The Secret To Spiritual Flight Mastering The Art Of Intercession by Apostle Arome Osayi: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Foundations: The Believer's Partnership With God in Prayer

We began attempting to explore the subject of prayer, taking a look at the book of the Acts of the Apostles and wondering what Jesus knew that we do not know, for which he set up a team of largely illiterate individuals and gave them a global mandate. One of the things Jesus knew very well was the power resident in the person of the Holy Spirit. In the book of Revelation, you will not see "Holy Spirit," you will see "Spirit," because the civilization sustained in heaven is powered by the full might of the Holy Ghost glory.

In Revelation 4, a voice said, "Come up hither and I will show you things which must take place hereafter." That is what we call a spiritual summon. There are times when God decides to summon you, and whenever he does, it means he needs your participation to accomplish what he wants to do at that time. It is not every time that God needs your participation. There are so many deliverances he effects over your life that you are not even aware of, so many battles fought while you sleep that you were not required to participate in. But whenever God needs your participation, he orchestrates what we call a sermon, and in a sermon there are higher levels and higher dynamics of prayer. God wants you to participate, and he gives you the grace to listen to the decrees issued from the throne room, because those decrees form the strategies by which you advance spiritually.

Custodians and Guardians

There is a realm called the realm of the custodians, those who have labored in prayer for a long time, not beginners, people with ten years or more of intercession. God hides secrets with certain intercessors, and there are secrets that, once hidden with you, death cannot take you. That was the antidote behind death that Simeon in Luke 2 had. All his age mates had died; he himself prayed to die, and death turned backward from him and never came to visit again, because he was in custody of a secret.

Some Jewish scholars (not biblical books, just Jewish writings) believe that at every point in time there will be at least thirty-six custodians on earth keeping the secrets of that generation so the earth can be preserved. If that number is affected, there will be a shift in the balance. As you grow in intercession, you find your prayer identity: you are either a custodian or a guardian. The Bible speaks of how, "while men slept, the enemy came" — the enemy could not come until men slept. Satan needs to put people to sleep, needs to give them anesthesia, before he can invade territories, families, or nations.

Prayer Is Partnership, Not Bribery

Our takeoff point was Luke 18, where Jesus revealed that we are creatures of prayer by design. We are sentenced to prayer. Men ought always to pray and not to faint. If you have found a way of existing without praying, you are malfunctioning, operating outside of the manual.

Prayer is not utopian. Prayer is a kingdom activity that creates possibility for the implementation of the will of God. Before man was created, God's creation was purely an act of his sovereign authority. But the moment man came upon the scene, God stopped that sovereign dimension of operation, because man was designed to be an extension of himself, bringing his dominion into the physical frame of reference. If man is operating accurately, God does not need to come down; God is the empowerment, man is the vessel through which that empowerment achieves God's dream. Man was so out of alignment that God had to become man in Christ to manifest. That is how determined God is once he sets out to accomplish something in a certain way.

Prayer is not bribery. You cannot pray God into weariness so that he simply gives in. Psalms 115:16 says the heaven, even the heavens, belong to the Lord, but the earth has he given to the sons of men. That scripture speaks of jurisdiction. Whenever God speaks, his words become law, and he himself becomes subject to it. So when God says he has given the earth to the sons of men, he is saying he wants you to partner with him through prayer so that he can accomplish what he wants to do. Your greatness is not that you are indispensable to God's plans; your greatness is that you accepted the privilege to participate with him. That participation obligates you to become a man or woman of prayer, so that you no longer wait for a prayer service to exercise your spirit, but pray in whatever moment you find, because that is what you were created to do.

Hearing the Voice of God

Hearing the voice of God is easy for those who pray. That voice is not in any language you learned in school; it is organic, biological, the same way your body speaks to you when you are thirsty or hungry, without you attending any school to learn that language. The Holy Spirit, once he comes to dwell in your spirit, begins to transmit in his own language, distinct from the language of thirst, hunger, or tiredness — but it is a language nonetheless. Discernment is needed more to decipher God's activity within your own heart than to decode demons, because the Holy Spirit does not speak your language, and every time you interpret what he is saying, that is discernment at work. Only those who pray regularly, consistently, frequently, can interpret that language. Exercise your spirit and certain things will begin to happen to you naturally, the same way no one teaches an animal by formal instruction how to track or sense danger.

How Not to Pray: The Prayer Hypocrite

Matthew 6 speaks of the righteous deeds of kingdom people: giving, praying, and fasting. In giving there is a giving hypocrite; in praying there is a praying hypocrite; in fasting there is a fasting hypocrite. Before Jesus taught how to pray, he first taught how not to pray. Matthew 6:5-6: "When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men."

The audience of the prayer hypocrite is men, not God. That is why the hypocrite needs a strategic position where people will see him, because his objective is to be seen by men. Because his audience is men, he has strange ways of prosecuting prayer, and if you are praying to a man, the answer you should expect will come from a man.

Key Marks of the Prayer Hypocrite

1. Prayer is primarily communion with God for the manifestation of his glory — but the hypocrite uses prayer to glorify himself.
2. Prayer is meant to be heard by God — but the hypocrite prays to be seen by men, not to be heard by God.
3. The hypocrite is not conscious of the heart-input for his prayer effort — his heart does not need to be in the prayer for him to achieve his goal.
4. Prayer is an activity of the heart — but the hypocrite makes it an adventure of the flesh, an act of pride rather than the humility prayer is meant to produce. Prayer is a call to humility, because to pray is to admit you do not have the answer, but God does, and you have accepted your place in that arrangement. True intercessors, over years, are shaped by the perpetual practice of humility in God's presence into deeply humble, loving people; whatever produces the opposite in someone is not prayer, but prayer hypocrisy.

Matthew 6:6 says God, our Father, sees in secret and is in secret; prayer is a secret, communion-based thing. If you pray the right way and not as a hypocrite, you become progressively more humble, because you understand the mechanics of what is really happening. The hypocrite who prays for years without that inward heart-work eventually only "produces wind" — Isaiah 26:15-18 describes it: a nation increased and glorified by the Lord, that in trouble poured out a prayer, like a woman in the pangs of childbirth, drawing near her delivery — "we have been with child, we have been in pain, and we have as it were brought forth wind." Prayer is like a pregnancy; whatever you conceive in it will eventually manifest. No intercessor can hide what they were truly pregnant with; in time it will be seen.

Guarding the Heart in Prayer

First: a man who will survive by prayer must be conscious of what is going on in his heart. Elijah, praying for rain, knelt with his head between his knees (the posture flight attendants call the brace position) so that he could not see the sky himself, and he had to send his servant to check seven times before a cloud the size of a man's hand appeared. That small sign was the confirmation of an abundant rain. You must be diligent to interpret accurately the sign forming on the canvas of your heart, because a small sign can be the sign of a great thing. Someone who ignored such an inward warning before travelling was in a bad accident; the sign had formed but was not given the authority of discernment. May you never call the Holy Ghost merely "something."

Psalms 139:23: "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me." An intercessor knows the theater of the prayer enterprise is the heart, and runs consistent checks to ensure it is free of bitterness, because unresolved bitterness — even a quarrel with a spouse the night before — will affect prayer. A true intercessor cannot afford to remain in a state of a heavy heart, because life itself depends on the prayer.

Second: you must lay aside every weight from the heart — Hebrews 12:1. Satan does not want your heart to rest, because he knows your capacity to draw the attention and glory of heaven in your direction to fight on your side. The moment your heart begins to find peace, he brings turbulence, often through a distraction, a message, a disturbance timed to consume your prayer strength for the day and derail what would have been accomplished. The prayer man must be light in order to fly.

Our intercessors had labored for six hours over a woman with no change. When I came into the room and made a few adjustments, the bondage broke in twenty minutes, because they were carrying weight and could not fly. On another occasion, a message came that a pastor was near death; by the time I reached the hospital, I did not simply begin praying — I first presented my case before God: for my childhood, have I not served you; the things I suffered for your name, those are my credentials; because of that, I make this demand: let him rise. After that prayer, the pastor began to recover, and later told the congregation, "I am alive because this man refused for me to die."

In another instance, ministers were struggling for a long while to cast a demon out of a possessed woman, unable to prevail because they were "heavy." A single cry from a place of lightness caused the spirit to leave instantly.

Closing Declaration

Lay aside the weights, the concerns, and let Jesus and Jesus alone be your focus. "Hast thou not heard, hast thou not known, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles."

• You can fly beyond the reach of the scorpion, beyond the reach of the serpent.
• You can mount up under the wings of the Spirit of God.
• Hide yourself in the heavens before you show yourself on the face of the earth.
• Present yourself before the throne of grace before you manifest as master over situations and circumstances.
• Receive wings to mount up, so that you might fly beyond the weight of your current trouble.

Habakkuk 2:1 — I will stand upon my watch, and set myself upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me. Set your heart in listening mode. If you want to bring intervention for someone in crisis, remove your heart from the grief first. When you want to help people, do not enter into their emotion; shield yourself from it, and fly.