Prayer Works Morning Devotion: October 14, 2025

Thus Says The Lord-Who God Says He Is, His Commandments and Promises

Isaiah 51:21-23: "Therefore Please Hear This, You Afflicted, And Drunk Not With Wine. Thus Says The Lord, The Lord Your God"

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Good morning, family. Welcome to the morning devotion. Pray that you had a blessed and peaceful rest last night and that you woke up in the grace of God healthy and ready to face this day and to face whatever challenges may come your way. 

Knowing that God, our Lord, our Savior, walks before us and makes our crooked roads straight. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, we come before you this morning to give you praise, honor, and glory, and thank you for this day.  

Thank you for your grace, your mercy, your kindness, and your peace that passes all understanding and guards our hearts and our minds in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We give you all honor and glory this day because you alone are worthy. 

And we thank you for this day that You have woken us up to partake in, this is a day that You have made, Father, and we will be glad and rejoice in it. So, thank You. Thank You for Your mercy. Thank You for Your grace. Thank You for being Abba, Father.  

We come before You now and ask Your blessing on this gathering and fellowship of all those that are on this call. And we pray for Your Spirit to descend, Your Holy Spirit to lead and guide the words of my mouth, Father.  

Let the meditations of my heart and the words that I speak be acceptable in Your sight, O God, our Rock and my Redeemer. I pray, Father, for Your Spirit to touch the hearts and minds of those that are on this call, and I pray that Your words will be reflected in their hearts and their minds.  

Thank You once again for the privilege and honor of coming before Your people, Father. Thank You for giving me the strength and the wisdom and the understanding that You place in me to be before Your people. 

So I thank You now and ask Your blessing on this call, and it's in Jesus' mighty name that we pray, Amen. So, family, yesterday, our sister Debbie gave us a breakdown of the scripture yesterday, which was Isaiah 51:12-16. 

And I was just so taken aback but excited by what she brought forth, which was the cycle that God's people found themselves continually in. She called it a four-fold cycle, and that cycle began with rebellion.  

Rebellion, obviously, is sin. And the second cycle after the rebellion would be retribution, which God levies on those who sin. And this retribution leads to captivity by our sin. And then the third cycle is repentance. 

Which is true sorrow for our sin and the desire to turn from it, and then finally restoration to a right relationship with God after we cry out and admit to God that we are sinful and can't save ourselves from sin.  

At the end of yesterday's verse, verse 16, God tells Isaiah to say to Zion, You are my people. So the question today is, who are the people of God? Our verses today are from Isaiah 51:21-23, rather.  

However, I'm going to pick up from where we left off yesterday and read verses 17 through 23 to get the full context of what's being said. And I'll be reading from the New King James Version, and it says, Awake, awake!  

Stand up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury. You have drunk the dregs of the cup of trembling, and drained it out. There is no one to guide her.  

Among all the sons, she has brought forth, nor is there any who takes her by the hand among all the sons she has brought up. These two things have come to you. Who will be sorry for you? Desolation and destruction, famine and sword, by whom will I comfort you?  

Your sons have fainted, they lie at the head of the streets, like an antelope in a net. They are full of the fury of the LORD, the rebuke of your God. Therefore please hear this, you afflicted and drunk, but not with wine.  

Thus says the Lord, the Lord and your God, who pleads the cause of his people, See, I have taken out of your hand the cup of trembling, the dregs of the cup of my fury you shall no longer drink it. 

But I will put it in the hand of those who afflict you, who have said to you, lie down, that we may walk over you, and you have laid your body like the ground, and as the street for those who walk over.  

God says to Israel through the prophet Isaiah, I've put my words in your mouth and covered you with the shadow of my hand, I who set the heavens in place, who laid the foundations of the earth.  

And who says to Zion, you are my people? God also confirms Israel as His people in Ezekiel 38:14 in a prophecy to the neighboring nation of Gog. Are non-Jewish believers in the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ, considered the people of God? 

Yes, Jesus came for all mankind, not just to save Israel. The relationship of God to His people is more than His calling. They also call Him their God. David says, I know, my God, that you test the heart and are pleased with integrity.  

All these things have I given willingly and with honest intent. And now I've seen with joy how willingly your people who are here have given to you. And that you can read in 1 Chronicles 29:17.  

Here, God's people are identified more by their willingness to give of themselves, to give to Him by their nationality. Anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord becomes part of the people of God. 

The relationship does not come through church attendance or good deeds, it is a deliberate choice to follow God alone we can see from these verses that God is merciful. It goes back to say God asks you to listen.  

And that has very much been the theme of Isaiah. God has been begging the people to listen to him through Isaiah. In the verses for today, it starts out in verse 21 and says, Therefore please hear this, you afflicted.  

You're drunk, but not with wine. Thus says the Lord and thus says the Lord, mind you, is the theme of this teaching that we have been traveling through from since the summer. It's all the things that God has said.  

And here, God is saying that He is the one who pleads the cause of His people. He says here, see, I have taken out of your hand the cup of trembling. So, how merciful is God that even in our sinful state, God chooses.  

He's not obligated, but He chooses to treat us as His children. It says, The dregs of my cup of fury, you shall no longer drink it. And this will only happen family once we turn away from our wicked ways.  

And we have to, as I said earlier, reach out to God and let him know that we can't do this on our own, that only God can take away our sin. We can't remove our own sin. So again, anyone who accepts Jesus and that's the reason Jesus came because bulls and goats as sacrifice weren't enough to wipe away the sins of the world. 

It took God's own Son to come to create a right relationship with the Father. So, Jesus in Matthew 7:21 says, Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my father in heaven.  

So understanding that we cannot save ourselves from our own sin, that we need Jesus to be our savior, that in addition, we have to do the will of the Father. We have to do what God says and lays out for us in his Bible, in the book of wisdom, in order to be his people.  

Now, can anyone be God's child? Yes, it doesn't matter what your nationality is. It doesn't matter what country you're in. We can all be God's people. But it comes down to it being a choice.  

In Mark 38 and in 2 Corinthians 16, it lays out that we are the temple of the living God. As God has said, I will dwell with them and in them and walk among them. I will be their God and they shall be my people.  

In Mark 38 it says, For whomever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation of him, the Son of Man, also will be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.  

So both scriptures indicate, again, that a choice has to be made in order to be God's people. And when we make that choice to embrace God, He embraces us as well.  

So, I reach out and say this to you, and even to myself, that we have to recognize first that we are sinful, that we don't always walk on the path of righteousness, and when we do stray that we must seek forgiveness. 

We must not be prideful we have to be humble and we have to allow for God to do the work in us that he wants to do so that we will be ready when Jesus returns. Again I thank you for hearing this because this was placed on my heart this morning to give. 

Because there's so much going on that can deter us from the path that God has us to walk on. And understanding that we are His people, that we are the temple that God resides in through Holy Spirit.  

We also have to recognize that we do not want to defile that temple. We do not want to allow that temple to become ruined by sin. So family, let us continue to walk in the light. Let us continue to seek God's face each and every day.  

Look for God in all things that we do. and confess any sins that we may make both in word actions or in our deeds we have to represent the kingdom as we go forth in this journey. We have to be the light as Jesus says the salt of this world and so if the salt loses its taste then what good is it?  

We can't afford to lose our taste. We need to still stand tall and we need to be confident and continue to pray for our faith to be built up. Praying for the covering of the Holy Spirit of the blood of our Lord and Savior over us each and every day.  

Let's pray family. Heavenly Father, once again, I thank you for this time to be before your people. I thank you for the words that you give me. I thank you for your heart, your care, your concern, your blessing.  

I thank you that you are a loving Father and that you sent your son 2,000 years ago to die on our behalf. And it's through his death and resurrection that we, 2000 years later, have hope of eternal life with not just Jesus, but you in heaven.  

So we are extremely grateful, Father, and we lift up holy hands to you, thanking you that you trust us with holy things. We pray for clean hearts, pureness of heart. We pray for a renewed strength in spirit, in body, in soul, in mind.  

We pray, Father, that You will continue to walk ahead of us and lead us on the path of righteousness for Your name's sake. We pray, Father, for forgiveness of sins where we fall short and we repent that we may even fall under rebellion at times.  

But we know, Father, that there is an advocate for us, and that advocate is Jesus. And when we hear the enemy in our heads telling us we are not worthy, we know that that is a lie from the pit of hell.  

And so we thank you, Father, for your faith building and encouragement through your Son that all things are possible with You. And even if we only have faith the size of a mustard seed, that that is what it would take to move that mountain that's in front of us, out of our path.  

So, we thank You again, Father, for Your wisdom, Your understanding of our wickedness, our sinful state. We thank You, and we know that in Jesus, He knows our frailty and so he leads us.  

Now, Father, as I close this prayer, I ask you to bless all those that are on this call. I ask that you lead them in the way today that keeps them on the path to salvation. Touch their hearts and minds.  

Touch all of us, Father, as we go out into the world today and help us to represent Your kingdom in all the things that we may need to do this day. We pray, Father, for those that are ill, and we pray that You heal them because we know by the stripes of our Lord and Savior, they are healed and healing is the children's bread.  

So we pray for healing, Father, for those that may be ill, and we pray for those that are tormented by depression, or by anything, Father, that tends to want to lead them away from your marvelous light.  

Continue to wrap your arms around them, continue to keep them under the shadow of your wings, Father, and allow your Spirit to work the work in them that will bring perfection on the day of our Lord's return.  

So thank You, Father, again for this day. Thank You for Your grace, Your mercy. Thank You for, again, just being Abba Father, Your loving kindness. We pray all these things, asking You to lead us not into temptation this day, but deliver us from the evil one.  

For Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever in Jesus' name, we pray, Amen. Amen, family go in peace this day and know that the Lord goes before you, that He orders your steps.  

Even though you make your plans, He orders your steps. And open yourself up to be a willing vessel for His use and be surprised at what you will be able to accomplish in His strength when you let go of your own.  

God bless you this day, Father. God bless you, family, rather and I pray that you have a blessed and wonderful day. Go in peace.