Unlocking the Heavens: Release the Supernatural Power of Your Worship (11 page)

How can we come so boldly to the throne of grace? Only by the blood of the Savior, Jesus:

So, brothers and sisters, we are completely free to enter the Most Holy Place without fear because of the blood of Jesus’ death. We can enter through a new and living way that Jesus opened for us. It leads through the curtain—Christ’s body. And since we have a great priest over God’s house, let us come near to God with a sincere heart and a sure faith, because we have been made free from a guilty conscience, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. Let us hold firmly to the hope that we have confessed, because we can trust God to do what he promised
(Hebrews 10:19-23 NCV).

We not only have an invitation, we also have an escort. Our escort is Jesus’ blood, shed on the cross for us. We know this from the New Testament, but another way that we know it is from the book of Daniel. This is interesting; Daniel reported as follows: “I was watching in the night visions, and behold, One like the Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven! He came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought Him near before Him” (Daniel 7:13 NKJV). Notice the wording—“they brought Him near before Him.”

Daniel had a vision or a dream in which he saw the Son of God coming with the clouds of Heaven to the Ancient of Days, which is another way of saying God the Father. And as you can see, Jesus had an escort: “they brought Him near before Him.”

The question is this: who are
they
? Would ordinary people be escorting Him in? Absolutely not. Who could be escorting Him? Well, according to Ezekiel’s vision (see Ezekiel chapters 10 and 11), the cherubim are always moving in Heaven, like a wheel in the middle of a wheel. I think it would be doctrinally correct to conclude that Jesus had an angelic escort to the Ancient of Days. So when Jesus approached the Father to put His blood on the mercy seat, He approached Him with an angelic escort.

Now, according to the passages from the book of Hebrews, we approach with a different escort. Our escort is not angelic. The children of the Most High God have a
blood
escort into the throne room. That blood that Jesus sprinkled on the mercy seat, His own blood, gives us complete access to the throne of grace. Because of His blood on the throne, now you and I do not require an angelic escort in order to get into the holiest place. We can go straight into the throne room, boldly. The blood makes the way. You don’t hear much preaching about the blood anymore, but the blood is still the key to the throne of grace.

Grace is where divine influence can be demonstrated in a life. It is the source of power in the universe. In the spiritual power grid of the universe, the power plant for the grid is the throne of grace.

Not only do we have an invitation to enter the throne room, but we have a specific invitation to the holiest place in the universe, the holiest place of all: “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into
the holiest
by the blood of Jesus…” (Hebrews 10:19 KJV). Wouldn’t you think that the throne room was already the holiest place in the universe? It’s not quite the holiest place, because the very holiest place is the bosom of the Father, Daddy’s lap. (See John 1:18.) Jesus is in the bosom of the Father, heart of His heart, and that is the closest anyone can get to God.

So now not only do you have an invitation and a guaranteed escort to come into the throne room but, because of the blood of Jesus, you also have an invitation to get up into the throne and to sit in Daddy’s lap.

The question is this: do you believe it? If it sounds too far out for you, you will deprive yourself of access to the power of God. To repeat—there is only one source of spiritual power, and that is the very throne of God. Authority comes from God Almighty Himself and nobody else. You cannot just decide to say, “I am going to get up and do a miracle.” That’s not how it works. But if God says, “You are going to get up and do a miracle,” a miracle will happen. He determines the miracles.

HEAVENLY PLACES

The heavenly Father is inviting you to sit with Him just as Jesus sits with Him. That’s what the Word tells us—that we are seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:

Though we were spiritually dead because of the things we did against God, he gave us new life with Christ. You have been saved by God’s grace. And he raised us up with Christ and gave us a seat with him in the heavens. He did this for those in Christ Jesus so that for all future time he could show the very great riches of his grace by being kind to us in Christ Jesus. I mean that you have been saved by grace through believing. You did not save yourselves; it was a gift from God. It was not the result of your own efforts, so you cannot brag about it. God has made us what we are. In Christ Jesus, God made us to do good works, which God planned in advance for us to live our lives doing
(Ephesians 2:5-10 NCV).

I have always tended to see God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—at work in the universe, but I have seen myself way down here on earth. I’ve heard about the angels flying around the cherubim singing, “Holy, holy, holy,” and thunder and lightning and all of that in the throne room. (You can read about it in Revelation 4 and 5.) Yet, I have always viewed myself as standing way down here, far away (and in some ways thankful to be so far away!).

That’s not what Jesus died for. He didn’t come and die just so we could remain far away. Jesus died to get us into Daddy’s lap.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to get off the bus at my grandmother and granddaddy’s house. They had an old house with a front porch. I would run up that long driveway across the field, and my granddaddy would be sitting in the chair on the front porch. My favorite thing to do was to run up the steps and jump up into his arms, where I could sit in his lap and talk with him about how my day had gone. That’s a picture of how it is with you and the Father. Yet here’s what we do in the Church: we say, “Lord, send Your power down. Lord, come down to us. Lord, come.”

God is answering, “Hold it. I ripped the veil, not so I could come down to you, but so that you could come up here to Me. Come on up now.” We always want Him to come down and we do not seem to want to go to the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Why do we always want to live down here? We freely ask God to get involved down here. But all the while He is seated far above all principalities and powers, far above everything that is in the earth, all powers, all might, all dominion. He does not want you to invite Him to come down. He wants to invite you to come up!

The Bible says that Jesus sits at the Father’s right hand. When Stephen was being stoned, where did he see Jesus? At the right hand of the Father. (See Acts 7:56.) Psalm 110 pictures Jesus at the right hand of the Father as well. But according to Psalm 109:31, the Lord is at
my
right hand: “For He shall stand at the right hand of the poor, to save him from those who condemn him.” I am poor and so are you—weak and easily defeated. Yet, I have been positioned in heavenly places, right in the bosom of the Father.

Every time I go into the throne room, I am transfixed by its magnificence. The thunder and lightning, the sound, the angels zooming around. However, that’s not what Jesus shed His blood for—so that I could come and look at angels. I get to go past the angels who cry, “Holy,” and I get to crawl up into the throne of God. (First Peter 1:12 says that the angels desire to look into redemption. They don’t have a blood escort.) When I get to the seat of the throne, there is Daddy God. I hug Him and say, “Daddy, I love You.” I start talking to Him. Then I turn to His right hand and hug Jesus, and I tell Him I love Him, too. They say, “Sit with us.” Then the three of us sit together in the heavenly throne of grace.

There’s plenty of room there, and all the time in the world. Doesn’t it make you want to come up too? You really love Jesus. Why stay down here dreaming about one day coming up to heavenly places, when in Jesus you can come there right now?

PRAYING IN THE THRONE ROOM

That brings us to prayer. Knowing about the throne room and the Father’s lap has redefined my prayer life. Jesus said, in essence, “Don’t pray like other people pray” (see Matthew 6). He said, “Don’t pray with long repetition. Don’t use all of those religious slogans. When you pray, go into your secret place, lock yourself in with the Father, and talk with Him.”

In your own prayer time, you can get into a heavenly position in Christ through His blood. Go and be seated with Him in heavenly places. Spend your prayer time listening to what the Father is saying to the Son and what the Son is saying to the Father. There have been times when I have heard them talking to each other, and I understood what they wanted me to do. Every time I have done that thing they told me to do, I have seen miracles. That almost sounds like something Jesus would say, doesn’t it? “Jesus said, ‘I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing alone. The Son does only what he sees the Father doing, because the Son does whatever the Father does’” (John 5:19 NCV). I want to stay close to God so that I can’t say or do anything except what He has said and done first.

The key to such power is in the throne room, and the reason the Church doesn’t have any power is because we keep asking God to come down here and demonstrate Himself. The whole time God is saying, “No, you come up here and get in the throne of divine influence, so you can demonstrate My power in the earth as My Son did.”

So holy is the bosom of the Father that we are changed when we spend time there. No one can ever stay the same if they spend time right in the middle of the communion and compassion of the Trinity. I have learned how to live up there for the most part. Every morning, the first thing I say is, “Lord, sprinkle me with Your blood. I have failed you. I have come far short of Your glory, but Jesus’ blood makes me whiter than snow. You have said that if I confess my sin, You will be faithful and just to forgive my sin and to cleanse me from all unrighteousness. Sprinkle me with Your blood.”

I feel the cleansing power of that blood. I’m sure you have had times when you have asked Him for forgiveness and you felt as if somebody was literally pouring cleansing fluid over you. You can feel yourself being washed clean. Whether or not I feel it every time, I say to Him, “Lord, now I know that I am righteous in You, because of Your blood. Now I can accept Your invitation to come into the holiest place in the universe.” Then, I step boldly into Heaven, just as confidently as I used to come home from college and run through the front door and say, “Momma! Daddy! I’m back!”

This is the real Christian life and not the life of deism that most so-called Christians live. For the most part, the Church is full of people who are deists in their thinking. They recognize that there is this big God up there who is in charge of everything, but they don’t realize that He is personally involved in their lives. More than that, they don’t realize that they have been invited to join Him in Heaven—before they die.

Once you try it, you will understand how you can’t go back to your old way of doing things. Go boldly into the throne room even if the people around you think you are crazy. Nobody may comprehend your throne room experiences but you. But it is a fact that the throne room is not an ethereal, imaginary place. It’s a real place that you can go to anytime you want.

There is no stress there. It’s only when you come out that you get stressed. For example, this morning in the shower I said, “Lord, sprinkle me with Your blood. I want to go into the throne room, and I want to be with You.” I did that. Then I had to go to the airport and things started going crazy. I started freaking out. I felt myself go whooshing out of the place of total peace in God, almost like a vacuum had sucked me out of that heavenly place and spit me out back down in this natural realm. Then I boarded the plane and realized what had happened. I said again, “Lord, sprinkle me with Your blood. I want to go back to that heavenly place.” I simply went back to the throne room. I have been learning to stay longer each time. When I first started trying to live there, I would get sucked out all the time because I wasn’t used to living there. By now, I’ve practiced the presence of God enough that I’ve learned to live there more of the time.

A humble Christian named Brother Lawrence wrote a little book in the seventeenth century called
The Practice of the Presence of God
. He found that he could live in the presence of God twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Jesus became our Savior so that all of us could have this experience. I have lived here, and I have lived up there. Up there is better.

DWELL IN THE SECRET PLACE—AND SEE MIRACLES

Have you ever found yourself in a church service where God’s presence just broke out? If you have, you know how it feels to be saturated in God’s peace. You don’t worry about your kids or about money. You are not really doing anything; you’re just sitting there. When you have such an experience, you have tasted what it is like to get into the bosom of the Father. When you walked out of the church, you may have thought you had to leave it behind. You didn’t. You can live there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Living there will give you abundant peace—and some miracles, too.

Not long ago, I went to Mississippi because I had been asked to preach at a church. A lady came forward in the church service. When she came up to the front, I could see that her right eye was milky white. She said, “I can’t see and I want to see. I can distinguish light and dark, but I can’t see anything else.”

Because for several weeks I had been spending extra time in this heavenly place in Christ, I immediately heard the Father say to the Son, “Tell the eye to look straight on.” I was standing there in front of her, but it was like I was also seated in the heavenly place of the throne room.

I had twenty-five students with me, young adults who are in a college program we have at our church. I called them over and told them, “For the first time in my ministry—the first time in twenty years of preaching full time—I know this woman is getting ready to receive a creative miracle. I know she is going to get healed, and I want you to see it with your own eyes.” They gathered around. I told the woman to put her left hand over her other eye, and then I said, “The Lord said, ‘Tell the eye to look straight on.’” As soon as I said those words—and I didn’t lay hands on her; I didn’t blow on her; I didn’t yell; I didn’t scream—her milky eye started to form a pupil and an iris! Then I could see it focus. She started screaming and shouting to God. It scared the students to death. They had never seen anything like it. Some of them ran backward.