Interview with Dr. Miranda: What Are the Three Most Important Prayers for the Year?

For me, one of the most fundamental verses of the Christian life is the word of Jesus Christ that says, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you.” Another verse that I believe is related to that word is the one in the Old Testament that says, “It is not by the sword, nor by armies, but by My Spirit,” says the Lord.

These two verses have something in common, and that is that they invite us to keep our eyes fixed on spiritual things as the foundation of everything else. If our spiritual life, if our level of spiritual anointing, is where it ought to be, the other things will generally begin falling into place little by little.

That is why one of the most important requests I always make of the Lord for my church is that our church may always keep its perspectives and priorities properly ordered. May our church not become so enamored with its programs, its resources, the people who come, or its reputation that it forgets that what matters most is the state of my relationship with God and with the Holy Spirit.

My great desire is that our church may always maintain a high level of spirituality, that we may remain faithful to the Word of God, and that it may be a congregation where the Word of the Lord runs freely, where there is sound doctrine, doctrine that is in harmony with the values and teachings of the Word of God, because that is the standard, the point of reference for everything else.

If a church remains close to the Word of the Lord, then that means its priorities, programs, mission, vision, and strategies will be governed and determined by the content of that Word; and if a church is in harmony with the values of the Kingdom of God, that church will prosper. So my request, always for my congregation and for myself, is: “Lord, help us remain centered on Your Word and Your Spirit, with a high spiritual temperature.”

That reminds me of the words of the Apostle Paul, who says that we must be fervent in spirit, and the word in the original Greek means covered with fever. The idea is that we remain passionate about the Kingdom of God, that we not become so accustomed to the blessings and to the language and images of the Gospel that we begin to take it for granted, as though we stopped seeing it as something new, beautiful, interesting, and exciting.

Therefore, when we pray, we should always pray that the Lord will keep our church at a high level of spiritual life, filled with the gifts of the Holy Spirit and also displaying the fruit of the Holy Spirit, because it is one thing to have the anointing and power of God and another to have the character of Jesus Christ.

Those two things are complementary and very important: the power of the Holy Spirit, but also the fruit of the Holy Spirit, so that there may be a high standard and a sense of holiness before God.

God demands that the church live differently from the way the world lives. The Word says that we must not conform to this age, to this culture, but rather be transformed through the continual renewal of our understanding. That is, there is a call to live differently from those who do not know the Lord. All of this has to do with the realm of the spirit, with spiritual life.

Another thing that seems very important to me for us to pray about for our church is that our church may be a model for other congregations, and not in a prideful way, or as though we wanted to show off León de Judá, because something I always try to confess is that we are a church like any other, in need of the Lord’s grace, with our great imperfections and our great need for the Lord always to be touching, transforming, forgiving, and putting up with us.

I like to confess that because it is the truth and it keeps us protected from the attacks of the enemy, who is always looking for pride so that he can use it as an excuse to attack a congregation or ministry. But out of our desire to bless the Kingdom of God, we do have that desire to be an example for other churches.

There are many Hispanic churches that do not have the resources we have received—and glory to the Lord for that—and that need modeling; they need to see how God is moving in certain ministries. I believe that in every city there should be a certain number of ministries that serve as points of reference, just as there are “teaching hospitals,” hospitals used so that medical students can come and learn to practice medicine in a context of excellence and a high degree of professionalism. In the same way, there should also be teaching churches, mother churches, churches that teach, which exemplify the best values of the Kingdom of God and can transfer their anointing and endowment to other ministries. Through their quality of life, because that is very important, through their love for the Lord, their administrative excellence, and their ability to embrace different sectors of the community and be a visible and active presence in the community, they can inspire other churches and ministries to do the same. There are many pastors and many churches that are isolated and are learning how to be a church or how to be ministers on their own, discovering things, experimenting, failing, stumbling, reaching dead ends, and retracing their steps to find the way. How good it is when they find resources, models, and “disciplers” who help them walk that path of ministerial learning more quickly. So one of the things we can ask of the Lord is that He always help us to be salt and light, not only in the world but even within the Kingdom of God.

A third thing I would also like us to ask is that the Lord help us be an active presence in the community. By that I mean that the world outside may see our church as a church that is not merely concerned with bringing people into the church, taking their money, and entertaining them with a program every Sunday, but that they may see the church as an institution involved in the life of the community and its crises, its challenges, its daily struggles, and the community’s social problems, and that it is contributing meaningfully to the improvement of those problems. This includes areas such as young people and their educational problems and their moral and social problems; housing; and politics, encouraging people to vote, to become involved in the city’s social and political processes, to build relationships with mayors, city council members, and social agencies, and to be a resource for those agencies that are also trying to help our community.

That is, God has given the church authority, access to thousands of people, and a voice that is heard, and those resources need to be contributed not only to bring people into the Kingdom of Heaven for eternity, but also to help them, while they are here on earth, to live productive lives. The church should be a resource for those people who, perhaps from a secular perspective, are trying to do good but who are nevertheless important sources of blessing to the community.

There should be cooperation between the church and those secular agencies. It is therefore important that God help us, and that is a process into which we have launched ourselves and in which we have achieved certain levels of success, but we still have a great deal of ground to cover.

It is also very dangerous ground, because when we collaborate with the world, the world often wants to use our resources but also wants us to change our way of seeing things and surrender our values. The world and the secular community see things very differently from the way the church sees them. So the world often comes to the church and says, “Help us and contribute to our work, but on our terms and according to the values we believe are legitimate.” And many times, in its sincere desire to be a blessing to the world, the church tends to sacrifice many of its distinctive values and gradually allow its commitment to the values of the Kingdom of God to erode.

We must be very careful, because we need to let the world know that we are willing to be a blessing, but we are not going to allow ourselves to be cut down; we are not going to allow our understanding of human reality to be changed. On the contrary, we possess an understanding that the world needs: the understanding provided to us by the Word of God and the Holy Spirit. So there is always a tension there. When we have to cooperate with the secular world, there is a siren song that tries to drag us toward the world, and we must definitely resist it. The Church of Christ throughout the centuries has not been entirely successful in maintaining that tension, but we must try to do so.

Again, to summarize, the prayers of our church should always be directed first toward asking God to help us remain in close harmony with the values of the Kingdom of God, always making the spiritual our priority. Second, that God may help us be a model in the most positive sense of the word, an example and a source of resources and blessing for other members of the Kingdom of God, churches, and ministries; and third, that our church may be a source of help, a resource intimately involved with the challenges, struggles, and problems confronting our community, and that it may be seen as a friend of the community.