Literally, for IHOP-KC, there is only one thing happening this week. The prayer room is here at FSM for the day (as they are building the new stage at the actual prayer room) and many, many of our staff are downtown preparing for the torrent of 15,000 bodies that are preparing to lay seige to the Municipal Auditorium.
I’m speaking at two sessions (on the Book of Revelation and the Second Coming, naturally…), leading the prayer room on site, and helping facilitate our Solemn Assembly on Sunday - an all-day prayer meeting with 10,000 plus. After helping out this morning a little, it’s back to my little hideaway to consolidate my thoughts for the sessions.
I’m tired already, but this is what we do.
David
December 27th, 2006
I’m “on the clock” for a few hours this morning (8 - 10 AM, every Monday - including today). So here I am, in the prayer room, praying that all of you would have a joyous Christmas.
If you’re wondering, we opened some gifts last night (after our annual Bo Ling’s Chinese Restaurant / drive around and look at amazing Christmas lights tradition); we did the “run downstairs and see what’s out” (a bike, two robopets, and full stockings) thing before I left; then it’s breakfast and the rest of our gifts at around 10 AM.
So, for now, it’s two glorious hours of me, Shelly Hundley (leading worship), and Jesus. And about 35 other folks, also either “on the clock” or loving the novelty of the prayer room on Christmas morning. And Mike in his little cubicle thingy, hereafter known in this space as his “LCT”). Mostly though, it’s me, Shelly’s voice, a little bit of keyboard, and Jesus.
Merry Christmas from the Sliker Family!
- David
December 25th, 2006
In looking back at the past year, I am amazed at how much can happen here at the International House of Prayer over a 365-day span.
For example, in looking over a year’s worth of Sunday sermons from Forerunner Christian Fellowship…
(FCF is our church that serves: Kansas City – people looking for a good church, the IHOP community – people who moved here because they love the message and community of believers that have gathered here, and the Missions Base – people who thought it would be a good idea to call themselves an “Intercessory Missionary”, raise support, and lead the Prayer Room)
…I found that it was fascinating to just look at the messages that were imparted to our community.
2005 seemed to be the year in which we as an IHOP-KC family were connected dynamically to the Sermon on the Mount in general and to the value of meekness in particular – especially related to the reward that Jesus longs to give those who are willing to contend in love for unity with His heart.
2006 seemed to be, in the general sense, a reconnection of our spiritual family to our core values (or “heart standards”), which can be summed up in the acronym “I.H.O.P.”; or –
(more…)
December 23rd, 2006
First up, Daniel. Since I’m biased, I won’t even comment.
So am I the 3,005,456th person to post cute kid pictures on a blog? Should I be sent to the blog penalty box? Is this too cliche?
I’m sure most of you won’t mind.
- David
December 23rd, 2006
Don’t do it.
Someday I’ll list some semi-comprehesive reasons as to why one should only start a 24 hour house of prayer at gunpoint. Not the easiest thing to pull off.
But if you must, and just in case you were interested…and near the Atlanta area, you may want to be at this conference.
Any chance I get to hang out with the Humphrey family I tend to jump on - they are among the best of the best people around. If you love prayer and are within a few hours of the IHOP-ATL, you really need to connect with Billy. If you love prayer and are anywhere near the Charlotte area, you really need to connect with Kirk. There is no one like him - he is truly one of my favorite people and one of the most focused, dedicated leaders I have ever known. I love the Zadok House of Prayer!
As I said earlier, “Year in Review” is coming tomorrow…
- David
December 23rd, 2006
It’s Friday night, and typically most of the earth isn’t doing what I’m doing at the moment – which is sitting in a mostly empty prayer room listening to gentle melodies and easy, lilting phrases waft through the room accompanied by a simple keyboard progression and slight guitar accents picking away in the background. To fully grasp the glory of what I am describing, you really should either: a.) Be here or b.) Subscribe to the webcast. The info is elsewhere on this website, but for $10 a month you can stream the prayer room live into your home 24 hours a day. You could leave it on all the time and let night and day prayer transform the atmosphere of your home, your dream life, and actually participate in some of the prayer meetings. Pretty wild, eh? I’ve set it up for some of my friends around the nation, and they are hooked. On a side note you can pretty much always catch me leading the Tuesday 4 PM (to 6 PM, CST) prayer meeting. It’s one of our all-staff prayer meetings, and we generally focus on praying for the salvation of Israel. After that last statement, some of you have two options: read Romans 9-11 or download my notes from the “Meditations from the Prayer Room” part of the website. Whatever is easier for you, though “both” may be helpful to those who are particularly troubled…
Side note about the webcast: in about four months, for that same $10 a month, you will be able to watch a TV-quality webcast, each and every day. I won’t tell the whole story (it’s long, involved, and simply crazy), but we will be changing the look and feel of the prayer room (upgrading the stage, lighting, sound, and cameras) to make it more inviting to those who watch us on our webcast. God TV will be partnering with us significantly in this endeavor – it’s pretty exciting. If you have Direct TV, you can watch us on the God TV network, as they will be doing much programming involving IHOP-KC in the days to come – starting with much of the Onething young adult conference at the end of this month. It’s both great and terrible all at the same time. It’s great for you, mostly terrible for us. I’ll let you read between the lines on that one for now…
Since I’m here in a prayer room on a Friday night with much caffeine coursing through my veins, I thought it would be fun to look back at this past year and do a “Year in Review” for my life and IHOP-KC in general. Then I started going on and on about the webcast. Blogs are weird.
OK – I’ll wrap up this stunning masterpiece of literary genius and get diligently to work on my “Year in Review” post.
- David
December 22nd, 2006
As of this past Sunday (Dec. 17th) this website has been officially “up and running”. Whew! There will be much more to come (thanks, Josh Hawkins!) as I will be adding teaching notes, info about Tracey and I, photos, links, etc. The biggest additions will be info about Tracey, what she is doing, etc. The site is way too “me!” for my taste right now. It’s a great start though. We’ll also be adding a way to order some of my other materials for those who are interested, like my End-times syllabus (from my Biblical Foundations of Eschatology class at FSM) and some CD sets.
Having just finished our winter 2006-2007 update and emailed it to many of you, hopefully some of you are finding your way here (which was the purpose of the update). Of course, the “undeliverable” emails being kicked back to me by the dreaded “System Administrator” were to be expected - some of my contact info is out of date. So send the update to anyone you know who knows the Sliker family (ones that you know know us and ones who know you know that they know we know, in other words).
I look forward to hearing from many of you - some of whom I haven’t been able to touch base with for quite some time.
December 22nd, 2006
In other words, it’s Paul saying in essence:
“This is what God’s plan is through Jesus - and you are called to be a dynamic part of that plan in a stunning way. Therefore, I pray that you really understand what this means for you.
“I pray that you would understand who He is (and how awesome He is), who you are (and how awesome you are called to be), and how much power is available from heaven to bring you into this awesomeness.”
- David
December 13th, 2006
Some thoughts I typed the other day to someone asking about Ephesians 1:17-19:
To understand the different subjects that Paul is speaking of, it is helpful to actually start reading the passage where Paul begins his next idea, which is verse 15, or, if you are in the mood - all the way back to verse 3.
Paul is not speaking interchangeably about the Godhead - no one comes into the knowledge of the Father except through the knowing the Son (Jn 14:6; 17:1-26). Instead, he has begin his letter with an outline of the Father’s plan THROUGH His Son Jesus, a big part of which is our redemption, or the Father’s plan to bring all of humanity together in “Him” (1:3-8) or, Jesus - but even greater is His desire to bring all of heaven and earth together in “Him” (1:9-10). The key phrase to get a feel for Paul’s language is in verse 4 - “He” (the Father) chose us “in Him” (Jesus).
This will be the theme, then, for the rest of the book: We have been chosen by the Father to unite fully as a bride with Christ Jesus and to participate fully, therefore, in all of the stunning plans that will happen through His work and leadership. Paul prays in 1:17-19 that we would understand the full implications of this stunning fact - of who it is that we will be joined to and who we will be (or who we are called to be) when we are fully joined to Him. He then prays after a bit in 3:16-19 that we would comprehend (once these truths sink in) how much Jesus loves us - and that we would be fully transformed internally by His love working by grace in our hearts. THEN, Paul urges us once we connect with these truths to walk worthy (4:1-3) of this calling - and proceeds to give believers practical advice on how to walk out his exhortation daily (ch. 5-6).
Okay! Back to 1:17-19. Paul goes on to define with two statements a little bit of what “in Him” (again, Him being Jesus) means for us as believers in 1:11-14, “therefore” (in verse 15), after Paul had heard of their faith in Jesus and corresponding love for the saints (evidence to Paul of a true Holy Spirit work amongst them) he began to pray for them unceasingly that God (the Father) would bring them into a greater measure of supernatural understanding about “Him” whom they had faith in (or, the “Him” of the last 16 verses - Jesus).
Paul then prays that we would come to understand (by grace) the hope of the calling of Jesus; he clarifies that statement in a sense by appealing to us to understand how amazing His (Jesus’) inheritance is - He is going to inherit what Paul would later refer to (Eph. 5:27) as a glorious church, a bride that would be without spot or wrinkle.
Thus the “hope” of our calling is knit to who Jesus is laboring for us to BE, not what we are being called to DO. When we lay hold of the high vision of who Jesus wants us to be and what He wants us to participate in, it changes everything.
Paul understood that if we also came into an understanding of the “exceeding greatness of His power” towards us who have set our heart to say “yes!” to that calling, we would not lose heart along the way. Because of our proneness to come short we have a corresponding proneness to give up or become discouraged - to lose heart or lose hope. When we understand the vast power that is at work FOR us THROUGH Jesus that we might come into our calling, it encourages us to not lose heart but to keep going in obedience, diligence, faithfulness, and (as Paul called it in Col. 1:11) patience and long suffering with joy.
December 13th, 2006
“The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first. That is how revival comes. That must also be true of us as individuals. It should not be our ambition to be as much like everybody else as we can, though we happen to be Christian, but rather to be as different from everybody who is not a Christian as we can possibly be. Our ambition should be to be like Christ, the more like Him the better, and the more like Him we become, the more we shall be unlike everybody who is not a Christian”
- Martin Lloyd-Jones, Introduction to the Beatitudes
When I posted my first little blurb on how odd it felt to do a “blog” that no one could read at the time (my website had not launched yet), I made sure that this quote by Lloyd-Jones found a prominent place. It perfectly captured my desire to be both like and unlike. That is my hope with this, what I now call a “wordcast“, for reasons that would be understood to those who read this space regularly. My foremost hope in writing is to establish something that is both familiar yet still greatly dissimilar to what constitutes normative Christianity in the west at the end of the age.
In sharing my heart in this space on a continual basis, I want to do more than give a daily “play-by-play” of what life is like lived in a 24/7 prayer context. The prayer room is more than a place to talk with God and wrestle through my struggles to pray without ceasing. It is a greenhouse, a prayer furnace in which Jesus cultivates hearts and lives to match a message that is necessary for the hour that is coming. It is a veritable petri dish of divine ideas in their formative stages within hungry hearts that are on a journey to know Him. Where there were at one time only two or three from this particular prayer room that chronicled their lives and hearts via this medium on a regular basis, there are now over 40-50 from IHOP-KC that have jumped into this world of wordcasting.
I want to talk about both aspects of life in a prayer room - the internal and external aspects. I will throw in the occasional “aside” to give an idea of what I’m staring at as we approach the end of things as we know them to be. It’s amazing to me how normal we can be while staring massive societal disruption in the face. It is important that you know that about me - I have a firm conviction that we are living in the last generation of this age.
That conviction is going to shift the paradigm and color the commentary of everything that I write, say, and live. You may not fully connect with what these thoughts are about until you connect with what I believe. You don’t have to necessarily agree, but it’s good to know where I am coming from.
Bless you on your own journey - hopefully into the depths of the heart of Jesus. I’d like to meet you along the way and be a little helpful if I can.
Here are some great posts to get you started:
Change the Earth
He Who spoke it will accomplish it
A Life Well Lived
Summary of my view of the End-Times
Sermon on the Mount Series
Dangerous Responses to Barrenness in Prayer
David Sliker
March 2007
December 9th, 2006
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