How Big Is Your Chair?

Love to all! I often struggle with the articles that come my way because I have to sift through an aweful lot of "Is this Biblical?" sorts of questions. Occasionally though, I read an article that just makes my soul glad and leads me straight to worship. This note from Mahesh Chavda does exactly that and I hope you are as encouraged as I am. Love to all, t


Mahesh Chavda:



How Big is Your Chair? The Bigger the Chair, the Greater the Authority and Victory!



Encounter with a Warring Angel



Several weeks ago I was sitting in my library when I suddenly heard a noise behind me. I turned, and there was an angel right there. He was young-looking, majestic, awesome, full of strength and joy and vigor. He was smiling, but there was also the fragrance and atmosphere of battle all around him. He was a warring angel, and he had just come from battle. I had the impression that I was not his assignment. He was literally coming from one battle and was heading off to another one. But in between he just landed momentarily, looked at me, smiled and asked, "How big is your chair?" Then, just as suddenly as he appeared, he departed.



After he left, and before I even had time to process his question, "How Big is your chair?" I realized that I was hearing music all around. In those moments that he was there, he carried with him the vibrations of the hymn, "Come Thou Almighty King: Come Thou Almighty King/Help us Thy Name to sing/Help us to Praise…Come and reign over us, Ancient of Days."



It was as if this hymn were the song of the battle the angel had just won. The sound and words lingered in the atmosphere surrounding him as he carried the message from the Lord, "How big is your chair?" Before I could even ponder the question, the Holy Spirit answered, "Psalm 22:3. You are enthroned on the praises of Your people."



When the Lord asks a question it is loaded. The message was not about my chair. It was about the Lord's chair. His throne. How big is His throne? How big is the chair we have made for Him in our hearts? We make His chair big through our praises.



We Represent the One Who is in the Big Chair



He is enthroned on our praises. God is speaking to us strategically in this hour. Make it personal in your life—become a vessel of His glory as you enthrone the King of kings in your heart. The bigger your chair, the more awesome you make God, the more awesome the release of His glory. How do we make God awesome? We begin to praise Him. We magnify the Lord as we proclaim His goodness, harmonize with His Word and exalt His mighty name. We become more and more in tune with the Throne of Heaven, and you become more aware of His awesome power and authority. You become a possessor of the truth, and in that context your chair gets bigger. The bigger the chair, the greater the authority, the greater the victory!



We represent the One who is in the big chair. He puts His servants in situations where they are responsible to bring in the Presence, to carry a big chair mentality into that situation. The bigger His throne, the more you will begin to resonate the supernatural reality of Heaven, and will see with eyes that go beyond the natural realm.



Some of the greatest warriors are the Zulu tribes in South Africa. In fact, the Zulu army used to put terror in the British Army. But just as powerful as they are in the natural, when they found Jesus, they became awesome warriors in the Spirit. These men dripped miracles, signs and wonders. They never became famous, as they were content to live simply off the land with their flocks, but they knew the King of Heaven and carried His presence.



I was friends with one of these Zulu ministers, Elijah Maswangani. We used to minister together in Jerusalem quite frequently. In one of our times together he told me the story of his mentor, an old Zulu warrior. During a crusade, he was asked to open the meeting in prayer. The old man simply stood and beheld the Lord and said, "Awesome…Awesome." Then he looked down, and once more he said, "Awesome." That was the end of our meeting, because the enthroned One suddenly appeared. The tent was filled with the Glory of God. Every stretcher was emptied. Every blind eye opened. People ran to the altar in order to meet this King and be saved. That old Zulu warrior carried a big chair.



When you get into the presence of God, you may have been praying. You may have been struggling. You may have come to an impasse in your life. But you just say, "Awesome." You just step into worship and that's it. The angels are loosed. At Bethel, Jacob came to a place where the gate to Heaven was standing open. Angels ascended and descended from the Throne to earth. Jacob said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the gate of Heaven." God wants to raise up people who can come into a situation and just say, "Awesome." We connect with the Living God and become a conduit for His glory to touch the earth. We behold Him, and angels take care of the details. We worship the covenant God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and He brings us into covenant breakthrough.



We often make faith religious—it's all about us quoting a hundred Scriptures, making confessions over our situation, getting our theology in order. Knowing the Word is good. Rehearsing His promises is powerful. But when faith becomes religious, it is like a rocket trying to lift us up to God, in our own strength.



There is an ease in the glory! We come into revelation of His awesomeness, His power, His majesty, and we come into communion with the God of covenant breakthrough. This is resting in the finished work of Jesus.



Thanksgiving and Rejoicing



This is how we began the Wakey Wakey: 40 Forty Days to Awaken America, and this is where we end—rejoicing in the finished work of Jesus Christ. We have fasted and prayed. We have humbled ourselves according to 2 Chronicles 7:14, and now we can rest in His promises—because His guarantee is that, "I will hear, and I will answer." We have fasted, so now let's celebrate with thanksgiving and rejoicing. How big is your chair?



When that messenger arrived in my library, the room was infused with the strains of "Come Thou Almighty King." Later when I shared with Bonnie what had happened, she immediately saw the angel had just come from victory in the American Revolution and was jubilantly heading to the next battle for our liberty—the one we are in today. One of our friends was with us, and immediately googled "Come Thou Almighty King."



Amazingly, what she found was that during the Revolutionary war a group of Hessian soldiers fighting for the British, stormed into a church on Long Island and demanded that the congregation show allegiance to the British tyranny by singing "God Save the King." The organist started the tune that we call "America" but the people, true to the colonies' cause and their God sang, "Come Thou Almighty King." The song was an anthem birthed in the Great Awakening that held spiritual authority over the tyranny and humanistic governing, and gave sound to the Rider on the White horse advancing His Kingdom in the mouths of faith-filled Believers. They had a big chair.



"The people who know their God will do exploits!" (Daniel 11:32). The people who know their God intimately, in communion with Him, will do exploits. He is giving us signs right now. Let us stand and revel in Him and His victory. Let us thank Him in advance, "calling things that are not as though they are" for the turn-around in America. Let us proclaim His goodness and mercy in awakening America. Let us celebrate!



Your praise can shape your history. Your praise can move mountains and bring Heaven down to where you are today.



Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It's way over our heads. We'll never figure it out.



Romans 11:35-36 (The Message Bible):

Is there anyone around who can explain God?

Anyone smart enough to tell Him what to do?

Anyone who has done Him such a huge favor

that God has to ask His advice?

Everything comes from Him;

Everything happens through Him;

Everything ends up in Him.

Always glory! Always praise!

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Revolutionary Prayer - Pete Grieg

Revolutionary Prayers By Pete Greig


Published: November 8th, 2009

Can our prayers change nations? Did prayer really help bring down the Berlin Wall? 20 years ago today the world watched stunned - from the Kremlin to the White House - as the wall which had separated East from West for more than quarter of a century came crashing down. And remarkably one of the sparks which detonated this seismic change was.. a weekly prayer meeting!

If you ever wonder whether prayer really can change the world, read on...

Growing up under communism, in a mining village near the East German city of Leipzig, Markus Laegel (today one of the leaders of 24-7 Germany), remembers those prayer meetings as a formative moment when he realised the power of prayer. His father worked, like most men, in an open mine where his minimal wage was supplemented by daily bottles of vodka. With almost nothing to do after work other than drink, Markus remembers a generation of his father's friends all being reduced to alcoholism while their families struggled to survive. Times were desperate living under one of the most repressive regimes on earth.

Candles and prayers

When Markus was 13, word began to spread about a weekly prayer meeting at the church of St Nicholas in Leipzig. It was said that people were daring to cry out to God for an end to the oppression of communism. That simple prayer meeting had begun several years earlier with just a handful of faithful Christians on a Monday night, but now it started to grow. Exactly a month before the wall came down no fewer than 70,000 people gathered around the church to intercede for peace. The government was alarmed and threatened to shut the church down. Doctors were so concerned that they set up an emergency clinic in the building, expecting the prayer meeting to be showered with bullets...

So many people were expressing their protest in prayer that the State was preparing for war. Markus Laegel remembers guns on the roofs of churches and tanks in the streets. But when the Berlin wall eventually fell one communist official made a surprising admission to a journalist: 'We were prepared for every eventuality,' he said, 'but not for candles and not for prayers' Red Moon Rising

Regime change

The Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who was arguably the pre-eminent theologian of prayer in the 20th century, said that 'To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising.' Twenty years after the prayer-fueled uprising that brought down communism in Eastern Europe, we find ourselves living under the subtler oppression of unregulated capitalism and secular humanism. Maybe it's time to to rediscover the spirit of those Leipzig Prayer Rallies once again.

Eugene Peterson's classic book 'The Contemplative Pastor' (which, let's face it, sounds about as harmless as a book can be) goes as far as describing prayer as 'a subversive activity [that] involves a more or less open act of defiance against any claim by the current regime.'

To pray for the Kingdom of God to come on earth is to invite an uprising, a regime-change, a revolution. It is subversive. But sadly we've reduced 'Thy Kingdom come' to a religious catch-phrase, short-hand merely for a few less people leaving our churches, and a few more homeless people receiving a tuna sandwich on Friday nights. By contrast, the former Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper clearly understood the revolutionary implications of Christian allegiance (and I can almost imagine his hand trembling with a mixture of terror and excitement as he wrote these words):

There is not a square inch of domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: 'It is mine!'

24-7 Prayer exists to welcome Christ into every 'square inch of domain of our human existence'. This means that, whenever we see the tyranny of enemy occupation at work in our own lives we try to pray for Christ's Kingdom to come instead. Wherever we see oppression, amongst the poor, in our educational systems, in goverment, or even in the church, we use our free wills to say defiantly: 'Not my will but your will be done'.

When we pray in this way, I'm reminded of those urgent messages tapped out in code to Allied forces by resistance fighters far behind enemy lines in the Second World. In the darkness and despair, our prayers can light up landing-strips for the invading forces of heaven. And when we come together to do this in sufficient numbers, we can move from small-scale guerilla warfare to publicly defying tanks and guns with our prayers for liberation.

24-7 and the future

After a decade of continual prayer that has touched a hundred nations and impacted so many thousands of individuals, I am unspeakably grateful to God for the 24-7 movement. But now, as we begin to look ahead to the next decade of non-stop prayer, my longing is to move from the transformation of individuals to the transformation of nations and the liberation of entire communities, through the power of concerted prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ our returning Lord!

The reception of a new world from God is under way in our time. It is apparent in the staggering, frightening emergence of new communities... Thus we are at the risky point of receiving from God what we thought God would not give; namely a new way to be human in the world.' Walter Bruegemann, Hopeful Imagination