planning quarterly trips to fuel the works we started. It
no glow of faith. There is no mighty pressure, no hold on to God, with a deathless, despairing grasp —"I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me." There is no utter self-abandonment, as there was with Moses, when, lost in the throes of a desperate, pertinacious, and all-consuming plea he cried: "Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin; if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book." Or, as there was with John Knox when he pleaded: "Give me Scotland, or I die!"3
DIVIDING BETWEEN SOUL AND SPIRIT
We all have rough days. Overwhelming days. It's important as a watchman that you learn to quickly divide between soul and spirit. In other words, are we feeling down and out, depressed, or on high alert because we're having a bad day or because we're picking up on a prayer burden that we can't express with mere words? Are we oppressed because we're oppressed? Or are we are feeling the oppression in the atmosphere so we can stand in the gap for a people group?
I'm reminded of a trip to London in March 2020. I went to London to plant Awakening House of Prayer campuses and establish a School of Prophets almost every month during 2019. Our monthly visits were tapering off and we were planning quarterly trips to fuel the works we started. It should have been a victory, but I felt some sort of sting. At first, I could not discern it.
As I was walking to a restaurant down the streets of South London, I began to feel as if I was losing something. I felt like when I left London, I might never return—that I may never walk the streets again. It was overwhelming to the point that I teared up through dinner. I explained to my friend how I was feeling and told her, quite honestly, I
couldn't really put exact words to the feeling and I wasn't sure in that moment if it was my soul or my spirit. I talked it out, then I prayed it out. I also sought the Word.
See, God's Word is an anchor for our soul (see Heb. 6:19). The Word of God keeps us grounded when we feel instability or we aren't sure the source of an emotion. And Hebrews 4:12 tells us:
For the Word that God speaks is alive and full of power [making it active, operative, energizing, and effective]; it is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and [the immortal] spirit, and of joints and marrow [of the deepest parts of our nature], exposing and sifting and analyzing and judging the very thoughts and purposes of the heart (AMPC).
The Word itself divides between soul and spirit. So when you aren't sure if you are having an emotional response to something or it's the Holy Spirit's emotions manifesting as a prayer burden, the first thing to do is get in the Word of God. I didn't know fully what it was for a few days. But about ten days after we left London, Europe went on lockdown due to the coronavirus. It will be many months before we can go back again. But more than that, it's the pain and death people there are experiencing that I was feeling. So I pray.
THE ENEMY'S DECEPTION
The enemy wants us to default to the soul. He wants to trick us into believing the prayer burden is a disturbance in our mind, will, and emotions. He wants us to sit and feel sorry for ourselves and agree with the subtle suggestions