Rabbi Schneider - The Power of the Word of God

We're gonna be looking today at the prayers that the apostle Paul prayed for God's people. The reason it is so vitally important that we understand and get into our own spirit man, these apostolic prayers, is because this, the apostolic prayers beloved, that were prayed by the apostles, listen now, are literally, listen, the word of God. In other words, the prayers that the apostles prayed, that we have recorded in the scriptures, are literally God's own words that are coming to us through His apostles. You see the Bible says, "All scripture is inspired by God". That men when they wrote the scripture we read, did not write on their own initiative, but rather that when they wrote the scripture they were writing by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

So what this means is, the prayers that Paul prayed, that are recorded in scripture, are actually prayers that were inspired by the Holy Spirit. And here is the point, when we are praying, listen now, the prayers that are breathed by the Holy Spirit, we are literally praying the word of God. Now hear me, it's the word of God that transforms us. Get this point, it's so vitally important. When we pray the word of God, which the Apostolic Prayers are the word of God, we absolutely will be supernaturally changed. You see the Bible says, "God sent forth His word and healed them all".

Listen to me, God saves us, transforms us and raises us. Get it now, by His word. Jesus Himself is the embodiment of the word. This is why John tells us, "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God and the word", who is Jesus, that was God, listen now, "became flesh". So God, how does He save us? He does it beloved, by sending, hear me now, His word. Jesus is the embodiment of the word. And then Jesus is walking and ministering on earth, two thousand years ago and what does He say? He said, "The words", get it now, "the words that I speak", He said. "Are spirit and life". He said, "The words that I speak are spirit and life". So once again God's saves us by His word. We see that He sends us the embodiment of the word, who is Jesus. Then Jesus said, "The words that I speak are spirit and life".

Now let's look at Jesus' life, okay? It begins, His ministry begins when He's led into the wilderness by the Spirit to do battle against the enemy of our souls,HaSatan, the devil. And every time Satan comes at Him, what does Jesus say? He says to the devil, "It is written". How does He defeat the devil? Get it church, listen, by the word. See Paul told us in the book of Romans, regarding the same theme of the fact that it's the word that saves us, Jesus being the embodiment and then the spoken words of Jesus and the words recorded in scripture save us, because they come from the Father's bosom, Yeshua Himself.

Listen now, Paul tells us in the book of Romans that the word is near you. It's not so far away in heaven that you can't reach it. It's not under the sea that you can't attain to it. But he said, listen now, the word is in your heart. And he said, "If anyone confesses with their mouth when they believe in their heart that Jesus is Lord they shall be saved". But then Paul says, "How should they call upon Him in whom they've not believed and how should they believe unless they are told? And how shall they hear and be told unless someone is sent to them? And how shall someone be sent to them, unless a preacher comes that's sent to them by the church"?

You see the whole thing is this beloved, the expressed person of God is His word and it's the word that saves us. Scripture is the word. Jesus said again, "The words that I speak, which are recorded in the Bible, are spirit and life". And men that were moved by the word, because the spirit and the word are one, recorded scripture. I say all that as an introduction, only beloved church, to help us understand how critical it is to understand the prayers of the Apostles, because when we focus our prayers on the themes that they prayed for us for, we are gonna be supernaturally energized, listen now and the power of God will change us.

I want to say one more thing before we actually continue our journey today by going to the book of Colossians. Here's what I want you to really get this, we must listen not just hear the word. But we must get it in our heart, listen now, by meditating on it. Too many people know the word in their mind, but it's never moved from their mind to their heart. You see the word, in order for it to grow must be watered.

Jesus told a parable. He said, "The sower went out to sow the seed". And He talked about four different types of ground. He talked about thorny ground. He talked about rocky ground. He talked about a ground where the bird, the vulture, the bird immediately came and stole it. And then He talked about the type of ground that the seed was sown in. He said, "Remember the sower went out to sow the seed". Then He talked about the type of ground that received it, listen now and it watered it, and it was good ground, and that ground bore fruit.

You see, in order for the word, because Jesus said, "The seed". When the disciples asked Him, "Tell us the meaning of the parable". Jesus said this, He said, "The seed is the word". Remember the parable of the sower and the seed. He talked about the seed and He talked about the four grounds. The disciples said, "What are you talking about exactly? How does this relate to our walk in the Lord"? Jesus said, "Here is the mystery of the parable. The seed is the word", once again the word. And He said, "The grounds are different types of human beings. The ground that bears fruit", listen now, "is the one that receives the word and waters the word". So it's not enough for us to know the Bible and have it memorized.

You know I remember years ago I was in a church and they taught the youth how to memorize the Bible. And they would have quizzing competitions where different youth groups would go to different churches and the one churches youth group would compete against the other churches youth group to see who had most of the Bible memorized. And that's awesome, I mean praise God. What a great way to spend time, to memorize the word. But it's not enough to have it memorized with our minds. It must be meditated on, so that it moves from our mind to our heart. And when we meditate on the word through prayer, through looking to the Lord for revelation on it, what happens beloved, is that it is then digested and we're transformed and changed by it.

Again, all that I'm sharing with you now is to help you understand that we need to shift our prayer life to be praying predominantly for the things that Jesus and the Apostles prayed for us about. I have another series, it's called The Prayer Life of Jesus, that does the same thing that I'm doing in this series when I'm examining the prayer life of the Apostles. I'm teaching us how to pray the same things that Jesus prayed and today we're gonna pick up in the book of Colossians. We're gonna be looking at a prayer that the Apostle prayed and I want this to sink deep into our hearts and I want you to start praying for yourself, for your loved ones and for the church the same themes that we see Paul revolving around here in the book of Colossians.

We're going today church to Colossians chapter one. I'll be looking today at verses number nine through twelve. Here's what Paul says. He says, "For this reason also since the day we heard of it, we have not", get this now, "ceased to pray for you". So we know that he's praying, because he just said, "we've not ceased to pray for you". And he says, "And to ask that you may be filed". So he's praying and here's what He's asking, "that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding". You know the scripture says, "Let every man be quick to hear and slow to speak".

Many of us have heard the illustration before, we got one mouth, but two ears. What Paul is praying, listen now, is that we'd have wisdom and understanding in spiritual insight. And this takes time before the Lord. What I do, as I'm reading the word, if I'm reading a book by a very inspired author dealing with the word of God, when something strikes me when I'm reading through it and I feel weight on a sentence, I don't immediately just then keep reading. But I stop, because I just read something and I felt weight on it.

Somehow I felt the Holy Spirit cause me to recognize that the sentence that I just read it's snapping out to me, it's coming to life. I feel it more than what I just read previous to it. What I'll do then, is I'll stop and I'll read it again. And I'll read that sentence or paragraph again. And then I'll say, "Father God give me understanding of what this means". Perhaps I'll pray that same thing that I just read back to the Lord and then I'll pray it again, listen now, in my own words. For example, if we just got done reading a scripture that says, "By His stripes we are healed".

Let's say for example we're reading about the ministry of Jesus in which He healed the sick and we're dealing maybe with a need, a physical need we had in our body. What we do is we stop then, we digest what we just read. If for example we read that Jesus has just healed a sick person and then said to the sick person after He healed them, "Your faith has made you well". And we also recognize that the Bible says, "By His stripes we're healed". We stop and we say, "Father God thank You that by Your stripes I am healed. And right now Father God I declare that I'm healed and Your healing my body right now, presently, of whatever it is physically that you're dealing with". We pray the word. We pray the word.

So once again Paul says, "I pray and ask that you might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding". And so if again you need a physical healing and Paul is saying here that he wants you to be filled with knowledge of His will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding. If you need a physical healing you need the knowledge of His will with wisdom, so that you could pray in faith for healing. In other words, if you need to be healed and you need wisdom as Paul is saying here, you need wisdom regarding the knowledge of God's will for your healing. The first thing that you need to understand, because remember Paul says here, listen again. He says, "I pray that you might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding".

If you need a physical healing, we first of all need to understand how God heals and more importantly even we need to understand if it's His will to heal. See a lot of people don't have understanding about God's will to heal. They've been taught with false theology, or perhaps they've seen people get sick that knew the Lord and never got better and died. And so they're not really convinced that it's God's will to heal them. They think, "Well I know that God can heal me if He wants to, but I don't really know if it's His will to heal me". And so they don't really have wisdom and understanding in regard to this. They're confused by it and as a result of that they are not fully able to appropriate all that Jesus purchased for them when He shed His blood and gave His life on the cross.

And so Paul says, "I want you to have all spiritual wisdom and understanding". He said, "Regarding God's will for you". And so listen, we can't just go through life without thinking as zombies. If we have a need in our life, or we need to connect to the Lord in a certain area and even beyond that we should do this, because we love God, we need to fervently be praying that He would give us wisdom and understanding in the knowledge of His will for our lives in all ways. And so I just want to conclude, because some of you probably right now are wanting to understand how to be healed. Paul says, "I want you to have wisdom and understanding".

Let me read it again and I'm just gonna kind of close out today's message and we'll pick up next week. But I want to talk about wisdom and understanding in the knowledge of God's will, specifically regarding today, physical healing. "For this reason", Paul says, verse nine, Colossians one. "Also since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding".

And so again, I want to just specifically get application here. That's what I've been kind of doing. I've been taking in this one phrase in Paul's prayer, that he's praying that we would have wisdom and understanding in God's will and I'm just giving you an application of this, a specific application. And say, "Okay if we need a healing in our body we need the wisdom and understanding of what God's will is in this".

Well first of all let me say this, we see that after Jesus preached, his longest messages in the word of God, the sermon on the mount, Matthew 5-7. Immediately coming down from the mountain in Matthew chapter 8, listen, He healed them all. So we know that first of all God heals all diseases. Two thousand years ago He did. We see it repeated over and over again in scripture. And Matthew told us in Matthew 8:17, that when Jesus healed them all after preaching His longest sermon in the Bible, He did it to fulfill Isaiah chapter fifty three verse four and five. Which says in the Hebrew, speaking of the atonement of Jesus, that He took in our own body, in His own body, that Jesus.

Let me say it again, that Yeshua when he was crucified took in His own body our sickness and diseases, in the Hebrew it says and carried them away. So once again, Matthew after Jesus healed everybody in Matthew eight, Matthew said, "This was to fulfill Isaiah chapter fifty three". And what's Isaiah fifty three about? It's about the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ, who was pierced through for our transgressions. He was wounded and crushed for our iniquities. By his scurgeon we are healed and He carried away our sickness.

So first of all in the knowledge of God's will we have to be convinced that in the atonement Jesus gave His life not just to heal our soul, but to redeem our bodies. You see the Bible says that we've been united to the Lord. That we're now bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh. That Jesus in heaven right now and even as we draw from Him spiritual life for our soul, we also draw from Him spiritual life for the healing of our body. Then secondly we need to understand in the knowledge of His will regarding physical healing. We have to understand Jesus healed them all, because He was moved with compassion.

You see beloved one, God is still the same God. He's still, listen to me now, moved with compassion. And He is as compassionate for you and I today, as He is beloved, for those ones that He healed two thousand years ago. And when you're convinced of that, that Jesus died on the cross so that you could be healed, when you're convinced that He still has compassion for you, then you know what? You can still pray with faith according to the word of God, thanking Jesus that He paid the price for your healing. Jesus said, "Whatever you ask for in prayer according to My will, believing you've received it, you shall have it".

You can now thank God that Jesus paid for your healing. You can pray the word, thanking Him that in Him you're complete, that you believe it, that you receive it and you can thank Him beloved. Listen, beginning right now that you've received your healing and that you're being healed, that the Spirit of the Lord is literally healing your body today. Now hang on to that, because remember you gotta work, you gotta water. The Lord is saying, hear me, "Cease My word and don't let anything else in".

You see Peter walked on water when he kept his eyes on the word of Jesus, when Jesus said, "Come". But as soon as he focused on what he felt, the wind, or what he saw, the waves, he sunk. So you can't look at your feelings. You can't depend on what you feel, okay? Or what you see. You depend only on the word of God. And so again, Paul prays that we would be filled with all spiritual wisdom and understanding regarding God's will for our life. Beloved, God loves you today and I say to you, by His stripes you've been healed. I love you today beloved ones. God bless you in Jesus name.