Tag Archives: spiritual authority

Discipleship and witness, Living by Faith, Walking in the Spirit

Pressing on – or being pressed?

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“Now when evening came, His disciples went down to the sea, got into the boat, and went over the sea toward Capernaum. And it was already dark, and Jesus had not come to them.” (John 6: 16-17)

Getting on with the Mission
I love this story: I don’t think there are many cameos in the Bible that point the contrast between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh as well as this one. While Jesus was up on the mountain, the disciples headed for the boat. There are “big picture” examples of the flesh taking matters into its own hands and the consequences that are brought about – Saul’s hasty sacrifice when Samuel was delayed, narrated in 1 Samuel 13, comes to mind – but the disciples in their boat seems to speak particularly eloquently into our lives as disciples today. Unlike Saul, they were they were not disobeying any of God’s commands (1 Samuel 13:13): there is no record of Jesus telling them to wait until He came back. They were just getting on with their mission as well as they could.

Feeling Compelled
The main parallel with the story of Saul’s sacrifice is that, like him, they would have “felt compelled.” (1 Sam 13:12) Saul had picked a fight with the Philistines and now they were gathered against him in their numbers; and the people, trembling, were hiding in caves and pits and “were scattered from him.” (vs 6-8) The disciples knew they had to go to Capernaum and “it was already dark.” Although they didn’t know where Jesus was, there were plenty of people around with boats, so they probably assumed that He had either gone on ahead or would soon follow in someone else’s boat. He would either be at the house in Capernaum waiting for them, or would turn up a bit later, but wherever He was it was time to get moving. It’s also quite possible that they were exhausted and wanted to get away from the demands of the crowd. So the situation was compelling, and all very human. And all very plausible: have you never lost contact with someone in a group and thought: “Well, we’re headed for the same place. We’re bound to catch up with them there.” I certainly have.

Lost Authority
So it’s easy to be critical of the disciples for setting off without the Lord, but actually what they did was very natural, and it’s the naturalness of their action that makes it such a valuable lesson for us. And although they were not disobedient to God in the way that Saul was, there is a similarity in the consequence: they both resulted in a loss of authority. Saul lost his authority to rule Israel (1 Sam 13:14), and the disciples lost their authority to rule their circumstances. Sudden squalls were common on Lake Galilee, so whether or not this particular one was whipped up specially by the enemy to destroy them, or whether it was a natural occurrence, the disciples knew the risk they were taking and were confident that their skills and experience as fishermen would take them safely to Capernaum. It’s when we assume we are in control that the opposite is often the case.

Recognising the Difference
After three or four miles with the waves buffeting their boat and “a great wind blowing” (v.18), that confidence was probably ebbing away, and they were still only a little over halfway to their destination (Bethsaida to Capernaum was about six miles). Just as the disciples will have agreed with the Lord that they would go over to Capernaum, we too can have objectives that we have prayed over and been in agreement with the Holy Spirit about, but we can still set off without Him in the boat. We can employ all the natural resources we have at our disposal to act on a word, but we can leave out the presence of God and be following our own agenda. Smith Wigglesworth said this: “I must recognise the difference between my own spirit and the Holy Spirit. My own spirit can do certain things on natural lines, can even weep and pray and worship, but it is all on a human plane, and we must not depend on our human thoughts and activities or on our own personality. If the baptism (in the Spirit – my parenthesis) means anything to you, it should bring you to the death of the ordinary, where you are no longer putting faith in your own understanding; but, conscious of your own poverty, you are ever yielded to the spirit. Then it is that your body becomes filled with heaven on earth.“ (For transcripts of Wigglesworth’s sermons and other material relating to his life and ministry, see http://www.smithwigglesworth.com)

The Valley and the Mountain
How much of our worship and our mission, are “on natural lines,” rowing stalwartly towards God’s objectives without His presence in the boat? We pray for the wind and waves to abate but to no avail, because, whatever our gifting or our position in the church, we have no spiritual authority in our own strength. And when we are drenched, exhausted and storm-tossed, the enemy whispers into our hearts: “What do you think you are doing in this boat anyway? You’re never going to get to your Capernaum: you might as well give up now…” Yes, we are able to silence that voice and we row on through the storm, pressing on towards the goal as we shout Philippians 3:14 into the wind. We stay afloat but Capernaum doesn’t seem to get any nearer. But the “goal” that Paul is referring to is “the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Lake Galilee is at the bottom of a valley, 200 ft below sea level. The mountains that surround it rise to 2000 ft. And here, for me, is one of the central points of this story: While Jesus was up on the mountain, the disciples were down in the valley.

The Upward Call
What are our goals, as individuals and as churches? Where is our Capernaum? I think in many cases we can get into the boat and start rowing, but never actually get there, and the dream of seeing the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven becomes seeing the Kingdom of God in heaven when our ship has finally sunk on earth. But although it’s true that the Old Testament heroes of faith “did not receive the promise,” (Hebrews 11:39), the next verse starts with the words “God, having provided something better for us…” God has provided something better for us than rowing through the storm until our ship has sunk. God has given us His son, He has given us the Holy Spirit, and He has given us a choice: do we stay lower than sea level and do what circumstances and our natural thinking dictate, hoping we’ll meet God when we’ve arrived; or do we go up the mountain to seek His face first (Psalm 27:8), and not move until we know He’s coming with us?

The way Up is Down
We need to remind ourselves that we can no more climb the mountain through our own strength and abilities than we can row to our destination. In his sermon “Keeping the vision,” Smith Wigglesworth says this: “There are two sides to this Baptism: the first is, that you possess the Spirit; the second is that the Spirit possesses you. This is my message at this time – being possessed by the Baptizer, and not merely possessing the Baptizer… I believe that God’s ministers are to be flames of fire; nothing less than flames; nothing less than mighty instruments with burning messages, with a heart full of love, with such a depth of consecration that God has taken full charge of the body and it exists only that it may manifest the glory of God.” Later in the same message he says: “It seems to me that the way to get up is to get down.” In his book “Pride versus Humility,” Derek Prince says the same thing: “The way up is down; the way down is up. If we want to go up, we must start by going down.” The only thing we can be certain of is that we don’t know where Jesus is going at all, unless we are with Him: He might not even be to Capernaum; and if He is, the chances are that it won’t be when we think, because His thoughts are not our thoughts. If we want His plans, we need to be dead to our own. Our abilities, our understanding of what God has done in the past, our ideas of what His next move is going to be: these all need to be at the bottom of the lake before we start out, because we don’t actually ask Him to come with us: we go with Him. We’ll find Him up the mountain.

If we want to press on, we need to respond to the upward call of God, and start by going down.

Knowing God, Prayer and Spiritual Warfare, Walking in the Spirit

The Anointing

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Jesus is the Messiah: the word messiah means “Anointed one.” In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells us that “God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit and Power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, because God was with him.” (Acts10:38). In our church contexts we often talk about people “moving in the anointing,” or we might say that “the anointing was on such-and-such today.” When we use the term, what we are saying is that the power or the presence of the Holy Spirit was evident at the time, just as Acts 10:38 tells us that He was present with Jesus, but this is a generalised statement. What more specifically does Scripture tell us about the Anointing?

In Luke 4:18,  where Jesus quotes from  Isaiah 61:1-2, we read specifically what His anointing was for:

 “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the broken hearted, 
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;

To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.”


As the called and chosen followers of Jesus, we, His disciples can – indeed, should – expect this anointing to be upon us as well if we are to do the Works that He did, as He promises in John 14:12. If we aren’t doing the works, it seems to me that it’s because we aren’t in the Anointing. If the Church is the body of Christ on earth, then it’s true to say that His body carries the anointing that was poured upon it when the Holy Spirit was given at Pentecost. But no one individual walks in the fullness of the ministry of Christ: Ephesians four teaches us that different individuals carry different ministry gifts, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 speak about the gifts that the Holy Spirit imparts as He wills, and Romans 12 talks again about the Grace gifts of God. These are all aspects of God‘s anointing on the Church, expressed in the specific contexts that relate to our walk with Him.

The anointing of the Holy Spirit is modelled in the Old Testament through the anointing with oil, and this model has been retained in the New Testament church. James 5:14-15 makes this statement: “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” Will save the sick … will raise him up… What has happened to that certainty? Why is healing just a possibility today, and not a given as it was then? I think the answer lies in our understanding of what the anointing means.

Anointing for Authority
In 1 Samuel 16:13 we read “Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him  in the midst of his brothers, and the spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward.” David was anointed to be King. It was the anointing for authority. (There is another anointing in the Old Testament, where a different oil was prepared, and this was the oil used to anoint the priests and sacred objects. This was the anointing for consecration, which, though connected, is a separate subject.) Previously the authority to rule had been with Saul, but we read in the following verse: “The spirit of the Lord departed from Saul.”  Authority had been transferred to David with the anointing that was now on him. When David killed Goliath, he had already been anointed as King: he carried that anointing in the sphere of influence that he had been given at the time, although he wasn’t crowned for about another fifteen years. Just as David was set apart and anointed many years before he sat on the throne of Israel, we too can know the call and the anointing of God for ministry long before moving into the full sphere of our authority.

As well as the anointing on David, another notable passage on the subject in the Old Testament is when Elijah received this instruction from the Lord after he had met with Him on the mountain: “Go, return on your way to the Wilderness of Damascus; and when you arrive, anoint Hazael as king over Syria. Also you shall anoint Jehu the son of Nimshi as king over Israel. And Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel Meholah you shall anoint as prophet in your place. It shall be that whoever escapes the sword of Hazael, Jehu will kill; and whoever escapes the sword of Jehu, Elisha will kill.” (1 King’s 19: 15–17)  In fact, Elijah only fulfilled the last of his three tasks, anointing Elisha as his successor; Elisha himself carried out the other two. It’s notable that this anointing was for a very specific purpose: the destruction of the enemies of God. Elijah lived in the days of the idolatrous king Ahab. Hazael of Syria was a ruthless king whom God raised up to punish Israel and Judah for their apostacy. The “sword of Jehu” killed Jezebel and the priests of Baal, and ended the dynasty of Ahab. Jehu was so thorough that Elisha didn’t have to kill anyone.

Destroying the works of the devil
Exactly how and when these commands were fulfilled is not the subject here, but what is clear is God’s purpose. Two men were to be anointed as King, and Elisha was to be anointed as prophet. Their authority is both secular and spiritual, and God‘s plan here is explicit: He has chosen all three men to destroy His enemies. Moving now to the New Testament, we see that the purpose of the anointing on Jesus is summarised in1 John 3:8: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.” The anointing on Jehu, Hazael and Elisha pointed to the anointing on Jesus, and this in turn  was poured out on the church at Pentecost: the anointing to destroy the works of the devil. These may be the poverty, broken heartedness, bondage, blindness and oppression of Isaiah 61, or any other works of the enemy that we confront as we go out in Jesus’s name to “proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Places to Walk
However, there are two considerations that we need to remember. All authority in heaven and earth was given to Jesus, so the anointing that He carried was limitless and universal. We are in Him, but we are not Him, so any anointing that we carry is limited to the sphere of authority that we have been given in the Kingdom of God. God said to Joshua, “I will give you places to walk among those who stand here.“ (Zachariah 3:7). We too have “places to walk;“ that define our spheres of authority. Whether it’s our home, our workplace, our church small group, our entire church or our nation, it has been given to us to exercise spiritual authority in that realm. God may expand that realm, just as He moved David from the sheepfold to Saul’s court to the cave of Adullam to the throne of Israel, but we don’t presume to take upon ourselves authority that hasn’t been given to us. And by the same token, if we are in a place of “crowning” others, for church eldership, for example, we must remember that a physical anointing and calling out for leadership has to be a confirmation of what God is already doing. Samuel was instructed to anoint David; Elijah was instructed to anoint Jehu, Hazael and Elisha. The human act of anointing is just a physical expression of what is doing in the spiritual realm: it carries no real authority in its own right. Proverbs 27:8 says “Like a Bird that wanders from its nest is a man who wanders from his place.” If the anointing ministered by the elders always healed the sick in the time of James and only occasionally heals the sick today, it’s not the anointing that has changed, but the authority of those seeking it: they may not be walking in the places that they have been assigned in heaven.

Peace
The second consideration is this. In John 20: 21- 22, Jesus passes on the anointing to his disciples: “So Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you! As the father has sent me, I also send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit…”  As we know, the substance of that breath did not land upon them until Pentecost, but the anointing and sending took place in that moment shortly after the resurrection. And preceding the sending and the anointing was His peace. If we are to go and His Power, we must go in His Peace.

Peace comes with certainty, the certainty of knowing that we are seated in heavenly places, that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us, and above all the certainty that we are in God‘s will. We don’t gain authority over the power of darkness by shouting at demons or at circumstances: If we are to do the works at Jesus did, the powers of darkness will be overcome “with a word“, but it will be a word that carries the weight of the anointing, spoken in the peace of knowing where we stand in Christ, and knowing that we are operating within the sphere of authority we have been given. I hear a lot of people making scriptural declarations over negative circumstances, or “binding the enemy“ with their voices raised, and I’m sure I do it myself, but Isaiah 42:2 says “He will not cry out or raise his voice, nor make his voice heard in the streets.“ He did not need to: the anointing did the work, and the words He spoke carried the light of  life themselves. If we have God‘s word for a situation, and we are standing in the peace of knowing our authority, we don’t need to add to it with our flesh.

The Rema Word
Finally, I think that it is this certainty that brings faith in ministry situations. A rema word is a word spoken by God into a specific context, usually for a specific purpose. Often it comes through a gift of the Holy Spirit or through prophetic ministry, but not always: God speaks to each of us differently and in innumerable ways. Everything that Jesus did was in response to a rema word from His Father, brought to Him, presumably, by the Holy Spirit. Occasionally I get a word of knowledge for healing, for example; and when I do I can pray in faith for God to do the miraculous because I know God is with me.. Sometimes I see it happen; often I don’t. I would say that the times when I don’t see healing are probably the times when the “word of knowledge“ hasn’t been a rema word of God at all, but a figment of my imagination; it’s not that God’s word hasn’t born fruit. God’s word won’t return to Him void: it’s only mine that will, because it hasn’t been released under the anointing. Again, If God has revealed demonic activity through a gift of discernment of spirits, it is because He is about to destroy that particular work of the enemy; but if we see a work of the enemy and have no particular revelation on how to approach it, we can bombard it with every scripture in the Bible and the devil will just laugh at our efforts. When we move in the Anointing, God is with us to do His work. When we don’t, we are not only wasting our time but we are sowing seeds of unbelief – in our own hearts and in the hearts of those we are ministering to. God wants relationship with us, and we must always operate in the power of the Spirit out of the dynamic of that relationship.

Jesus knew who He was. He knew He was Lord of heaven and earth, and for that reason even the wind and the waves obeyed Him. He knew He could walk across the stormy Sea of Galilee in the Peace of His complete authority, but even then He only did what pleased the Father; He only did what He saw His Father doing (John 5:19). After He had fed the crowds, He left them behind and went up the mountain to spend time with His Father. I can imagine the Father saying something like this: “My son, you know you have authority over that storm down there: now is the time to go and use it, because the enemy is trying to destroy your friends.”

Dynamic relationship with the Holy Spirit; knowing who we are in Christ and being within our sphere of authority, hearing and applying the rema word of God: I think these are keys to staying in the anointing that will enable us to walk in peace through the storm, and to bring its work to an end.

Be prepared; hold on., Living by Faith, Pursuing Love

Bread from Heaven: 2

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Make the people sit down
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that what matters most of all is “faith working through love.” So here we are on the mountainside. We have kept in step with the Spirit; we have lifted our eyes with love, we are aware of how God has led us to and provided for this moment, and so we believe that Jesus wants to meet the need that is now before us. Even though He knows what He is going to do, we don’t. What next?

Jesus says, “Make the people sit down.” Some miracles require preparation, and that preparation has to be in obedience to what the Lord has asked us to do. The disciples could not see with their natural eyes what might happen next, but they got their instructions and complied with them. Like the unprofitable servant (Luke 17:10), they simply did what they were told to do. And more than that, they had to do so with authority. 12 men had to exercise crowd control on 5000, many of whom had their families with them, and all of whom were ravenous and will have wanted to be first in the queue for whatever goodies Jesus was going do dish out. We have probably read and heard the story many times, but if you imagine the scene and do the maths it’s not hard to see that the first miracle was actually getting that crowd ready to receive the food in the first place. When I was a teacher I found it hard enough to control a group of thirty, so I needed to exercise authority – and that was when I knew what it was I was going to deliver.

The disciples could organise the crowd because the Lord had clearly given them the mandate to do so, and they put their trust in His authority without question. I wonder what they thought He was going to do? Elijah and Elisha both worked miracles of multiplication, but the nearest thing to supernatural provision of food at this level that they would all have known of was the manna in the wilderness. It was a story that they would have heard many times, and it was deeply embedded in their culture. Maybe when they heard it they wondered what it was like, and now they were thinking, “Wow, we’re going to see manna! Awesome!” How often we have one expectation, and God does something completely different, often meeting our need at a deeper level. But one thing we do know, is that God is “able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us.” (Eph. 3:20) We can be expecting manna when God has multiplication in mind.

Authority follows the Anointing
So when God gives us an instruction, we don’t know what we are being prepared for: all we know is what we have heard and the One who is doing the preparing. But because we have had the instruction, we have the authority to carry it out. I have a friend, Andrew, who tells the story of a meeting when he stepped up to preach at a conference towards the end of the worship time, and the Holy Spirit said to him “The anointing isn’t on you; it’s on the lady who is ministering with the flags.” He knew the Lord’s voice well enough and had the humility to obey, laying down his message and releasing the flag ministry to become the focus of that part of the conference. Authority followed the anointing.

In how many churches, every Sunday, is manna on the programme when God has multiplication planned? Our meeting this week will be basically the same format as last week. And the week before, and next week. We know what to expect, and we know what we will do: it’s time to gather the manna.  We prepare our sermon or our worship set and it’s what we do. If we are Pentecostals or charismatics we probably ask God to anoint it, but what we are much less likely to do is to ask Him to replace or change it if He wants to. If it’s a smaller group we might be more likely to be flexible, but a hungry crowd at a conference, waiting to be fed? Will we put down the important message we have spent a week preparing and praying over, and move aside for the flags? Andrew did just that, the power of God fell, His manifest presence came into the room, and lives were changed. Andrew didn’t know what was going to happen: he just “made the people sit down.” If we will hear God’s word in faith and act in authority, He will provide more than we can ever ask or imagine. All we have to do is lay down our lives.

Manna, or Mission?
We have sometimes hosted gap year students from Germany who have come to spend the year as interns working with the children and young people in our church. We have kept in touch with most of them, and recently one of them, David, invited us over to his wedding. We accepted the invitation, and decided to visit two of the others while we were in Germany. We weren’t driving and it meant quite complicated travel arrangements, but we knew they would like to see us, and we wanted to see them. (We were actually hoping to arrange a visit to a fourth family, but the travel arrangements just didn’t work in the time we had available. There was no grass in that place…) One of our friends referred to our trip as a “mission.” That’s a bit high-sounding, I thought – we are just going to a wedding and visiting a couple of other young friends and their families. But God had plans that we knew nothing of, because we walk in works prepared beforehand. (Eph 2:10)

What God had prepared for the young man we visited first of all was to organise an outreach in his town three days after we arrived, which gave us time to prepare and pray with him and spend time with his family. We went into the town with the outreach team, met some of his friends in his church, identified a spiritual stronghold over the town and pulled it down in prayer.  Next we moved on for David’s wedding. We had two days there, but couldn’t stay at the venue on the night of the reception because it was fully booked, and we were going to have to stay in another hotel a few miles away. But God! The owner/manager of the venue gave a free room, already paid for by guests who had not shown up, and even arranged to collect our luggage from the other hotel, where we had already taken it that afternoon. This enabled us to have a precious time of prayer with David and his new wife the following morning as well as some good conversations with his unsaved aunt and uncle, which wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been able to stay there on the second night.

After the wedding we went to see our third and most recent gap-year student, to find that her father, an elder in their village Lutheran church, was considering leaving it because, as he put it, ‘the pastor just gave history lessons and didn’t preach Jesus.’ We prayed with the family and were able to encourage them, and we had a lovely day together on a Rhine cruise, which further cemented our friendship. The mission didn’t end there, because we called in to see our daughter on the way home back in the UK, and our visit coincided with a visit from one of her friends who had been planning to go to her house for months, who had been wanting to meet us, and who, again, was in need of prayer.

No-one got dramatically healed, no-one got saved – although someone did on the outreach – but love took us to Germany, we did what we were told, there was “much grass in that place” (including a free hotel room), and Jesus did some building in His church from plans that we knew nothing of. A bit like the disciples, who were probably just expecting some time out with Jesus in the hills and found themselves managing a large-scale outreach, we just thought we were going on a trip to celebrate David’s wedding and visit two other families; but it turned out that God had planned the three sets of circumstances to coincide in different parts of Southern Germany for us to walk in a mission that He had prepared beforehand. Potentially, every day can be a mission where loaves and fishes are ready to be multiplied. So are we in the promised land yet? Because when we arrive, the manna stops.

Christian Life, Prayer and Spiritual Warfare, Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven

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“Assuredly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again I say  to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. For if two or three are gathered together in my name I am there in the midst of them.“ (Matthew 18 : 18 – 20)

Symphony
To agree is to be an accord, in harmony. The Greek word is where our “symphony“ comes from: sum (together) and phoneo (to sound), so to sound together. This is more than just intellectual assent: it is hearts in harmony. We regularly quote verse 20 at our gatherings as evidence that Jesus is “in our midst,” particularly if only “two or three” have turned up at the prayer meeting; but I think we also have to remember the significance what it is to be in His name. The Greek word onoma means a lot more than what is written on our birth certificates. Strong’s defines it like this: “the name is used for everything which the name covers, everything the thought or feeling of which is aroused in the mind by mentioning, hearing, remembering, the name, i.e. for one’s rank, authority, interests, pleasure, command, excellences, deeds etc.” It doesn’t mean we’re in His name because we’re Christians or church members: to be in His name because is to be sharing in His identity. We are part of who He is. He is love and truth and grace. If, on earth, we are not gathered together in love and truth and grace we are not in His name.

I can’t say I really understand the dynamics of just how Jesus is more in the midst of us  when we are gathered in love and truth in this way, because Jesus is in each of us anyway. Maybe our unity in some way allows the Holy Spirit to transcend the limitations of our flesh so that He really does become “the fourth man in the fire“ (as in the story of Shadrach, Mishach and Abednigo): however it happens there has to be some connection between this Scripture and the words of Ps 133 that declare “the unity commands the blessing.“ But I also think these are the conditions for verse 18. I can’t imagine that anything happens in heaven without the Father’s authority. Anything that is bound or loosed in heaven has to be so because the Father decreed it. As well as the physical and metaphorical sense, the Greek words for binding and loosing can also be much more generic such as preventing and allowing, obliging or releasing. The Son and the Father are one so when we are in agreement on earth, in love and in truth, Jesus is agreeing with us too; and if Jesus agrees with us, then so does the Father. John 17:21 is fulfilled: “that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” And then whatever we ask on earth, whether it’s binding or loosing, is authorised in heaven, it shall be so, and the Father is glorified. (See John 14:13)

Unanswered prayer
I think one of the answers to the thorny question of unanswered prayer may be found here. We may be praying God will and God’s provision, and quite probably quoting God’s word;  but if we are not at the level of unity needed to be genuinely in His name we cannot really expect Jesus to be “in the midst” in the way that He expresses it here. We may well quote the Truth from Scripture, but Truth needs to be spoken in Love. Prayer is always about God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, and thus extending His Kingdom among and through us. We all know what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount: “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” (Matt 6:33). God is Love, and “Love is the Fulfillment of the Law” (Romans 13:10), so both God’s Kingdom and His righteousness are expressions of His love. I think God’s kingdom must be real among us before it can be extended through us.  It cannot be without significance (nothing in Scripture is!) that these verses are sandwiched in the middle of Jesus teaching, then answering Peter, on the subject of forgiveness. If we really want to be in agreement when we pray, with all that this means, I think it’s important that we examine our hearts towards each other and ask God to reveal any areas of criticism or unforgiveness that we may be harbouring, before we say “amen.” If there isn’t genuine unity, we can’t expect the blessing.

The Courts of Heaven
The other aspect of binding and loosing is the one most commonly used among charismatics (I use the term loosely: I’m sure I mean Pentecostals as well, and I have a suspicion that Jesus doesn’t use either of them…), and refers to “binding” spiritual forces of evil, and “loosing” people from their bonds. Jesus healed a woman whom He said Satan had bound for 18 years, (Luke 13:16) Her healing is often used as a template for spiritual warfare, but if the truth were told how often do we see a change in someone’s condition when we make these decrees?

In Zechariah 3:7, the Lord says to Joshua

‘If you will walk in My ways,
And if you will keep My command,
Then you shall also judge My house,
And likewise have charge of My courts;
I will give you places to walk
Among these who stand here.”

In Christ, we too walk in those places of spiritual authority. It was when Jesus gives Peter the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt 16:19) that He first made the promise that is repeated, word for word in Matt 18:18: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed  in heaven.” Those keys are symbols of authority. I think we often have the mindset that our “binding and loosing” on earth are words of authority that release actions in heavenly places, but if that is true what is going on in heaven isn’t happening on the earth, at least in most cases that I have seen. But what if we turn it round and say that whatever is bound or loosed in heaven is bound and loosed on earth? In other words, we can only bind/loose on earth what has already been bound/loosed in heaven? That actually makes a lot more sense to me, and it means that we have to know what is bound and loosed in heaven before we can see it happen on earth. Jesus only did what He saw the Father doing, so He loosed the woman that Satan had bound for 18 years because He saw the Father do it in Heaven.

Kingdom Authority
Joshua was a prophetic type of Jesus. Jesus did on Earth what He saw the Father doing in heaven, because he was walking there.  I think that the occasions when we see binding and loosing actually happen are when we’ve seen it or heard it in the place where we too have walked “among those who stand” in the courts of heaven and have seen what the Father is doing. The earthly realm has been given over through sin to the control of the evil one, but we are no longer under that control; we are above it, and we are taking it back for the King. If we want to at least have the opportunity to see what the Father is doing, we need to “Set (our) mind on things above, not on things on the earth.” (Col 3:2)  Jesus tells us (Matt 28:18) that  “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.”  In Christ, we are in the place of all authority.  To bind and to loose is to express that authority on earth as it is in heaven, whether it is over demons, sickness, finance, or any other circumstance, great or small. We will see it happen more often when we keep His command (Love one another) and walk in His ways, with our minds set on the places that He has given us to walk among those who stand in the courts of heaven.