TODAY’S DEVOTION (Friday 25th April 2025)
Coming out, He went to the Mount of Olives, as He was accustomed, and His disciples also followed Him. When He came to the place, He said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.”
And He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if it is your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.”
Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
When He rose up from prayer, and had come to His disciples, He found them sleeping from sorrow. Then He said to them, “Why do you sleep? Rise and pray, lest you enter into temptation.” Luke 22:39-46 NKJV
WELCOME TO THE 115TH DAY OF OUR YEAR OF VICTORY
We bless the Name of the LORD for giving us 115 days today. I don’t know how old you are, but if you look back and calculate accurately you can tell how many days you have lived on planet earth and see how faithful our God is.
You will realize how precious each day is. You will also see why you must make the most of the opportunity to be alive, by spending your days to serve your generation according to the will of God.
If you do that with certain scriptures in your heart, you will come to the place of realizing that this life is worth nothing, except we spend it doing the things that are assigned to us by the LORD Jesus Christ. The true beauty of life is buried in your divine assignment on earth.
I have been privileged to minister to the poorest of the poor, and the richest of the rich on earth. I looked at both people and see how useless and worthless this life can be without Jesus.
I found the poor with the faith that tells them to look for money, then they will have peace on earth. On the flip side, the rich suddenly realized that having money is not a peace creator. It will increase your purchasing power but will never give you peace.
I FOUND THE LIVES OF BOTH USELESS WITHOUT THE LORD.
It dawned on me that if both had built their lives around the LORD, if the poor or the rich had used their time on earth to find out the assignment God created them to fulfill for Him on earth, they will not just be happy, they will be fulfilled.
The poor will never be poor, and the rich will never have riches without peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.
Friend this life is worth nothing except we spend it doing only the things assigned to us by our LORD and savior Jesus Christ. If we spend the life doing what is assigned to us by circumstances, we may achieve life success or progress in some areas but will never achieve that peace that only Jesus gives.
In our devotional text we find the LORD face to face with the ultimate thing Heaven assigned Him to do on earth, a death on the cross to redeem mankind from eternal death. In the garden of gethsemane where He went, He was getting ready to pay the ultimate price. He was doing that through travailing prayers.
The text presents what I will call a Passover scene where Jesus was found agonizing in prayer in readiness to face the sufferings of the cross. He had lived within His assignment for over three decades and was now about fulfilling the ultimate of it all.
He showed us how to achieve life happiness and progress by living our days doing only the things He assigned us.
If you read the book of John from chapter 14 to chapter 17, you will realize that Jesus achieved life joy and progress by doing just that. He rejoiced in the Spirit because He lived His days within His assignment.
Your life will not be what the LORD created it to be if you do not live your days within your assignment. You could be rich but will never be fulfilled.
One major faith position Jesus took to live that way, was the faith position of personal travailing prayers. I learned that we will never be able to live our days doing only what He assigned us to do without engaging in personal travailing prayers from time to time.
LET’S LOOK AT THE SUBJECT OF PERSONAL TRAVAILING PRAYERS.
If we have not faced God in deep prayers as believers, we cannot come into the full awareness of why we are here, live within that awareness, and become deeply committed to our assignments. The truth remains, no one can be deeply committed to what they are not spiritually aware of.
Spiritual awareness is important in a man’s walk with God.
Do not forget, God is Spirit. If we are not spiritually aware, we will not be able to walk with Him, know why we are here on earth or do anything He wants us to do with our lives on earth. Travailing prayers will help us shut down the flesh and come very alive in the Spirit, where there are no interferences.
The promotion of spiritual awareness by travailing prayers can be seen in the lives of everyone who has ever walked with the LORD. If you want to live your days in perfect Spiritual awareness or awakening, you must embrace travailing prayers.
Apart from exhuming commitment to life assignments, by spiritual awakening, the next thing personal travailing prayers do to us is, it helps us to build capacity in the Spirit; capacity to either face the attacks of the enemy and take them on with grace, or capacity to come out strong when faced with the terrible.
Everyone who has been involved in personal travailing prayers will tell you how it helped them to build spiritual capacity. Travailing Prayers are spiritual capacity building agents. Friend, the need for spiritual capacity today cannot be over emphasized.
We are often confronted by the flesh, the world and the devil, resulting in so many things in our lives. But with spiritual capacity built in the depth of prayer (and Bible study), we can conquer them all. It takes spiritual capacity built in prayer (powered by the revelation knowledge of scriptures), to conquer in any battle of life.
Jesus knew that spiritual capacity was all He needed to face the cross and bring redemption to a lost world, hence entering the prayer room. You will never build spiritual capacity by going to mountains and caves to pray, having your head anointed with oil, having your feet washed etc.
YOU WILL ONLY BUILD IT THROUGH A DEEP STUDY OF THE WORD AND TRAVAILING PRAYERS UNDER AN APOSTOLIC MANTLE.
The next blessing of travailing prayers is it helps us to birth in the natural realm what had been divinely predetermined.
Every one of us must understand that what has not been birth spiritually on our knees, cannot be born practically in our lives. It takes travailing prayers to move things from invisible realm of time to the visible realm of our lives.
Jesus died, got buried and resurrected in the garden during that prayer time before going out to actualize it in the City of Jerusalem. This mystery must be understood. He got everything accomplished on His prayer knee before going out there to actualize it.
Friend, what you have not gotten on your knees through travailing prayers, you will never get on your feet through diligent work. The only way not to labor in vain is to bend your knees to pray out a thing before going out there to work it out. That is the secret of exploits in the Kingdom.
For instance, if you want to get married especially after God has revealed everything about it to you, the next place to enter is the prayer room to process and move everything from promissory note to performance.
Whatever God may have revealed to you is a promissory note. You are to enter the prayer room and travail in personal prayers until you see it performed in the spirit realm. After which you go out to actualize it. Anything outside this will turn your expectations into disappointment.
Many have sat on amazing prophecies and revelations from the LORD for years and died without seeing them come to pass. They knew how to receive prophecy but never knew how to travail in prayers for them to be made manifest.
THIS IS A PROPHECY-SEEKING GENERATION BUT NOT A TRUE TRAVAILING PRAYER GENERATION.
Most pray and pray hard but do that in the outer court of the Spirit realm. Until we add genuine Spirit birthed travailing prayers to our lives, we will keep so many prophecies unfulfilled.
If you are called into ministry but you are not living a life of travailing prayers that are birthed by the Holy Spirit and quality times with the word, no significant word of prophecy from God will ever come to pass in your life and ministry. In fact, your ministry will be a misery on earth.
Sadly, many who fell into this ditch went to the devil to power their callings, hence having great Ungodly ministries and churches today. They did that instead of repenting and embracing Holy Spirit birthed travailing prayers as God’s tool for bringing forth their callings on earth.
Many great men and women died small because they never embraced the principle of Holy Spirit birthed travailing prayers.
Yes, great gospel ministries are the graveyards today, because the people with such terrific mandates did not move into the prayer room and spend the rest of their lives there after being called into ministry.
It is through travailing prayers that we turn visions into reality, purposes into performance, and mandates into ministries. If you do not wake up in travailing prayer as a Child of God with a divine call, you will never see what God may have spoken to your ears come to pass.
Living a Christian life or ministry from the word and prayer rooms is an apostolic culture that our Church generation has forgotten. But that was what kept the early Church on fire. We are the next on God’s list!
LET THIS SCRIPTURE BE AN ADDITIONAL MEDITATION FOR YOU TODAY.
“but we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” Acts 6:4 NKJV
