Hello, everybody, Will Ford here with 818 The Sign, and I have something I want to share with you that is so powerful regarding prayer. Revelations 5:8 says, “There are bowls in Heaven full of incense which are the prayers of the saints.” As a matter of fact, the bowls are actually golden bowls. Think about it, that’s how precious your prayers to God. Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought about that God collects your prayers – not in plastic Tupperware bowls, not in wooden bowls, but it says He puts them in golden bowls, because that’s how precious your prayers are to God.
Can I share with you what accumulated prayer has done in my life, personally? In my family, I have something that literally collected intercession, it literally collected prayers. It is a 200-year-old kettle pot. It has been passed in my family for at least 6-7 generations. A 200-year-old kettle pot used by the slaves in my family. They used it for cooking, they used it for washing clothes, yes. But, secretly they used it for prayer. They were owned by a slave master during the days of slavery. As the story is told, this slave master did not want them to pray, because he did not want them to get any kind of hope for freedom. So, he refused to let them pray on this plantation.
These forefathers of mine in my family, they were Christians. And guess what? They decided to pray anyway. So what they would do was, they would go out to a barn late at night to make sure their prayers weren’t seen. But, to make sure they weren’t heard they used this kettle pot. They would take this pot, invert it and turn it upside down, prostrate themselves on the cabin floor, use 3 or 4 rocks to prop up the edges of that kettle pot. They would lie flat on the ground, put their lips in between the opening between the ground and the kettle so that the kettle pot muffled their voices as they prayed through the night.
The story that was passed down with this pot, is that they didn’t think they would see freedom in their time. So they prayed for the freedom of their children and the next generation. It is powerful when you hear about that and you hear about this concept. They were using that pot as an acoustic means to keep their prayers from being heard. But literally there is a prayer bowl in Heaven that catches all of our prayers. Revelation 8:3-5 says at some point in time God takes those bowls with your intercession, those prayers, and He adds more incense to your incense. In other words, more prayer to your prayer. Now, is that the prayer from other people around the world, other people in your family, the prayers of the Holy Spirit, the prayers of the intercession of Jesus? I don’t know, it could be all 4, or 5 of them. But at some point in time, Heaven’s prayers get connected with your prayers.
In Revelation 8 it goes on to say that at some point in time, those prayers get thrust down to Earth and released as thunder, and fire, and lightning, and earthquakes as a result of your prayers. That is literally what happened in our nation. Here in America we literally had a time period where the prayers, of not just black Christian slaves, but also white Christian abolitionists. Those prayers were used by those people. God used those prayers by those people to end slavery in our nation. It transformed hearts, which transformed laws, and we saw a powerful transformation and reformation come to our nation. Not only that, but those prayers have continued on.
The powerful story behind that kettle in my family is this: I had a dream about Martin Luther King and in that dream, God began to deal with me about some of the unforgiveness issues I had around the race issue. I shared the dream with a good friend of mine, Lou Engle. He invited me to do a prayer gathering at the Lincoln Memorial on MLK Celebration Day. But little did I know I would meet a man who had a dream about the man who was holding the event, and he had never heard of him before. He found out this man existed, decided to come to that event, comes to that very prayer meeting, and we became friends. We’ve been friends for 15-16 years. Well fast forward, that friend found out 4 years ago that the Civil War ended in his family’s front yard. We thought, what a cool coincidence, that I have this kettle pot where slaves prayed for freedom. You have this house where General Lee fought his last battle. We thought it was an amazing coincidence. But then we stumbled on more research and guess what we found? We found it was his family who owned my family where that kettle pot came from.
Now mind you, this happened to two guys who were led by dreams to the place where Martin Luther King said in his I Have A Dream speech, “I have a dream that the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.” That is powerful, but you know what the starting point for that whole thing was? People that were praying in my family, also praying in his family. He didn’t just have slave owners in his family, he also had people who were abolitionists who fought for the ending of slavery in his family. In all of our families, there are powerful things called generational curses and generational blessings. They represent these dominated things or storylines over families. What God is shouting to all of our families and all of our nations right now is this: what storyline do we want to be a part of? The healing or the hurt? The blessing or the curse? What storyline do we want to be apart of? And the way we get to be a part of God’s storylines for our nations, is to participate as an intercessor with God, in praying for the ensuing generations. I am Will Ford, this has been God Today. God bless you.