9. Speed Prayer: David’s Boss • by Arthur Burk • Sapphire Leadership Group, LLC • www.TheSLG.com • 1

9. Speed Prayer: David’s BossSo you are a counselor and young David comes to you with his sad, sad story. He has been unceremo-niously yanked from home to serve a psychotic king. He manages to play his harp in a way that calms one of the demons in his boss, but there is another demon who simply wants to kill David.

You do some checking, and in fact, this is not David’s paranoia. There are corroborating accounts that the javelin has been thrown on multiple occasions.

So you settle in to build a strategy.

First of all, obviously, we have the mesmerizing spirit at play. Saul ought to be grateful to David for his skilled work, and he is not. You coach David on putting together a strike force that will press in for God to shine His light and make things clear to all involved.

You realize now, since you are a cutting edge person, that the mesmerizing spirit operates from the platform of the Egyptian Curse. The way Saul sees him is upside down, for sure. You coach David on attacking this spirit with intensity so the light prayers team had great freedom to work.

And David goes back to work feeling really good about your wise counsel. He is armed and danger-ous, ready to bring order to the palace and beyond. After all, he is a warrior, right! He can do this.

The only problem is, the more he presses in to God-speed for the solution, the worse things get.

Finally, in desperation, he fires you and flees for his life. He feels really guilty about not having the faith and the fight to see this to the end, but things were pretty scary back at the palace.

He goes to Gath asking for political asylum and almost gets killed. As he sneaks out the back door there, he has to be wondering if he messed up by not following your advice. Maybe if he had stayed in that murderous place for one more week, the tide would have turned. Anyway, he can’t go back there because he burned his bridges and is now labeled a traitor to the king.

He scores with the king of Moab, receives asylum for his extended family who he moves there.

THEN the prophet Gad travels all the way from Israel to Moab to give David a prophetic word that he needs to go back to the land of Judah. Shocking to move toward danger, when he has put so much effort into becoming safe. He can’t go back to the palace, and

9. Speed Prayer: David’s Boss • by Arthur Burk • Sapphire Leadership Group, LLC • www.TheSLG.com • 2

he is ashamed to go back to you since he spurned your advice, so he heads to the forest of Hereth and settles in.

There God began to build an army for him.

This was a surprise to him. He expected to chill in Moab until God was done with Saul and the throne was handed to him. God expected him to start a major project and grow by leaps and bounds while he was waiting for the big time project.

By now David has figured out that the pesky SLG counselor he went to was all wrong and that God-speed didn’t mean fast answers to his prayers for safety with Saul. Rather God-speed meant getting out of the place where he could not grow anymore and start doing the most scary thing imaginable.

He was looking at the present and the future and did not see the process in between.

This is the story of a very good friend of mine in the Sapphire tribe. I shall call her Mrs. Life Giver since she had earned the title with thousands of hours of hands on engagement with friends and strangers. She ministers to people’s spirit and soul seamlessly and has left a trail of life in the secular institution where she has been employed for many years.

Humanly speaking she should be honored for her excellence in the secular work and for the fragrance of Christ that she brings in the beauty of her spirit.

She is not. She is being ripped in many ways recently.

You see, one of the major expressions of the Egyptian Curse that has been unleashed in our nation in the last few years is the concept that need = right. If a person is needy, they must be in the right in any discussion. Or put another way, no employee who has hurts can be confronted over their wrong behavior since it would clearly be an attack on a hurting person.

Rather than being able to hold need and wrong behavior in tension, and address both, the Egyptian Curse says only the need can be addressed and the need by definition produces a mountain of rights, first of which is to be excused from all responsibilities.

That is the drama at Mrs. Life Giver’s workplace. There are some wounded people on staff who she has to work with. She is seeking to address wounds and responsibilities simultaneously, with grace and is being battered for that perspective. The mindset of the leadership is that she is pain free therefore she ought to just do endless heavy lifting and cover for the ineptness of the other employee.

She started working on the mesmerizing spirit, and things went from bad to worse. She called an SLG friend who asked if she was up to speed on the Egyptian Curses stuff. She said no, since she had been too busy with the crises at work to deal with Arthur’s relentless blogging.

9. Speed Prayer: David’s Boss • by Arthur Burk • Sapphire Leadership Group, LLC • www.TheSLG.com • 3

She repented in sack cloth and ashes and went to get caught up on this Egyptian thingamajig that would help her at work.

Supposedly.

But what if her SLG advice was wrong?

Mrs. Life Giver has explored from time to time starting her own business. She loves what she does but thinks going into business would be almost as scary as David going back to Judah, to become the Most Wanted Man in all of Israel.

But what if that is God-speed? What if God is letting the devil drive her out of her workplace so that God can give her the fastest start-up the SLG tribe has ever seen?

I don’t know and she doesn’t know. And you don’t either!

But we can pray with passion that God-speed would rule, whether it is in sorting out the mess at work, or in birthing a new business without the startup agony most entrepreneurs face!

9. Speed Prayer David’s Boss

Copyright July 2015 by Arthur Burk

From the Hub, with fire today!