Accessing the Spirit of Prayer That Touches Heaven

Something else happens to you when the spirit of prayer falls on your life as you’ve developed a life of prayer.

Not only does prayer become your inhale and your exhale, as we’ve discussed in previous chapters, but prayer begins to affect your vision. You start to see things differently. In fact, I believe you begin to see with Jesus’ eyes, and what you see and the way you see it will move your heart in a similar way to how Jesus’ heart was moved in Matthew 9.

Jesus, in the height of revival, looked back at the crowds that were growing. The people who had been healed, delivered, and set free were grabbing their family and friends and bringing them to Jesus to be touched by Him. It was as if the needs and the demands were exploding all around Him.

In one verse, we are given a rare glimpse into the soul of Jesus Christ. We read, “But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd” (Matt. 9:36).

Apparently, Jesus looked back and saw the crowds. He took notice of them. If there is anything that must be restored in this hour in regard to believers and leadership alike is the connection to and unity with Jesus’ eyes. To see what He sees—to perceive as He perceives—is a must in this hour.

Jesus looked at the crowds and what He saw moved Him deeply in compassion. His description of the people being like weary and scattered sheep who didn’t have a shepherd tells us something. He was pained to see these people exhausted, scattered, and harassed because of the lack of a shepherd or leader.

What Jesus saw was not a people crisis. It was a leader crisis.

In the same way sheep are prone to losing their way and becoming vulnerable to a predator, so these multitudes, if not taken care of, would have become prey to the evil one. Jesus’ compassion for them welled up, and He looked for His shepherds to attend to them.

This call for shepherds echoes throughout the Old Testament. God is ever looking for shepherds to lead His people. God prepared Moses to shepherd the nation of Israel out of Egypt by Moses faithfully shepherding his father- in-law’s sheep for forty years. David shepherded his father’s sheep, thus qualifying him to shepherd the nation of Israel into her greatest hour. The Lord Himself is called the “Shepherd of Israel” in Psalm 80:1. The prophets continually, on the other hand, indicted the leaders of their day over their negligence as shepherds and held them responsible for the state of the people under them (see Jer. 23; Ezek. 34).

The prophet Jeremiah gave us a great promise that, in the last days, God would raise up shepherds according to His heart who would feed people with “knowledge and understanding of” Him (Jer. 3:15).

I believe with all my heart that Jesus is once again looking over the earth, and what He is seeing is moving Him to release a deep guttural call across the globe to leaders to connect with His eyes, connect with His heart, and take up the apostolic burden of shepherding the people of God. This is what has pressed me to write this book. I believe you could be one of these shepherds who Jesus is wanting to sweep up into His heart and enable you to see the state of the sheep, giving you a heart full of compassion for them and a shepherding heart to lead them.

Jesus, welling up with holy compassion, grabbed His disciples and brought them into what He was seeing, feeling, and wanting. So, He said to them, “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest” (Matt. 9:37-38).

Jesus gathered His disciples in closely and in essence told them, “Guys, I want you to see what I see, and I need you to understand that there is not one more thing that needs to be done to prepare this harvest to be reaped. It’s here. It’s ready. It’s plentiful! The issue is not the readiness of the harvest. The issue is that there are few people who know how to reap this harvest and then know what to do with the harvest once they’ve brought it in. Men, there are few laborers.”

This is intense. Just picture Jesus looking at these guys, or make it more personal, picture Him looking at you and me and saying, “You ain’t got what it takes to do anything about this.” I cannot overstate how hearing this from Jesus is the core door into being used by God in the future days. We must feel this sting of not having what it takes before we will ever be useful to God in any capacity. It’s the revelation of our inability that causes us to cast ourselves upon Him to be useful to Him and His Kingdom. This must precede any apostolic usefulness in the Kingdom of God. As Art Katz has written,

To what degree, therefore, must failure precede a true appropriation of one’s calling? . . . There is something about failure, especially when it is born out of the best well-meaning intentions to serve God, that does the depth of work in the human soul like nothing else can. …

…There is no man more qualified than the one who believes in his deepest heart that he is without qualification. The whole preliminary work of God is to disqualify us before we can be qualified.

Whatever comes out of Jesus’ mouth next will let us know what we can do to respond to our inability and what to do with our pain and our burden for the condition of the people we see. What He says next will strike at the heart of the humanistic, current gospel that is being spread all over this nation as well the nations of the earth.

In light of the immediate needs of the people and the lack of quantity and quality of current laborers, Jesus did not tell the disciples to go. He told them to pray!

Today, Jesus is telling us the same thing, “Pray.” Prayer isn’t laziness, a waste of time, or foolishness. Praying in light of the immediate needs of the people is the apostolic heart, lifestyle, power, and message of the Gospel. It also exposes all the well-meaning intentions of humanity to use and apply our own wisdom, power, and resource.

Merely because we see something that deserves to be rectified is not necessarily a justification to do it. We cannot act in response to need. We pray.

There is nothing more opposed to the purposes of God than the well-meaning intentions men perpetrate in their own human and religious zeal.