Unity

Hi Everyone! Hope you're enjoying the beautiful Holiday! Last week was such a wonderful time of worship and prayer. We could really sense the hunger of everyone in the room for more of God. And everyone seemed to press into His presence to worship Him and really intercede on behalf of our city. Its wonderful how the Lord can partner up people through prayer and worship. I am still getting to know many of the people who have been coming to our meetings, but last week it was so easy to feel how we are all united with the same Spirit! And I thought it was so fitting that we spent some time last week praying for the unity of the Body in Binghamton. We are believing that the Lord is going to use this House of Prayer, and all the prayers lifted up all over the city, to bless the churches here with an increase of unity among them. We know that God's heart is that as His people we would "be brought to complete unity." Let it be so Lord!
See you all tomorrow at 7pm at the City Light Cafe.
Blessings!
Deanna

Contending for Intimacy

This post is from Lindsey...
Hey everyone!
Just a reminder, inviting everyone out for two hours of worship and intercession tomorrow, 5/18/10, at 7pm at the City Light Cafe, across from First Assembly and next to the Forum.

It's been so awesome to see what God has been doing at each and every meeting. They are all so unique! Last week, God did something really different through the meeting. To be perfectly honest, (well, on my end of things) it was hard. It was hard to sing. It was hard to rejoice. It was hard to pray. And many of us felt some intense spiritual warfare going on in the room, which was pretty sobering. But I love how God uses the warfare. It brought me, personally, back to the basics of asking the question, "why do we do what we do? What is the purpose of BHOP?" This is not a performance, or an event, or a concert. This is more than just a prayer meeting. This is a steady movement of intimacy. It's a place of receiving a greater revelation of His deep love for us, and learning to live extravagantly devoted to Him. It's the Mary of Bethany spirit, of seeing His worth, and freely giving everything we have and laying it down at His feet for the sake of having and knowing Him. And with that comes great opposition. A good friend reminded me a couple weeks ago, that it's in the realm of intimacy that the attacks from the enemy are the greatest, because out of that place, healing, restoration, power, life, deliverance, unspeakable joy, solidification in boldness and courage are brought forth. Once you begin to have even a teeny-tiny understanding of how much you are treasured by the King, a contagious transformation into freedom begins. It's in the fiery, dangerous grounds of deep intimacy where we want to be found day after day, week after week. Will you join us?
Lindsey

Intimacy first...

We had a wonderful opening night last week and we hope many of you will join us for worship and intercession tomorrow night! We will be meeting every week from 7-9pm on Tuesdays at the City Light Café, across the street from First Assembly. Come, join us and invite anyone who might be interested! I think as I try to update this blog weekly about what is going on at BHOP-NY, I am going to take some time to explain a little bit about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and to describe our vision in a little more depth. So in this posting I want to describe one aspect of our prayer meetings that is so important to our vision. We use two prayer formats during our prayer meetings that are part of the Harp and Bowl model. The first one we do is Worship with the Word. During that set we pray and sing through a portion of scripture. It is a time for people to worship the Lord, dig deeper into a scripture by singing it and praying it back to Him, and a time for intimate communion with Jesus. The second prayer set we do is Intercession. During this set we pray for our city, our churches, and our nation. We also try to have times of small group prayer and prayer ministry for anyone in the room. At this time we are only having one prayer meeting a week and we split the time evenly between the two prayer sets. Our hope is that one day we will have many more prayer meetings going on so that much more prayer is being lifted up to the Lord. Sometimes after our prayer meetings it feels like the time has flown by and our prayers can seem so insignificant. And to some it might seem like a waste of time to spend half of the meeting praying and singing through a Scripture (Worship with the Word). But the reason we do it that way is that we are establishing something here. We are building a foundation that the Lord can build upon. I believe that if we are faithful in establishing intimacy first, keeping worship, praise and communion with Jesus in first place, then the Lord will grow the intercession into what He desires it to be so that we are partnering with Him to move in our land. One key aspect of our vision is to restore the First Commandment to first place in our lives. We want our intercession to come from a place of faith and our prayers to come from an overflow in our hearts. The only way to have an overflow of faith and love in our hearts is to encounter His heart as we commune with Him. And that is one reason why we start every prayer meeting with Worship with the Word! So our hope is that as more people come and catch the vision, more will begin serving with us, and we will be able to hold more meetings. But until that time, we will be faithful with the vision the Lord has given us, and though our prayers may feel small and weak, we are lifting them up to a Mighty God!