9 DAYS TO GO: PENTECOST POWER!
This is Wednesday the 20th of May and we are 9 days away from what promises to be the greatest Pentecost since Acts 2. We are in our second daily countdown to that event, and if this is your first time connecting to the countdown make sure to go back and see yesterday's focus, as well as the overall prophetic word that was also released May 15 on the Elijah List. This is really a must to understand the full promise of what we are expecting to unfold. The countdown will end with a Facebook LIVE Friday, May 29, at 7PM—we will have some special guests with us that we will be announcing as part of a night of encounter with the Holy Spirit in the way He sees fit to visit us. My expectations are high!
TODAYS READING: PSALM 44
From yesterday’s post you will remember that the Lord has given Psalm 44 and Psalm 77 as the posts to the door into this Pentecost’s “Upper Room.” Psalm 67 is the overhead lintel. Today we look at Psalm 44. The idea of going through these Psalms is to connect with the honesty, hunger, and passion of David, and thereby stir up our own honesty, hunger, and passion for the Holy Spirit—with POWER. To remind you, the original promise of Acts 1:8 was, “And you shall receive POWER—when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” It was not, “and you shall receive tongues.” That was a key sign they had been filled with power, but the point was the power. Some became spiritually inebriated. Some bubbled up with prophesy. Perhaps some shook. Perhaps some fell over as slain in the spirit. But the promise was, “You shall receive POWER.” They could not be effective advancers of the kingdom of God on earth without it.
“We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us what you did in their days, in days long ago.” -Ps. 44:1
David begins this chapter motivated and challenged by testimonies of God’s power in days gone by. You can almost hear his, “in days LOOOOONG ago.” It is an awakened passion, “Where is the God of Power?” In the next few verses he rehearses what he has heard of God—driving out nations and crushing their enemies. He tells how it was not their own might but totally God’s right hand of power. Verse 4 is a favorite verse of mine and something I regularly personalize.
Ps. 44:4: “You are my King, O God, Command victories for Jacob.”
The Lord has spoken to me often for decades with the 444 number sequence. I would see it strategically when the Lord had a “commanded victory” for me in a meeting or setting I was headed into. For those seeing a lot of 444 in these 10 days of waiting on the Holy Spirit, consider it as a personal promise to you that the Lord has a "commanded breakthrough" for you this Pentecost. Verses 5, 6, and 7 are all about it being only God’s power that gives us victories. I love verse 8.
Verses 9-22 are a seemingly next level downward spiral for David. Maybe he had just watched a little too much CNN or MSNBC—but he lets out a complaint of raw honesty. Read it and see. David tells of feeling rejected, humbled, unaccompanied in battles, plundered by the enemy, devoured like sheep, scattered, sold out, made a reproach, scorned, derided, made a byword, covered with shame, taunted, reviled—and a couple more descriptive words. David was very engaged and connected with his heart. Where we might say, “Sorry Lord I have been a little disappointed and discouraged”—David is a wordsmith with his disappointment. In verses 20-22 David further lets the Lord know this has all happened despite his own faithfulness to the Lord. “If we had forgotten the name of the Lord”—this might be understandable, was in essence what he was saying. I love David and have always identified with his honesty. The last 4 verses of the chapter are then an almost guttural, desperate cry from David that we want to be able to connect with, perhaps repeatedly, in this 10-day waiting period.
Ps. 44: 23-26 “AWAKE! WHY DO YOU SLEEP, O LORD? ARISE, do not cast us off forever. WHY DO YOU HIDE YOUR FACE, and forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust:
“Our body clings to the ground. Arise for our help, and redeem us for Your mercies sake.”
Before you leave this reading today, you want to have experienced what David has described in this chapter. Awareness and memories of a great, big, powerful God who has done so much—in times past. And you praise and boast in Him as such. But then permit the realities of todays' challenging circumstances come over you. The national and global challenges. The agenda of the organized corruption and how it continues to be evidenced. Then find your own contradictions. Your own places of pain where perhaps you don’t go often. I think I counted 17 descriptive words or phrases of disappointment that David let out to God in verses 9-22. And remember God said of David, “He’s a man after My heart.”
God is not put off by your awareness that you are not experiencing enough of Him. In fact, He loves and respects those who notice and demand for more of God—rather than make a doctrine that says, “it’s okay not to have any power.” (cessationism) Peter, highlights David in Acts 2 for ten verses as one who demanded to see more of God. We know it was David who said, “I would have fainted, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of God IN THE LAND OF THE LIVING.” (Ps. 27:13,14)
It is okay, and even commendable, to feel the wretchedness of having such a powerful God and experiencing so little of it. It is how you empty yourself completely of you, of your excuses, of doctrines of devils. It is how you feel the hunger you are supposed to feel. Nothing worse than to be spiritually skin and bones and not to feel it. There's a name for that syndrome. Jesus said in His first message to His first gathered crowd, “Blessed are they/you who hunger and thirst…” David didn’t just gripe, he came to the place he could just not take the contradiction any longer of his personal level of experience versus what he knew was there in God. He stirred himself into a radical cry. “GOD WAKE UP!!”, “Quit hiding your face of favor!” By his own description, David is laying on the floor and you can almost see him pounding his fist on the dust as he further insists, "ARISE O GOD—Be who You are!! Show your POWER!! For us, it needs to be, “Holy Spirit you’d better not miss me when you are pouring out this Pentecost!!” If that comes out of you too politely, you didn’t get there yet.
Get there today. Tomorrow we look at the other doorpost of Psalm 77.