Meet Me in the Morning, Part 2

Greetings, friends and new listeners. Welcome to this program of the Archie Hardy Ministries. I'm Sharon Knotts thanking you for joining us today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.

I'm happy to bring you today's message, Meet Me in the Morning. I don't know about you, but the most important thing in my life is the presence of the Lord. Without God's presence orchestrating the daily events of my life, whether extraordinary or mundane, I would have no joie de vie, no joy of life, and certainly no peace of mind and rest of heart. And they all flow from my morning time with God.

This sets the tone for the day. But I did not always practice this until God showed me His way and said, Meet me in the morning. So God said, I will no longer go with you. I want you to get these people that are left and take them in there to the land that I said I swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

I can't go back on my word. It was a unilateral covenant. God could not change his mind. He promised them the land and their seed. He said, Get these people and take them in there.

But I'm not going with you. And I love what Moses said. Exodus 33 11. Moses said, If you don't go with us, I'm not going either. He was bold to say to God, God, if you don't go with us, I'm not going either.

Amen. And that's exactly what God wanted to hear. He wanted to hear from the voice of a man, God, your presence is more valuable to me than all these people and anything else or this land or the promises or the honey and the milk that's flowing and the grapes and the silver and the gold and a cattle on 1000 hills.

You can have it all. Give me your presence. He said, If you don't go with us, I'm not going either. And the Lord said in verse 14, and the Lord spake unto Moses as a man would speak unto his face.

It says in verse 11, and in verse 14, he said, My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest. Let me tell you something. The only way that we can have freedom from turmoil, inner turmoil and, and being perturbance and all kinds of conflicts and unrest and anxiety. I was speaking to someone earlier this week, and they were telling me how they've always got so much anxiety. And they wake up in the middle of the night worrying about things that may never happen way out could or way not.

And if they are, it's going to be in the future and worrying. This person is gotten away from the Lord. And I said to them, had you, they were thinking maybe they needed to get some anxiety medicine.

You know, I don't know, Zoloft or one of them things. And I said, Did you ever stop to think that maybe you need to get back with the Lord? Because he said, I will go with you and my presence will go with you and I will give you rest. Jesus said in Matthew the 11th chapter, he says, take my yoke upon you and learn of me for I am meek and lowly in heart and you shall find rest for your soul.

Amen. God's presence is where you can have rest for your soul. God's presence is everything. It's greater than all material blessings. It's even greater than spiritual blessings.

Now that's not an easy moron. Let me tell you something. It's greater than ministry. Many people get hung up on ministry and they lose the presence of God. I want God's presence. Number one. Number one. Give me God's presence.

It's the ultimate prize. Amen. I want God's presence and then let my ministry come forth out of God's presence because it doesn't work the opposite.

It's not interchangeable. Ministry flows out of God's presence and where the presence of the Lord has lifted. All you've got is this mechanical thing because you've learned how to do it. But God's presence is what chases the devil, oppression, fear, torment, and everything that comes with that package. And so Moses said in verse 13, now therefore I pray thee if I found grace in thy sight, show me now thy way that I may know thee that I might find grace in thy sight. Here's what Moses asked God. He said, I want to know your ways. I want you to show me your way, God. There is a very powerful verse. Don't turn there.

If you're taking notes, just jot it down. A very powerful verse in Psalm 103 heaven says God made known his acts unto the children of Israel, but he made known his ways to Moses. There's a lot being said there. God obviously showed his mighty power to Israel. I mean, think of the plagues that he put on the Egyptians. Think how he opened the Red Sea and they walked through. Think how he kept them in the wilderness. He rained bread out of heaven and brought water out of a rock and the rock followed them. I don't know how it followed them, but the Bible says they followed them and I believe the Bible. And then the Bible says in first Corinthians the 10th chapter that the rock was Christ.

Amen. And so think of the miracles that God did for them. He showed them his mighty power. He showed them his mighty miracles. And that's all some people want. They want to see a miracle.

They want to see some manifestation of God's mighty power. Moses said, I want to know your ways. I want to know your heart. I want to know what you think about. I want to know what you're feeling.

I want to be your friend. I want to speak to your face to face and lip to lip. I want to be intimate with you, God. You can see a miracle without being intimate with God.

You can see a miracle without even knowing God. But if you want to know God's ways, if you want to know God's thoughts, it's going to cost you something. Amen. It's not going to come by wishing.

It's going to cost you something. God will make his ways, his heart known to those who will diligently seek after him. Amen.

And hopefully some of them are in this building this morning. Okay, turn with me to Exodus the 34th chapter, just one chapter over. So he said, God, I want to know your ways.

And I'm paraphrasing a lot for the sake of time. Remember when he said, show me your glory. And the third where we were in 33, chapter 33, if you're reading, you would have saw that in 17 and 18, he said, God, I beseech you, show me your glory. If I had found favor in your sight, like you say, then this is a good time for me to ask for a big biggie.

See when God says, Oh, I know you by name. You're my friend. I love you. You're special to me. That's the time to say, Well, Lord, well, Lord, what do you think about?

Please don't waste that on give me a new house, a new car, a new any, please don't waste that moment on something like that. Say, Lord, show me your glory. Let me hear your voice.

Tell me something that I don't know about you. Share some secret with me, Lord. Amen. So he said, if you will show me your glory and listen what God said, God answers him. Chapter 34, verse one.

Whoo. Okay, let's just drop down to verse two to get right to it. God said unto Moses, and be ready in the morning and come up in the morning unto Mount Sinai and present thyself there to me in the top of the mount and no man shall come up with thee. Let me tell you something right here. My brother and sister is the key. This is the secret to intimacy with God. If you want to know God's heart and God's ways, if you want to have an intimate relationship with him, if you're not happy with what you had, because you want more, it's good what you got, but you want more. What you got, it's joy unspeakable and full of glory, but you want more. There is always more.

You never reach the ultimate, the pinnacle, the apex. Let me tell you something. There's always more. So God said, come up into the mount in the morning. Be ready. See, you see the thing about it is, is in order for him to be ready in the morning, he had to be ready when he went to bed.

He had to already have it in his mind. I'm not going to oversleep. I'm not going to push the snooze button on the alarm clock and say, just let me get a few more winks in. I'm a little tired.

I've been climbing this mountain. I need to sleep a little extra today. He went to bed. He had the clock set for 6 a.m. He said, I'm not going to get up at 6 0 1. I'm getting up 6 a.m.

He told himself when he went to bed, I got my shoes right here. I got my staff right here. I got my robe right here. I'm going to get up in the morning. I'm going to present myself to God. I'm going up on the mountain. He promised me he would show me his glory and I'm not going to let anything stop me from being there.

Amen. He said, be ready in the morning. If you're going on a job interview and they tell you that be in my office at 8 30 in the morning and you want to look your best, feel your best, be on your best, have your resumes in your hand, have everything you need. You're before you go to bed that night. You're going to have it all laid out and you're going to get up on time. You're going to allow extra time for a traffic jam. You're going to allow extra time for something unexpected. If anything, you're going to get there early. You're not going to be late because you know the early bird's going to get the worm. And if you miss your appointment, they won't give you another one.

They'll say, sorry, your time's up. We got somebody else waiting. You're going to be ready. Amen. He wanted to see God's glory and God said, you got to be ready in the morning. And he said, present yourself. When you come to God in the morning, you present yourself.

That's how I feel in the morning. When I come to the Lord, I'm saying, Lord, this is the day that you have made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. I am here, oh Lord. I am here to worship at your throne. I've come to the mount of prayer. I want to see you and hear from you this day and let no man come with you when you're serious. When you are serious about getting away with God, you know that you're going to have to go like Jesus said in your prayer closet and shut the door. Now that means different things to different people. Amen.

What I mean, you might, I have already been forced because I didn't have any choice to be in where other people were around. Couldn't, you know, but oh, but there is still a way that in my spirit I've learned, I've learned how to discipline myself to shut everything else out and just let it be me and God. Why do you think the Jewish men put on their prayer shawl? Why do you think they put it over their head when they say their prayers? They are saying I may be out here in the world, but in the spirit I'm in my prayer tent. I'm talking to my father. I'm talking to my God. I'm worshiping Yahweh. I'm calling on the name of the living God.

Amen. He said, meet me in the morning. First thing in the morning, let me tell you something, saints of God, morning prayer is the secret to every great man and woman of God who ever had a dynamic walk with God who did great things for God, who was used mightily of God.

I tell you without a shadow of a doubt, you will, if you could search every one of their lives, you would find people that got up in the morning and spent their time with God to meet with him first thing in the morning before you're distracted by the busyness and the business of life and the carnal routines that come in because that's just how it is. Before you've had contact with anyone else that could set your emotions in a particular course that would chart your day without the divine guidance of your father first before anything else can come in. I think of it as tithing my time.

That's how I think of it. Giving God the tithe of my time. See, when you pay your tithe, you don't just give God your 10th.

You're supposed to give him your first and your best. When I get paid and I count our money out, when I count off the money, I always count God's tithes first. Okay, this is God's tithes right here.

I'm showing God you are number one most important. You get yours first. Okay, now Benny gets his and I get mine and the bills. That's how we do it. But really, God gets his first and then the bills and then Benny and then me.

Amen. And then our money sort of just gets all mixed and we just believe in putting it all together and working in unity like that. But what I'm saying, it's not only giving God your 10th, but giving him your first. Because if you don't give him your first, you will not give him a 10th. Because by the time you get it all figured out, there won't be no 10th left.

He'll be lucky if he gets 10%. Amen. But when you give God your 10%, first, your best and your first, you will have enough for all the rest. And you'll have enough for you. Even if you're the last one on the list.

If you're the last one on the list, I still get what I want. Amen. Because that's just how it works.

And so I think of it as giving God the first hours of my day before I'm weary in my body, before I've got my emotions in gear, maybe in the wrong way, in the wrong gear. Amen. Because let me tell you something, saints of God, one thing about all of us, we may have different financial status in this church. Some have more money than others.

Some of us have, you know, some have a nicer list. Maybe some have more money to spend, a bigger house, a better car, better job, you know, more this, more that, more the other one thing we all have equal of his time. Somebody in this church may make 100,000.

Somebody else may make 25,000. But we all got 24 hours in a day. We're all on the even place there. And we all can give God the same sacrifice of our time. Amen. And so I think of it as giving God my tithe.

And I give him the first hours of my morning. Now I've got to confess it was not always that way in my life. I'm not going to stand up here and tell you it was because it's not true.

It was not always that way. I will confess to you that for many, many years, the weakest link in my spiritual walk with God was my prayer life. And it was something that bothered me a great deal.

But I just didn't seem to, I don't know, break out of it. And for a long time, you know, and here's the thing about it, I lamented over it constantly. I was constantly lamenting over the fact that my prayer life was not what it should be. Amen.

And here's the paradox. I used to use the limited time that I did spend in prayer, apologizing to God for all the time I didn't pray. So what time I was praying, I was using it to apologize for not praying. How much help do you think that did for me?

How much ground do you think I gained there? Because this only created feelings of self condemnation. And when you have condemnation and frustration that is self-defeated.

And so it's a vicious cycle. But I always held high the hope one day I am going to have a powerful prayer life. One day I'm going to be a prayer dynamo. One day I'm going to have a prayer life like brother so and so has and sister so and so has. One day I am going to have a breakthrough in my prayer life. I'm going to have a consistent, powerful, enjoyable, enjoyable prayer life. There's nothing enjoyable about a prayer life when the whole time you're confessing, I'm sorry, don't pray. I'm here Lord, but I'm sorry I didn't pray.

I don't think God enjoys that either. Amen. And so my prayer life basically was a failure. And I wanted to come out of it.

I had high hopes that one day I would. But and I did. But it didn't happen all at once. It wasn't like a lightning out of heaven struck me.

And ta-da! The powerful praying dynamo sister Sharon was born. Didn't happen that way. So why was my prayer life such a failure?

Well let's look at a couple things. First of all, it was not about how. It was not about how I prayed. The problem was for me.

Now I'm speaking for me. So don't go get mad. Okay? It was about when. You see my life was so busy.

Okay? I was a wife. I was a mother. I was a minister. I was the choir director. I was the bookkeeper. I was the editor.

I was the announcer for the radio, announcer for the TV. And I mean from the moment my feet hit the floor in the morning until I went to bed at night, I was just capital B-U-S-Y. Busy, busy, busy. Sometimes I would just sit down in the chair for a minute after dinner and conk. I'd be knocked out.

Like that. Because I was so tired. You know I had two boys and how many know they can drive you to distraction?

We won't go down there. And then I had a new, I had a toddler and a kindergartener. And so my day was just busy. I would get up in the morning and it's fixed breakfast and packed lunches and take Sarah to school and go up the track.

I could go up the track and walk a mile and then come home and man clean house. I had, one thing I had was a clean house. My house sparkled. There wasn't no dust in my house. Now, you know, it's angel dust.

It's not dirt, it's angel dust. I would actually look and see that my glass tables would be shining. There was no crumbs on my floors and my carpet. I had a clean house. And I would clean that house every day and then I would delve into all my work.

All my work whether it was typing or computing or bookkeeping. There were days I had to get dressed up and run up here and do TV tapes and then do announcements for Tom and then, you know, all of that constantly. Then go pick Sarah up from school. Then go by the store and get some food. Then come home and fix dinner. And then clean up from dinner.

Okay. Now, finally, it's time to pray. Because you see, being a choir member, we have always told the choir members we want you to pray a minimum of one half an hour.

Minimum. Hopefully more, but minimum one half an hour. And when I got on the choir, we were strongly, strongly urged to make that right before church, like say six o'clock. The reason being then you're going to come to church with your mind stayed on the Lord. You got rid of all the stuff from all day and you're going to be able to minister in the pulpit under the anointing of the Lord. How many, I hear some men out there. So some of you had, you know, the same message that you got.

That's great in theory, but it's poor in practice. And the reason is because by the time six o'clock came and I've been going like this all day. So now I slow down so I can pray. And when I slowed my body down to pray, it conked out.

It stalled and conked out. And there I was, I'm falling asleep, wake myself up, sputter a few words. Oh Jesus. Oh, I love you Jesus.

I love you Jesus. Day after day after day after month after month and year after year. You see physically, mentally, emotionally, my body, every part of me was exerted. And when I tried to put a few clicks in the ignition to get the prayer wheel turning and I'd click it, there was not enough gas to turn the engine on and let it start humming. Because I was out of gas.

I had ungiven everything I had to give. Amen. And so I would try and try and I would end up right about time. It's time to get up, get dressed and say, tomorrow, Lord, tomorrow, Lord, I'll do better.

Tomorrow, Lord, I'm going to, I'm not going to fall asleep tomorrow, Lord, tomorrow I'm going to do better. But you know what happened. And I went through that pitiful pattern for years and years.

And I knew one day a breakthrough was going to come. Amen. So number one, it was about when, when I prayed. Number two was the fact that because of all that, it put me under condemnation all the time. There's nothing any greater to kill faith in condemnation. It will undermine your prayers from the get go.

You're already starting off from the point of failure before you even say amen. So what is the remedy? The remedy is to get up and spend time with God before the distractions come in that take away completely your focus.

Before exertions drain your energy, your stamina, your strength, especially as you get older. When you get younger, you can burn the candle at both ends for a while, but it don't work when you get older. Amen. Before somebody offends you and gets you in a bad mood and you don't feel like praying.

Amen. Before your boss gets on your case, before Billy's teacher calls and says your child is a brat, come get him. Before your car refuses to start or before you get in a traffic jam and you're late for work. Before the washer overflows and ruins your carpet. Before your neighbor backs into your mailbox.

Before your spouse pushes the wrong button that always set you off. See, before the flesh has a chance to get the wheel. This is where we're going today. Before the flesh has a chance to get the wheel, to get the ascendancy, you get in the prayer closet, put the flesh in descendancy and the spirit in ascendancy. So, did I sit in a service like we're sitting in here this morning and heard a message like this and went home and put it into practice?

No. Hopefully, if anybody's here caught in what I just described, if that sounds like you and I'm not trying to humiliate anybody. Amen.

Hope and confessions go for the soul. Hopefully, you will take this message and it will be your turning point, but that's not how it worked for me. What happened to me was, I had a life-altering back injury that turned my life upside down and inside out. And I lived in pain 24-7, sleepless night after sleepless night. Not only did I have physical pain, but then I had mental, emotional and spiritual. And I don't know which one was the worst.

They all just kind of meshed together. And so, there were times when the warfare against me was so great and even the physical pain that I felt I was on the very precipice about ready to be pushed into the abyss that I would never get out. There were times I was almost there. And God in His mercy, I won't go into details, from time to time would send someone or something to pull me back before I went over the edge.

But this went on and on. And finally, after being awake, so I would lay awake all night wishing the day would come because there's nothing worse than to be in pain all night in the darkness. Because at least during the day you can get busy doing stuff and get a little distracted.

You can watch TV, you can put on something, you can read, you can talk to somebody. But when everything's dark and quiet, your pain is saying, just screaming at you. And hours seem, they're agonizing.

They seem like they become 120 minutes instead of 60 minutes. So what was my remedy? I stumbled on it out of desperation. Lamentations, the third chapter. Lamentations, the third chapter and I'll read it to you.

Verse 19. Remembering my affliction and my misery. I was in misery. I can't even begin to describe to you the misery I was in. Sometimes I think about it now, I can't believe I lived through it. The wormwood, that means the bitterness and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance. Even now when I think about it, I think, my God, how did I survive?

Well, I know how, but you know, it's a rhetorical thing. Amen. My soul hath them still in remembrance and is humbled in me when I think about it. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed because his compassion's fail not.

They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness. And what happened to me is I would get out of that bed of pain. I hated in a way to see part of me hated to see the day come because I knew it was going to be another day of pain. But I got out of that bed and there was nothing I could do but walk and talk to God. I couldn't get down on my knees.

I couldn't get in kind of a position. So I would begin to walk and talk with God. And as I began to walk and talk with God, he began to pour out his mercy for that day. I got through that day.

Well, next day I repeated it. I got through that day. And one day at a time, morning by morning, God sent his mercies. God sent his compassion's. And when I would begin to connect to God, my spirit began to get stronger. My faith began to develop. It was painstakingly slow. I don't want to mislead you. It didn't happen in a week.

It didn't happen in a month. It was a long journey, but it was happening little by little, morning by morning. God was revealing more and more of his mercies to me.

Amen. And I began morning by morning to meet God. And I began to spend that time with God and God began to do a work on the inside out. It would be a whole nother message to tell you about that, and maybe I will one day. But you see, that was how I got my breakthrough to start to fix the when.

The when part of my broken prayer life was getting up in the morning and being with God. And after a while, it dawned on me, my Lord and my God, why haven't I been doing this all those years when I had a well body, when I didn't have pain in my body? What if what if I had back then done this? My God, what maybe I don't know. Maybe I would have had a different outcome.

I don't know. But I know that's what it took for me to see. And I'm saying to some of you, if you are wondering how you can fix your broken prayer life, there's nothing I could tell you more. If you want to be in ministry, if you want to be used by God, whatever it is, the greatest advice I could give to anybody is start your day with God and whatever the sacrifice is to do it, make up your mind to do it because the rewards are outweigh. And there'll come a time when you'll look back and forget about that you ever had a problem. Amen. Amen. What an inspiring word of the Lord.

Meet me in the morning. You know, it was always God's intention to have a daily personal relationship with man. And he did until Adam sinned. Then God chose Abraham and his seed to reconnect the broken relationship when he sent Moses to bring them out of Egypt bondage.

They were two to 3 million people. And on Mount Sinai, God spoke to them and called them to be a nation of priests unto himself. God told Moses to tell the people to prepare themselves for their meeting on the Holy mountain.

But when they saw the lightning, the fire and smoke and heard the thunder, they were afraid and ran. They said to Moses, you speak to God and you tell us what God says and we will hear, but we don't want to hear God speak lest we die. And sadly they pulled away from the presence of God, but not Moses. The scripture says that God showed Israel his miracles, but he showed Moses his ways. Moses besieged God, not for material blessings or prominence, but he said, show me your glory.

And God told Moses, be ready in the morning and come up in the morning to the mountain and present yourself to me and no man shall come with you. This is the secret and this is the price for intimacy with God, morning prayer and meditation with the Lord. Every great man or woman of God, whoever had a successful influential ministry has had a daily time of intimate prayer with God to meet God first thing in the morning before the busy-ness of distractions and the carnal routines of life intrude on the thoughts and hearts and set the emotions on a particular course and chart the day without divine guidance and spiritual strength. Even Jesus, the son of God had to rise up early a great while before day to spend time with his father and receive his instructions for the day's ministry. You know, for many years I had a woefully impotent prayer life of which I greatly lamented.

I would try to break out of my rut, but always would fall back into prayerlessness until I discovered it was not how I prayed that was my problem. But when to meet God in the morning was the key to developing a dynamic and enjoyable prayer life to order, meet me in the morning on CD, send a love gift of $10 or more for the radio ministry, request SK145, that's SK145, mail to Archie Hardy Ministries, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203, or order online at ArchieHardy.org where you can also order on MP3. But to order by mail, send your minimum love gift of $10 to P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203 and request offer SK145. Until next time, this is Sharon Ott singing Maranatha.