BECOMING A CONDUCTOR

BECOMING A CONDUCTOR

                “For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds upon the foundation with gold, silver precious stones, wood, hay, straw each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it, because it is to be revealed with fire; and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. If any man’s work which he has built upon it remains he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as through fire. Do you not know that you are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.” 1Cor. 3:11-16

                As I woke from sleep this morning the Holy Spirit was striving within me. Once again I was preaching a sermon in my dream and in it I was struggling to put some things together and the Lord was helping me to get the message right.

                Does anyone think that I am somehow clever enough to come up with fresh revelations of truth day after day? Absolutely not! The Lord is working within me, burning away wood, hay and stubble and replacing it with gold, silver and precious stones so that I can become an effective conductor of His Spirit and His Word. There is still a lot of flesh in there, but God is at work within me burning it away so that I can become a pure conductor of His Word. This is true of all of us if we belong to Jesus.

                What the Holy Spirit was doing in my dream this morning was to connect the dots and to bring two great truths together so that we can see them as one. We use the theme of wood, hay and stubble, gold, silver and precious stones in one sermon and then in another sermon we may talk about the fact that our bodies are the temple of God. But friends the two thoughts are every much connected.

                Our bodies are like the tabernacle of Moses. We come to the altar and we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice. There on the altar God begins to burn the wood, hay and stubble out of us and then to clean the ash away so that as we move into the Holy Place He begins to put pressure and light and refiner’s fire upon us and what does pressure and heat and light produce? It produces Gold and silver and precious stones.

                But as we move closer to the Most Holy Place and the direct presence of God that refining continues to increase as His presence purifies us. But this refining is accomplishing something in us that we do not often think about.

                What is the difference between wood, hay and stubble verses gold, silver and precious stones? Wood, hay and stubble are not good conductors. You would never wire your house with wood, hay or stubble. It doesn’t conduct electricity. The power may be there at one end of the wire, but it is not coming out the other end because wood, hay and stubble are not conductors.

                So if we want power and light to come out the other end of our circuits we had better use something that conducts electricity. Gold, silver and precious stones are conductors of power and light.

                The more purely the gold and silver are refined, the better they conduct electricity and the more a precious stone is polished and cut and shaped, the better it conducts light. Some precious stones can even turn light into a laser beam. Laser beams can cut through anything   and like the Word of God they can be “sharper than any two edged sword and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Heb. 4:12

                Our pastor preached on the powers of Pentecost last night and the fact that the Holy Spirit has not stopped pouring out the same power that He poured out on the day of Pentecost. So we keep praying for more power. We know a great harvest is coming and we seek God for a revival of Pentecost in our midst. We want to turn the whole world upside down with the miraculous Word of God in a very short time in these final days. WE want what those first Messianic Pentecostals had. So we seek God and we cry out to Him for more power and more of His presence. But if God is the same yesterday, today and forever, then He has not turned off His power. On the contrary, we have become poor conductors of that power and presence.

                In 1 Cor. 11: 27-30 Paul talks about taking communion and he warns the people that if they partake of it in an unworthy manor without first examining their hearts they can eat and drink judgment to themselves and for this reason many among you are weak and sick and a number sleep.” (They are dead)

                What is Paul talking about here? The communion supper that Jesus instituted is nothing less than the blood and body of the New Covenant that contains within it the very elements of the Passover and the tabernacle of Moses all wrapped into one.

                On that first Passover, they smeared the blood on their doorposts and lintels. They ate the entire lamb including the head, legs and entrails along with bitter herbs and unleavened bread. They ate it with haste, dressed for a journey for they were being delivered from Egypt. Then they marched into their death in the Red Sea and by God’s miraculous grace they were raised to newness of life on the other side. They had put Egypt behind them with no provision for returning that way again. They put Egypt behind them leaving no possible means of survival other than the supernatural providence of God.  They went to Mt. Sinai to hear God’s will for their lives. They failed in their promises to God resorting to the worship of a golden calf. So God had Moses build them a sanctuary so that He might dwell among them.

                All of these things Israel did physically in order to demonstrate great spiritual truths. In Passover we find the DNA of the Gospel of our salvation. We go through the same steps when we are born again. And what is this process doing? It is burning the wood, hay and stubble out of us and making us into better conductors of His presence and his glory. We are being remade into carriers of His presence and conductors of His salvation to others.

                So why is it that the church is apparently weak today? Why is the world not beating a pathway to our doors to find healing and power and the manifest presence of God? We know that Jesus attracted the crowds because He was able to demonstrate the powers of God. We know that there have been certain rare outbreaks of the Spirit of God in various places so that people came from far and wide to be in the presence and power of God.  So why is this not happening all over the world and in every church?

                My answer is that we are not spending enough time in the presence of God, in the Word of God and in the refining fire of God. John came baptizing in water for the repentance of sin, but Jesus came baptizing with the Holy Spirit and fire. And Jesus went everywhere preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom and before He left He commissioned us to preach the same Gospel of the Kingdom and to demonstrate its power by doing His works and even greater works.

                Everything that we need is already here! We don’t need more of God’s power. We need to become better conductors of His power and that means allowing Him to burn away the wood, hay and stubble in our lives so that we can become purer conductors of His Holy Spirit and power.

                Believe it or not, the great shaking that is coming is going to shake a whole lot of wood, hay and stubble out of the church so that God can take His Remnant people and refine them so that they can use them. Wood, hay and stubble will never be able to conduct His power to the lost and the dying. We desperately need to spend more time in God’s presence. Like Moses of old who spent 40 days and nights on Mt. Sinai being face to face with God, we need to move closer to God in our day. We need to carry a message of power by which the lost may be brought into a connection with God for the salvation of their souls.

                Sometimes we grow weary of praying because we are not praying the kind of prayers that will burn the stubble out of us and refine us like gold. WE do not pray in the Spirit as we should. We don’t allow the Holy Spirit time to groan within us according to God’s will.  We have allowed the cares of this world to take us away from the Most Holy Place where God’s presence dwells and we are still living by the flesh rather than by that new spirit that God has placed in us when we were born again. We end up hanging around the outer court, wanting to come to Christ, but unwilling to be consumed upon the altar.

                We remain outer court Christians with one foot in Christ and the other foot in the world. We are standing with one foot on the boat and one foot on the dock and the boat is pulling out and we are becoming stretched to the breaking point because our security and our hearts are still on the dock

                This is why I say that we need once again to review the spiritual DNA of God’s Feast days so that maybe we can find the lost secret of God’s power. We get born again and then we sit on the shores of the Red Sea and we say, “Okay… what’s next Lord and yet, being unwilling to move ahead, we come to think that our only purpose on this planet is to sit and wait for Jesus to come and take us out of here.

                No! Jesus has a great final harvest of souls to bring in and in order to carry out this harvest we need to be made into pure conductors of His Spirit and Truth.

                Much of the church is sick and weak and many are even dead, simply because we have never allowed God to do a full work of rebirth in them. We only pick and choose the parts of the lamb that we want to eat and then we wander around in Egypt, unwilling to enter into the death of our flesh and a full new birth into His kingdom of power and light.

                It is time my friends to surrender to the Refiner’s fire so that God can make us into good conductors of His glory. The feasts of the Lord then, are not being resurrected so that we can enter into them physically, but so that we can find out what we have been missing in our New Birth that will turn us into the revealed sons of God that all of creation is waiting for with eager anticipation.

                Our spiritual Passover is just as real and even more real than Israel’s first Passover out of Egypt. The unseen things are more real than that which is seen. God’s templates may have been temporary, but the message they carry is eternal.  God gave Israel the first Passover to lay down a template of salvation for us. He set His patterns up to provide the physical DNA upon which the Spiritual Gospel is founded.

                And He has made us a “kingdom and priests unto our God.” Rev. 1:7. We must therefore enter into the Most Holy Place of His presence, to be refined so that we can bring out the power and presence of God to those around us. We, therefore, need to pray to God that He will make us priests unto God and conductors of His fruit and gifts, so that we can minister to a lost and dying world.