I said that we were on the most rapid learning curve that I've ever seen in the body of Christ
in terms of learning about spiritual warfare, and I was going to also show you some of the
incredible resources that have come out.
I've never seen literature on a new field come out as rapidly as it has since 1990.
I mean this is something fairly new for the whole body of Christ.
And I'll just, some of these books many of you will know about, but really the first
one in 1990 was John Dawson's book called Taking Our Cities for God.
You know this book came out, actually it was published in the end of 89, but it sold in
1990.
This book sold 100,000 copies in one year.
Man, I've never had a book of mine sell 100,000 copies in one year.
And you know, you wonder, you start asking how come, well I'll tell you how come, it's
because just before this book came out, Frank Peretti's novels came out, see?
This Present Darkness and Piercing a Darkness, see?
Now these novels came out, and you know they're still on the bestseller list.
People from Episcopalians to Pentecostals to Baptists to Presbyterians, they're all
reading these things.
And you know, these books of Peretti's, they're fiction, you understand what I mean?
In other words, they're figments of his imagination, you know these demons flapping around and
chopping each other's wings off and angels zapping them and you know, that's all fiction.
But he's asking, he's raising the right questions, see?
People are saying, what is going on out there, is there something going on?
And then John Dawson comes out with the first nonfiction book on it, just suck it right
up like a vacuum cleaner, everybody wants to read that.
And so John Dawson came out with this in 1990.
Also back in those days, I was starting to get into this and I didn't have any books
myself to write, but I looked around the world and found 19 different Christian authors who
were saying something about territorial spirits and strategic level spiritual warfare and
put them together in this book called Engaging the Enemy.
And this book has just been a, just given us a solid foundation for moving on to where
we are now.
You know, as I say, most of us didn't know anything about this before 1990, but a few
people had begun writing about it and their writings are all in here.
And then George Otis Jr. came out with this book, The Last of the Giants.
This is an incredible book.
This is the first book on, what I'll talk more about as we go on, spiritual mapping.
This is a book on macro mapping.
The whole, you know, he talks about the Prince of Persia and the Prince of Greece and the
Garden of Eden and Babylon and all that.
And this is an incredible, incredibly important book.
And then another one that came out right then was Cindy Jacobs book called Possessing the
Gates of the Enemy.
This is, this book was the first one that tells how to do it.
The subtitle is A Training Manual for Militant Intercession.
And Cindy in here tells you, you know, these books tell what it is.
She tells you how to do it.
She also tells you how not to do it because there's a whole chapter in here on flaky intercession.
And somehow, if you don't know it yet, when you get into spiritual warfare, it sort of
attracts the flakes, you know, like, you know, like, like honey attracts bears and, you know,
these flakes kind of come in.
And so Cindy tells us how to recognize these flakes and kind of how to handle them.
And really, a wonderful book.
And then as I started writing my prayer warrior series, the first one that I wrote was Warfare
Prayer.
And actually, this seminar here that we're doing is sort of dealing with the content
of this book.
Tonight, I'll do a seminar on another book and then tomorrow afternoon and tomorrow evening,
you know, just based around the ideas that are contained in the book.
So this book, Warfare Prayer, you have this?
Okay.
If you have this, then, you know, you can you can follow on this seminar with the content
of this book.
And that will that will help you.
I, I now teach all of this, all of these books that I just showed you, I require with my
students in Fuller, I now teach.
Actually in Fuller Seminary, we now have five courses on power ministry.
I don't know any other seminary that has that many.
We have one course on healing, which I teach sometimes and Chuck Craft teaches sometimes.
We're both disciples of John Wimber.
He started that years ago.
We have a course on casting out demons, which Chuck Craft teaches.
We have a course on inner healing, which Chuck Craft teaches.
We have a course on strategic level spiritual warfare, which is what I'm dealing with here
this afternoon, which I teach.
And then next summer, I'm starting a new course on spiritual mapping, which will be brand
new.
I'll talk about that tomorrow afternoon.
At this time, I'm going to talk about spiritual mapping.
In fact, you'll be the first ones ever to hear the introductory lecture to that course.
And I've never done that lecture before.
But in my in my course on spiritual warfare, which I teach in the spring between the winter
and spring quarters, I have John Dawson come in and he helps me teach it.
And I have Cindy Jacobs come in and she helps me teach it as well.
And then in the new one I'm teaching starting next summer, George Otis is going to come
and help me teach that I teach all of these both on the master's level, one course and
another course on doctoral level.
And these people all come in to help me help me teach these courses.
So when I say we're on a learning curve, at least it's at the place now where we're teaching
it in graduate school.
And when Fuller Seminary is able to do it on a I hope a responsible basis and in a way
that that will do that will do justice to the subject and also to be a credit to the
kingdom of God.
So that's part of the learning curve I was talking about.
It was it was a while ago that you know, I can just it's not hard to remember back in
the days when we hardly knew anything about this at all.
On the bottom of page four, I've got an example about Guadalajara, Mexico.
Let me just let me just say a couple words about that.
I was invited to the city of Guadalajara in 1990, which is when this whole thing was starting
to do a church growth technical side of church growth conference for the Church of God down
there, which Pentecostal excuse me, Pentecostal Church of God.
And what they did was they selected their 200 top leaders from the nation, not all the
pastors, but the 200 top leaders, and I was going to spend a week with them teaching them
church growth principles, which I which I did.
And I was really surprised with what I found because I'd never been to Guadalajara before
there.
I found a city of six million people there, second largest city in Mexico, and they had
160 churches.
Now, when I saw that six million people and 160 churches, wait a minute, what's going
on?
It's Latin America.
In 1990, this day and age, there's research has shown that most places in Latin America
have between 10 and 20 percent evangelicals.
And here in Guadalajara, it wasn't even close to that.
I figured that if they even had 5 percent, which is lower than most places do have, if
they even had 5 percent, they should have had 1500 churches, not 160.
And then my mind went to Guatemala, which is just across some boundary line that somebody
drew from Mexico to the south.
And Guatemala is now about 30 percent evangelical.
And I figured if Guadalajara had the same percentage evangelicals that Guatemala had,
instead of 160 churches, they would have 9000 churches.
So I began agonizing.
Why only 160 instead of 9000?
I was agonizing over this.
The Lord kind of showed me, said, you know, he said, suppose you took these 200 Mexican
pastors that I was teaching and put them over on this side of the room.
Now, suppose you took 200 pastors from Guatemala and brought them in and put them on this side
of the room.
Suppose you gave them all the same theology test.
You know what?
They'd all score about the same.
Suppose you gave them all the same test and biblical knowledge.
They score about the same.
Suppose you gave them a test in morality.
They score about the same.
Spiritual life.
They score about the same.
What's the difference?
How come these people represent 160 churches?
These people represent 9000.
And then the Lord showed me.
He said these Mexican pastors are not perpetrators of their situation, they're victims.
They're victims of spiritual forces which have not been broken over these people as
they have in Guatemala.
And since then, I've found out what's happened in Guatemala.
But as they have in Guatemala.
And so these Mexican pastors, they don't need to be scolded.
They don't need to be reprimanded.
They don't need a kick in the pants.
They need deliverance.
Deliverance from these high ranking powers that are over them and blinding the minds
of the people in Guadalajara.
And when I was wrestling through that, I was so upset that I went back to my hotel room
after I did a conference one afternoon and I prayed.
And I said, Lord, what is going on?
Short prayer.
Then I went down.
Then I went down, had a cup of coffee in the hotel.
I hadn't been there five minutes drinking that cup of coffee.
When God showed me the seat of Satan in Guadalajara.
Now, how do you show me that?
I picked up a tourist magazine.
Have a cup of coffee.
And I started going through the tourist magazine.
I found a page that showed me a picture of where the seat of Satan was.
It was in the Plaza Tapatia.
And sure enough, in fact, I actually confiscated the tourist magazine.
Took that page out and then I bought a color postcard with a picture of where the seat
of Satan was.
And here's where it was.
This is the Plaza Tapatia.
And right here, where that red dot is, where the seat of Satan was.
I say, how do you know it's the seat of Satan?
Because here are the points of interest for tourists.
And in this list, number 28 is the Devil's Corner.
The Devil's Corner.
This is the Devil's Corner.
So named and indicated.
Now, I spoke to my chauffeur, another Mexican pastor who was taking me back and forth from
the hotel to the conference.
I said, look, tomorrow, can you come a little early and take me down to the Plaza Tapatia?
I'd like to see the Devil's Corner.
I'd like to see where the seat of Satan is.
And he said, sure.
So he came early.
We started driving down there to the middle of the city, Plaza Tapatia.
About three or four blocks this side of it, when we were getting there, we were driving
in the car and I prayed out loud.
I prayed protection out loud.
And he was driving, looking at this gringo there.
What is the gringo doing?
And let me remind you that I'm fluent in Spanish, so I'm doing all this in Spanish.
And we get to the Plaza Tapatia, park the car, and go and find the Devil's Corner.
And I was appalled at what I saw there.
There was no big banner saying, welcome to the Devil's Corner, folks.
No, not like that.
No man dressed up in a red costume with a tail and horns, you know, a pitchfork running
around scaring people.
Much more subtle than that.
The cement of that beautiful plaza had changed right at the Devil's Corner into marble.
And on the ground, a huge piece of marble was beautifully engraved in that marble, a
compass pointing to the north, the south, the east, and the west.
The geographical Devil's Corner had claimed the whole city.
I mean, I got shivers up and down my spine when I saw it.
So we got back in the car and started going back to the conference and my friend said,
you know, he said, a funny thing happened to me there.
I said, what was it?
He said, you know, I've been to the Plaza Tapatia a hundred times and I never felt what
I felt today.
When I walked in there today, I felt a dark cloud of evil and oppression.
And I said, well, I said, the reason for that is easy.
I said, the first hundred times you went down there, you went as a tourist.
And you know, Satan could care less about tourists going up to Devil's Corner.
I said, but today, for the first time, you went as an invading enemy.
And Satan knew that and you felt the spiritual up.
He said, that's right.
He said, now I see why you prayed protection.
And we drove to the conference.
The Lord protected us.
I began sharing this with these 200 pastors.
You know, I said, their eyes, I never thought of this stuff before.
Naturally, this was 1990.
Nobody was even talking about this, even though they were Pentecostals.
They hadn't they hadn't thought about these kind of things.
And as I talked to this one man right over there stood up, he introduced himself as Sexto
Jimenez.
He was the superintendent of the churches in Guadalajara.
I mean, there were people from all over Mexico.
He was the superintendent from Guadalajara.
And he said he was talking to me, but he was talking to the rest of the pastors.
And he said, you know, he said, I've never heard this before.
I never heard Peter Wagner talk about this.
I never knew anything about what he's talking about.
But I'll tell you one thing about our city.
He said six months ago, 80 of us pastors just decided that we needed to get together and
pray.
And for six months now, we have been praying once a month.
80 of us, we've been praying together.
And he said last Sunday, we baptized 29 people in our church.
It was the highest baptism we have had in the whole history of the church.
So you see what's happening.
I mean, even without instruction, even just I'm going to talk about the unity of the pastors
just in just a few minutes.
Even just the pastors praying together did enough damage to the armament of that strongman
over the city that the harvest began to come in.
It was just a trickle, not a huge amount, but just a trickle.
And nevertheless, that is the kind of results we see when that kind of thing happens.
How much more when we're instructed and intentional and know what we're doing other than just
getting together and praying, which is a wonderful way to start.
Now I'll pick up if I have some time later, I'll pick up on this next item that you see
there about Argentina.
But before I get there, I want to make sure that I deal with the second part.
So turn the next page where you see the heading.
Oh, excuse me.
See page five and six.
Skip them because I've elaborated them on the next section that says the rules for praying
for a city.
So actually what I'm going to do is just an expansion and an elaboration of these rules
for praying for a city.
And we'll see how much of this we can get through by the time our seminar is due to
conclude this afternoon.
By way of introduction, I mentioned when I started and I'll continue to mention that
the only reason that I am into prayer, I'm talking about I personally am into prayer,
is because I have committed my life from day one to world evangelization.
I mean, I told you I spent my career as a missionary and now a professor of missions,
professor of church growth.
Evangelization of the world is my calling from God.
Other people have other callings.
Praise the Lord.
We need all the members of the body, but my calling is evangelism.
So what I am interested in prayer is how the prayer is going to win souls, how through
this more people will become Christians than would otherwise become Christians.
And as we do strategic planning for evangelism, there are three focal points, as you can see
on page one, that we're looking at worldwide.
First is the nation, evangelizing a whole nation.
And the Dawn Ministries is the leader in this, in my opinion, is the worldwide leader in
strategic planning for evangelizing a nation.
Dawn is an acronym for Discipling a Whole Nation, D-A-W-N, Discipling a Whole Nation.
The nation is headed up by Jim Montgomery.
He's in Colorado Springs.
And that's an incredible way of strategizing the evangelization of a nation.
I'm not going to go into it in any detail, but I want to put all of this in context.
A second target is people groups and the AD 2000 movement, which my wife Doris and I are
very much a part of, we're the coordinators of one of the 10 tracks of the AD 2000 movement,
is dealing with the people groups.
John Robb of World Vision is the head of the unreached people's track, and we're doing
a lot of research.
And we've got a catalog out now of over 5,000 people groups, profile of all these people
who are unreached people groups, and who they are, and to figure out how to reach them.
So the AD 2000 movement is doing that.
And in the cities is the third target.
And I've got to say this.
I really believe, don't carry this too far, or misquote me on this, because nations and
people groups are very important targets.
But I believe of all the three, the most important target is cities for the 1990s.
That we're going to win nation, city by city.
We're going to win people groups.
I don't know how it fits, because a lot of these people groups are rural.
That's fine.
Then we got to go rural.
But I'm talking about worldwide evangelization, city after city after city.
I believe the cities are a major target.
That's why I talked about intercession for a city.
That's why I'm talking about rules for praying for a city.
Don't misquote me and say that cities are our only target.
But I believe that God is showing us that for the 80s, for the 90s I should say, the
cities are the chief target.
And God has raised up Edgardo Silvoso and Harvest Evangelism as, to me, by far the state
of the art for developing and planning and strategizing the taking of a city, and particularly
through prayer as the main objective.
When I talk about Argentina, I said if I get to it, I'll at least say something about it.
But Edgardo Silvoso is the one who's designed all these evangelistic things in Argentina.
It's our principal laboratory of experimenting.
When I told you before the break that I sent Doris to Argentina, she went down under the
auspices of Harvest Evangelism and Edgardo Silvoso.
The week before last, I was down there.
Again, Kyle Duncan, who's here, was down there with me last week.
And we were again under the auspices of Harvest Evangelism, because this is, so far as I'm
concerned, the state of the art.
Inside what we're looking at now, misceologically, is what we call the 1040 window.
And that's the reason we call it 1040.
You don't have this picture in your book, so I just stuck this overhead in here, is because
this is 10 degrees north latitude, this is 40 degrees north latitude.
And within this imaginary geographical rectangle are over 90% of the most un-evangelized people
of the world, and the headquarters of all the major non-Christian forces of the world
are within the boundaries of that 1040 window.
And so this is something that has directly to do with spiritual mapping.
And when I get to spiritual mapping a little later on, I'll show you some examples of what
we're doing to find out what the strongholds of the enemy are in the 1040 window, because
if, as a matter of fact, binding the strong man is important, if, as a matter of fact,
our weapons are not carnal, our weapons are spiritual, if, as a matter of fact, prayer,
and specifically warfare prayer, is the kind of prayer that's going to remove the armor
of the strong man and release the people, then the more we know about how to target
our prayers, the better off we are.
And that's what spiritual mapping is all about, is to how to target the prayers.
Now, I'll get a little bit on spiritual mapping this afternoon, but tomorrow afternoon, the
whole afternoon, is going to be on that subject.
These rules, I'm going to give you six rules now for praying for a city.
And I'll tell you the reason that I want to stress these rules, and I want to make sure
you get them before we finish our seminar this afternoon.
Folks, when we talk about spiritual warfare, we are talking about warfare.
You understand that?
And I don't know that in any event in all of history, any war has ever gone down without
bloodshed, without casualties.
And the same with spiritual warfare.
If it's really warfare, which it is, there are always going to be casualties.
Now, the reason I'm giving you these rules is that one of my responsibilities as an international
leader in the spiritual warfare movement is to reduce the casualties to a minimum.
I feel a lot like General Schwarzkopf in the Persian Gulf War.
One of the things about that war is that it has so few casualties on both sides.
And I want our spiritual warfare to be that.
I want to reduce the casualties as much as possible.
Now, one of the many things that we have to do to reduce casualties is to follow these
rules.
And if you don't follow these rules, you're in much more danger of becoming a casualty
than you are if you follow them.
So this is like a boot camp training.
I imagine that Marines go through the same thing.
They say, you know, here are the six things you do to reduce the casualties in an actual
battle.
Well, here are the six things you do to reduce the casualties in spiritual warfare.
Okay.
Rule number one has to do with the area, as you can see on page two in your notes.
And the rule goes like this.
Select a manageable geographical area with discernible spiritual boundaries.
The most common error in drawing up a plan for strategic level spiritual warfare is to
select too large an area.
It's really easy to do.
It's easy to select an area that's too large.
And when you do that, I don't mean that nothing happens, but I mean it really reduces the
effectiveness of the energy that you put into strategic level warfare.
We have a movement here in Los Angeles that I belong to called Love LA.
Some of you probably belong to it as well.
And you know, the area that we have chosen is the Los Angeles area, which is basically
Los Angeles County.
It doesn't include so much Orange County, but it includes Los Angeles County.
And we've been working, going on four years now, praying for Los Angeles.
And sometimes it's very necessary to pray for a large area.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do Love LA.
I continue to be a part of it.
And large area prayer efforts have values.
And you know, I have these there on page one, so put them down.
Number one, they have a value, a motivational value.
People want to pray.
People want, there's a great motivation to get together and then to help others get together
and to pray for an area like Los Angeles.
So it helps Christian leaders.
It motivates Christian leaders to pray.
Number two, large area prayer efforts are frequently catalytic.
They stimulate the formation of more regional prayer efforts.
What we do have now in Los Angeles County is many local prayer efforts that didn't exist
before we all started together to get together and pray for Los Angeles.
And then in some ways they are strategic.
In other words, there are some dominating spirits that dominate probably a whole area
like Los Angeles County.
We don't know.
We haven't done enough spiritual mapping, but there could well be, which must be addressed.
However, keep this in mind now because we're trying to get into some of the details.
Most of the work of strategic level spiritual warfare you will find is from the bottom up,
not from the top down.
A lot of it starts with ground level spiritual warfare, which so weakens the spirits that
then they can be addressed.
Let me give you an example of that just so you get that in your mind.
Remember I quoted a couple of pages ago about Paul going to Ephesus and Diana of the Ephesians?
Let me just remind, I'm just going to paraphrase.
I don't want to take the time to read scriptures now because of time, but you'll remember this.
These silversmiths and then the city council of Ephesus got really upset with the apostle
Paul because he was ruining the economy of the city.
They accused him of blaspheming Diana of the Ephesians.
Now, Paul's response was, no, I did not blaspheme Diana of the Ephesians.
Do you know what that means?
It means the apostle Paul, when he went, he knew exactly who Diana of the Ephesians was.
He knew where her temple was.
He knew everything about it naturally because everybody knew it.
You didn't even have to go to the library to find that stuff out.
Everybody knew it.
And yet Paul never went in her temple and he never addressed her.
What was Paul doing?
He was casting demons out with handkerchiefs.
He was having magicians burn the books.
He was working on the ground level and occult level.
But what was the result?
The strategic level began to lose her power so much that people began to panic.
But Paul never addressed Diana of the Ephesians.
A lot of people have a stereotype of what we talk about spiritual warfare.
They say, oh, we don't believe in that because we don't want to go out in street corners
and yell at the devil.
Well, that's not what this is all about, going out in the street corner.
Paul didn't do that.
And yet there's a whole lot of things that enter into it.
So that Diana, according to Clinton Arnold in the book I just showed you, Ephesians Power
and Magic, she wasn't just a city territorial spirit.
She had influence in the whole region called Asia Minor.
And remember the story of Paul going to Ephesus?
Ephesus became the evangelistic center, right?
And all of Asia heard the gospel.
And all these churches were planted around Ephesus.
Remember that?
And Clinton Arnold says all those churches that were planted were practically right around.
You could draw the boundary.
That was the influence, the territory of Diana of the Ephesians.
And so God was glorified.
She couldn't keep God from being glorified.
She couldn't keep people's minds from being blinded.
And so by the time Paul left, Asia had heard the gospel and she was very weak.
Now I'll tell you something very interesting.
We switch from the book of Acts, ends at chapter 28, right?
After Acts ends, we go into history.
We know a lot of things about what happened in the past, not from the book of Acts, but
from history, right?
There's a Yale historian named Ramsey McMullen.
I don't even know if he's a Christian.
I don't know if he is or not.
I don't have any evidence one way or another, but his specialty as a Yale University professional
historian is the Roman Empire, specializing in the Roman Empire.
And part of his studies was to find out how Roman Empire became Christian.
And so he writes this book published by the Yale University Press, Christianizing the
Roman Empire.
And what he says in here is that the reason the Roman Empire was Christianized is because
demons were being cast out all over the place.
Just secular historians, just part of history.
Demons would be...
Then he also tells about how when after the apostle Paul had left Ephesus, the apostle
John visited.
And he says the apostle John...
Now don't forget, this is not the book of Acts now, right?
This is history, okay?
Yale historian.
The apostle John went there and the apostle John did enter into the temple of Diana.
And he directly addressed that wicked demonic spirit called Diana, which is a manifestation
of the Queen of Heaven.
And he even records John's words.
John said right in the temple, oh God, at whose name every idol takes flight and every
demon and every unclean power, now let the demon that is here take flight in thy name.
And when he said that, the altar of Artemis split into pieces, physically split into pieces,
and half the temple fell down, collapsed.
And then Clinton Arnold records that after that, the cult of Diana of the Ephesians practically
disappeared from the Roman Empire.
That's what we're talking about.
Now why didn't Paul go into the temple?
God didn't tell him to.
That's just very simple.
That wasn't God...
Because later on, one of the rules is timing, see?
It wasn't God's timing.
But when John went, why did he go into the temple?
Because God told him to, see?
And so you only move to what God tells you to do, but all these three things are...
Are interconnected.
And that's why when we talk about a large area, a lot of the work is done from the bottom
up.
A lot of work will be done in Los Angeles.
Not from people joining together and identifying some spirit over Los Angeles, but area by
area, San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley, Conejo Valley, all, you know, from the bottom
up this is going to happen.
Then the powers get weak, then we're ready for them.
That's the way this whole thing seems to work.
Now I'm going to move on to rule number two, skip that bottom of the page two there for
the moment, and go to page three, where it says rule number two, the pastors.
The rule reads like this, as you can see, secure the unity of the pastors and other
Christian leaders in the area and begin to pray together on a regular basis.
Remember how they did that in Guadalajara?
They just did it.
Think of your city.
Do a little exercise now.
Think of your city.
I'm talking about the city you live in, not the Los Angeles.
For me, it would be Pasadena.
For here it would be Van Nuys.
Think of your city.
How would you describe the Christian presence in your Southern California city, if you come
from Southern California?
You know, a couple of weeks ago, I listened to Ed Sobozo down there in Argentina.
I told you this person who's a genius for cities, and he said it, you know, I never
heard it said better.
You know, he said, in most cities here in the United States, you could describe the
church as a scattered, the Christian presence as a scattered collection of POW camps, prisoner
of war camps.
And in each one of these camps, the people in these camps are in a survival mode.
They know they're in a war, no question, but they're in a survival mode.
They're huddled together just to survive this war that's going on out there.
They're trying to keep their families together.
They're trying to keep current on their mortgage payments.
They're trying to keep their teenagers off drugs.
I mean, this is a struggle.
They're just huddled together, struggling, and they're going to continue to struggle
and survive until the war is over.
Doesn't that describe most of the churches in your city?
Doesn't mine.
You see, they know they're in a war, but they choose a defensive attitude.
Very few churches in any city in Southern California are barracks sending out the spiritual
Marines to take the community.
They're huddled in prisoner of war camps.
Therefore, very few churches are making a difference in their community.
And they're a very little threat to the devil.
Most churches don't threaten the devil hardly at all.
But the minute pastors start praying together in a community, the spiritual atmosphere of
that community changes and Satan becomes worried.
He becomes very agitated over that.
Why?
It's because he knows what most pastors don't know.
He knows that the pastors are the...
Get this phrase now.
It's a very important technical phrase.
Write it down someplace in the margin.
Pastors are the spiritual gatekeepers of the city.
Get that phrase.
Pastors are the spiritual gatekeepers of the city.
The pastors in the city, folks, you know this, but you haven't thought of it in many cases.
The pastors in the city are the highest spiritual authority.
There is no spiritual authority over the pastors.
Suppose Billy Graham moved to your city.
He got his picture on last week's Time Magazine.
Suppose Billy Graham moved to your city.
He would not have authority, spiritual authority over the pastors of that city.
And you see, Satan knows this.
And that's why when the pastors, the spiritual gatekeepers...
I don't mean when the pastors assign it to their associates or their prayer leaders.
I mean when the pastors pray together, then Satan is threatened because you have the strongest
spiritual force in that city beginning to come together.
And if we forget this, if we forget how important the spiritual authority of pastors is over
a city, Satan's going to get away with it.
He wants to get away with it.
See what we're talking about here, this verse in 1 Peter, I'm not going to go into this.
I don't want to take the time.
It's a spiritual warfare of pastors.
Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary, the devil walks about like a roaring lion
resists him.
You know, in that passage, I'll just tell you this.
I don't want to elaborate on it.
All three biblical words for pastor are used in this, which is poymen, which is the word
for pastor, piscopos, which is the word for elder or which is the word for bishop, and
prespuderas, which is the word for elder.
All the three classical Greek words for church leadership are used in this passage.
And then it talks about being submissive.
This is a great passage.
Check it out, the whole passage on the authority of the pastor.
But when the pastors begin to get together, then Satan begins to get worried because his
kingdom is not threatened in a city until the pastors are physically praying with each
other.
And when I say the pastors seek unity, I'm not talking about fill in the blanks here.
Unity is not organizational unity.
I'm not talking about doctrinal unity.
I'm not talking about legal unity.
Not talking about political unity or unity of style or philosophy of medicine.
Not talking about whether you put your hands up in church, whether you don't put your
hands up, whether you speak in tongues, whether you don't speak in tongues, whether you baptize
babies, whether you baptize adults.
I'm not talking about any of that stuff.
What I'm talking about, ladies and gentlemen, fill in the blank is spiritual unity.
The kind of spiritual unity I'm talking about is the pastors of the city together recognize
who the real enemy is.
Because you know, a lot of pastors go around thinking each other is the enemy.
Oh, does Satan ever love that one?
No wonder nothing, no wonder churches don't change the community.
But when pastors get together, the spiritual gatekeepers, the authority, the spiritual
authorities and mutually recognize that Satan is the enemy in this community, we're not
enemies of each other.
We're well on the road.
That's why it's rule number two.
And there are many other things that are said about that, but I want to go on to rule number
three.
Now, some of you will think maybe I'm picking on you rule number three, but I'm not.
I just want to explain it to you.
Rule number three reads like this, project a clear image that the effort is not an activity
simply of Pentecostals and Charismatics, but of the whole body of Christ.
Now, why do I say I don't do that to pick on Pentecostals or Charismatics?
For one thing, I can speak like this because I'm not a Pentecostal Charismatic.
I'm one of these very traditional evangelical Christians.
See?
And you know, when you go to a city and announce we're going to start spiritual warfare, we're
going to start praying for the city, you know, who are the first ones that jump on the bandwagon?
The Pentecostals and Charismatics.
They say, oh man, this is what we've been praying for for years.
Oh man, we love it.
Let's go.
And so you have the whole thing.
See?
And you know what?
Sometimes that happens so rapidly that people get the impression, oh, this is what those
Pentecostals do.
See?
It's not for the whole body of Christ.
It's just for the Pentecostals.
And I agree with Ed Savoso.
Ed Savoso says we have assembled a truly interdenominational faculty.
This is for an institute that we did the week before last, because we believe Satan's number
one scheme is to turn spiritual warfare into a divisive issue.
Spiritual warfare is and must remain a Christian issue.
And if the enemy can succeed, and I've found out that even in marches for Jesus, non-charismatic
say we don't do this because that's what the Charismatics do.
Folks, that is a lie, and that is a trick of the enemy, and we're falling right into
his trap.
I'm speaking as a traditional evangelical.
So I mean, I'm a Congregationalist.
My church is Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena, California.
You know, I mean, it's so true.
Our church came over on the Mayflower.
Now that's more than you can say about Foursquare.
And we show it.
I once took a survey of all the Congregational songs that we sang in our church in six straight
weeks, six weeks in a row, and looked up the dates the hymns were written.
Not a single one in six weeks was written in the 20th century.
You can't get more traditional than that.
That's how traditional it is.
And yet we want to be part of this.
We don't want to be left out.
We don't want to be just spectators at what God is doing.
Even we Congregationalists want to be participants in all this.
So all we ask from you Pentecostals is a little bit of patience.
That's all.
Because when a new idea, an exciting spiritual idea comes, Pentecostals, like I say, want
a knee-jerk reaction, want to get a part of it, but evangelicals are different because
we're trained.
See, we have a mindset.
We've been trained that when a new idea comes, first of all, we've got to ask some questions.
Okay?
So we have to ask a few questions.
Then we have to look a few things up in the Bible.
Okay?
Now that takes a little time.
All I'm saying, just be patient.
And so give us a little time to ask some questions, look a few things up in the Bible, and then
we're ready.
Let's go as the body of Christ.
Pray for us in the meantime, because we need a lot of that too.
So all I'm saying is that let's make sure that this happens.
Let's take steps.
I could tell you about how I helped organize Pasadena for Christ, you know?
And I mean the one person in Pasadena who was really gung-ho was Che-An, the pastor
of the largest Charismatic Church, Abundant Life Church.
And he wanted to go, he knew all about this, he knew we were going to the spiritual war.
So Che, let's sit down.
Let's put the pastor of the Congregational Church in as president, and the pastor of
the Nazarene Church in as vice president.
And they both accepted.
And Che, you do all the work.
Yeah!
Okay, he didn't care.
He wasn't out for glory.
He just wanted to see the job done, see?
And so, you know, we had to kind of make sure that we had all the body of Christ, body of
Christ ready for what God wanted to do in Pasadena.
Now rule number four, turn the page, is the spiritual preparation.
It goes like this.
Assure the spiritual preparation of participating leaders and other Christians through repentance,
humility, and holiness.
I've got to say that of all the six rules, the one that will reduce the casualties the
most is this one, particularly the part that says repentance, humility, and holiness.
And a key passage for this is in James chapter, James chapters three and four.
You know, it's their warfare passages.
Submit to God, resist the devil.
That's what these passages are talking about in James.
And then the repentance is here in James three.
It talks about wisdom that doesn't descend from above but is earthly.
Wisdom is from above is pure, the fruit of righteousness sown in peace.
I'm not going to have it.
I'm not going to take time to go into all this, the exegesis of this.
But this repentance is repenting to God, is repenting to others.
And then the humility is there in James four.
It says God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
And the holiness is there.
Draw near to God.
He will draw near.
Cleanse your hands, you sinners.
Purify your hearts.
Cleanse your hands.
Get rid of outward sin.
Get rid of anything that looks like sin.
But also inwardly, get rid of any kind of thoughts and any kind of motivation that would
drive you into sin.
Cleansing on the outside, cleansing on the inside.
Holiness is very, very important.
As a matter of fact, when you get into this, when I have tracked now for four years as
being a first hand participant in warfare prayer, I have found out that the by far,
I mean much more than 50%, who knows 60, 80% of warfare prayer is repentance.
And can you repent and not be humble?
No, they go together.
Repentance, humility, and holiness.
Cleaning up your act.
Because if we don't repent and if we're not humble, if we don't get holy, we can get
clobbered.
Like Cindy Jacobs says, if we go into the battle and we're not holy, we've got holes
in our armor.
And who's the first one that knows about the holes in our armor?
The enemy, because he's firing these fiery darts and they can get through if we got holes
in our armor.
See, so that's why I say this is the chief protection that we need.
When I teach this at Fuller, I take a whole lecture on holiness.
And when I do that, I have to pray more than any other lecture because I've found more
spiritual warfare in class when I teach about holiness than any other subject.
Why is that?
I don't know.
I can only figure maybe that threatens Satan more than anything else because one way that
he's been getting away with a lot of junk is by blinding Christians to how to be holy
and to be, and to what I'm talking about here, see.
And so anyway, he gets really upset when I teach on holiness.
And I know the other day our pastor at Lake Avenue preached on holiness and we had a whole
prayer session ahead of time for protection for him because, well, I think we need more
teaching on it.
Anyway, I'm not going to get into that because I want to get through these rules before this
particular seminar ends.
Rule number five, research the historical background of the city in order to reveal
spiritual forces shaping the city.
Now what this brings up is this field of spiritual mapping.
And as I said, I'm not going to, I'm going to teach on this tomorrow afternoon, so I'm
not going to spend a lot of time on it right now.
I will remind you, because some of you won't be here tomorrow, I will remind you that George
Otis's book, The Last of the Giants, is the first textbook that we have had written on
spiritual mapping.
And this is on what we call macro mapping.
This is, like I say, all the worldwide view of the principalities and powers.
And the third book in the Prayer Warrior series, which I'm going to talk about tomorrow afternoon,
is this one called Breaking Strongholds in Your City.
This is a book more on the micro mapping, how you do it.
It gives questions, what questions you ask in your own city and how to do it in your
own, in your own community.
So more, more of this will come up as we go on.
But I was just going to show you some of the things that George Otis is doing, which I
don't recall that I'm going to mention tomorrow.
Like I said, tomorrow is the first time I've done the lecture, so I'm not that familiar
with it myself to learn as I go along.
But one thing that George Otis has done for our AD 2000 movement, he heads up what's called
the spiritual mapping division in our United Prayer Track that Doris and I coordinate.
And here he has mapped the regional strongholds of the dominant spiritual strongholds are
the black and the red are significant spiritual strongholds.
So I look at the black and red.
These are the places in the world where Satan is most deeply entrenched.
He's more deeply entrenched in these areas than he is any other part of the world.
And look where most of these are, right in the 1040 window or the greater 1040 window.
This is our last thrust for world evangelization right here.
And last month, October, we sent 300 prayer teams.
Tonight I'm going to talk about what we call prayer journeys, and I'll bring this up again.
But we sent 300 prayer teams in the month of October into these 62 nations of the 1040
window to pray what we call on-site with insight.
And on-site is just getting there.
Insight is the spiritual mapping.
And George Otis provided us with something that no other time in the history of Christianity
have Christians been equipped with this kind of intelligence espionage information.
Here is a, it's a whole book, but I just copied this page.
It's called The Strongholds of the 1040 Window.
With these many profiles on each one of the countries, obstacles to ministry, spiritual
power points and festivals and pilgrimages.
There you see Bangladesh, here's Tibet, Algeria.
We have these for the 62 nations of the 1040 window.
All information as to how to target prayers when we go in there to pray on-site with insight.
And early next year, early 1994, YWAM is going to publish a book with these.
And each one of these will be expanded to three or four pages.
Expanded profiles of the command and control posts of the enemy throughout the 1040 window.
So we've never had this before.
This is new stuff, folks.
Talk more about it when we get there tomorrow.
Okay.
Rule number six, rule number six has to do with the intercessors.
Work with intercessors, especially gifted and called to strategic level warfare, seeking
God's revelation of the following.
What you see there is an outline on the gift of intercession.
But I don't have to stop here because tomorrow night I'm going to do the whole lecture on
the gift of intercession.
Okay.
I'm going to do the half or not the whole thing, but that's going to be a whole significant
part of what I do tomorrow night.
So it would be redundant of me to stop here and tell you about that.
All I want to say is this, just sum it up, what I'm talking about intercession.
I'm not talking about normal Christians who have a good prayer life.
I'm talking about people who have a special gifting and calling to intercession, just
like others have a special gifting and calling to evangelism.
I mean, every Christian witnesses for Christ, but some have a special gifting.
Same with intercession.
Some have a special gifting.
Now one of the things that the intercessors, one of the qualities of the gift of intercession
is that intercessors hear from God more accurately and regularly than most of us do.
I mean, we should all hear from God.
Don't get me wrong.
But intercessors have a special anointing to hear from Him.
Okay.
And so if these people exist, they exist in churches, they exist in cities.
And here's what I'm trying to say.
Very few pastors have the gift of intercession, hardly any to tell you the truth.
I mean, you have a David Young, you have a Larry Lee here and there, you know, but most
pastors don't have the gift of intercession.
But the intercessors do.
The thing that the intercessors have the pastors don't have is the ability to hear clearly
and accurately from God.
But the pastors have something the intercessors don't have, which I talked about a few minutes
ago.
What's that?
The authority, the spiritual authority.
Intercessors can't function in a vacuum.
Intercessors only function when authorized by the spiritual authority of the pastors.
But the pastors themselves need the intercessors to hear from God and the pastors exercise
spiritual authority.
And you know, that's a winning combination.
The first thing that through intercessors and through the whole body of Christ and a
lot of others as well is to discern the redemptive gift or gifts of the city.
Now that is developed as a technical term which was developed first of all in John Dawson's
book, Taking Our Cities for God.
I put this first.
I'll tell you another thing about the course I teach in Fuller.
I have John Dawson come in as the first, after I get the course going, he's the first lecturer
I want to talk to my students, both master and doctoral level.
And I have him come in and speak on the redemptive gift because you see, the redemptive gift
is God's creative purpose for that city.
What we believe is that God has a purpose for every city.
He has a purpose for your city, for my city, for any city represented here.
And to discern what the purpose of God is for the city is the positive side of strategic
level spiritual warfare because our prayers then are to pray into being what God wants
the city to be.
Now, if there's some obstacles to that, we try to remove the obstacles.
For what purpose?
For removing the obstacles?
No, to get rid of the obstacles so God is glorified.
And that is the mindset I want my students to get.
So the intercessors are the ones who very frequently are those who hear what the redemptive
gift of the city is.
Number two, discern what are Satan's strongholds in the city.
When we do the spiritual mapping and the historical research, it's not always self-evident as
to what Satan's strongholds are.
So what we have to do is combine those who have a gift of discernment of spirits with
the actual data that people turned up.
One of the chief people that Doris and I associate with is Cindy Jacobs, and we do a lot of work
with her around the world.
We go to pray in different parts of the world.
We were recently in Brasilia and many other places.
And you know, it's amazing the difference between Cindy and me.
I'll go into a city like this and see this big mural.
And I said, oh man, this is a great artist, wonderful artwork.
Cindy goes down and I said, yeah.
Because she's seeing things that I'm not seeing.
What I'm seeing the visible, what she's seeing, the invisible.
She's seeing those forces of evil that are portrayed by that.
So I need her because I have my gift of discernment of spirits is practically zilch and hers is
very high.
And so, and she's one of these intercessors I'm talking about who can discern those kinds
of things.
The going along with this is to also discover the territorial spirits that are assigned
to the city.
When we went to the city of Racistencia, which was our first three-year project for field-based
spiritual warfare related to evangelism, we went to the city of Racistencia.
We sent Victor Lorenzo in there.
And Victor Lorenzo has a chapter in here.
I was just with him last week.
And he got the names of the five, the six spirits that were keeping Satan's work going
in Racistencia.
They were blinding the minds of the people.
And the names, maybe I'll be able to explain these later on, but the names were Curupi,
Pombero, Queen of Heaven, Spirit of Freemasonry, Witchcraft, and San La Muerte.
That's the one I wanted to get to.
And the Spirit of Death.
This Spirit of Death was so powerful that most people in that city worshiped death.
This sounds incredible, how Satan can deceive you.
They worshiped death.
They had 13 shrines in the city to the Spirit of Death.
And in fact, they had made him a saint because in Spanish they called him San La Muerte.
La Muerte means death in Spanish and San means saint.
So he was to them saint, death.
They sanctified death.
And it had a high priestess and a whole hierarchy of people.
They would do sacrifices and invite that spirit.
And the reason they worshiped that Spirit of Death was that he promised if they would
worship him and do his bidding, he would promise them a good death.
Can you imagine the hopelessness of a people who would go after a spirit because of that
promise?
See?
In fact, they worshiped him so much that people would carve images of San La Muerte out of
human bone and they would surgically implant them under their skin so that wherever they
went they would go with, they'd have a good death.
It was incredible bondage.
But he was identified.
I mean, Victor Lorenzo identified him.
Doris and Cindy went.
They prayed, they didn't pray, but they got the pastors, the spiritual gatekeepers of
the city were the ones that were doing this under the coaching of Cindy and others.
And by the time they got to this evangelistic crusade, I told you about, remember when they
burned the fetishes?
Doris and Cindy arrived on the airplane for this event, big evangelistic crusade, and
they were met with the news that one week before they arrived, the high priestess of
San La Muerte for the whole city was smoking in bed, her bed caught on fire, and the flames
consumed three things, the mattress, the woman, and her statue of San La Muerte.
The statue was five feet away, and nothing else in the room was consumed.
Now she died a miserable death.
And what did San La Muerte promise?
A good death.
And so what had happened, so far as we can figure the theology of that is that through
the spiritual warfare that had been going on for two or three years then, she was so
weakened like Diana of the Ephesians that the whole spirit world turned against her
because she was supposed to prevent that evangelistic crusade.
She was not able to prevent it.
They turned against her and gave her a miserable death.
And that's the way Satan keeps his promises.
Nobody prayed that she would die.
You understand that?
Don't go quoting the wrong thing.
Nobody prayed that she would die.
We don't pray those kinds of prayers.
But that's the way the world of the spirit, because Satan comes for three reasons, to
steal, to kill, and to destroy.
And that manifested right there.
Now one of the things that we, the advantages we had is we knew who those territorial spirits
were.
And then corporate sin, past and present, which needs to be dealt with.
This is so important because I talked about repentance, humility, and holiness.
And honestly, this is the principal part of strategic level spiritual warfare, is doing
the spiritual mapping, finding out where the strongholds are, finding out back in history
where the strongholds are, and then going into heavy duty repentance.
We have a technical term we use for this.
We call it, Identification Repentance.
You see, a lot of us don't understand this.
I'm not going to have time to deal with that because our seminar is coming to an end.
But just to give you the idea, a lot of us, the only thing we're used to repenting for
is sins that we personally are guilty for.
Now we're supposed to repent of them.
I'm not saying we don't.
But there's another way of repenting as well that is valid spiritually.
And that's the way that Nehemiah repented and Daniel repented.
They said, Lord, forgive us for the sins of our fathers.
Generations in the past, sins of generations of past can carry on to the third and fourth
and sometimes the 10th generation.
And the results of those sins are still here among us.
Just to give you an example, you'll have to get the book, Warfare Prayer.
You'll see concrete examples in there.
Just to give you an example, you see the revival in the world.
Remember I spoke about the revival?
You know, I can just talk from now until this evening on revival in Latin America, in Asia,
Africa, I can't talk about it in America.
Yet revival is burning in other parts of the world, but hardly at all in the United States.
Now what's the question?
Why?
Now there's probably a lot of answers to that question, but I want to tell you one that I'm
sure of.
One is that we have not dealt with our main number one national sin.
I'm not talking about personal sin.
I'm not talking about your sin, my sin, even though we're part of the nation.
Our chief number one national sin is racism.
And until we deal with that sin of racism, the revival is not going to hit us.
And so where are the strongholds?
How come we're not dealing with it?
Where are the strongholds?
There are two major strongholds and probably a thousand minor ones, the two major strongholds.
The broadest one, the most in quantity is bringing slaves over from Africa.
That's the largest sin.
But the deepest one, talking about breadth and depth, the deepest one is the way we treated
American Indians.
And if we particularly, we European Americans don't come to terms with that in repentance
and humility and identification repentant, you say, well, I never had it.
I never was a slave owner.
Right.
I never treated them in your rock.
I'm not talking about what you did.
I'm talking about nation, our nation.
If our nation doesn't come to terms with that, our inner cities are going to continue to
fall apart.
We're going to have riots and we're going to have three kids killed like they were on
Halloween night in Pasadena.
And there's no stopping it.
Because when you analyze what's happening in our cities in America, there's no sociological
explanation for that.
There's no anthropological explanation.
There's no educational explanation.
There's no explanation.
There's no natural explanation.
It's a spiritual thing.
And that's so all I'm doing is just giving you a live 1993 example of how we have to
identify corporate sin, past and present, and then deal with it with repentance on the
scale of the sin.
I mean, I could say right now, let's repent of bringing slaves over.
That would be fine.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That's not going to solve the problem because this is not the scale on which that sin was
committed.
And so, John Dawson is so helpful with that.
He's writing a new book that's going to be out soon.
He hasn't quite finished it yet called Healing America's Wounds.
That's going to be the key book that's ever been written on this subject of racism, of
our American sins, of identification, repentance.
And that'll probably sell 100,000 copies the first year too.
I hope it does because that's dealing with this.
And then God's plan of attack and timing.
That's number five is essential to hear from God.
It's essential to hear when.
Remember what I told you about the difference between Paul and John in Ephesus?
See, they both knew the timing of God.
When we go out, we went out, for example, a little over a year ago, maybe just about
a year ago in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.
I mean, I'm going to show you.
In fact, tomorrow I'll show you the spiritual mapping.
I remember I got the maps of Brazil.
I'm going to show you tomorrow afternoon.
When we got out there, I mean, that place is incredibly demonized as a city.
I mean, this is wow.
And so one of the questions when you get, I forget we had about 100 people, didn't we?
We said only 40, but about 100 showed up.
You can't keep Brazilians away from this to pray.
And so one of the questions, what is God's timing?
What should we pray for now?
We knew who the territorial spirits were.
But God told us through mainly through Cindy Jacobs that the only thing we could do would
be to repent and to worship God.
That's all.
Repent and worship God and not go against any of the things that we already knew spiritual
mapping was done, but not do it because it's not God's timing.
And I'll tell you what, we didn't get outside of God's timing and all of us are still alive.
But if we had gone outside of God's timing, that's when the casualties come in.
And so Cindy is one of these people, the gift of intercession, the sermon of spirits.
And she's one of the people that leaders like us and the pastors who were there asked, what
is God's timing?
And what does God want us to do?
And what doesn't he want us to do?
Not ever, but at the moment.
And so that's very, very important.
Jesus himself had to do it.
Jesus said, most assuredly, I say that the son can do nothing of himself, but what he
sees the father do for whatever he does, the son does in like manner.
So if Jesus had to wait for the father's timing, more so even we have to wait.
And then let me just put on two final words of wisdom and this segment will be concluded.
First of all, if you're interested in this, if you say, you know, I believe that God wants
me to do this in my city.
Don't do it.
Number one, without securing your pastors covering.
Make sure that your pastor, I'm not saying your pastor has to do it, but make sure that
your pastor says, you say to your pastor, I'd like to go out and pray for my city.
Will you bless me and just make sure your pastors?
Yes, I bless you for this.
I mean, that's very important because who's the authority?
Pastor, if you don't have the covering of that authority, you're a sitting duck for
the enemy.
And people come up to me and say, you know, suppose my pastor doesn't believe in this.
Suppose he won't bless me.
I say, well, then you've got two choices.
Either don't do it or get another pastor.
I'm as serious as I can be.
Don't do it or get another pastor.
And do it in a group.
Don't go out alone.
Do it in a group.
Make sure you have agreement in a group and I'll talk a lot more about agreement tonight.
Now, tonight, the second part of this series, I'm going to deal with this book called Churches
that Pray and talk about prayer in the local church.
Heavenly Father, we just thank you and bless you for what the Spirit is saying to the churches
these days.
Lord, thank you.
And thank you that you're giving us ears to hear.
Thank you that you're blessing us because what the Spirit is saying we're hearing.
We're not perfect.
We have so much more to learn every day, every month is a learning experience.
And yet, Father, we do want to be part of what you're doing.
We want to be overcomers.
We want to be overcomers so that one day we'll see Jesus and he'll say, come and sit with
me on my throne.
Thank you for obeying me, he will say.
And you may sit with me on my throne.
So Father, that's our desire.
Our desire is to sit with Jesus on his throne.
Our desire is to overcome and we humble ourselves before you and ask that you will fill us with
your spirit and give us the power that you promised to your disciples, the power to move
into the nations in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and the other most parts of the earth and
seeing your kingdom come.
We thank you and praise you in Jesus name.
Amen.