Bethel Deliverance International Church

Bishop Eric A. Lambert, Jr.: Prayer is battle. It is the battle of you surrendering your will to God's. It is the battle of you praying through satanic strongholds and pulling down satanic strongholds. And you will find the more that you do that, then you will find the will of God will start to override you. You'll begin to find out that Christianity has nothing to do with what services you offer to the church, but it has to do everything with you walking with God hand in hand. This is the reason, beloved of God, that you can see people pray and pray and pray and pray all the time, and yet their lives aren't changed.

Praise the Lord, everyone. Pastor Eric Lambert here. I'm glad you decided to join us today. The message today is a systematic study out of the book of Colossians. Now, that's one of my favorite epistles by the Apostle Paul because it speaks to us about purpose. When Paul writes to these individuals who have come to Christ, they're being bombarded by Old Testament teaching and legalistic views. Paul says your purpose is to seek the things of God.

I have discovered that many Christians really don't have the slightest idea why God even saved them. What is your purpose? I want you to understand that Paul says if you've been risen with Christ, seek those things which are above where Christ sits on the right hand of God. Before he gets to that command, he talks to them about how they should live, and therein lies your purpose. We are left here to prove to the world that God is who the Bible says he is, and we make proof of that through our lives.

You see, we're surrounded by so many cultural things that are pulling us away from our true purpose: to honor God, to love him with all of our hearts, our minds, and our souls, and to love our neighbor, our fellow man, as we love ourselves. So join us on this tremendous journey through the letter to the Colossians, where you'll learn that Christ is what the Bible says he is and who God has made him to be. Enjoy the message. We'll be back with you at the close of the broadcast.

I said this on Wednesday night—we're studying prayer, the essentials of prayer, and now we're including sovereignty because if you understand sovereignty in your prayer, you won't pray for a lot of silly things. You'll see like Jesus said in Matthew's Gospel, "Your Father knows what you need before you even ask." So why are you spending so much time asking? If he wanted you to have it, you'd have it.

But we're not comfortable in that. Why? Because we don't know the heart of God. So here at Bethel, our theme for two years has been chasing the heart of God. But it came to me that the people who sit under that particular vision don't know how to chase God. So the Holy Spirit says, "You start teaching how to chase me."

And no one's teaching how to chase God. We have workshops on worship, we have workshops on prayer, we have workshops on marriage, we have workshops on money management, but we've never had a workshop on how to chase the heart of God. It seems innocuous. It seems like it's something you can't be taught to do. That's not true. Jesus said, "Take my yoke upon you and learn about me." Learn.

We think everything in God is on-the-job training, which means you will rationalize it based on your relationship. If you take 10 married couples, stand them down front, tell each one to give a five-minute synopsis on marriage, each one will be different because their personal outlook and experiences are different. You're going to get the newer ones saying, "It feels so good. I'm telling you, it's great to just wake up next to somebody." Then you get somebody 20 years in and they say, "What's marriage? It's hell."

Now, you press that person. You don't just let them say that. You press them: "Why is it hell?" Because it requires self-sacrifice. It requires compromise. It requires giving up of myself. It requires taking some direction from somebody that I really don't want to take it from. It requires a family or a cultural change that I'm not willing to make, but I do so for peace.

So it's hell in adjustment. Not that it's punishment, but it's hell because you have to adjust. I said this several weeks ago: the most difficult part of your Christian experience is death on the cross. You don't want to die. But Jesus said you can't follow him unless you die. And unless you do that—well, the Colossians were so steeped in cultural practices that they were missing the key component of Christianity, which is Christ.

How close are you to him? Is he an addendum to your life or is he your life? Has he been lost in the shuffle of church work and responsibilities? Do you glory in what God does for you rather than who he is to you? Do you give the devil access to your mind and your heart instead of filling your mind with the Word of God, which makes it a ground that Satan can't get into?

So when you read this, you will find that Paul's primary purpose in writing this, because the words have come to him, is to fight off heresy. Stuff you're hearing and you're believing that's not biblical. Stuff about God that's not biblical. People are always telling you, "Well, God showed me that John Doe has such and such a problem." Why would God show you John Doe's problem?

If a Catholic priest can keep the secret of the confessional, why doesn't God? Listen, if I thought God was going to tell you stuff about me, I wouldn't tell him the secrets of my heart because you'd be sitting out there looking at me like, "God told me what you're struggling with." And I would go to God and say, "What's up? You told me to come to you and whatever I share with you, you would keep it to yourself."

Even if I was satanically inspired or motivated—not demon-possessed, but satanically inspired—do you think God would spend time telling you? If you go to chapter two, Paul begins to write some things that need to come together. Verse six of chapter two he says, "As you have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk ye in him."

People who want to get married go to somebody at this church and they say, "We want to get married," and they take you through this arduous process. You've got to fill out a paper. I don't even know how it is anymore and don't want to know. But you fill out this paper and you put in a lot of stuff. To be honest, the purpose is to impress the person that's going to do your premarital advising.

Half the time it's not true because there is a question that asks, "Do you live together?" Some people say no, but then in the course of conversation they say things like, "Yeah, because when he got up this morning and left the house..." Then the advisor starts to walk down a very orchestrated road to help you for marriage, and it really doesn't. It takes you through a facade.

So you graduate from the process after maybe four, five, or six weeks, and you graduate from that and you think you're ready. I don't know if they ever give out certificates: "I completed the premarital course." That's like saying, "I got my driver's license." What does that mean when you crash into the car in front of you? You're just a licensed accident.

But you don't know because the best counseling—when I was a child, I came from a very large family. My mom had eight brothers and sisters, and I had an uncle who believed the scriptures that said replenish the earth. He had 13 kids. When one got the measles, they threw everybody into that room with the one who had measles to expose everybody to it so all of you could get it because we have to go to work. We can't be sitting up here waiting for you to catch it one at a time. They just threw everybody into the room, everybody would get exposed to the measles germ, and everybody would go on about their business.

I think you ought to take premarital people and throw them in a room with people who have been married 20 years. Not newlyweds, because then you're going to further raise the illusion. Throw them in there with somebody who's been married for about 10 years. Ten years is pretty good. You still have some semblance of yourself, but you're rapidly losing it. Just throw them in there and let them hear about it.

This is what's happening here. There are people who have come to Christ and they're thrown into this large room, if you will, with people who are vacillating: "Do I give my all to Christ, or do I listen to my friends and say I should be serving these idols?" What should I do? So it goes back to your purpose, because when you don't have a keen awareness of your purpose, then you fall for anything and everything.

I'll use marriage again. Why do you use marriage so much, Pastor? Because God does. Because it's the closest example to his relationship with his children. Submission, headship, surrendering—all that stuff that you do to God, you're supposed to. In fact, he goes as far as to say, "Husbands, you should love your wife as Christ does the church." And I'm going to tell you, less than 1% of husbands love their wives as Christ does the church because they never sat down to figure out what that means.

It sounds beautiful: "Love your wife as Christ does the church." What in the world is he talking about? If you truly loved her as Christ does the church and treated her the way he treats his church, you would see here in chapter two, verse six: "As you have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him."

Now, the Elizabethan language of the King James doesn't do justice to this because when you hear "so walk in him," here's the problem: you take what's read in the King James version and you bring the language up to now. So right now you're thinking, "What could that mean to walk in him?" But a better way of saying this is away from the common—see, the New Testament is primarily what's called Koine Greek, and Koine means common.

The New Testament was written in the common language of the day. Those people understood it. We don't. That's why we need concordance and lexicons, because we don't understand language. What happens is we pervert the meaning of the verse trying to take language from today to make it applicable to then. You cannot interpret with a 21st-century mindset things that come from the 1st century.

You have to understand what is meant. And when you understand what was meant when it was written, then you can get some semblance of an idea of what it means. When he writes, "As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk ye in him," what he's saying is, make that relationship tight. Connect with him. Now, if I were to say, how do you connect with Christ?

The super-spiritual of the group would give me a whole bunch of religious fluff: "Child, you've got to spend days and hours a week in prayer, and that's how you connect with him." No, it's not. Prayer is not what we've made it to be. We discovered some things in our Bible study about prayer that psychologically, all you need is 12 minutes a day to have a successful prayer life.

That's a psychological, scientific reality. There was a study done with a certain group of people and they discovered that the people who were praying that 12 minutes a day over a prolonged period of time had better mental status. They had more peace. Your frustration is not in praying; it's knowing what to say and how long to stay down there.

So we came up with, "Can't you pray with me for an hour?" There's nothing in the Bible that says you have to pray for an hour. That was just what Jesus asked the disciples. He wasn't making it a mandate for you and me. So you're under extreme pressure to pray for an hour, and that has taken your prayer and made it a task.

Is there anyone that you talk to for an hour or so on the phone? If you do that, it's usually pleasant. In fact, the time just slips away because you're so enamored having good conversation and fun. You don't go into prayer and have good conversation and fun with God. Prayer is battle. It is the battle of you surrendering your will to God's. It is the battle of you praying through satanic strongholds and pulling down satanic strongholds.

You will find the more that you do that, you will find the will of God will start to override you. You'll begin to find out that Christianity has nothing to do with what services you offer to the church, but it has to do everything with you walking with God hand in hand. This is the reason, beloved of God, that you can see people pray and pray and pray and pray all the time, and yet their lives aren't changed.

They're still mean. How are you going to be in the presence of God as much as you say you are—"Child, I pray all night, I pray all the time"—and you're just as mean as a Texas rattlesnake? Something's not clicking for me. When you go into prayer, he should rub off on you. Okay, that's enough.

He says you're to walk in him, and notice what comes after that: rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, as you have been taught. He's talking about their salvation instructional training. He's talking about how Epaphras and his team gave them the necessary tools to live for Christ. He says, "Abounding in that teaching with thanksgiving." So it is important that you have people in your life to help you become acclimated to the kingdom of God.

Some of us, when we get to a certain stage in our Christian life, don't want anybody to help us anymore. We don't need it. That's why there are people who say, "Oh, I don't have to go to Bible school. I've been in Bible school since I was 12." Well, so what? What does that mean—you stop going? I would not go to a doctor who doesn't continue education.

You think because you've been a Christian for all these years that you don't need to come to Bible study anymore? Oh, I did that when I was a child. Things have changed. You've changed. God never changes, but your view of him sure has. Paul here says the key to Colossians is relationship. You're being defeated because Satan is causing you not to see Jesus for who he is, which is the exact same problem that the apostles had.

They could not see him for who he is. They didn't even trust his sovereignty. When he told them, "Look, I'm going to go before you and they're going to kill me," Peter said, "Be it far from you. You ain't dying." And Jesus said, "Get behind me, Satan," because you're looking at things through these eyes.

You have identified areas in your life that are difficult. You have identified challenges in your life and you demonize them. But if you trust the sovereignty of God, you must say he put that there. I cannot say he's in control and then strip that control when I don't like the circumstances. And that makes me fall for anything.

We become susceptible to satanic voices when we're no longer hearing God. What is the key verb that represents the kingdom of God? It begins with an F and ends with an E. We can't go forward till you answer that question. The key component of the kingdom of God begins with an F and ends with an E. Forgive.

In fact, it's the only thing that God says will prevent me from forgiving you. Not that he can't forgive you, but he's saying your lack of forgiveness does not open your heart to receive it. So when he says "I can't do it," it's not on him. He's saying, "I can't do it because you won't let me." And the reason you won't let me is because you haven't forgiven someone else.

If you spend substantive time with God, the first casualty that you will find is your will. You will never again look at a person through suspicious eyes. I know that's difficult because some of us think we're really spiritual. Some of us think, "Praise God, God shows me everybody." Why? What is the point?

Who wants to sit by and have God reveal a person's faults and then never query them so they can get delivered? You just want to hold on to that so-called revelation so that you can remain a judge. Where's the scripture where Jesus talked to the lady taken in adultery? John 8? You sure? You're the Christian Education Pastor. If you're wrong, you're fired. You sure now, Doug? Okay.

I'm going to show you something. At this time, we should be exhibiting the character of Christ, right? We've been with him for a good amount of time. Yes, you're right, Doug. It says—did you all hear the collective sigh? Phew! I want you to know the story, but let's go past the story down to verse 10. When Jesus lifted up himself and saw that nobody was there but the woman, he said to her, "Woman, where are your accusers?"

You see the woman there? It's the same woman that he used when he spoke to his mom about the absence of wine. Depending on its use, it's a statement of honor. It's not like you say to your wife, "Woman!" She knows that's fighting. But then there are times you use "woman" in a more loving manner: "Woman, I'm so glad you're in my life."

Jesus uses this term. If you look at the beginning of the chapter, they used the term as an insult: "This woman was taken in adultery." Jesus said, "Woman, where are your accusers?" His forgiveness restored her. The woman with the issue of blood that came up behind him and touched—she had been ostracized for years. She couldn't even go to family gatherings. After she was healed, Jesus turned and called her daughter. She hadn't heard that before. If you're spending time with him, the speech that comes out of your mouth towards anyone should be one of healing.

Tremendous words from the Apostle Paul, words to encourage, to edify, to educate, and to liberate. You see, we shouldn't go back to the old things that God has called us out of. You and I are called to rise above philosophy, to rise above tradition, and move into the intimacy of living for God. I'm so glad you joined us today to hear the Word of God that will carry you through every situation that you find challenging in your life.

Remember, Christ in you is the hope of glory. I thank God for your prayers, for the many correspondence you send to us to let us know that you are being blessed. There are people that I encounter at various places in my government, in my world, in my life, and they tell me how blessed they are from hearing the Word of God from the Climbing Higher broadcast.

To you I say thank you. Thank you for the encouragement, thank you for the prayers, and for the financial support. It means a lot to us. But I want you to know that what would mean more to me than anything is you giving your heart to Jesus Christ and living for him. And as the Apostle says, seek those things which are above where Christ sits on the right hand of God. One day I'll see you in heaven and we'll enjoy eternity with the Christ of Calvary. God bless you. See you again on the Climbing Higher broadcast.