Maintaining Your Prayer Fire Part 1 by Pastor Philip Olubakin: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Altar That Must Not Go Out

Leviticus 6:12-13

And the fire upon the altar shall be burning in it; it shall not be put out: and the priest shall burn wood on it every morning, and lay the burnt offering in order upon it, and shall burn thereon the fat of the peace offerings. The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out.

The fire is upon the altar, yet it must also be burning in it. Some people's fire is only physical — they take on the conditioning of an atmosphere without any fire actually burning inside them. God is not only thinking about the fire burning on your altar; he is thinking about the fire burning in it.

Fire needs to burn something to keep burning. Fire does not burn on its own. What it feeds on is what keeps it going.

Proverbs 26:20

Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out. Wherever fire goes out, somebody who was responsible for putting the wood stopped putting it. Fire can burn indefinitely if it has something to burn — a fire disaster can burn for six months, even burn down a nation, so long as fire is not stopped. So if your prayer fire goes out, it did not go out because it got tired. It went out because someone who was supposed to be feeding it stopped feeding it. You are responsible for the state of your prayer life.

Consistency Is Not the Problem — Value Is

Consistency is emphasized in the text: the priest burns wood on the altar every morning. Most people already have consistency; they check their phone first thing every morning without fail, they follow a series faithfully episode after episode. Consistency is not the struggle. The struggle is whether what is consistently being done is moving a person closer to their desired destination.

Wood is placed on the altar every morning, not when the priest feels like it. Success is not a matter of unusual love or flair for a discipline; it is a matter of putting something more important ahead of what is merely preferred.

1. Small prayers plus consistency plus time leads to spiritual growth. It is the basic things that change us. Small prayers, done consistently and given time, produce growth — not a single five-hour prayer marathon attempted once.
2. Master the basics and repeat daily. There is no successful person who is not a routine person. The sun does not rise as the spirit leads; it rises as commanded, every morning, and that predictable routine is what makes it dependable.
3. Own your own spiritual routine. Do not blame a spouse, a job, children, or the state of the nation for a dead prayer life. The moment a person successfully finds an excuse, that skill of excuse-making gets mastered like any other skill, and it becomes a straight route to failure. Everyone has the same twenty-four hours.

The true test of diligence is not the size of what is done in one sitting but whether it is done every morning, without storing it up. Israel could not store manna for the future; it had to be gathered every morning. Psalms 5:3 — in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.

Order Your Day, Don't Let It Order You

Start your day early to leverage time. Place prayer first before the demands of the day come flooding in. The earlier a person connects with God, the more that connection compounds. The rush of modern life is not simply natural — it is designed to keep people occupied with mailboxes, deadlines, and urgent requests so that there is no time left for quiet time with God. That rush must be fought deliberately by placing God first, before anything else.

Find a Strong Enough Why

Whatever a person is struggling with, the first thing to find is a strong enough why. A strong enough why can carry a person through any what. Jesus, for the joy set before him, endured the cross and despised the shame. If the reward set before a person is strong enough, the pain along the way becomes bearable.

• A phone flooded daily with the pain of others — a woman who died eight months pregnant with the baby still in the womb, a seventeen-year-old boy so hyperactive and autistic that he had to be chained to a wall — becomes, for one preacher, the reason to keep carrying an anointing that heals rather than trade it for a few minutes of pleasure.
• A woman with breast cancer, told by doctors she would die, later testified with tears that she was cancer free because Jesus healed her — and that alone is reason enough to fast, weep, and pray without limit.
• Even physical discipline illustrates it: a person who once could not run fifty meters trained until they could run ten kilometers straight, once they found a strong enough why to keep at it. Motivation follows a strong why; it does not precede it.

Get into purpose in time — take on assignments bigger than personal capacity, things that will compel a return to God every morning, because a need that outsizes your own strength drags you back to the altar. Enough why builds strong consistency in the life of prayer.