I honestly don’t know what else to pray for anymore.
Every other request… every other petition seems so trite and trivial in comparison.
It all just seems so small when held up against my asking for the Holy Spirit.
What else is there to ask for outside of God Himself?
You will always ask for what it is that you need.
If you’re thirsty, you ask for a drink.
If you’re hungry, you ask for food.
The intensity of my asking is proportionate to the intensity of my need… and this is what we need to see.
In this hour… right here… right now… we must see how much we need the Holy Spirit so that we may begin asking for Him.
And we must not limit our asking to a one time request.
No.
He is what we must persist in asking for until we receive a greater baptism in the Spirit.
Dear reader, I feel that in the core of my being it’s that important.
There is genuinely nothing greater that we could be spending our life on right now than asking for a greater outpouring of God’s Spirit in prayer.
In what should be a familiar parable to you if you’ve been reading my previous blogs, Jesus links the man’s asking his friend for three loaves of bread to asking the Father for the Holy Spirit in Luke 11.
This is important.
The requests are the same… they are equivalent.
The man asks for these three loaves because he wants to care for and feed his guest that showed up at the unexpected hour of midnight.
He had to ask because he didn’t have what he needed.
He had no way of carrying out the intention of his heart as a host because of what he lacked.
But he never told his guest to do what he was responsible for as an entertainer.
The man never suggested that his visitor track down food for himself.
He didn’t tell him to search Google to see what restaurants were open at that hour and pay them a visit or to check out the drive thru at McDonald’s.
Rather, he asked for bread from a friend — who represents God in this story — to feed his hungry guest.
Without this bread, he had nothing to give.
And without the Holy Spirit, we have nothing to give.
The world is starving for a reality that only the Holy Spirit can give, but it’s not up to them to find it… it’s on us to provide it.
WOW!
We owe it to them to have something to give…
In the past, I’ve wanted to see God do things through my life for my sake.
I wanted to be blown away by what I saw and by His moving through me.
In other words, so much of the bread I was asking for in the past was to satiate my own hunger.
And truthfully, He honored that.
But there’s a change in the wind, guys…
The difference this time around is that I no longer find myself asking for bread for my sake.
I find that I’m asking for bread on behalf of everyone else.
And that is the difference maker!
I believe God is wanting to give the Holy Spirit more than we are willing to ask… and I believe this selfless request is what He’s been waiting for.
What I don’t have… what I’m not able to produce is provoking me to ask for what it is that I want to give to those around me.
I want to demonstrate the gospel in a greater way for their sake, not mine!
And I believe that one day we will all look back and say, “…and that made all the difference.”
- Brian Connolly, Faith Like Birds
Read the previous blog!
