PUSH: Persevere Until Success Happens Through Prayer Read Online Free PDF Page B

and miserable that it seems as if God had set Himself against it.”
    But we read in Isaiah that God Himself went through this very same thing before the Sun of Righteousness arose in the earth:
“I have long been silent; yes, I have restrained Myself. But now, like a woman in labor, I will cry and groan and pant”
(Isaiah 42:14 NLT). And just before the Son fulfilled His destiny as the Redeemer of humankind,
“He began to be troubled and deeply distressed. Then He said, ‘My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death’”
(Mark 14:33-34). Seven hundred years earlier Isaiah had already prophesied,
“He shall see [the fruit] of the travail of His soul and be satisfied”
(Isaiah 53:11 AMP).
    We bring forth from our spirit the life God has birthed into our innermost being. When Jesus made the statement,
“From his innermost being shall flow…springs and rivers of living water”
(John 7:38 AMP), what was translated as “innermost being” here is the Greek word
koilia,
which, according to
Vine’s Expository Dictionary
, means “womb.” 8 Dutch Sheets, in his watershed book
Intercessory Prayer,
writes, “We are not the source of life, but we are carriers of the source of life. We do not generate life, but we release, through prayer, Him who does.” 9 Sheets goes on to define spiritual travail as “releasing the creative power or energy of the Holy Spirit into a situation to produce, create, or give birth to something.” 10
    Yes, the power of the Holy Spirit is released through prayer, but it is also released when we simply believe and trust in God during a period of difficulty or hardship, such as a time of intense labor. Jesus prefaced the verse where He spoke of living water flowing from our innermost being with,
“He who believes in Me [who cleaves to and trusts in and relies on Me]”
(John 7:38 AMP). We cleave to and trust in and rely on God when we labor in life just as we do when we labor in prayer. By doing so, we release the creative power of the Holy Spirit to give birth to something new through us.
    Whatever is born in the natural realm is birthed from the spirit, and by the Spirit, through our travail. It is during these times of travail that we cry out to the Lord and
“groan within ourselves”
(Romans 8:23). Each of us individually is called to labor on behalf of the seed of life we carry. We may suffer in the process, but as the psalmist declared,
“Those who plant with tears will gather fruit with songs of joy. He who goes out crying as he carries his bag of seed will return with songs of joy as he brings much grain with him”
(Psalm 126:5–6 NLV). In other words, there is a season in which we go through pain and hardship carrying the promise God has given us, but in the end, if we continue to trust the Lord of the harvest, we will reap joy and gladness.
    Again, Jesus likened our life in Christ to a woman about to give birth:
    When a woman gives birth, she has a hard time, there’s no getting around it. But when the baby is born, there is joy in the birth. This new life in the world wipes out memory of the pain. The sadness you have right now is similar to that pain, but the coming joy is also similar…a joy no one can rob from you
(John 16:21-23 MSG).
    Scripture not only speaks about individuals travailing on behalf of the life of Christ being formed within themselves and other believers (Galatians 4:19), but it also speaks of the Church corporately travailing on behalf of the kingdom of God being formed within the earth. When Jeremiah wrote,
“For I have heard a cry as of a woman in travail, the anguish as of one who brings forth her first child—the cry of the Daughter of Zion, who gasps for breath, who spreads her hands, saying, Woe is me now!”
(Jeremiah 4:31 AMP), he was speaking of the Church travailing on behalf of a world pregnant with new souls for the kingdom. Isaiah prophesied the end result of this:
“As soon as Zion was in labor, she gave birth to her children”
(Isaiah