On October 1, of 1998, the Lord called me to seek Him full-time. I spent the next two years, at least six hours per day, seeking God. During those two wonderful years of encounter with the living Christ, God revealed Himself to me as He uncovered to me His person, and as He lifted me to new places in God, and the vehicle that He used to "bring me up the mountain" was "soaking prayer".
I've known much of wrestling prayer in my life, and some of the Spirit of intercession, and I've found both to be wonderful aspects of prayer. However, nothing has been so life transforming and fruit producing in my personal pursuit of Jesus than has been soaking prayer. The Spirit of God taught me, early on, the principle of returning and rest, in my pursuit of God and in my trek up the mountain. Again and again, He reiterated to me that, "in returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength" (Is. 30:15). The Lord would allow me no striving or anxiety, but required a quiet trust in Him to do a great work in me, and a great work He did.
I would lie on my back on the floor looking up at the ceiling, which was strange to me, for I was used to praying on my knees with my eyes closed. However, kneeling is a posture more suited to wrestling, supplication, or intercession, and lying is a posture more suited to surrender; hence the reason God often causes people to fall backward when His Spirit comes upon them. He had brought me to a deep and real surrender at the cross, and now He was doing His wonderful work of revealing His person to me, a work of God in response to faith and surrender, not in response to insistent prayer. Power may be obtained through insistent prayer, but intimacy can only be obtained through surrender. The gentle dove will take wing and fly if pressed too hard.
I basked in the glory of the Lord for hours each day, lying on my back looking up at the ceiling as if looking up at the surface of the water from the bottom of a pool of liquid love. The tears would flow down my temples and into my ears, and then onto the floor. At times, He would remove a veil from my face and reveal Himself to me in a higher revelation, and this would in turn bring me into a higher or more mature state in God and into a much more intimate relationship with Him. "But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor. 3:18 NKJV).
During this wonderful time, the Holy Spirit personally took me through the scriptures and taught me the scriptures as he uncovered to me, through revelation and through experience, the secrets of God's hidden wisdom. I remember one incident, out of many such, when He told me to look up a certain Hebrew name, and He told me that it would mean such-and-such. Sure enough, I looked up the word in my Hebrew dictionary to find that the word meant just what He said it would, and it confirmed to me what He had just revealed to me concerning the spiritual significance of the rather obscure Old Testament passage.
It was during these times of soaking in His presence that He brought me through many of the steps that He brings us through in our development toward becoming the bride or wife of Christ. It was through soaking prayer that he took me to the mountain heights of revelation and intimacy, and after years of testing His work in the dearth and heat of the wilderness, it is soaking prayer that once again has become the greatest passion and joy in my life, for it is through soaking prayer that I daily encounter my Beloved, the fairest of ten-thousand.
His desire for you is that you climb your mountain of revelation and intimacy with Him, and that you begin to discover for yourself true surrender to Christ and true rest in God. There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest. I believe that He is going to open a fountain for you in our soaking prayer center where you can come and drink to your heart's delight and become saturated in the presence of our Lord.
To help you more fully understand the principles behind soaking prayer, you may want to read an article that I wrote during that period of my life as I climbed my mountain in search of God. Returning and Rest
-Mark Frost
