We have received disturbing news from the brother who leads the reconciliation ministry in North East Congo. Apparently a militia group associated with Al Qaeda has been on the rampage. Beni is where the ministry is based and where Daniel and many of the team live. I'll quote from his emails:

In Beni town and territory, this militia group is causing unimaginable atrocity to the population. From 1st to 16 October, they have massacred around 80 people. 31 of these people were killed in the night of 8 October, in Beni just 1km beside the Christian university... We thank God for His unfailing Grace. It has been unimaginable and no one can really say what is the intention, but God is sovereign!

Thanks for your prayers and let us keep on praying increasingly. This is terrorism having the same nature in many places. Trauma is being very high. Children are much more severely affected. Your prayers out there are the only hope we have.

All national authorities have passed through Beni, but we have not seen anything to guarantee the security so far. It seems to be devilish politics going on, and money is playing a big role amongst those who should protect or take proper decisions. MUCH PRAYERS PLEASE.

Rhiannon Lloyd

Let's pray for the situation in DRC for His peace and stability to be restored. Pray that this militia associated with Al Qaeda will stop its atrocities and that the government will be effective in combating them and protecting the people of DRC

My cell phone spurs me on each time it powers up with AT&T's motto, "Rethink Possible!" Marketers, in this case, are good theologians-and Christians in the Western world would do well to take this exhortation seriously.

When it comes to praying for God's miraculous intervention, why is it so easy for us in the West to default to the position of unbelief? Why do people in the Third World seem to experience more of the miracle-working power of God?

How can we grow in faith and pray history-shaping prayers for our community and nation and world-and rethink possible?

A few weeks ago, while I was pondering a new development that could result in a new ministry opportunity, some friends from Southeast Asia came to visit my family. I had pretty much concluded that this "possible opportunity" was a long shot. But in that moment of wondering, my visiting friends presented my wife and me with a beautiful pewter wall piece etched with the words, "Nothing is impossible." I had jumped to an unbelieving conclusion. And their gift was a loving rebuke.

Assume the Possible

Why do we so readily assume that things will not go our way or that they're impossible to attain? I can hear the Lord saying to me as He did to His slow, unperceptive disciples, "Where is your faith?"

Our same visiting friends had been in Myanmar in 2010 to help launch the Children in Prayer movement in that much oppressed nation. And in January 2011, I had the privilege of joining hundreds of ministry leaders for a second, similar effort. Out of those two events, an estimated 40,000 children mobilized to pray for their nation.

Nothing seemed to budge in Myanmar-spiritually or politically-until the children began to intercede. Then, in short order, the whole nation seemed to shift. The military junta, which had dominated the land with an iron grip, released political dissidents from prison, including the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Greater economic freedom was granted. Reconciliation efforts suddenly began between some of the ethnic groups that the government had been fighting for many years.

Political news commentators did not know how to explain such a precipitous turn-around in a nation so long accustomed to tyrannical oppression. But the prayer ministry leaders believed that "God's secret weapon," the prayers of children, were a major factor.

When I was with World Vision, an international humanitarian and childcare organization, we witnessed the same phenomenon. As director of prayer ministries, I asked field staff in five countries to have the children in the program pray for their very poor communities for one year. All of us were astonished by the miracles that occurred in those communities where the kids were praying for specific needs: the infrastructural changes, such as digging wells and establishing new clinics, resolving community splits, the healing of people with terminal illnesses, and the prevention of terrorist invasions in the places where the prayer was happening!

Staff people asked if we could renew the children's prayer effort for another year. After a second consultation, people recited an even longer litany of miracles to the wonderment of all. The Children in Prayer (CiP) effort spread by word of mouth to 20 national offices, and later about 50 of our World Vision national offices continued developing CiP efforts. Even after I left World Vision, the prayer movement spread beyond that organization with an estimated 75-80 countries supporting CiP efforts. This is all to the glory of the Lord who loves the prayers of children!

Learn the Children's Secret

Why are children's prayers so powerful? How can they serve as a model to us more skeptical, slow-to-believe adults?

Jesus taught that He has delegated authority to believers so we can even bring Satan down in our communities and nations. Jesus said He saw Satan "fall like lightning from heaven" and that the authority of Jesus will enable us to "trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy" (Luke 10:18-19).

Moments later, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, was rejoicing as His people overcame the devil and brought deliverance. He joyously praised the Father for revealing these things to "little children" (v. 21). Apparently children have a greater openness to receiving such a revelation from God. The implication is that His adult disciples will be slower to grasp such a reality unless they cultivate the same childlike hearts. In other places, Jesus said that the Kingdom of God belongs to people who are like children, and that we adults should seek to be like them (Matt. 18:2-4, 19:14). Why? Because adults tend to be encumbered by the baggage of doubt, fear, and wrong belief systems that keep us from simply trusting God to do what He promises to do.

We have become captive to a materialistic and non-supernatural worldview. We may not realize how deeply we have become affected by this corrosive influence. But if we ignore God's promises to do the impossible (if we will simply ask, trusting Him like small children depending on their parents), it is as if we, in effect, have taken scissors to Scripture.

I believe this is a major reason why serious and persistent prayer is not on the agenda of most Christians and ministry leaders in the West. We live in a material world seemingly controlled only by laws of nature, so we have imbibed the idea that prayer makes little or no difference. Humanism's teaching that "man is the measure of all things" has also crept into our thinking. Both are false philosophical teachings that cut off the realization that God is the One in whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).  

For the rest of this article go to this link:

http://www.prayerconnect.net/magazine/issue-18-faith/why-not-here

Throughout 20-plus years of ministry, and in many diverse situations in 58 national prayer initiatives, my colleagues and I have found certain Scripture passages and principles to be especially helpful in releasing our faith-and the faith of the local people who have participated in prayer with us. It is the release of our faith together in unity, through the enabling and guidance of the Holy Spirit, that "moves mountains" and accomplishes astounding breakthroughs in prayer.

Here are some of those Scriptures:

John 14:13-14: "I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it."

The sky is the limit. We can ask the Lord for anything. We can accept the invitation He has extended to us, releasing our faith in His enormous capacity to do the impossible.

Matthew 18:18-20: "Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them."

Praying with others in corporate unity, even in twos and threes, can change the atmosphere of what is possible in communities and nations. More than 30 times in the Book of Acts, and in all the great spiritual revivals and positive social transformations of modern history, we see that these movements have been preceded by united prayer. Theologian Walter Wink said, "History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being."

1 John 5:14-15: "This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us-whatever we ask-we know that we have what we asked of him."

 Praying according to God's will involves both hearing His Word and following the leading of His Spirit. Faith will gradually build within us as we listen to the Lord, follow His direction, and then see His wonderful answers. In this manner we also avoid the presumption and flakiness that sometimes characterizes overly subjective praying that goes its own way.

Matthew 17:20: "Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."

God has enrolled all of us in the educational process of learning to trust Him with more and more of our lives. The Lord is always looking for faith, and He tries to draw it out from those who are with Him. Jesus did this with the Syro-Phoenician woman whose daughter was ill, the father of the demon-possessed boy, blind Bartimaeus, and Jesus' own obtuse disciples (me included).

I often take a bag of mustard seeds with me to hand out before we pray for breakthroughs in difficult situations. They come from a seed specialist in my church. The seeds are very tiny black objects, not the partially germinated yellow ones from the grocery store. As brothers and sisters in Christ hold these in their hands together, they realize it does not take a lot of faith. It takes only the willingness to exercise what we have. As we do, that faith unleashes God's hand to do His wonders.

Ephesians 2:6: "God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus."

Notice this is past tense. It has already been accomplished. We have been raised with Christ to sit in heavenly places with Him. Though we are still very much rooted in this material world, we are already joined through the Spirit to the One who sits on the throne of the universe. Through intimacy with the risen Lord, we share in His authority exercised by faith through prayer.

What an awesome position He has accorded us to rule and reign with Him! When we understand that and live in the presence of the supernatural, all-powerful Lord of eternity, trusting Him for miracles on earth becomes routine, normal behaviour.

 Let's begin to live and pray from that position so we can see breakthroughs for our world we have not yet dreamed of!

-John Robb

Excerpt from

http://www.prayerconnect.net/magazine/issue-18-faith/why-not-here

Article Subheading
 
 In Babylon, the prophet Daniel found the promise that God made through Jeremiah.

"in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years." (Daniel 9:2 ESV)

What did Daniel do when he received the words from the Lord? What he did was that he prayed before the Lord, asking for forgiveness. He humbled himself and prayed before the Lord, recognizing not only his sins, but sins of his ancestors that they committed before God.

There is a 70th year anniversary that has a significant meaning to Japan: the Pacific War. Recently, Prime Minister Abe went worshipping at Yasukuni Shrine, where approximately 2,100,000 soldiers who died in the war are worshipped. He also went to war memorials in other countries. In this time of increasing darkness, I sense that there is something that the Lord is saying to us, the churches in Japan. That is, the reality that there are "spiritual debts" toward Asian countries that have not been paid.

The 70th year anniversary of the Pacific War, we, SIR (Strategic Intercession and Research) Network have sent prayer teams to various places of the war on the days that have meanings in the context of the 70th year. Those teams stood on the land to pray with the local churches and Christians.

 Below is where we have gone to pray. Starting out at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on December 8th (7th in Hawaii)in 2011, we went to Hong Kong (Dec 28th), Singapore (Feb 15th, 2012), Kalijati, Indonesia (March 8th), Corregidor Island, the Philippines (May 7th), the Battle of Midway (prayed at a ceremony in Hawaii, Kokoda, Papua New Guinea (Sept 8th), Tarawa and Makin, Gilbert Islands (Nov 23rd, prayed at a National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii), Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands (feb 7th, 2013), Singapore (the Shonan Shrite Site, Feb 15th), Buin in the Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea (April 18th), Dutch Harbor, Allusion Islands (May 30th), Kokoda and Sanananda, Papua New Guinea (July), Majuro, Marshal Islands (Feb 6th, 2014), Sandakan in Sabah and Labuan, Malaysia (April), Biak Island, Indonesia, and Imphal India (May), Guam (Aug 15th), Rabaul, Papua New Guinea (Sep 20th), Leyte Island, the Philippines (Oct 20th), and Clerk Air Base on Luzon Island, the Philippines (Oct 25th).

As we stood on these fields and prayed together with the local church and Christians in those countries, the Lord spoke to us the promise of "restoration and healing." Standing on the lands that were once battle fields where much blood was shed, I felt the responsibility of releasing the curses on those lands in the name of Jesus who died on the cross.

We also faced the reality that many of those battle fields had been kept tied in curses through groups of family members and relatives from Japan coming to the lands after the war. They built memorial monuments for the dead soldiers so that they could hold memorial services, but it resulted in inviting evil spirits to the lands by them praying to and calling down the dead spirits at those services. Without exception, that lands that were once battle fields were groaning under such curses, manifested as volcanic eruptions, conflicts, wars among tribes, and the prevalence of idol worship.

We prayed to the Lord on the lands, repenting of our sins, asking for forgiveness and reconciliation to the local people, and asking for the removal of the curses poured onto the lands. The Lord heard those prayers, and also the local churches and Christians accepted our repentance and forgave us.

I met many people who would point at us, Japanese, saying, "my family was killed by the Japanese. But today, I forgive the Japanese." There were also many people who would say in their prayer, "Heavenly Father, first, I forgive Japanese people, "I believe that the reconciliation was a gift given to us in the promise of "restoration and healing" through the intercessory prayer on the lands on the 70th year.

The "spiritual debts" the Japanese churches owed have already been paid off in the Gospel of the cross. And now, I feel the coming of "God's Time," the time when we shall be sent to those countries with the Gospel.

The Apostle Paul appealed that he was "under obligation"(Romans 1:14), having the responsibility of preaching the gospel. I believe that Japanese churches are "under obligation" to those countries that we hurt, infringed, and invaded during the Pacific War to deliver the Gospel. And, that is necessary for the revival in Japan.

It will have been 70 years since the end of Pacific War in 2015.

The battle of Iwo Jima, the battle of Okinawa, the air raids to around 130 cities, and the dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were events that took place during the last six months of war. We have already been led to careful and thorough research on those events through intercessory prayer, but on this 70th year, I feel that the Lord is laying His hands on the whole nation of Japan to give the "restoration and healing" through sending us to stand on the lands and pray.

Missionary work after the war in Japan was began by the missionaries sent from European and American churches right after the end of the war. The Gospel was delivered in the towns burned to ashes by the countries that were once enemies. It is not an exaggeration to say that churches in Japan were built up through those missionaries' tears and prayer in hardship and the support from their home countries that sent them.

 For 70 years since the end of the war, churches in Japan have been devoted to preaching the Gospel and praying for the revival in Japan. The reality, however, is that the ratio of Christians to the whole population has not been changed; some say that it is declining.
There are words that are used to express one's refusal of Christianity. Those are words that Christians in Japan have heard at least once; that is, "Christianity is a religion of the United States." These words make me think what is behind them. Those missionaries came to the town that burned to ashes by the air raids, offered many supplies, and delivered the Gospel. It is said that Japanese people, in their extreme poverty, crowded around the supplies and surged to churches. Having lost in the war, many people who were disappointed at the gods they had believed in received the Gospel and became leaders of Christian churches later.
 
However, once the occupation, the so-called "seven golden years," were over, people started leaving churches. Now, more than one million people go to shrines and temples on New Year's Day for their first visit of the year, where Japanese people once went to pray for victory in the war. I cannot think but that there is a hidden "hostility", that turns into the resistance to the Gospel.

I believe that on the 70th year since the end of the war, we are asked to have intercession and prayer that bring "putting to death the hostilities" and the "restoration and healing". I am also certain that intercessory prayer from the United States, who was once our enemy, is needed in this process of reconciliation.

Finally, I believe that the time is coming, the time when Christians in Japan and countries of the Allies, including the United States, England, Australia and Holland, shall take each other's hands and bring "the Gospel of Reconciliation" to the countries that became the battle fields during the war.

The 70th year, to receive God's time.

SIR Network, Nozomu Takimoto - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Please pray for the work of the Lord in Japan and that the hearts of the Japanese people will be able to respond to the Gospel, no longer thinking it is from the United States or is a Western religion. Pray also for the work of the SIR Network in bringing reconciliation and healing to Japan's war enemies and to the Japanese themselves.