Two years ago the Lord led our household to pray through the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations – twice. And then three times. It took us over 250 days to pray through 171 chapters.

The abiding theme of that season (which is all the more intensely upon us in the fall of 2023) was/is HUMILITY • CONTRITION • REPENTANCE • FEAR of the LORD.

Beloved. This is the hour of judgment and the threshing floor of the Lord. If we didn’t hear and respond to the trumpet of the Lord in 2020, He’s making sure we hear it today. There isn’t another route to being prepared for the Day of His return. The Isaiah 40 road leads us through His threshing floor. This is the meaning of the prophets’ cry: “All flesh is grass.” (Isaiah 40:6-8)

“The voice said, “Cry out!” And he said, “What shall I cry?” “All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, because the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.” (Isaiah 40:6-8)

The threshing floor is where we discover that “humility, contrition, repentance, and the fear of the Lord” is more than a theme we post on a banner at our six-hour prayer rally. They are the Lord’s dynamic wisdom for how to carry our lives through the (Matthew 3:12) fire of the moments before Y’shua’s arrival.

“His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” (Matthew 3:12)

Over the last 3 years I’ve said it hundreds of times – if we’re not in a New Covenant small group, fellowship, house church or mission that is bringing, training and encouraging each other onto the threshing floor of the Lord our hearts will not survive/endure the refining fire that’s on the earth right now.

If you hear yourself saying: “This sounds too intense, and too radical…” let me tell you from (a lot of) experience – the voice of our flesh always looks for a way around the threshing floor.

Truth-be-told, our flesh often knows more than our theological head, or sentimental heart will acknowledge: the threshing floor of the Lord is a place where people die. EVERY part of our lives goes through the winnowing process – and we don’t come out the way we went in. The flesh “senses” this reality like a dog knows when he’s being taken to a bath.

My advice? Try dragging your flesh into the Lord’s mill as you sing the hymn by Katharina​​​​​​ Von Schlegel: “Be still, my soul, the Lord is on thy side; bear patiently, the cross of grief or pain…”

I honestly tremble that THIS is the Word/prayer that we prayed 2 years ago today. On October 29th, we prayed through Jeremiah chapter 13… The Lord had me transpose it, contextualize it, and pray it as though Daniel was pray/reading it…

Friends. The threshing floor was never meant to be a corrective for a flash-point of moral crisis. The threshing floor is a prophetic and integral part of where the Spirit ALWAYS intended for the American, end-time “prayer movement” to operate…

Jeremiah 13:
8 Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying,
9 “Thus says the Lord: ‘In this manner I will ruin the pride of (My people)
10 who refuse to hear My words, who follow the dictates of their hearts…
11 …I have caused (this people) to become My people, for renown, for praise, and for glory; but they would not hear.”
12 Therefore you shall speak to them this word:
13 ‘Thus says the Lord: ‘Behold, I will fill all the inhabitants of this land… the priests, the prophets, and all the inhabitants with drunkenness!
14 And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together,” says the Lord. “I will not pity nor spare nor have mercy, but will destroy them.”
15 Hear and give ear: do not be proud, for the Lord has spoken.
16 Give glory to the Lord your God before He causes darkness, and before your feet stumble on the dark mountains, and while you are looking for light, He turns it into the shadow of death and makes it dense darkness.
17 But if you will not hear it, My soul will weep in secret for your pride; My eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears, because the Lord’s flock has been taken captive.
18 Say to the (leaders), “Humble yourselves; sit down, for your rule shall collapse, the crown of your glory.
19 The (people) shall be wholly carried away captive.
20 …Where is the flock that was given to you, your beautiful sheep?”
21 What will you say when He punishes you? For you have taught them to be chieftains, to be head over you.
22 “And if you say in your heart, ‘why have these things come upon me?’ For the greatness of your iniquity…
24 I will scatter them like stubble that passes away by the wind of the wilderness.
25 This is your lot, the portion of your measures from Me,” says the Lord, “Because you have forgotten Me and trusted in falsehood.
26 Therefore I will uncover you that your shame may appear.
27 I have seen your adulteries. Woe to you! Will you still not be made clean?”

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JSB • October 29, 2023

NOTE: Right now, the Lord is lovingly, but firmly, holding our part of the prayer-movement over the open fire of His holiness. He’s “testing” the hearts of millions of His sons and daughters:
“How in the world are you going to stand in vibrant righteousness with Jacob through the intense “trouble” that’s boiling in the world, if you can’t even stand with each other in your own broken crisis of leadership?”

As a pastor/director of a House of Prayer, I am (very) often asked, “WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A HOUSE OF PRAYER?”

Often, the context of the question doesn’t allow me to give an answer as full as the one below. But after doing “House of Prayer” for 22 years, this one is the most succinct, on-target definition I’ve arrived at yet:

CULTIVATING INCREASED JEALOUS HUNGER FOR THE MANIFEST GLORY OF JESUS CHRIST TODAY is the House of Prayer’s prophetic mandate.

The Holy Spirit is engendering preeminent hunger and jealously for Y’SHUA of Nazareth’s glory in this hour within the Church and communities across the earth, in order to prepare a generation – a generation who will cry: “Maranatha!” – and help transition this age of the curse, to the next age where this anointed and promised King will reign supreme.

The One Who will inaugurate this new age is at the door of human history. He is ready to break in. When He does, He will judge, vehemently break, and entirely eradicate the curse wherever it’s found – in us (His household), in the lukewarm, and the godless in this world. (See Psalm 2:9)

He will reign forever victorious over sickness and death. He will reign forever victorious over darkness and the devil. He will reign forever victorious over sin, compromise and faithlessness.

He’s the Enemy of every enemy of love. He’s the Father’s Chosen Leader. He’s the King Who will rule every nation, tongue, tribe and family. He’s the Promised Lord the prophets have told us about. He’s the One Who will govern the earth from the geographical city of Jerusalem, in the nation of Israel. He’s perfect in love. He’s perfect in justice. He’s perfect in delegation of resource. He knows how to bring out the best in each of us, individually, nationally, and collectively. What’s more, He’s perfectly selfless; perfectly humble; perfectly confident; and perfectly zealous. He laid down His own life for each of us. His character of perfect love and holiness is precisely what our hearts have always longed for in a Leader. (Haggai 2:7) He’s perfect integrity. And He’s the only One worthy to hold the title deed of the whole earth. (Revelation 5:8-9)

Therefore, it’s only right that it be HIS GLORY that fills the earth.

It will beloved… It will!

Today, it’s SO WISE to “kiss the Son”. (Psalm 2:11) Today, it’s SO WISE to submit all of our issues (Family, government, evangelism, business, culture, race, exhilaration of the heart, conspiracies, sickness, bondage, economics etc.) to His manifest reign. (We do this through “prayer” and “intercession”.)

NOTHING will escape the scope of His rule.

“Prepare the way of the Lord! Every valley SHALL be exalted and every mountain and hill brought low. The crooked places SHALL be made straight, and the rough ways WILL be made smooth… The glory of the Lord IS about to be revealed. And all flesh WILL see it together.” (Isaiah 40:3-5)

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JSB • September, 2023

“The JUDGMENTS OF THE LORD are true and righteous altogether; more to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover by them Your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward.” (Psalm 19:9-11)
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The New Testament Church in our nation (my tribe) has been under a season of intensified judgment from the Lord. David (in Psalm 19 above) tells us this is a good thing. It’s not something irregular, or something we should be alarmed about. What should concern us is when we (for any number of reasons) believe that the Father does not or will not bring us under His judgment.

There are 5 Biblical reasons why the Lord brings judgment to His people. This is a major reason we wrote our book, “Seek My Face”. All of these reasons are designed to produce maximum joy-filled receptivity to the Son and His return at the end of this age.

When a people refuse to respond to the Lord’s judgments in humility, contrition, and repentance five other things happen in our lives, and in our world:

1. WE DO NOT GROW IN FIRST COMMANDMENT LOVE FOR JESUS. The judgments are meant to produce dialogue. And dialogue produces intimacy and increased love and adoration for Jesus and the ways of His heart. When we do not give ourselves to His judgments (the things He wants to have conversation with us about) our love for Him is stunted and stalls.

2. SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS GOES UNCHECKED and actually proliferates in our lives and relationships. The curse around us (in our lives and in our world) compounds. A pound of sin never sits quietly in the corner. Sin will always corrupt and grow unless checked. Evil begets evil. Unrighteousness begets unrighteousness.

The old saying: “There is no honor among thieves” depicts the fact that those who give themselves to sin will, as a natural result, have more sin visited upon them. If we could see it clearly, we’d understand that this is a basic law of physics – as real as gravity – and more weighty than time. It’s only by the mercy of God that sin and the curse of sin doesn’t exponentially envelope us and consume all 7.5 billion of us on planet earth. This causal result has massive implications for the Church on nine different levels; from our pursuit of devotion to God, to how we serve others, to our experience of unity in the body.

3. WE FAIL TO GROW IN CHRISTLIKENESS. Our manifestation of Christ in and through us grows dim – it does not grow more vibrant. Apart from humbling ourselves, taking up our cross and obeying the Father, we have no means by which to cultivate true, authentic and Spirit-empowered Christ-like wisdom, character and supernatural power.

4. OUR UNSAVED WORLD DOES NOT RECEIVE A WITNESS of how to respond to the holy and loving Lord of all the earth. When the judgments of the Lord are on the earth, the inhabitants don’t have a ready-paradigm and example that informs them about how to respond to this God that they have not known. This is the chief reason why the Lord brings His judgments to His household first… (See 1 Peter 4:17-18)

5. THE LORD WILL VISIT US WITH INCREASED “TROUBLE” in order to stimulate us to vital conversations about our patterns of thinking, and the ways of our hearts. He does this because He’s committed to us living in vibrant, and righteous love. He also does this because He’s promised an “equally-yoked” Bride (See Philippians 2 and 1 John 3) to His Son at the end of the age.

To be blunt, this means that if we don’t respond to Him with humble, contrite conversation, He will up the ante. He will place more and more intense pressure upon us, in terms of greater social upheaval, trouble and natural calamity, in order to get us to stop trusting in our own way, and our own thinking, and get us to entertain the idea of coming to Him in our “inability”. Under this construct many eventually turn Him for help simply because we have lost our capacity to control our circumstances.

Ultimately, should we continue to rebuff the Lord’s judgments, He will give us over to delusion and the forces of unrighteousness that by nature would consume us anyway. The ultimate end of this state is to come deluded to THE DAY of judgment and have no awareness that your soul was so lost, and you were so detached from the heart of Jesus. (We don’t wanna be the guys in Matthew 7:23 and Matthew 25:44)

Consequently, I can say with great confidence: increased trouble and pressure is coming. It’ll come upon us – in our generation. It will come because the Father loves us and is committed to us – and to the promise that He’s made to His Son. This isn’t rocket science. This isn’t even being prophetic. It’s simply knowing God; know the record and intent of His Word, and doing the math.

Today is a very good day to cultivate that needed lifestyle conversation with the Lord; to humble ourselves, to embrace the spirit of contrition, and to repent into all that Biblical repentance entails. It would do us well for the fear of the Lord and our heart’s desire for increased first-commandment love to constrain us in this.

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JSB • September, 2023

Beloved, if we build a church culture…
…that has no practical theology of cross-bearing; 
…that does not put corporate prayer at the center of our life in God; 
…that tells each other that we will not go through great tribulation;
…that believes the best we can know about God’s end-time storyline, is that “it’ll all work out”
…that lacks appreciation for the Father’s zeal to give His Son a prepared Bride;
…that minimizes the connection between the antiChrist spirit and the beatitudes;
…that places no accountability upon false prophets;
…that is strident in our own self-justification; 
…that develops no Biblical understanding of the corporate judgments of the Lord;
…that, when in crisis, reflexively criticizes and condemns the lost instead of “seeking the Lord”,
will we not be a people who are dangerously built on sand?

Father of glory. Do what You need to do to show us where we’re building. Don’t let us escape this vital conversation with You, Father!

Paul can boldly admonish his sisters and brothers in Christ: “O foolish Galatians! Who has BEWITCHED you?” in (Galatians 3:1) because he has GREAT confidence in the power of the antidote he has just given them in the previous two verses: 
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain.” (Galatians 2:20-21)

Beloved, the crucified life is STILL the pure, and much needed antidote to the witchcraft that’s beguiling so many of our American evangelical family members in our day.

The crucified life isn’t about learning a trick to navigate our world. It’s about being clothed with a Man; His heart, His Spirit, and His death (2 Corinthians 4:10) so that His resurrection power and His Kingdom can be released through us “as far as the curse is found”.

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JSB • August, 2023

A great fire of the Lord is here. 

“Even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matthew 3:10) Behold. “The time is near.” (Revelation 1:3)

Alert My people! Tell them now is the hour to come into My refining fire, and I will give them pure adoration, hope and faith in My Son; the Worthy One. 

Just as there is more furniture to arrange in a rich house than a poor house, there is MUCH to be tested and adjusted among a people of plenty.

There is also an abundance of mercy to be had. Know that you are in need of it. Do not be like the Laodiceans whose wealth blinded them from the knowledge that they needed to receive “gold refined in the fire” (Revelation 3:16) from Me.

Who will come to My Son’s (Matthew 3:11) fire today to be refined unto His holy, ascending glory?

“We know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” (1 John 3:2-3) 

Who wants pure love? 
Who wants pure fidelity? 
Who wants pure hope?

Who will die to make themselves pure for My Son?
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JSB • July 15, 2023

It’s 3:00 in the afternoon, and I’m re-reading Tom Stolz’s profound last chapter from Y’shua: The Only Hope for Israel AGAIN. (See the quote accompanying this article.)

One of the things that strikes me about WHY WE PRAY FOR ISRAEL, is because when I (as a German/American gentile) am praying for Israel, I am praying for someone other than me and my kind. I am not “looking out for my own interests” (Philippians 2:4), I am acting as the “servant” of the Father’s desire, just like Jesus did. “I am among you as a servant.” (Luke 22:27)

In my willingness to be “other focused”, I am not only resisting the tempters ubiquitous snare of “self-promotion”, I am not only operating against the grain of the curse of enmity (that Tom describes so well), I am not only operating in benevolent, self-sacrificial love, I am operating the way the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit ALWAYS relate to each other; “preferential love for the Other”.

Praying for Israel is saying, as Thomas A’Kempis observes in his book, “The Imitation of Christ”: “Taking up the most blessed place of all – to humble yourself, put yourself in the lowest place and become the servant of all.”

Frequently, when asked to pray for Israel, I hear well-meaning, moral Christians pray kind prayers that will eventually include a line that needs to assert “the Jews are no more special than any other people-group. God loves everyone equally.”

Truth-be-told, I don’t believe the Lord has ever heard anyone utter those words and not understood it as their homogenizing attempt to save their own tribe from being overlooked and relegated to second-class.

This attitude is the same self-adulating spirit that animated the disciples as they argued over who was the greatest. (Luke 22:24)

It’s also the same self-elevating spirit that spouts the reptilian response: “All Lives Matter”, when besieged, and fearful racial groups are asking for compassion and understanding.

God sees through these thin pieces of self-salvation and declares them “ichabod”. There’s no glory of the Lord in them, because there is no likeness of the Lord in this kind of thinking.

The question that the Lord asks, and the question that the gentile Church is confronted with in praying for Israel is, “My son, my daughter, can you leave your self-clamoring heart with Me, cease your tribal striving and consider others as greater than yourself?”

When the Lord sent the Holy Spirit to dwell within the multi-ethnic church at Pentecost it was not His attempt to make the Church into a collection of generic, mutually affirming equals. In fact it was precisely the opposite. The Baptism of the Holy Spirit empowered individual believers in Y’shua to live and dwell together in the manner of God Himself; “not considering that anything was their own” (Acts 4:32). Ha. They were even empowered to live with another man’s language in their mouths. (Acts 2:8)

Peter stepped to the microphone that day with no thought to the number of roosters that might crow; no care for who might be reporting him to the magistrates who had dragged his Lord away only weeks earlier. He was entirely selfless, crucified, dead and buried unto Holy Spirit empowered, enmity-shattering, “other-focused” agape.

Here’s the upside down, make our head explode part: Peter’s message that day wasn’t “Hey. All of our lives are equally valuable.” His message was just the opposite: “Repent. None of our lives merit worth and esteem. None more than another. And none less. WE ALL CRUCIFIED THE LORD OF GLORY. We all need our egos pierced to the heart. We all need to repent. We all need to be baptized into covenant death with this Man.”

The only flesh the Holy Spirit can occupy is dead flesh. He hasn’t come to revive the faltering. He’s come to make that which has been dead and buried ALIVE!

Being black and saying BLM is no different than not being black and saying All Lives Matter. They’re both expressions of dead flesh trying to save something that’s not worth saving.

I hope that’s not a novel idea to you. Because it’s the essence of the gospel. NONE of US are worth saving! Apart from His steadfast “chesed” we all live in the land of being the enemies of God. EVERYTHING that is gain to us comes through His mercy. EVERYTHING.

Philippians 2:3-4 is the beginning of the Kingdom living:

“Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.”

From this posture when we’re called to pray for Israel, and we hear of the Lord’s great love and passionate zeal for Israel, we aren’t filled with prideful rebuttal and jealousy. (Indeed, this is the spirit of the devil in its purest form.)

Instead, because we’re filled with the Philippians 2 mind of Christ, we pray selflessly for Israel SIMPLY BECAUSE OUR LORD HAS COMMANDED US TO “Pray for Israel”. And in praying we are saying, “I’m a dead man. My people are by all rights a dead people. I’ve put myself in the lowest place, and correctly esteemed my self, and my own tribe as nothing, and am nothing but a servant who has come to do Your will O Lord.”

Family of God, we will never achieve the value of “all” by esteeming each other’s intrinsic worth. This is the hallmark of Babel, not Jesus’ Kingdom. In the Kingdom of the Triune God, we will only achieve HIS VALUE OF ALL by esteeming ourselves as nothing – patiently waiting until our Lord should bid us to the head of the table. (Luke 14:10)

This is the only way for the tenacious curse of enmity to be purged from our souls and our relationships with others. This is the selfless love that will win the heart of Israel. This is the selfless love that looks like (Ephesians 5:26-27) “maturity in the Bride”. This is the selfless love that will herald a Jewish messiah to return to extend His supreme and sovereign reign over every heart and tribe and nation.

Let’s serve the Lord! Let’s pray for Israel!
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JSB • May, 2023