Thursday

The Vision of the Wooden Spoon

The vision began with a quiet stream, in a quiet, green meadow; it reminded me of Narnia for some reason: that peaceful. The stream was wider than one could jump across, and deeper than you’d want to wade across, and its flow was smooth and fairly fast. All in all, it was a very peaceful environment. The birds were singing.

Then a giant hand appeared in the sky, holding a giant wooden spoon, the kind of spoon that people use in the kitchen to mix cookie dough. The spoon dipped into the stream and stirred.

For a while, nothing much happened, except the stream became more turbulent from the spoon’s motion. After a minute or two, the stream darkened, and soon I could see things in the muddy stream: old tires, boots, cans, bottles, sticks and stones, jars, bags of rubbish. The hand with the spoon withdrew into the heavens.

I was kind of appalled. This had been a peaceful stream, in a beautiful meadow, and now it was full of trash and garbage and muck and mess. Well, actually, the peaceful stream had always had the trash and muck and garbage and muck and mess, but it had been lying hidden in the mud on the bottom of the stream. Now the stuff was out in the open.

The vision continued, and the stream kept flowing, and then I saw it: the garbage was flowing downstream with the flow of stream. Some of what had been stirred up came to the top of the stream, and was carried far downstream, out of the picture. Other things, heavier things, were carried a little ways downstream but they settled back to the bottom of the stream. Soon the stream was clear and peaceful again, but I knew that old tires, discarded shoes, bottles and cans were still there, lying on the bottom of the stream.

The hand with the spoon appeared again, and stirred the water again, and again the stream darkened with mud, again tires, discarded shoes, bottles, cans, and other detritus were stirred up, and again they floated various distances downstream.

The cycle was repeated several times, until eventually, the stirring from the almighty spoon did not bring up muck and garbage.

The stream returned to peace, but it flowed smoother, faster, than it had before, and I realized that it flowed cleaner than it had before. The garbage on the stream bed had settled under so much mud that the stream flowed smoothly over it, but still the garbage had polluted the stream.

Now the stream was actually clean.

I believe that this is what Father is doing in some of our lives. He’s stirring things up in our lives, and it’s uncomfortable. It’s easy to be appalled or offended at what he’s doing, because he’s good at what he does. Things are being stirred up, memories, habits, relationships that have been in our lives are being stirred up from the dark depths of our lives, and brought into the light.

And the reality is that much of what he’s stirring up is garbage: shame, embarrassment, memories of foolishness, of sin, histories of unwise choices, character weaknesses. It’s easy to resent these coming to the surface after how many years of being hidden in history.

But he’s bringing them up in order to wash them away, in order to remedy the issues. Trust him. Have hope, rest in the confident assurance that he does know what he’s doing, and that he’s working for good in you, for the purity that we really have wanted. He’s answering our prayers.

We can trust the spoon. More specifically, we can trust the hand wielding the spoon.


Homosexuals And the Move of God

There’s been a lot of talk about an increase in the movement of God on the earth, and how this is the beginning of a new “wave” of God’s interaction with this planet.

Recently, someone asked me a good question: “Where do gay people fit in the next wave? I heard one prophet say they will be a part of it, and they won’t necessarily be delivered, but that they too can walk with Jesus and be filled with the Spirit. Will the next wave deliver them, empower them wherever they are at, help them live single, or something else?

I’ve heard testimonies of Spirit-filled homosexual churches. I’ve heard prophets and evangelists testifying that they’ve been among churches that come from the homosexual movement: not “ex gays ministering to homosexuals,” not “former homosexuals,” but “churches made up of people in the homosexual community.”

The testimonies, from reliable sources, are of churches, filled with the Spirit of God, among the homosexual community. (The testimonies, like the churches themselves, are not in the public eye because of all of the wrath they have received from the religious community.)

I’m committed to learning from others’ testimonies (http://j.mp/WUa9gS), so I will not reject these testimonies. In point of fact, they are fulfillment of prophetic words from myself and others, and fulfillment of God’s promise that he would call people to himself from the ends of the earth.  

So where do homosexual churches fit into this next move of God? For right now, I’ll employ a new phrase that I’ve only just learned: “I don’t know.” (Whew. It feels good to say that.)

I’ve spoken out publicly about two characteristics that I (believe I) know about the coming wave:

1) It’s going to be so different than what we’ve experienced before and what we expect, that it will be hard for most of us to recognize.

2) It’s going to be so big that it’s kind of overwhelming.

When you combine those two, it makes for a real mess: outspoken church leaders who are overwhelmed by things they don’t understand or recognize. That ought to be interesting. Perhaps MacArthur’s “Strange Fire” conference was a representation of that?

But there’s a third thing that (I believe) I’ve seen: this wave, this move of God, being so big, and being so different, will carry with it things that we’ve always considered heresy, wrong, unclean. (Tsunamis are very seldom sparkly clean.)

This is where I put the reports of God moving freely among gay churches: I know (I’ve seen it in visions) God is going to breathe life into the homosexual community, and I hear reliable reports that he has begun to do this already. But wait! Shouldn’t they repent? Yeah, but I didn’t repent of all of my sin until I understood it was sin, and some of that was decades after I was saved and filled with the Spirit. And I guarantee you that their repentance is not my responsibility!

This is also where I put the (equally credible) reports of the New Age movement coming to Christ. I know God is going to breathe life into the New Age community, and I hear reliable reports that this, too, has begun to already. But wait! Shouldn’t they repent? Yeah, but see above.

So yes, the grace of God convicts God’s children of sin, and leads them to cleansing and repentance! Yes! Yes! But He clearly does that in his own time, not in mine.

So how will homosexuals and New Agers fit into the next move of God? I don’t know. I expect that they’ll be involved, but let’s see what God does, shall we? And let’s welcome those He brings into his house!


Dead Raising of Another Sort


One of the quietest places for a prayer walk is, at least in my town, the local cemetery. The neighbors don’t seem to be annoyed by my talking out loud in their yard.

I’d been walking in cemeteries all that spring and summer, just wandering around their back sections, talking with my Father. I usually chose the sections where all the gravestones are flat with the grass, simply because I didn’t need to go around them, so I was walking over peoples’ names. Occasionally one would catch my attention and I’d look closer.

Finally, the obvious occurred to me: ask God why this is catching your attention! Oh! There’s a radical thought. So I asked. “Father, why is Jacob Thompson’s grave marker catching my attention so much? What’s up with Jacob?”

In reply, I felt Father’s grief; Father was broken-hearted about this man, who had lain buried here for forty years, and he was sharing his broken heart with me. I felt honored, but I had to admit that I was also confused.

My first thought was that the man died in his sins, and was headed to hell, but it was not that. Father told me some things about his life: he was a Christian, and he loved God. In fact he was a prophet. But the church that he was connected with neither respected nor received prophetic gifts, and so his gift was never used, never really even activated.

Jacob Thompson had carried his gift to his grave, still wrapped, still unopened. This grieved Father.

I have to admit, I felt a little relief. If he was in hell, I knew that was really bad, and I didn’t have a clue how to deal with that. This didn’t feel quite as bad as that.

But I knew enough to realize that if Father were telling me about it, then there was something he thought I could do about it. So I asked. And he gave me a Bible lesson that was unlike any Bible lesson I ever heard in church.

I’ve taught often enough about Spiritual Gifts, and he reminded me of one of the things I teach in those lessons: spiritual gifts are exercised through an individual, but they aren’t for the good of the individual. They’re for the church.

In 1 Corinthians 12:7, Paul teaches us that “But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all.” Peter supports the idea in 1 Peter 4:10: “As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” The gifts God has given us are only for us to steward, and the goal is the profit of the whole community.

Principle #1: The gifts belong the community, though they’re exercised often enough by individuals.

Principle #2: gift has a metron, a “sphere of influence.” This is part of my teaching on gifts. Some are local, some are regional, a few are national, and a very few are global. Reinhard Bonnke’s ministry is global. Mine is not. As I reflected on Jacob’s gift, it seemed that his prophetic gift was given to the church in his city.

So Jacob Thompson had taken a gift belonging to the church of his city to the grave. That felt something like stealing: taking somebody else’s gift, and essentially throwing it away unused. That’s not good.

Next, standing in front of Mr Thompson’s name in cast bronze, Father took me to Romans 11:29: In my NKJV it says, “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” (The KJV uses that curious term, “without repentance!”)

I stood there, thinking about what “irrevocable” meant. If nothing else, it means that once the gift has been given, it stays given. That means once a gift has been given to the church of a city, that gift stays given. Jacob’s prophetic gift was not his possession, when he took it to the grave, it belonged to the church in his city.

Principle #3: Once given, a gift is never taken away.

Jacob was dead. He couldn’t use a prophetic gift any more. But the church in that city was not dead, and they most certainly could use a prophetic gift.

This kind of stuff scares me a little. I could tell we were heading outside of the box, and it’s so far outside of the box of “normal Christianity” as I’d always experienced it, that it felt strange, wrong, cult-like. But it had three things going for it: God was speaking it, the Word supported it, and it was relatively solid logically, given the things the Word had to say about it.

I stood there and discussed it with Father some more, letting him walk me through this radical conversation a second time, and a third. I may be delusional, but at least it was consistent.

So what can I do about that? I was aware that Job 22:28 said, “You will also declare a thing, And it will be established for you,” but I also knew that this was the teaching of Eliphaz the Temanite, who had already demonstrated he had a lousy understanding of God. Fortunately, this time, he’s backed up by Jesus himself: “And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” [Matthew 21:22].

Conclusion: That which has been taken away can be returned.

So I prayed, and declared a thing: that Jacob’s gift would be returned to the church in his city, and that they’d use the gift, and find profit in it. That was all.

I had a vague sense of something flashing out of the ground, and flying off to somewhere else. More significantly, I felt like I was done with Jacob Thompson. Whatever was holding me there about him wasn’t holding me any more.

I spent a good bit of time debriefing about this interesting incident with Father, and later, with some apostles and prophets I respect. And they didn’t freak out. They reminded me that John G Lake’s grave site in Spokane has been a popular tourist destination, and a lot of people have lain on it, asking for the gift that he carried be imparted to themselves. And a lot of times, it seems that it has happened.

Since then, I’ve had a number of other walks in cemeteries, but they’re more distracting now. One time, I prayed to restore a whole flock of gifts to the Chinese church in the region. Another time, gifts were restored to the local longshoremen. 









Brass Heavens? Consider Some Options.

The phrase “brass heavens” comes from the King James translation of Deuteronomy 28:23. “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” It was part of the consequences that God warned Israel would experience if they wandered off and rejected God in their new Promised Land.

We use the term “brass heavens” to describe an environment where it’s tough to connect with the heavenly realms, it’s difficult to hear from God, rare to experience his presence. Fundamentally, it’s about our experience of interacting with heaven.

Have you ever felt like no matter what you did or prayed, God didn't hear, didn't show up? That’s what we’re talking about.

There are a number of reasons for us to experience brass heavens. Deuteronomy says it’s a natural consequence of abandoning God. Indeed, it’s hard to connect well with God when we’re avoiding him. It is also commonly inferred that if the population of a region rejects God, then the heavens in that area may become brazen to them, and also to anyone else who comes into the region. Hmm. Maybe.

Personally, I believe that sometimes the “brass heavens” are a lie. There are times that the enemy simply accuses God before us: “He didn’t respond to us quickly or personally enough. You must be on the outs with God!” No, the devil just talks louder and faster than Father does.

There are times (Daniel 10:13 is an illustration) where the “brass heavens” are the result of events in the heavenly realms which we cannot see. Job also experienced this. It’s real, and it happens. In fact, in the Bible, it appears to only happen to good people.

There are undoubtedly other causes for that sense that we have which we describe as a brass heaven. Hold that thought; we’ll be back in a minute. Right now, let’s take a detour through the woods.

Some time ago, I was walking in the woods, and my attention was captured by something I saw there. I saw the same conflict acted out in two different ways, in two different parts of the forest.

I saw a giant fir tree, a grandfather, perhaps eight feet in diameter. The only tree of its size in the area, it was accompanied by its adult children: thousands of mature fir trees two to three feet in diameter surrounded it.

But the detail that caught my attention was the third generation of trees. There were not many saplings in the shadow of the larger trees. There were only a few young ones there, but they were thin, weak and yellowed from never having seen the direct light of the sun, their source of life. There were many that had died.

As I walked further, I came to a part of the forest that was dominated by great maple trees. A few giants spread their canopies, well separated from each other, the light through their leaves coloring the undergrowth a bright green.

Unlike the fir trees, the grandfather maple trees were not closely surrounded by their children. Between the great trees was a bright meadow, thickly populated by shrubs and berry bushes, but not a single young tree was growing in the meadow, though the meadow was surrounded by younger maple trees competing with younger fir trees for the light.

I’ve studied botany a little, enough to know that both behaviors are defense mechanisms for the mature trees. The fir trees grow tightly together so that there is no light left for any competitors, even their own offspring. The grandfather fir trees, the old growth giants, have no need to hinder the growth of any competitors: they tower above all others, secure in their own capacity to reach the sunlight, though the less mature trees still scratch and claw for their provision, even at the expense of the next generation of fir trees.

The great maple trees do it differently. The great giant trees give off a chemical that poisons the soil near them so that no tree can grow there, thus eliminating any competitors for the precious sunlight. Grandfather maple trees are broader, not taller, than their younger competitors. They cannot tower securely above the younger trees as the old growth firs can, so they must eliminate the competition.

Here’s a radical thought: what if the “brass heavens” over some people is the “forest canopy” of others?

I have lived among a metaphorical stand of fir trees. The community of saints were largely mature (both in age, and in their walk of faith), and they were so closely connected with others their age that there was no room for someone young in their faith to break in and discover the life that they needed to thrive.

Do you know how many churches have fights about the worship music? Just the question of “organ music or pop-rock music” has destroyed thousands of American churches. Other communities continually preach the same salvation message for sixty years, or, on the other extreme, the same marriage-and-family messages, ignoring the needs of the younger members, forcing them into the darkness, stunting their growth. The “brass heaven” there comes, at least in part, from the unwillingness of the adults to become parents, the inability to make room for the young ones.

I’ve also served the metaphorical mature maple trees, where the ministry is all about the one leader, and where no real growth is permitted among any other leaders who might challenge the position of the senior leader.

I’ve seen churches where the founding pastor is still the senior pastor 40 years later, but no youth pastor or worship leader is kept for more than 2 or 3 years, and the only associate pastors are those who’ve learned never to grow beyond a certain limit. The “brass heaven” in those places is, at least partly, the result of the senior leader’s ego.

As I’ve reflected on my lessons from the forest, I’ve been very grateful that I have feet instead of roots. I’ve used those feet to depart those deadly forests. There are thousands of folks like me, unwilling to sacrifice our own growth for the comfort of the fathers and grandfathers that have gone before us. Unfortunately, there are millions more, lost in the shadows, withering, dying without the sun.

Of course, wherever I go, there is always the temptation to gather a tight group of friends who support each other, but really don’t make room for another generation to be part of the community. Or there’s the temptation to create my own forest, where I’m the reigning monarch, and everybody else is reduced in order to serve my own needs.

The old growth fir tree is easily the best model from this particular day in the forest: tall and strong, secure in his own relationship with the sun of life, he broadcasts seed, carried by wind, and he populates entire regions, reshapes the environment within his influence.

The drawback, of course, is that it is incredibly costly to become the old growth fir tree: costly in time. It requires, in the tree’s case, centuries of growth to reach that size, centuries of avoiding the forest fires and logging companies and diseases that are the end of so many of its peers.

But I suspect that we can, ideologically, at least, become the old-growth giant long before we’re either old or giant. Being creatures that (unlike the trees) are created in God’s image with a free will, we can exercise our will.

We can choose to not participate in the closed relationships that keep others at a distance. We can choose to let others grow and thrive around us, encouraging the ones that will eclipse our own growth or gifting, so that they become greater and more successful than we’ve ever been.

We can choose to raise up and release a generation that’s just now encountering the “brass heavens” of the saints. 

Sunday

Healing & Daniel’s Delay

I was healed recently, for an issue I’d pretty much stopped asking for healing about.

It confused me, so I took it to prayer: Why was I healed now? I had prayed about this a lot back when, but now I’d kind of resigned myself to living with the problem. Why now, when I wasn’t even paying attention?

I have discovered three new pieces of this puzzle so far:  

First, the prayers that I prayed – that many of my friends prayed – over and over some years back are still valid. There is no expiration date, it appears, on prayer. Just because I’d stopped praying doesn’t mean the prayers stopped changing things.

Second, God reminded me of the story of Daniel 10. An angel showed up with Daniel’s answer to prayer, several weeks after he began to pray.

He continued, “Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them. But the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, because I was detained there with the king of Persia.” - Daniel 10:12-13

Then Father asked, “If the answer to Daniel’s prayer had been delayed, do you think your healing may have suffered the same problem?” Hmm.

I suspect that the same thing happens with healing some times. I suspect that more often, perhaps, than we realize, when we begin to pray for a healing, an angel is dispatched with the requested healing, but he gets held up.

In fact, this is consistent with my experience in this example. I had been prayed for a number of times for healing, and by some people who knew what they were doing in the realm of healing. Several of them had sensed that I was healed, though I experienced no change. If what they were sensing was God’s release of the answer, then my experience could be explained by an angel getting stuck in traffic with my healing in the back seat.

And the third piece of the puzzle of the delayed answer to prayer comes from Revelation 5:8b “Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people.” The pattern, in the book of Revelation, is that when bowls were mentioned, they were slowly filled up, and then poured in a manifestation of what they held.

So the thought is that sometimes, when we’re praying for a person or a cause, we’re helping to fill the bowls. And since we don’t know the capacity of the bowls, we don’t know how much it will take to fill them up. The parable of the unjust judge in Luke 18 supports the same conclusion, “that [we] should always pray and not give up.”

These three puzzle pieces lead me to conclude that the best direction for continued prayer on that person’s behalf may or may not be to continue praying for healing; it may be more effective to pray into the spiritual battle that the angelic delivery service may be experiencing.

Of course, this won’t work as an assumption: every time the answer to a prayer is delayed, to go deal with the heavenly battle, or every time an answer is delayed to assume that we’re just filling a bowl, and so we must keep praying to keep filling the bowl. Obviously, how we respond will depend heavily on good discernment and competent prophetic insight.

On a related note, I have been observing that God has been opening up more revelation recently on two subjects that could play into this subject quite helpfully:

·         He’s been talking about angels, and our partnering with them, which may apply if he leads us to forcefully intervene in the heavenly battle that our delivery angel may be caught up in.

·         And he’s been revealing quite a lot of information about the courts of heaven, by which we may address the same problem from a legal perspective: we may need to get an injunction against the demons holding my angelic messenger for ransom.

For years, I’ve been feeling the need to listen before I pray: “Father, what’s Jesus praying about this right now? I want to pray that!” I’m thinking that this is more needful than ever before.

Is this the time to pray for healing? Shall I go to war? Go to court? Or shall I just give thanks for the prayers that we’ve already prayed that are taking their time ripening? Or shall I keep on praying, in order to fill the bowl?

Our bottom line, I think, can be found in Jesus’ declaration: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”

I think that might be good practice for all of Father’s sons.




Thursday

Opposing a Spirit of Fear


Some years ago, a few well-known prophets from America’s east coast prophesied hell coming to the west coast, and to my Northwest region in particular.

They didn’t call it hell. They called it “The Big One.”  They called it earthquakes and volcanoes and a tsunami, and millions of people screaming and dying. They went so far as to say, “Move away from the west coast, if you can!”

That pissed me off. I hate it when God’s people use God’s name to prophesy the devil’s agenda for my region! That is not okay with me.

Even the secular news caught on, and there were “news” articles on TV most nights: “It happened to Japan! It can happen here!” with interviews of geologists and politicians and emergency response people and preppers and fear-mongers. It was ugly.

The prophets then added, “We asked God if we can stop this, and he said we can’t.” That one caught my attention.

I asked Father about it. “Of course they can’t stop it. They’re from the east coast.” That was all I needed.

We gathered a handful of prophets together in one of our homes and came before God, to see what He said about it.

It was a fun evening, but too long to detail. To summarize, there were two primary points we needed to pray into:

1) We (on the west coast) live on the Ring of Fire: there are going to be earthquakes and such; it’s how God built the planet: stuff moves. We can try to stop the movement of continents, or we can just change the effect of their movements. So we decreed lots of tiny earthquakes instead of the killer quake that Japan got that year. (And sure enough, we got a lot of small quakes over the next couple of months.) This was the little attack, the flash that was to capture everybody’s attention while the enemy went after his real goal.

2) The greater attack was the spirit of fear that was riding on the reports, the prognostications, the conversations about “The Big One.” The enemy wanted to use these reports, and use any significant quakes, to embed a demonic stronghold of fear into the people of the west coast, and the people of America.

We also opposed that attack, and the public fear-mongering pretty well stopped. The enemy has not given up his goal of embedding a demonic stronghold of fear in the people of the west coast, but he’s going at it more subtly now. (This is one example of the current attack: http://on.fb.me/1geQU6L.)

The goal of embedding a spirit of fear into the people of the USA appears to be a pretty key issue for the enemy. It’s everywhere. Look at the conversations around Facebook that are talking about GMO foods, and you’ll hear fear in a lot of those voices. You’ll hear it in the conversations about the dismantling of the US constitution, the Second Ammendment conversations, the vaccine controversy, the Obamacare conversations.

And pretty much every conversation that talks about “Jesus is coming soon” or “the antichrist” or “the tribulation” or “the rapture” is tainted with a spirit of fear.

If I may be so bold, I’d like to suggest that we have not actually been given a spirit of fear. The Spirit we’ve been given is about power and love and it’s about a sound mind.

By contrast, the spirit of fear that’s coming against us is merely a temptation: Will the people give in to fear, or will they resist? Will they respond in fear or in power? In fear or in love? In fear or in a sound mind?

It’s NOT the enemy’s choice whether the spirit of fear infests your house, your community: it’s YOUR choice.


What say you?