter 9 he is praying for Jerusalem. He knows the seventy years of captivity in Babylon is almost up, but prophetically he knows that Jerusalem will be destroyed once again in the future. However, God gives Daniel some encouragement concerning the "spiritual Temple" which is the church of Jesus Christ. He tells him that a messiah will come, which pertains to Christ Jesus. Daniel remained patient through his prayer and God came through immediately in Chapter 9. However, in chapter 10 it took twenty-one days for God to come through because of the evil spirit that was hindering. Daniel remained faithful through fasting, prayer, and devotion to the Lord. God came through and He can come through for you today. God is much concerned with the new Jerusalem temple today as He was with physical Jerusalem during the seventy-year captivity in Babylon. There will be a physical temple built in Jerusalem during the tribulation, but we need not to be concerned too much with that. We do need to pray for the peace of Jerusalem according to scripture, but our main focus is the spiritual temple of the church, and the Jerusalem in our own home as the temple, for we are a temple individually and corporately as a body.It's good to know prophetically what is going on in Jerusalem though as a believer. A journalist went to Jerusalem to see how far along they were to getting the utensils, priestly garments etc. for rebuilding the temple in the early 1900's. He went every decade, and in the early part of 2000 he went and asked them how far along they were? They said, "We have everything we need to start it!" They say it takes three and a half years to build it. This should not make us fear, but to motivate us to pray for God to shine His light upon His spiritual temple. The bible says, "that no man knows the day nor hour when Christ will come and there will be a "catching away" but we would know the season. We will soon reign with Jesus forever and ever. Want that be a great time! However, we need to stay focused as the body of Christ, and allow Him to work through us in these last days that we are living in. I believe we are living in the last season of this earth age, and it's time that we do the works of Christ like never before. Right now there are Daniel's in our midst who are praying for the temple of the body of Christ today, and they are weeping like Daniel for the mixture, greed, and other things that have leaked into the body of Christ. There are also Zechariah's, Joshua's, Ezra's, and Nehemiah's who are helping with the building of the spiritual temple. We have seen many minister's rise in the power of the Holy Spirit, who brought forth a motivation and revelation to build as living stones, and we will see this increase in the days ahead. Will you be a Daniel today and pray with fervent prayer? Let's start out our day with a desire for God to shine upon His temple. Let's ask God to forgive us as the body of Christ for things we let in our marriage as the bride of Christ, and let's focus on divorcing those things in the name of Jesus.
Prayer:
Lord we come to you in repentance and ask that you will forgive all of us for letting your body get to the place it is in. We have let money ruin your name, and we have loved the gifts and the things that you give more than you Lord. We ask that you would filter out the mixture, and that you would bring us to a pure place with you in patience as we pray for your light to shine down upon us. Amen
by Keith Edwards
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