I was praying and ministering to a girl recently, and she was adopted out at the age of five, and all her life she lived with this bitterness and grief and rejection in her heart. She encountered the Lord, and He took away all of the pain. We prayed with her, she went into an encounter that lasted an hour and a half. I've got a picture of her, and she's literally frozen like that, reaching and stretching out to Jesus, and Jesus is encountering her. She spent an hour and a half just - I can hardly do that for a minute, you know, hold your hand out like that's pretty hard going. It strains your back, strains your arm, and in the end you get tired; but she was frozen in an encounter with Jesus for an hour and a half, and in that time, He spoke with her, and ministered to her; and all that pain of her adoption and abandonment was just taken out of her soul. Just amazing. People need the power of God. Why are lives in such a mess? They're in a mess because there's wounds, there's griefs, there's abuse, there's traumas, there's issues that people cannot get free of without the power of God. People need the power of God.
Some of you here tonight, you'll be stuck in your life, stuck in your spiritual walk, because there's issues in your heart where you're not free, and you need God to touch you, need a breakthrough, need to get someone to speak into your life and help you. So Jesus compelled them to get into the boat to go before Him. Jesus always requires we go before Him. Now this is an interesting thing. It said: He sent them. In Luke 10:1 he says: He sent them into the cities He Himself would come. Now you've got to understand this. God has commissioned us to carry the gospel. He will come when we will go. He is already wanting to touch people. You've got to go out of your comfort zone, and engage where people are lost; and as you do that, you'll find God will come to them. You'll see your best miracles where there are people unsaved. You'll find continually, whenever you talk to people who are out reaching unsaved people, reaching lost people, that's where you see the biggest, and the best of the miracles; because the supernatural will always accompany people with faith in their heart, that carry the gospel out.
Let's have a look what happens in the story here. So the first thing we see is, God requires all of us: He compelled them and pressured them. They didn't want to go. He pressured them to engage the boat; got a picture of the local church, He literally persuaded them get involved with the local church, in the mission of reaching for souls. Get involved. How involved are you? How involved are you? Who is it, you're reaching out to? When did you last reach out intentionally to someone, to find out what's happening in their life, in their journey; listen to them, and let them see and feel the compassion of Jesus, and get touched by His love flowing through you?
Notice what happens there. He sent the multitude away. He sent them away, He went into the mountain to pray, and so He spent quite some significant time in prayer. You can't minister and see the power of God flow unless there's prayer in your life. When we look at it there, He came and met them at about the fourth watch of the night, that's 3am in the morning, so that means He was in prayer from about 6pm right through to 3am. Now if Jesus needed to pray - I'm not saying you've got to pray all that many hours. I don't think many can - however, what you've got to see is this: for the supernatural to manifest in your life, you must be a person of prayer. Without prayer, we don't see God move; and so Jesus spent time. Why did He need to spend that time? If you read in the gospel before that, you'll find several things happened. One of the things that happened was, He'd been ministering to thousands of people, and He and His disciples were incredibly tired. The second thing is, He got bad news, His cousin had been beheaded for his stand for the gospel, and so He was grieving over that. The third thing was, He tried to get His disciples to get away and have a break, and the crowd followed them; and instead of saying: hey guys, we've done our day, He continued to minister to them.