PRAISE to WORSHIP to GLORY

PRAISE to WORSHIP to GLORY
by Ruth Ward Heflin

I was born in the glory one Sunday after the evening service. My parents were Pentecostal pioneers. At the time I was born, they were living in a couple of the Sunday school rooms of the church they founded in Richmond, Virginia. I was born in those rooms in the glory of God that was manifested in their ministry. When I was a young girl, I went directly from school to the church on Wednesday afternoons. The faithful of the church were gathered in prayer from one to four. I attended most of those prayer meetings.

During the first two hours they had been making their petitions and interceding before God. During the last hour they would just bask in His presence. Those were the best times. Every petition they could think of had been made. Now the Holy Ghost took over. Sounds of glory, dropped into my spirit from those years, have kept me as I traveled all over the world in ministry.

I have been in thousands of meetings and heard thousands of sermons, but the greatest influence in my life have been those glory sounds that came forth in the latter hours of those prayer meetings where God’s people touched the eternal realm.

As air is the atmosphere of the earth, glory is the atmosphere of Heaven. It lifts us up above the earthly, into the very presence of God. Later, when I moved to Jerusalem to live and worship
on Mt. Zion, the Lord began to show me the progression from PRAISE to WORSHIP to GLORY and the relationship between the three. I have found myself sharing these simple truths with God’s people all over the world. Praise … until the spirit of worship comes. Worship … until the glory comes. Then …. stand in the glory.

If you can capture the basic principles of praise, worship and glory — so simple that we often miss them —you can have anything else you want in God. It doesn’t matter if you’re alone and have nobody to agree with you in prayer. It doesn’t matter at what stage you are in your spiritual development.

Move into the glory realm, and anything becomes possible!

Excerpt from “Glory; Experiencing the Atmosphere of Heaven” By Ruth Ward Heflin