I am sharing the first part of my communion time which focused on having answered prayer.

The Holy Spirit continually desires to expand our thought processes, enlarge our desires, and fill us with the Lord’s way of doing things and being right. He wants to bring us beyond our natural ways of thinking so that we can understand spiritual realities and cooperate with Him in experiencing the Lord’s purposes in our lives.

This morning, I was reminded of something the Holy Spirit spoke to me while I was ministering in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to a group of intercessors who had gone through a very difficult season of not receiving answers to prayer. They desperately needed encouragement, strengthening, and lifting so that they could continue meeting together and remain steadfast in interceding for the country.

The message the Holy Spirit gave me for them remains deeply relevant because discouragement is one of the enemy’s strategies for taking the Lord’s people off track because discouragement can make us misinterpret what the Lord is saying. We must understand that when our prayers seem unanswered while problems continue mounting, the experience can become extremely demoralising and heart-wrenching to the point where it begins to look as though the Lord does not care, or that He is deliberately ignoring the situation, or that He has abandoned those who are praying.

However that is certainly not the reality, so the answer is not in us concluding that the Lord has stopped listening. Instead, we must refocus our attention on the Holy Spirit and allow Him to show us the way forward from where we have fallen. The Holy Spirit always has a clear pathway available for us that brings us back to spiritual reality which restores us back to an awareness of how great our God is and how powerfully He is able to intervene in negative circumstances.

The Lord is able to change situations miraculously as He always makes the impossible possible by His mighty hand. Therefore, when discouragement begins to tell us that nothing is happening, we must resist that interpretation and turn our attention back to the asking the Holy Spirit for the necessary wisdom to move forward. He can show us what is happening spiritually and reveal the pathway into the manifestation of what the Lord has promised regardless of where we missed it.

The Holy Spirit gave a particular revelation while teaching these intercessors about “all kinds of prayers in the Spirit” from Ephesians 6:18. The revelation was that prayer is a seed that we sow to the Lord in the Spirit, while the answer to prayer is the harvest that we must also reap in the Spirit. This instantly revealed what had been happening to the intercessors because they had been praying intensely and fervently in the Spirit as they were faithfully sowing their prayer seeds. However, they had become very negligent when it came to reaping the harvest in the Spirit.

It was made clear to them that when the time came for the harvest, they repeatedly responded in the flesh. So instead of remaining spiritually alert and cooperating with the Holy Spirit, they were acting according to the flesh when the harvest was due. This had resulted in strife, arguments, and conflict, amongst them and consequently they were not seeing the results for which they had prayed for happening, because they were sowing continually but were not reaping which revealed clearly that the problem was not that the Lord was unwilling to answer.

The problem was that they were failing to participate with the Holy Spirit in the spiritual process required to receive the harvest. One of the most important parts of the revelation was that they were not watching in the Spirit as the time of harvest approached because although they were spiritually alert when they were praying, they were not maintaining that same spiritual watchfulness when it was time to reap the harvest of answered prayer. Consequently, they were continually caught off guard by the enemy at harvest time.

Their fleshly reactions at critical moments were interfering with the manifestation of what they had been praying for. So when this truth was shared with them, something remarkable happened the eyes of each persons heart were opened and there was a noticeable sense of relief in the atmosphere because they suddenly understood what had been happening.

They realised that their situation did not mean that the Lord had stopped hearing them of had not abandoned them. It became clear to them that their prayers had not simply disappeared but rather, that there was something they themselves needed to change in the way they were cooperating with the Holy Spirit in order to reap the harvest of answered prayers.

The problem was that they had neglected an important part of their prayer process which was contributing to the lack of manifested answers to their prayers. So once they understood this and made the necessary adjustment, through repentance they could return back to the place of walking in answers to prayer and experience the joy associated with answered prayer. Remember that Jesus always connected prayer and answered prayer with fullness of joy in their lives and that the promise of when we ask we receive, so that our joy becomes full.

Therefore, prayer is not intended to leave us permanently in a cycle of always asking, waiting, with no results which leads to disappointment, and despair. There is a complete cycle to prayer which is that we sow, we wait, by cooperating with the Holy Spirit, to reap the answer, so we experience the joy related to the manifested answer.

The revelation of cooperating with the Holy Spirit in reaping the answer to prayer became a source of light and understanding to the intercessors present who received the revelation. Understanding of this process ignited a renewed passion to walk in closer union with the Holy Spirit so that could be properly positioned to reap what the Lord had prepared for them.

I declare that discouragement will no longer take me off course because I refuse to interpret delayed manifestations as evidence that the Lord has abandoned me, ignored me, or stopped caring about my situation. So I boldly declare that my attention is turning again to the Holy Spirit as He is opening my understanding and showing me the way forward by revealing the pathways through which I will cooperate with the Lord and walk into the manifestation of what has been sown in my prayer times.

I declare that my prayers are not wasted and the seeds I have sown in the Spirit are producing a harvest in answers, so I am receiving more grace to reap in the Spirit what I requested from the Lord. I declare that I will not allow my flesh to interfere with my harvest and that I will never again be caught spiritually unprepared when the answer to my prayers comes due and I will remain watchful, discerning, obedient, and sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Where I have reacted in the flesh, Holy Spirit, please show me and where I have missed Your leading, teach me to turn back quickly in repentance. Where I have stood in the wrong place, please reposition me and where I have failed to recognise the appointed harvest time, awaken my understanding.

I declare that every prayer harvest appointed for my life that I have failed to recognise, receive, or reap is being brought back into the light by the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit for me to now reap in Jesus Name. Amen.