WHAT ARE YOU SAYING RICK?

WHAT ARE YOU SAYING RICK?

                My last article may be tough for some people… in fact you may be asking yourself II have jumped ship. But no, I have not jumped ship… and yet even as I say this, I am becoming keenly aware that the Lord is leading us into a new season.

                When we move from Law to grace, this doesn’t mean that we suddenly start disobeying the Law, On the contrary we enter into the supernatural realm of love that we can’t possibly live without the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. Love deals not only with what we do, but with our motives for doing what we do. Are we motivated by deep and compelling love of Christ in our lives or are we still just play acting?

                Moving from servanthood to sonship, doesn’t mean that you stop being a servant. But sonship requires the supernatural power of the Son of God if we are to finish His work in the world. Paul called himself a bond-servant of Christ and a prisoner of Christ, even as he was urging us on to sonship                and maturity as sons.

                Even so with new moons and Sabbaths and doctrines and various feasts and traditions, it is vitally important that we now see beyond the observance of those things to the supernatural life of Christ that we must now begin to walk in as sons and daughters of God.

`               We know that the final outpouring of the Holy Spirit is going to be 7 times more powerful than Pentecost. This doesn’t mean that we do away with the gifts of the Spirit. What it does mean is that we need to enter into a kind of maturity in which God can trust us with great supernatural powers. And in this maturity we must do away with some of the excesses that soiled the message in the generation before us. And here are some of the mistakes they made that we must now move beyond.

1.       They took whatever power they had and became super stars.

2.       They did not disciple the next generation, but rather kept these gifts to themselves.

3.       Then began to merchandise the Gospel, using it for financial gain.

4.       They eventually started teaching prosperity, which began to change the entire motivation for giving and eventually it changed their Gospel.

5.       They took great advantage of the poor and the widow saying, just send in your $10 with your prayer request and we will pray for you. Neither Jesus nor His disciples ever operated in that way. It is an abomination. Sick people desperate for healing, are made to feel like a big donation will somehow influence God.

                Likewise we have majored in types and shadows and there is nothing wrong with the types and shadows since it was God Himself that instituted them: but the point of the types and shadows was to teach Israel in physical terms that which Jesus would bring in spiritual power under a new covenant in His own blood.

                John came to baptize us with water, but Jesus came to baptize us with the Holy Spirit and fire. So do we have the fire yet or are we operating under John’s baptism?

                “And he (Paul) said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” And they said to him, “No, we have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit.” And he said, “Into what then were you baptized?” and they said, “Into John’s baptism.” And Paul said to them: “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the [people to believe in Him who was coming after him, that is in Jesus. And when they heart this they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them and they began speaking with tongues and prophesying.” Acts 19:2-6. Have you received your baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire? Without it we will have nothing to do with the final harvest!

                The feast days are vitally important as a form of correcting DNA, but the substance of these things is Christ Himself and as the Son of God, He is now calling us into sonship. We must now enter into the supernatural work of Christ that can only be fulfilled as we learn how to function as temples of the Holy Spirit… as living stones in the habitation of God Almighty. Anything less than the supernatural working power of Christ will fail to get the job done.

                The vast majority of denominations in the world today studiously avoid the subject and the work of the Holy Spirit. They are afraid of the gifts and they are afraid of what would happen if the Holy Spirit actually showed up in their midst.

                Bobby Conner recently did a survey of pastors to try and find out why Pastors are afraid of the Holy Spirit and the number one reason was that they can’t control Him. He doesn’t fit their agenda. He doesn’t fit into their 18 minute sermon with three points and a poem and He certainly seems to ignore the exact 30 minutes required for live streaming.

                When the Holy Spirit comes onto the scene meetings last two or three hours and the people hang around praying for more and it is often oh so messy as people are delivered and set free.

                Jesus told us it would be this way in John 3:6-8. He said: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from or where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

                Whaaaaat? How do you control a meeting like that?  The Holy Spirit comes when you least expect it. He comes in and messes up the program completely and then He goes and you don’t know where He came from or where He is going and then to your horror you find out that this is true of everyone who is born of the Spirit. Wow!

                And so pastors throw up their hands and they find out that they can squelch the Holy Spirit. They can grieve the Holy Spirit. They can ignore Him, deny Him and reject Him… but they can’t control Him. So the only pastors that can handle this kind of ministry are those who are learning how to minister by the Spirit rather than by the flesh… and they are learning to let the Holy Spirit set the agenda and to roll with the flow when He comes.

                So believe me when I tell you that the final harvest of the Lord is going to be powerful, and messy and unpredictable as many past revivals have been only this time God is going to sovereignly act to make His servants into sons, so that this revival will not fizzle out over time as have previous revivals. This time as the sons of God are being revealed, the Son will come in all of His glory and He will rule the nations with a rod of iron and He will teach us His ways and pour out His Spirit upon us without measure.

                He is going to build up 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… and speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him, who is the head, even Christ.” Ephesians 4:13-15 parts.

                When we graduated from school, we did not deny what we learned in school, nor did we do away with it… and yet at the same time, even as we entered into real life, our old school life became obsolete, because we were now living in the real world where things moved from the theoretical and into practice.

                Just so is this coming age of the harvest when we will move beyond our types and shadows and into the living realities of a supernatural life in Christ Jesus.