God Is Not as Interested in Your Comfort as He Is in Your Holiness

We are talking about the role of prayer, the part prayer plays, the function of prayer with respect to emotional health, the healing of our wounds, and the proper processing of life’s tensions, pains, wounds, and traumas. How to prosper, how to live an abundant life despite the attacks, struggles, and negative experiences that, as we have seen, are natural and are part of human existence in this fallen world we inhabit. But even amid those difficult experiences, the people of God can prosper and can say, “Where the Spirit of God is, there is freedom. If God is for us, who can be against us? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors. Hallelujah! Through him who loved us and gave himself for us.”

We prosper despite everything, amid everything; we can grow stronger every day and use life’s negative experiences to grow. I was speaking with a sister—let me begin by way of introduction—during a counseling session this week. I don’t know whether she is here, but if she is, I’m not going to say anything bad about her, so don’t worry. She was going through a period of great adjustment in her life, moving from one country to another, from one social situation over there to another one here, with all the struggles. And when we began to explore her situation, it was evident that God was using the possible decline in social status she had experienced and the tensions of feeling that she was in a different, unfamiliar homeland, even though she had to be here with her family.

But God was using all of that to shape her, break her, broaden her emotional reach, her range, expand her emotionally, and make her more like Christ. And it was evident that everything she was going through was like a message God was giving her; it was like a spiritual exercise so that she would grow in certain dimensions of her life, to make her humbler, more realistic, simpler, more tolerant, and so that she would die to things that were deeply rooted within her and could rise to a new life in Christ—richer, more powerful, more spiritual.

And that is what happens: we Christians can prosper in the midst of every situation, no matter what it may be. We can use life’s experiences as a step on which to ascend in our spiritual growth, because, after all, what interests God most is that we be conformed to the image of Christ Jesus, that you become more like Christ every day.

I say that God is not as interested in your comfort as he is in your holiness. Write that down before you forget it, please—it even rhymes. There’s a song title for you. God is not so interested in your being happy and comfortable and having everything nice, only for you to remain like a child. What helps us grow even in infancy—for example, if a baby experienced no conflict, its brain would not develop, because conflict is what stimulates your brain to process new and different things. And the same is true of spiritual growth. If everything went well for you, if there were no resistance of any kind in your life, you would become completely useless because your muscles would not develop. You have to be continually lifting things, exerting yourself, and moving, because otherwise muscles atrophy when they are not used. If you lie in bed all the time, do not complain afterward that you have no energy.

Many people believe that the more time they spend in bed, the more energy they have. It is exactly the opposite. Your muscles turn into spaghetti. If you want to have energy, get moving. There’s another bit of advice for you—that one is free; I’m not going to charge you for it.

God wants us to be healthy in every way, and one of the ways—we have already looked at various tools and instruments—is through prayer. I have given you many spiritual principles, but ultimately there is a dimension we must employ in order to be healed and strengthened. There are tools that are solely and purely spiritual in nature, interventions that we must carry out, like the one we carried out here this morning: positive confession.

Sometimes you are depressed and sad, and what God wants is simply for you to shake off that depression, throw yourself out of bed, take a little shower, put on your nicest clothes and some nice perfume, put on a little lipstick if you are a woman, play some good worship music, sing to the Lord, shout, celebrate, and dance, even if your bones creak. And you will see how that crust of depression falls away, because you are using a weapon of spiritual warfare: positive confession. That is important.

Many times, what the devil wants is simply for you to go into the closet, close the door, and not come out because you are depressed, or to put on some funeral music by Bach, or a solemn Mass by… I love them, but not when I am depressed. When I am depressed, what I need is Marcos Suito, or a merengue, a Christian cumbia, or whatever. Because what the other music does is strengthen the evil within us.

There are spiritual weapons; prayer is one of those spiritual weapons. I am also going to speak about spiritual warfare later on. Prayer—I began by speaking… we saw how a mother’s prayer was able to free this young woman from a demon of homosexuality, although I always say that not all homosexuality is caused by demons. I am covering myself here so that someone does not go off and put in the newspaper, “Pastor Miranda says that everyone…” No. Sometimes, as in this case, it was evidently something demonic, and she was set free through the authoritative declaration of a desperate mother. It was a very, very beautiful moment, and it greatly reinforced this idea that prayer…

That is why this week we have been praying and crying out to the Lord, seeking that power of God in our lives. It is very important that you live a life of prayer. The apostle Paul says, “Pray without ceasing.” We must be praying at all times. The word of the Lord also says to pray with every kind of prayer at all times.

In First Chronicles, chapter 4—I don’t know whether I will even get to this point, but if I don’t, I will turn it into a sermon of its own—First Chronicles, chapter 4, verses 9 and 10, contains one of the most mysterious and beautiful passages in the entire Old Testament. Years ago I preached about Jabez. It says here that Jabez was more distinguished than his brothers, and his mother named him Jabez, saying, “Because I gave birth to him in pain.” For the word Jabez means pain; it comes from a Hebrew word, jausev. It would take too long to explain how they are related, because they do not sound the same, but there is indeed an explanation: pain.

Imagine going through life with the name “Pain.” I would change my name the moment I turned eighteen—I don’t know about you—even if they took away my inheritance. His mother named him Pain as a reminder of the terrible experience she had undergone when she gave birth to him: “Because I gave birth to him in pain.”

And immediately, in verse 10, it says that Jabez called upon the God of Israel, saying, “Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory, and that your hand would be with me, and that you would deliver me from evil so that it might not harm me.”

And the beautiful thing about this passage is that it says, “And God granted him what he requested.” Say it with me: “What he requested.” The Bible says, “Ask, and it will be given to you.” The apostle James says, “You do not receive because you do not ask.” If you do not ask, you are not going to receive. God said that if you ask, you will receive. So, do you want to receive? Ask, and pester the throne; keep knocking on God’s door. God likes to be pestered. God likes to be awakened very early in the morning—not that he is sleeping, but he likes the first thing you do in the morning to be going to him, blessing him, and saying, “Daddy, I wanted to say hello,” with your little cup of coffee.

I have told you before that one of my fondest childhood memories, from about ten or fifteen years ago, is of my mother in the morning. When she converted to the Lord, my mother gave herself to the Lord completely, shoes and all. She committed herself in the Pentecostal church in the Dominican Republic, and we were very small. I remember lying in my bed, listening to my mother sitting in the kitchen and singing, “In the morning, the birds sing their praises to Christ the Savior.” That memory brings me joy and gladness, because as a child I loved to hear my mother’s voice singing in the morning. She set aside her time for prayer, her time for meditation with the Lord, and she was a woman devoted to prayer and to reading the Word. I have her last Bible, because she used several Bibles and wore them all out. It is full of notes, with pages all battered because she had used it so much. In fact, if your Bible is still brand-new, something is wrong somewhere. I love seeing well-worn Bibles.

Yesterday I had to ask Meche to help me because I had to put tape all over this Bible, and that is a failing on your pastor’s part. But in my defense, I called to have it rebound, and it takes six weeks for them to bind it. I cannot be separated from it because this is my study and preaching Bible, so I am praying that the Lord will somehow perform a miracle, because I do not want to replace it. My notes are in there; there are so many things in it—this spiritual bibliography, in a sense. I love this Bible. But Bibles have to be worked; they have to be used. Use your Bible. Do not leave it open to Psalm 23 as spiritualists do. Use it, devour it, feed on it, let it enter your life, because we have to ask…

Jabez asked, and God granted him what he requested. We must pray continually and persist before the Lord. Our first instinct when we are in trouble should be to go immediately to the throne of God. That comes first. Before going to the psychiatrist, before going to the doctor, go to the Lord, ask him, and present your case before him.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot change our faults or resolve our painful or deforming experiences by ourselves. We need a power that comes from outside us, an additional force that joins our efforts and supplies the crucial energy we need to complete the strength required to drive back the evil that has sought to settle upon us—upon our minds, our spirits, our families, our finances, our health, and our surroundings. We need the power of God to make the difference. We need that divine intervention.

Prayer refers our case to the Lord and draws his favor and mediation. When we give our problems to the Lord, we make them sacred; we add a different dimension to them. The image comes to mind of a king in the Old Testament—I do not remember whether it was Josiah or Hezekiah. The fact is that he received a letter from a very powerful enemy king, threatening to come and invade unless he surrendered all his land to that king. And what this godly king did, the Bible says, was take the letter from that wicked king, bring it to the temple, and place it at the foot of the altar. And that image—of bringing our problems, bringing our situation, our need, whatever it may be, and taking it into the holy sanctuary of God’s presence—that is prayer.

Prayer is what enables you to take your problem out of the merely human realm and bring it into the divine realm. Through prayer, you then make God your partner, your colleague, your collaborator in the battles you are fighting. That is why it is so important. For me, the first thing prayer accomplishes is precisely that: it transfers the need into the divine sphere, where it belongs.

And another thing I say about this is that it applies to every dimension of life. It applies to our emotional situations. There are struggles that all of us have in our lives; there are bondages of every kind. Who does not have some deformity in their life—except perhaps me? But everyone else has bondages, emotional problems, pain, situations that deform us, bad memories, and all kinds of complexes. And all of those are things we must transfer into the realm of the Spirit, and we must continually present these situations to the Lord.

If you are afflicted or hounded by some negative thought, something that brings pain into your life, an affliction, a bondage you do not want in your life, something that brings you shame or a sense of guilt, or that takes away your confidence when you appear before the throne of God, present it before God and make it a subject of continual prayer before the Lord. Apply divine energy to that problem so that God may gradually reduce its size.

You have heard me speak of spiritual radiation therapy. I say that sometimes we simply have to direct radiation at life’s emotional and spiritual tumors, reducing them little by little, day by day, until they disappear. Perhaps I will say a little more about that later.

Prayer, number one, mobilizes the resources of the Kingdom on our behalf. It then intervenes directly in any threatening situation and changes it. Ultimately, that is what it is: you are asking the power of God to go into action and destroy that presence, that bondage, that stronghold within you. The word of the Lord says that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal—that is, they are not human, they are not material—but are mighty in God for the destruction of strongholds. And strongholds means those powers, those presences, those influences that have established themselves within us like a detachment from hell and that, from within, exert control over some aspect of our lives. And God’s weapons, including prayer, are powerful for destroying those strongholds.

Because for spiritual presences within us, we need spiritual weapons to drive them out. The word of the Lord also says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, it says, against the darkness of this age and against hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Quite simply, if you are struggling with experiences from the past, with someone who harmed you in some way, with your environment of poverty, with the government that does not want to give you more welfare money, whatever it may be, that is not your enemy; ultimately, the enemy is those powers underlying all of it.

Do you think that ISIS in the Middle East, or Al Qaeda, which is destroying and killing and publicly cutting off heads—do you think that is purely a political, geopolitical, or regional phenomenon? No. Behind that are powers, principalities and powers that are utterly demonic, which delight in beheading a person, slitting that person’s throat, and putting it on display. I believe that part of what is happening in the world right now—in this world that does not believe in spiritual things—is that spiritual powers are now backing modern man into a corner, forcing him to abandon many of his rational pretensions, and spiritual powers are establishing themselves at the very center of the global environment.

Those are demonic powers, the same powers that slit people’s throats, sacrificed them to idols with fire, killed them, and sacrificed them on altars. The Maya, the Aztecs, peoples in Africa—in practically every country in the world there have been human sacrifices, and today there are many different kinds of human sacrifice. Abortion is one of them, as are all these things that are happening; these demons are displaying their power today by using the internet, but demons are always seeking the world’s attention. They are spiritual powers.

Unfortunately, politicians and governments fight only the symptom, but they do not fight what lies underneath it, which is the spiritual root. That is why Paul says that, ultimately, our struggle is not against geological, geographical, economic, or political principles. No, that is simply the surface outcropping of something that lies very far beneath it; the true cause is principalities and powers.

And the same thing happens—we have gone very far afield—but the same thing happens with our emotional and deforming situations. There are situations in our lives that are like a detachment of the devil lodged inside our psyche, and prayer is the power that enlists the grace of God to cast these things out. It sends reinforcements to change our minds, and that war must be fought in the spirit because they are spiritual enemies.

I am going to talk a great deal about that because it is more complex than that. But one of the uses of prayer, then, is that it mobilizes the resources of the Kingdom of God on our behalf.

Number two, prayer also brings discernment and wisdom into our lives concerning how to act in a situation of pain or crisis. There are situations in your life—for example, marital situations or emotional situations—for which you have sought a solution in many different places, and many times, while you are praying, God will give you an answer, an illumination concerning how to approach that problem and how to get out of it. It may be counsel that comes into your spirit. It may come through someone who arrives and sheds light for you, telling you what you need to do. God may reveal to you the true origin of what you are going through. An image or a mental impression may come into your life, but prayer is a great resource for drawing wisdom, discernment, counsel, and strategy concerning how to proceed in life.

I depend a great deal on prayer and the illumination of the Holy Spirit for this whole matter of construction. There are so many things, so many problems that we have confronted over nearly 20 years of constructing buildings and radically renovating them, and it is wonderful how, if you ask God, he gives you wisdom and strategy about how to improve your marriage, how to get out of your problem, how to manage your finances, and how to heal from the wounds in your past. Prayer sort of loosens those things that are tangled up and petrified inside you. God gradually releases them, and with prayer… God brings understanding and strategy into our lives. God is a giver of strategies par excellence, brothers and sisters. I depend on God for any strategy I need, any problem I have, any situation I must face; the first one I go to is the God of strategies.

For me, one of the names of God is the God of strategies, because I continually see him giving me strategies about how to guide my life, how to guide the ministry, and how to resolve situations. Just now, while I was standing here formulating this, I said, “Okay, Lord, give me an image, an example of how you give wisdom for dealing with problems.” And while I was speaking here, David came to mind, when he was going to fight one of those enemy groups and David said to the Lord, “Lord, where should I attack them? From here or from there?” And God told him, “No, when you hear the wind moving the trees, when you hear a wind moving the trees”—it seems that he was in a forest—“when they begin to move, attack, because I am delivering the enemy into your hands.” He had to wait for that particular moment. God sent his power, and when David saw that wind, which was a symbol of the Spirit of God, he said, “Now, then, go in and attack, because I am with you.”

Strategy. God gives strategy. To me, prayer revitalizes your mind; it gives you wisdom. Ask God for understanding. The Bible says that if anyone lacks wisdom, what should he do? Let him ask God, who gives abundantly and without reproach, and it will be given to him. People sometimes ask, “Pastor, how did you build—not you—how did they build this sanctuary?” They always put one person out front: “How did you build this…?” People think that this multimillion-dollar church… Did that child say amen? Out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants—glory to God. God is strengthening me. I already told you to ask the Lord for wisdom.

People wonder how our church… Brother, it is God giving wisdom and providing people. I see my brother Mario here, sitting over there, whom I respect and love so much. When we were here renovating that first sanctuary, I asked the Lord for wisdom and strategy to do it, and God gave Mario, me, and several of the people who worked on that first sanctuary wisdom. We were already driving the architects crazy by changing their plans and everything else. They wanted to be rid of us as quickly as possible because God was giving us better strategies than they themselves had for doing things.

I specifically asked the Lord for the wisdom he gave Bezalel and Oholiab in Scripture. You may say, “What in the world is that?” They are two people in the Bible. Read your Bible so that you do not have to wonder about such things. When the tabernacle was going to be built, God gave these two men, it says, wisdom and knowledge about how to make pots, how to make perfumes, how to make fabrics, and how to build the tabernacle. And I said, “Father, we are going to build; we need that wisdom.”

And I tell you, brothers and sisters, I believe God gave it to us and has given it to us throughout all this time, and he gave it to Mario, and he has given it to Javier and to others who work in the sanctuary. That is how God works. God gives wisdom through prayer, because I assure you that I continually bathe all of this in prayer. Every day without fail, I have to go before the Lord and offer him the same prayer until I wear him out. My desire is to pester God so much that he says, “Okay, I’m going to give it to you; now leave me alone.”

That is why there is the parable of the widow who bothered the judge so much that the judge said, “Okay, so that she does not exhaust my patience, I am going to give her what she asks for; I am going to grant her justice.” It is an illustration. God is not like that. God is not like a bad judge whom you have to wear out, but he loves for us to come and knock at his door until he says, “Okay, here you are; take it.”

To me, prayer is a very beautiful source of spiritual wisdom and of the strategy I need for my problem. So it mobilizes the resources of the Kingdom and brings discernment and wisdom.

A third thing prayer does is change our perspective. Sometimes, as I was telling you this morning, all we need is a change of perspective, and that changes everything; it makes all the difference. Because many times God is already with us, God has already changed things, but our eyes are so tired, so frightened, and so terrified by the problem that we do not see that God has already changed things. So we remain entangled in the problem, not because God has not changed it, but because we do not know that God has already changed it. And there is an illustration of that in Scripture: when Elisha and his servant are surrounded by an enemy army, a Syrian army—surrounded. Suddenly they were in the forest, horses began to emerge all around them, and they saw that they were surrounded. And Elisha’s servant began to tremble and panic. “Oh, what is going to happen? The enemy is all around us.”

And Elisha says, “Lord, open his eyes so that he may see the spiritual reality around them.” And it says that the Lord opened the eyes of Elisha’s servant, and Elisha’s servant realized that the army was itself surrounded by an immense encampment of angels. They were protected. But of course, these are things on the level of the spirit. This man was not a very godly man, but Elisha lived in the presence of the Lord and could see the angels around him. And then they saw those angels, they saw that encampment of God’s army, far more powerful than the other army; I imagine that brought them rest.

And in fact, it says that God blinded the Syrian army, and Elisha practically took them by the hand, led them away, and brought them right into the center of Israel. And when their eyes were opened, they were surrounded by the Hebrew army. And look how far the power of God reaches when he intervenes: the king of Israel said to Elisha, “Sir, shall I kill them? Shall I execute them?” “No, do not kill them. How can you kill those whom you have already captured?” And they simply took them away again and returned them to their own land so that they would leave that place and go back to their country. In other words, what had been a situation of captivity and death became a situation of dominion, authority, and mercy toward the enemy.

Wow! How God changes things, doesn’t he? And it was all because prayer, and this man Elisha—filled with the power of God and dwelling continually in the presence of the Lord—enabled him to see things that could not be seen in the flesh. And many times that is what our spiritual situation is like—our emotional situations, our marriages, our children. Sometimes the only thing we see is the problem, but we do not see how God may be working to turn that situation into something glorious, and many times God has already given the word and all that remains is simply for that problem to crumble. It may take some time, but the root has already been pulled out. And that brings me to something else: many times we pray and God has already answered, but it takes time to see the answer on the level of temporal and spatial reality.

Because when God works, he often works at the root, and of course, when God cuts off the life of an evil tree in our lives, it takes time for that to become effective and manifest in the world of time and space.

One day, when the Lord was walking with his disciples toward Jerusalem, he saw a fig tree like this plant, so beautiful and leafy, and a fig tree is supposed to have figs. It was so beautiful, so green, so lovely, and he reached in to see whether he could find any, but all he found were leaves. And he became upset because that tree reminded him of the unfruitfulness of the Hebrew people, who, the Bible says, were like a fig tree that bore no fruit. They had all the gifts and all the word God had given them, but they were totally unfruitful. They looked very beautiful: a great deal of religiosity, a temple that was a wonder of the world, an incredible religious apparatus—but there was no fruit.

I believe that was what caused the Lord to become upset with that tree. Prophetically, the Lord was warring against the fruitless religiosity of the Jewish people, who were going to crucify him even though he was right there in their midst. They were as blind and as barren as that tree, and he said, “May fruit never grow from you again.” And he continued on his way, and nothing happened. The tree remained as green and as beautiful as it had been at the beginning, and the disciples said, “What could have happened to the Lord? It seems the eggs and plantain he ate were bad; they were too salty. He’s in a bad mood.” And they continued on their way—well, they said nothing and continued. The Lord went on ministering during the day, and in the late afternoon they returned by the same route, and that tree they had left all leafy and beautiful had withered. And Peter was surprised: “Lord, look, the tree you cursed has withered.”

What had happened? When the Lord said, “May fruit never grow from you again,” the root dried up. But what happens if you pull up a plant, a flower, and put it…? It is not as though it dries up immediately; it still has water inside it. It may take a few hours for it to wither, right? That is what happened. The Lord cut off the root. When he spoke those words, that tree’s capacity to renew itself was neutralized; all it had left was the energy still present in its petals and leaves, a little bit of moisture, but it was going to dry up because it had no power to renew itself.

That is often what happens with the problems in our lives. There are situations in our lives, there are struggles, there are bondages, there are things that, if we pray to the Lord and make them a matter of prayer and warfare and confrontation, God will dry up the source that feeds them, because the devil always needs to keep feeding and adding fuel to the fire of his wickedness within us. And many times, when we sanctify a problem, the Lord immediately cuts off at the root its power to renew itself, and then, over time, we see the problem beginning to give way, the bondage beginning to give way; our anxiety is no longer as strong as it was before. The periods of depression become less frequent and less intense, and one day we wake up and say, “Wow! I haven’t been depressed in six months,” because the Lord gradually dried it up.

Sometimes God kills things at the root, and sometimes our reality has changed all around us without our realizing it. We have prayed, so what we need to do is keep persevering and believing until it disappears completely. The spiritual world is very mysterious, and it takes time.

God often works supernaturally within nature. And there are different ways in which he works in your life, but one thing is certain: your perspective has to change. And for me, prayer is often what allows me to begin to feel a new strength. As that little chorus says, ‘When I lift my hands, my burdens go away; you give me new strength; all of that is possible when I lift my hands.’

Stand to your feet. Let’s sing that chorus, because many times when you declare—brothers and sisters, when you have problems and difficulties, listen, don’t wait for the problem to go away before lifting your hands. Lift your hands so that the problem will go away. Sometimes you have to praise the Lord, and that changes your perspective. Sometimes your prayer of faith transforms the situation.

I ask the Lord, “Lord, help me every day to see things more through your eyes, from your perspective; change my perspective.” When you pray, ask the Lord to fill you with strength, because sometimes, when your perspective changes and your confession changes, your reality changes as well. We have to stop seeing ourselves as tiny, like the Jews in the Promised Land, who, it says, saw themselves as ants and grasshoppers before the giants who were in the land. But God had given them the land. They had a document that said, “That land of Canaan belongs to my people and no longer belongs to you,” and therefore their strength had already dried up.

Those giants had no strength against the people of God; what the people needed was to see themselves as giants too, greater than the giants who were in the land. I ask the Lord, “Lord, help me change my perspective and see myself as the mighty giant that I am, that you are, in the power of God.” The devil respects those who respect themselves.

If you see yourself as a tadpole, the devil will see you the same way. But if you see yourself as a prince of God, a priest, a priestess, a prophetess of God, the devil will have to respect you; he will become afraid of you. Ask the Lord, “Lord, change my perspective; change the way I see myself, and the way I see you and your promises.” Change your perspective, and your reality will change. You will become a magnet for the power and grace of God in your life. Stop declaring negativity over your life. Change your vocabulary. Declare the goodness of God. Speak positively; declare verses from the Word of God. Call yourself a renewed, strengthened, favored person, raised up by God, and the world will have to adjust to your self-image.

Let’s declare that this morning, and let’s lift our hands in the name of the Lord and believe that God is fighting for us. We worship you.