Building Watchman Towers of Prayer and Intercession

God is calling Christians to watch and pray. Are you on your post?

Are you building walls of religion or towers of prayer? Your answer could denote the difference between a woe-filled fate and a fulfilled destiny.

Prophets obsessed by the fear of man or unholy desires will not fulfill God’s ultimate plan. We must be careful, then, not to prophesy according to the party line in order to establish and preserve popularity in ministry circuits. If we fall into this trap we find ourselves in danger of perverting the gift of God by building walls of religion.

True prophets are not always the most popular five-fold ministry gift on the block because they are bold enough to release a word of the Lord that deals with sin or that warns the local church of potentially unpleasant circumstances coming down the proverbial pike. In order to properly carry this mantle, genuine prophets must build towers of prayer.

False prophets build walls of religion that lead people astray with fabricated edification, misleading exhortation and counterfeit comfort. “These evil prophets deceive my people saying, ‘All is peaceful!’ when there is no peace at all! It’s as if the people have built a flimsy wall, and these prophets are trying to hold it together by covering it with whitewash! Tell these whitewashers that their wall will soon fall down” (Ezekiel 13:10 NLT).

Verily, verily, the whitewashed walls of religion are going to come tumbling down in a heap of self-righteous rubble and the false prophets are coming down right along with them. Let’s not forget that Jesus pronounced woe on the Pharisaical hypocrites, calling them whitewashed tombs that look beautiful on the outside but are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean (Matthew 23:27).

You can’t whitewash sin. You can’t whitewash religion. And you certainly can’t whitewash false prophecy. We must guard our hearts in order to maintain a pure prophetic flow and a life of prayer that will wash away the plans of the enemy instead of fortifying his deception by watering down the truth for the sake of acceptance.

True prophets may not always have the flare, charisma or appeal of their false twins, but who said they are supposed to? Jeremiah wasn’t the most popular prophet in his time, nor was Ezekiel in his day. John the Baptist had his head served up on a silver platter for warning the people of the looming decision between everlasting life and eternal hellfire. But they were the unadulterated mouthpieces of God. And so it should be.

One of the key disparities between the true and the false prophet is prayer. The Bible says the foolish prophets discussed in the 13th Chapter of Ezekiel did not stand in the gap or make up a hedge for the house of Israel so that it could endure the battle. These diviners did not intercede in prayer to protect God’s people.

True prophets, by contrast, may not win any popularity contests in the local church, but they will sacrifice to make intercession. Instead of building walls of religion, they build towers of prayer; watchtowers in the spirit that allow them to see the assignments coming against the local church. They take that revelation and use it as spiritual mortar to make up a hedge in prayer.

You can’t separate a prophet from prayer any more than you can separate an evangelist from preaching the Gospel. The very first time you ever see the word “prophet” in the Bible, it is connected to prayer. In the Book of Genesis when Abimelech took Abraham’s wife, the Lord said, “Now return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live…” (Genesis 20:7). So while not every intercessor is a prophet, every prophet is an intercessor.

Consider the prophets of old. They were often called watchmen. Scripture reveals three types of prophetic sentinels whose mission is to stand guard, keep watch and report what they see. We find Old Testament prophets on the walls, walking in the streets of the city and in the countryside.

“I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence…” (Isaiah 62:6) Watchmen on the walls are positioned to see far distances in the spirit and discern whether friend or foe is approaching. The watchman gives word to those in authority so they can decide whether to sound an alarm of welcome or an alarm of war. In today’s local church, these watchmen help protect against enemy attacks. Every prophet is called to this post.

“They surround Jerusalem like watchmen surrounding a field, for my people have rebelled against me, says the Lord,” (Jeremiah 4:17 NLT). This relates to the prophets in the harvest fields. Prophets have a clear role in evangelism as watchmen who protect Gospel-preaching efforts against the destructive work of principalities and powers that keep the lost from hearing the truth. Prophets should be deployed on local church outreaches and international missions to watch, guard, pull down and destroy opposition to the Good News.

“The watchmen found me as they made their rounds in the city” (Song of Solomon 3:3; 5:7 NIV). In today’s times, this watchman is assigned to stand guard over the Body of Christ to see emerging problems. This is a larger responsibility that carries with it a heavier prayer burden and greater implications for the Church at large.

The point is anyone who stands in the five-fold function of prophet should keep their spiritual binoculars around their neck and watch. But not just watch – watch and pray always. Anyone carrying a prophetic mantle needs to closely examine the fruit of his or her ministry. If we have prophesied peace unto popularity, then we need to repent. We need to trade in our whitewash for some substantive mortar and start building towers of prayer that will bring genuine edification, authentic exhortation and legitimate comfort to God’s people.

Let us not be foolish prophets who build our ministries on the sands of seduction for the sake of acceptance because Jehovah promises that rain will pour from the heavens, hailstones will come hurtling down and violent winds will burst forth against those whitewashed walls and expose them (Ezekiel 13:11-12).

Instead, let us build our ministries on the Rock and prophesy the mind of Christ so that when the hurricanes of religion come against the local church and when Jezebel hurls her spiritual sleet at the sanctuary and when the winds of witchcraft blow against the walls, the foundation of our ministries and our local churches will be fortified to stand and withstand in the day of battle.

Jennifer LeClaire is the editor of The Voice magazine. You can visit her online at www.jenniferleclaire.org

Discerning Signs and the Supernatural

By: David Coker

What’s the purpose of supernatural signs that point toward your destination?

God is building and establishing His Kingdom. But He’s not pressured to build His Kingdom using media hype and hocus-pocus. No, He’s doing it His way, according to His Word. He’s setting apostolic governing churches in territories to build His Church. One function of true apostles and prophets is to expose the counterfeit operations of Satan that try to slip in and subvert the credibility of the Word. If Satan can discredit the quality of a move of God by sending the false, he is able to successfully restrict and limit the effectiveness of the true move as it happens. In this season, it is vital that we build everything we do upon the foundation of the Word of God. I’m not trying to criticize any particular move of the past or present. My goal today is to equip you with knowledge and understanding to help identify a true move of God.

Imagine you are driving to your favorite vacation spot. When you get about 30 miles from your destination, you see the first road sign with the city’s name. Do you slam on your brakes, slide across the median and jump out at the sign? I would hope not! Yet, in the body of Christ, it seems we have become sign hunters. At the first sign of a “miracle” or the “supernatural,” we bring everything to a screeching halt so that we can take pictures of the sign, dance around the sign, and even build churches to the sign. How foolish we have become! The sign’s purpose is to reveal location. Spiritual signs are no different. When you see a spiritual sign, it is not advertising itself, it is merely pointing the way to where God wants you to go.

Jesus said in Matthew 12:39, “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas.” Jesus didn’t say they were “slightly in error.” He called them EVIL and ADULTEROUS! What He is saying is that if you are seeking after a sign, you are showing love for the sign rather than the one who gives the sign. You are actually cheating on the truth. You are adulterous, looking for benefits from something that you don’t have real relationship with.

How many churches and “revivals” have become so “sign” minded that they have become adulterers to the Truth?

In our media-sensitive world, we have billboards everywhere and they can distract us from our real focus. If we’re looking too intently at a billboard, we could miss a signal from another driver and cause a wreck. When the sign becomes the focus, we lose sight of the true destination.

In the Old Testament, people had to live by signs. They didn’t have a born-again spirit from God to give them direction through an inner witness (Eph. 3:16). They needed outward signs from God in order to know where to go and what to do. Moses followed a cloud of fire and Gideon set out fleeces, but Paul simply prayed in tongues and built up his inner man (1 Cor. 14:18). He then proceeded to write two thirds of the New Testament! In Proverbs, David prophetically writes that the spirit of a man is the candle of the Lord and searches all the inward parts of the belly. As New Testament Christians with the nature and Spirit of God resident in us, we don’t have to look for outward signs. We can simply know in our “knower.” We are to walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7), meaning we follow the leadings and promptings of the Spirit that dwells in us.

The New Testament not only tells us which signs are from God, it even lays out which signs are used in which situations. There are signs that follow believers (Mark 16:17), there are signs to the unbeliever (1 Cor. 14:22), and there are gifts of the Spirit that are operations of the government and power of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12, and Ephesians 4).

Signs come from different sources and serve different purposes. Some are road signs that regulate driving, some are billboards that advertise, and some are identifiers that tell what and where things are located. All of these signs are legitimate, but they aren’t all from the same people. In the supernatural, there are all kinds of signs but they aren’t all from God. How do you know the difference between a legitimate sign from God and just a billboard?

One Sunday as I was preaching in my church, just as I pointed at one of the ceiling fans someone happened to turn the fan on. Now I know people who would take it as a sign that the “wind of the Spirit is moving.” No, it was just a coincidence. I call these “Santa Claus signs” because it’s like a young kid that convinces himself Santa is real because the milk and the cookies are gone the next morning when he wakes up. When you want something badly enough, circumstances can always line up to support your hopes that it is true. If you’re looking for a sign, the devil will make sure you see one. I absolutely believe in prophetic and supernatural signs, but I also know how to measure them against my born-again spirit.

I’ve known family members and friends – good people, many of whom sincerely loved Jesus – who visited psychics. Those psychics were able to tell them why they were there, what they were looking for and what the outcome of a situation would be, and it all came true. Does that mean you should visit a psychic? By all means NO! Psychics operate with the help of demonic, familiar spirits, not the Holy Spirit. Demonic power can be real, not just a powerless imitation.

Nowhere in scripture do we find signs of jewels appearing, gold dust falling, people being led to act like animals, stigmatas (blood or oil from peoples hands like the wounds of Christ), odd “friendships” with angels, or special angels that carry special anointings. These are “billboard” signs that have been put up by other supernatural powers but don’t fit into God’s reality. The important thing to understand is that these false signs are just as real as the other signs. Have you ever followed billboard signs, looking for a certain restaurant or café, only to get there and find that the location doesn’t exist? Just because a sign is real, doesn’t mean it’s from God or that it’s pointing you to God. Many signs point you to dead ends. It’s important to remember that there is a real spiritual world out there, and God isn’t the only one putting signs up on your spiritual road.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve seen God do some very interesting things. I’ve seen people healed, delivered, and set free. I’ve seen miracles that simply cannot be explained. However, there is one common element to everything God does… His Word. God’s response is always in line with His Word. And His Word will bring real transformation in the lives of His people.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that people can be completely ignorant and still operate in the Spirit. I once worked for a great man of God. He loved Jesus and wanted to live right before Him. One time he was in the hospital with pneumonia and had a vision of the Lord Jesus Christ walking up a hill with His back beaten and bloody. He recounted this vision to me with such detail, recalling even the sharp contrast in the red blood against the green grass. I have no doubt that it was a true vision from God. The problem was that he was ignorant in how to interpret the vision. He thought that it meant that since Jesus was willing to suffer that much for him, then he should be willing to suffer pneumonia for Jesus. How sad! He was given a vision showing that Jesus had already carried his sickness and healed all his diseases to strengthen his faith, but because he lacked understanding, this man got it all wrong!

I’ve known other folks who genuinely loved God, but got distracted by the bright billboard strategies of Satan. These good people wanted to experience a mighty move of God so badly that they got caught up in the flakiness of whatever the current “revival” was doing. I have watched many get excited about “something new” and then disappointed (and sometimes deeply wounded) over the outcome. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen plenty of these people who became so deceived by the trickery that they completely lost touch with God’s plan for their lives. Consider William Branham, the great healing evangelist of the 1940’s. He started off pursuing God, but then started experiencing visitations from angels. He became so deceived that he started to think he was Elijah the prophet. Because of his deception, many other believers began to doubt that God really wanted them healed. Now that is exactly what the enemy intends; to discredit God’s reality, destroy ministries, and turn people away from the Faith.

Any text that we take out of context is a pretext. The same goes for any sign. Any sign taken out of the context that it was received (good or bad) is a pretext and can get us into trouble. That’s the problem with living by signs. They can be interpreted incorrectly. They can come from the wrong people. We can build a temple and worship at the sign, never making it to our God-purposed destination. We MUST learn to walk by faith after the Spirit. We must understand how to discern signs and compare them to our instruction manual. We must keep our focus on where God is taking us and not get caught up in the supernatural things around us on the way.

David Coker has a refreshing voice and the heart of spiritual father. He is a 1985 RHEMA graduate and the founding apostle of Gateway Believers Fellowship in Carnesville, Ga. He is also pioneered Breakthrough Apostolic Ministries Network (B.A.M.), A relational network of apostolic ministries. His ministry can be reached at www.gatewaybelievers.com.

Revival All Over The World

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