As a child of the Father, it is your privilege to come to your Daddy each day and receive everything you need to meet your two daily needs—food and forgiveness. Like a good father, God loves to bring in the groceries—Give us today our daily bread—and to take out the garbage—forgive us our debts. Food and forgiveness represent the two basic needs of your humanity—your physical needs (food) and your spiritual needs (forgiveness).  Read More

As mind-boggling as it sounds, Christ has assigned to you the responsibility of advancing His kingdom by prayer. In His strategically crafted prayer pattern, once He leads you to encounter the Father’s ferocious love—Our Father in heaven—and to declare the supremacy of His Name—Hallowed be Your Name, then He gives you the nobility as His redeemed children to declare the advancing of His kingdom—Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!  Read More

Declaring the supremacy of Christ’s name in prayer clears the atmosphere from the distracting noise of everyday life and from the static of demonic interference. Christ sculpted His life-giving, God-encountering apostolic prayer pattern strategically. Once He leads us to the headwaters of the Father’s love—Our Father in heaven, He immediately calls us to declare the supremacy of His Name—Hallowed by Your Name!  Read More

All true prayer rises out of a fresh encounter with the love of God in Jesus Christ; everything else is little more than hollow religious talk. For this reason, when Jesus crafted His prayer pattern, He starts with the four key words, Our Father in heaven.   Read More

Your local church exists for one primary purpose—to hold out the flame of Christ’s manifest presence. This is the single mark that distinguishes the church from every other organization on earth.  Read More

The fire of God’s manifest presence is not the latest fad or some toy with which to play. God does not strut His miracles in front of the church like a three ring circus. On the contrary, God always prepares us in advance so that we appropriately humble ourselves under the weight of His glory.  Read More

All Israel met God in the fire. They were led through the wilderness by the pillar of cloud each day and by the pillar of fire each night (Exodus 13:17-22). When God leads His people, He makes it explicitly clear to them the way they should go. The journey from slavery to the promised land was a major transition for the people of Israel, and God did not want to leave them guessing.   Read More

The entire early church met God in the fire. There were no exceptions. On the day of Pentecost, the Bible explicitly says, “Fire appeared on them and rested on each one of them” (Acts 2:3). The next sentence goes on to unpack what the manifestation of fire was all about, “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4). No exceptions.  Read More

Christ is the manifest presence of God. When John the Baptist declared that Christ would one day baptize people in the Holy Spirit and fire, he put his finger on both the role of Christ and the role of the Holy Spirit.   Read More

Abraham met God in the fire. In a vision God showed Abraham a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch. On that day He sealed the covenant He had made with Abraham with fire. Never again would Abraham doubt his calling. This was certainly not the first time God had spoken to Abraham, nor would it be the last. We have on record at least twenty separate encounters Abraham had with the manifest presence of God  Read More

When you encounter the manifest presence of Christ, you are shaken to the core.When the prophet Isaiah met God in the fire, he was shaken to the core in one of the most dramatic fire-encounters in the Bible (Isaiah 6). Virtually every sensory perception was activated—his eyes were opened to see the Lord high and lifted up (v.1), his ears were opened to hear the angels singing Holy, Holy, Holy (v.3), his touch receptors were activated to feel the threshold shake (v.4), and his sense of smell was activated to smell as the incense smoke filled the temple (v.4).  Read More

When the genuine fire of God’s manifest presence comes, it accomplishes three things that only the manifest presence of Christ can accomplish:   Read More

Yes, Elijah met God in the fire, but when it comes right down to it, Elijah never prayed for fire. Instead, he simply prayed for the manifest presence of God to be made tangibly known to God’s people.  Read More

Normally when you want to start a fire, you do not pour water on the wood. When Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal, however, he was so confident that God was going to supernaturally send fire that against all odds he instructed the people to fill four jugs with water and pour it on the offering. He not only did it once, he had them do it three times to form a large puddle that surrounded the sacrifice.  Read More

On this day, August 22, in the year of our Lord 1727, “The Prayer Watch” was launched in Herrnhut, Germany. The Prayer Watch was a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week, fifty-two week prayer meeting that lasted one hundred years. The small community of only twenty-four young men and twenty-four young women rallied with their pastor, Nicholas Ludwig Von Zinzendorf, and agreed to spend an hour each day in prayer in their own rooms. They interceded for each other’s needs and the needs of those around them.  Read More

Elijah met God in the fire. In perhaps one of the best known fire-encounter moments in the entire Bible, Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal at Mt. Carmel. He boldly declared a universal biblical reality; “The God who answers by fire, He is God.” What Elijah was declaring is that our God consistently answers prayer by sending the fire of His manifest presence. This is a timeless kingdom principle that we not only want to learn, we want to learn to pray.  Read More

King Solomon met God in the fire. When he dedicated to God the magnificent temple he knelt on the floor, spread out his hand to God and declared the temple holy to God. He devoted this magnificent temple to God as a house of prayer for all nations, a meeting place for God and His people where God would tangibly answer specific prayers. When Solomon finished his prayer, God sent the fire.   Read More

The Apostle John met God in the fire. He was serving as a political prisoner of Rome on the Mediterranean island of Patmos when he saw the exalted Christ. His Lord was on fire from head to toe. Christ’s eyes were like flames of fire, His feet glowed like molten metal in a furnace, and His face shown like the sun in all its brilliance. In Christ’s right hand were seven balls of fire, and He was walking among seven flame holders.  Read More

King David met God in the fire. He knelt at a simple altar and called on the Lord, and the Lord answered his prayer with fire—the fire of His manifest presence. God loves to answer our prayers with fire. All prayer is moving toward the vortex of encountering God in all the glorious splendor of His revealed presence.  Read More

Moses initially received his call out of an encounter with the fire of God’s manifest presence. It ruined him forever. Later in his ministry, he was still crying out for the manifest presence of God, If Your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. When Moses asked God for His presence to go with him, he obviously was not asking for God’s omnipresence because it is impossible to get away from God’s omnipresence. Moses was explicitly asking for God’s manifest presence.  Read More

No sooner had Moses encountered the fire of God’s manifest presence than he stepped into barefoot worship. God ordered him to take the sandals off his feet—because he was on holy ground. The omnipresence of God had not made the dirt holy; it was the manifest presence of God that made it holy.  Read More

Moses met God in the fire. His life was immediately and permanently changed the day he encountered the manifest presence of Christ in the burning bush. As a shepherd, Moses had walked past that bush a thousand time, and a thousand other bushes just like it. Every other day, however, the omnipresence of God had been in the bush, and it had had absolutely no impact on him. Today was categorically different...  Read More

It is not your responsibility to set yourself on fire for God; that’s God’s job! The Holy Spirit is a skilled Fire-starter—not with a physical fire that kills and destroys, but with an internal Spirit-fire that purifies, empowers, and mobilizes.  Read More

On this day, August 13, in the year of our Lord 1727, the manifest presence of Christ was poured out on Nicholas Ludwig Von Zinzendorf and his church family in Herrnhut, Germany. This twenty-seven year old pastor of a group of young, vibrant believers would refer to this day as “our baptism in the Holy Spirit” and “our Pentecost.” Church history would call this day the birth of the missionary church. They received fire—they had ignition and they had lift off!  Read More