INFORMATION SPONGES

INFORMATION SPONGES

                It is becoming more and more frequent. I am awakened by a dream sometime between 2:30 and 3:30 AM. The dream sits me up in bed and so I roll out and come to my office to pray and to seek the Lord for the message He will bring. This morning in my dream I was speaking in a prayer meeting and saying. “It doesn’t matter how faithful we are about attending prayer meeting unless we are passing on what we learn it is dead.

                As I look back over a lifetime of prayer meetings and Sunday school or Sabbath school meetings, I see two things.

1.       These are the faithful core of the church… the praying people… then ones that always show up.

2.       We are still talking about what should be and how we need to reach out to the lost. Our truth remains largely theoretical. It is stored in us as potential rather than a living reality.

                In some ways we have become information sponges. We attend every class and go to every seminar and we study as well… and yet there seems to be a major disconnect between what should be and what is.

                My encouragement to all of us is this: In light of the fact that we are now spiritually gearing up for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in unprecedented measure, and given the fact that this Holy Spirit is being poured out for the purpose of the harvest; it should motivate us to become more proactive in our faith.  We now need to put into practice what we have talked about for so many years.

                We don’t have to start out as a TV evangelist. In fact, I think our main problem is we dream of the coming harvest while ignoring the hurting person sitting next to us in church. We dream of receiving power from on high, even as we soak up information that we keep to ourselves.

                As Christians we desperately need to think in terms of being a hose rather than a rain barrel. Water that sits in a rain barrel for too long begins to grow squiggly stuff in it and to hatch mosquitos. Living water must flow, or it becomes stagnant. It begins to breed discontent and gossip and strife. Stagnant water becomes obsessed with the church’s air conditioner and the room temperature, the color of the paint and the carpet, and the volume of the music and the length of the sermon. They have lost their big picture and their vision. Once, living and vibrant saints have become dead wood.

                The coming outpouring of the Holy Spirit is going to either breathe life into dead things, or it is going to burn them up. It will go much easier on us if we will judge ourselves rightly and will begin to get rid of the dead wood in our own lives. We need to become conduits of the Holy Spirit to those around us.

                 Do you want more power? Then give it away. Give what you’ve got. Bless somebody with it and God will automatically increase the flow. And when you start giving it away, then you will begin to hear the voice of the Lord telling you and showing you where to give it away next.

                At church this Sunday, there was a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t an emotional thing and nothing extraordinary had happened. The Holy Spirit just sovereignly showed up and one thing Pentecostal people know is they know when the Holy Spirit shows up. Pastor got up to speak and we (the worship team) were still playing as we often do in order to segue between the worship and the message. There was an awesome sense of God’s presence. Pastor stood up and said, “I’ve got a sermon to preach but the Lord is constraining me to have us gather in groups and pray for one another. The Holy Spirit is here to touch and to heal us. Everyone find someone near you and pray for them.”

                So, while this was going on the band kept playing our last worship song, but the Lord pointed out a young man in the back of the church and urged me to go and pray for him. I hesitated, telling the Lord that I was playing the bass, but He said “No… Go!” So I sat my bass on its holder and headed for the back of the church.

                As it turned out, this young man had been baptized as a youth, but had not been following the Lord since the 8^th grade and he was now a junior in high school.” So I told Him what the Lord showed me. He has a calling on his life.  I told him that each of us is born with a God given purpose and we will never find what we are looking for until we come to Him and ask Him to show us what that purpose is.

                I said to him, “The Lord literally made me put down my bass and come down here and pray with you. He is telling me that you need to seek the Lord for that purpose and you will never have real peace of mind until you find it. I shared a bit of my personal experience with him and then prayed for him with great passion and an awesome sense of God’s presence.

                Then I went back up to my bass, but from then on throughout the service I was flooded with an overwhelming awareness of the Holy Spirit upon me. I had to keep wiping away the tears. I had obeyed the Lord and He had used me as a conduit and so it was like the Lord was giving me a “Ata-a-boy” bear hug throughout the rest of the service. Obedience is electrifying.

                We often talk about obeying God and immediately our minds picture the Ten Commandments on tables of stone. But what about the living and eternally vibrant “NOW” obedience that involves doing what the Lord is telling us to do in this present moment?

                Jesus walked in that eternally” NOW” obedience, doing only what He saw the Father doing and saying only what He heard the Father saying. The Pharisees were all concerned about His “Law-on-stone” obedience… even being willing to put Him to death for what they saw as the slightest infraction. For one thing, He was breaking all of their self-made laws for keeping the Sabbath, but Jesus said to them, “You guys have it all turned around. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. You set the Sabbath up as some sort of idol that you serve, but it was really pointing forward to the REST that you would have in Me. Come to Me and I will give you that REST.

                Friends, it is time to move beyond the stodgy stagnation of theoretical Christianity and into the flow of the Holy Spirit. Truth is not a stagnant recitation of facts, Truth is living and active and sharper than any two edge sword… truth flows or it is lost.

                Have you ever wondered what the electricity is doing in your home’s wires when all the lights are turned off? Is it just sitting there waiting? Really, I think that electricity is in the form of quantum potential and it doesn’t really exist until you turn the light on. Once you flip the switch the electricity is instantly there to bring light.

                This must be true of our Christian lives as well. Our lives are only as vibrant as the flow with which we are becoming living conduits of that life to others. Until then it only exists as quantum potential.

                The Holy Spirit is calling us into an entirely new arena of Christian living. Church is not some place we go to rehearse age old traditions. It is not a repository of long held doctrines. The Bible has all of the doctrines we will ever need.  We don’t need an organization to tell us what to believe. We need the Holy Spirit and the Word along with quality personal time with the Lord. For too long we have believed we are God’s remnant people because of a list of dead doctrines. There is nothing wrong with the doctrines mind you. It is rather that we have made them into a museum of facts rather than a conduit of life.

                God tells us what the purpose of the church is in Ephesians 4:12-13, 15 It is for the “equipping of the saints for the work of service to the building up of the Body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ… speaking the truth in love we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ.”

                Becoming like Christ is not a fixed position… becoming like Jesus involves operating in the same flow that Jesus operated in. It means becoming a conduit of the Father’s love and power.

                The church’s job is to make hoses, not rain barrels. And if church has become stagnant, then it is because we are sitting on truth, becoming fat with truth, being dormant with quantum potential, but never turning on the light.

                You will be surprised at how much quantum potential is in you. When you finally turn on the light, the Holy Spirit will electrify you and you will say, “WOW! What was that? And life will never be the same again. It’s time to get into the flow of God’s power.