Facebook note on Saturday, 22 January 2011 at 22:53
Following on from Coming into God's House
Well that's a weird header title!
Let's deal with waggling first of all. On a handful of occasions, and there is one I'm calling to mind, Jorge Pradas who was used to lay apostolic Word in Emsworth, got us all waggling our arms and shaking our hands. This will confirm everything this current move think about the predecessor move of the 80s! But no, what he was getting us to do in the Spirit was shake free from all our preconceptions about
what we thought church life was
what the Christian life was
what our own lives were
and allow the Holy Spirit to invade.....to make what was nebulous, fluffy and ultimately just empty religion....specific and defined.
Around 10 years earlier Jorge was staying with his friend and former Brethren pastor Ian McCulloch in Emsworth. He was on holiday. But naturally he got invited to a monthly or weekly charismatic prayer meeting some of them held on Sunday nights. These were people from different churches. So there was Jorge minding his own business, but suddenly kicked to alert in the Presence of God that was evident there.
If God has birthed a ministry in you....it's part of you. There is no holiday. So like a bolt from the blue, this Word came out of heaven through Jorge . "What do you call yourselves?"
"A fellowship."
"What's a fellowship?"
People assumed it was a Catalan/Argentine translation problem probably.
So he repeated. "What's a fellowship? You can have fellowship. Show me in the Bible the word fellowship."
This stunned the charismatics, who were there for mutual encouragement and where they could freely use the gifts of the Spirit.
The Bible only recognises the Church. Are you the Church or aren't you?
That night then, Emsworth Church was born on that word. The church began and fundamental from the outset was that the members believed this was the Church.
Watchman Nee writes....you can have as many local churches as you like, meeting wherever geographically, but they must all be conscious that they are THE CHURCH and that they ARE ALL ONE THING.
Explaining that to the other churches in Emsworth seemed too difficult, so 15 years or so later they reverted to New Life Christian Church, Emsworth.Maybe something was lost in the process. Maybe this was an Ishmael/Isaac battle that was lost here. I am not there, so cannot comment.
I am in Portsdown Community Church. Peter Stott seems clear on the specificity of the church being the Church that happens to meet in the Meridian Centre...but whether it's always the same for all members I don't know.
"Community Church" is the style used in the days of Pyramid Apostle Networking. Their apostle was Tony Morton of Southampton. Community gets over "Redeemed Community". Well you hope it does.
But in all this hand and arm waggling, we have to be shaking ourselves from another of Man's orthodoxies.
Each individual perhaps thinks of himself/herself as two peas in a personal pod. The Old man/New Man rattling around inside. Old Chris new Chris in permanent Romans 7 struggle for identity. There's no personal specificity in the Spirit.
This is the "extracurricular" activity that the Holy Spirit has been cooking in the last 20 years. If we're not even clear what our church is....what are we believing about ourselves?
The Bible is very clear about the work of the Cross. It's not about to be complete. It's not being worked on. Jesus was quite categoric. "It IS FINISHED"
I have died with Christ. It is now nolonger I that live, but Christ who lives within me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.
It is on this base that I stand individually. I am now Christ in my form. This is a faith stand. It is spiritually defined. It has absolute specificity. And put another group of like believing believers alongside me, and boldly we declare we are the redeemed community, the Church of the Living God.
Waggle your arms again and your hands.....shake off all the old preconceptions. The concept that we are some kind of humanist vehicle for activities such as praise, prayer,preaching and coffee at the top of the Meridian Centre in Havant.
An activity centre that meets 10.30 every Sunday and does more prayer activity at sundry other occasions, and runs a 2ndhand furniture shop to provide for a debt relief advice charity. All these are things. What's the Spirit reality?
Well there is a believing, and there is a Spirit reality, because people comment on it when they come. There are processes happening in peoples lives that Paul would saymatches his phrase: I came that I might find Christ crucified among you.
But I believe the gifts to the church all over the world are tightening up in their specificity. Faith only operates around specificity. In Genesis chapter 1 God never said, Let there be something kind of , I dunno.....like Light I suppose." It was targeted and entirely specific. It's also tougher humanly being specific isn't it?
Abraham knew that confronting 2 kings. He said Sarai was his half sister...actually she was....hummmm....but she was HIS WIFE....and that gets to be pretty relevant if you know someone is after sleeping with her. And not only that but the God of heaven's entire calling on your life is to bring forth a son of Promise through PRECISELY her.
I don't know what's tougher, Abraham being specific about his God Promise/wife relationship or Peter being specific about the exact relationship with
THE RABBI that has placed a specific CALL on your life, that you've been with three gob-opening years, while you watched and personally participated in some stunning miraculous events. And then....no half measures here....complete with cursing....Peter says at Jesus trial "I %^$£*&.. ing never met the guy Jesus in my life!"
My burden here goes beyond this to a specificity in the Spirit. What we're into, to be fully Christian, has to tie in with the heavenlies. In bringing the KINGDOM of GOD to earth. Daniel Yordy and Francois will tell you the KINGDOM is here already. That it's the knowledge of the Glory of God that has yet to fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Well some would say Thy Kingdom Come - the prayer....was fulfilled at Pentecost. The Kingdom did come.In Power.
But we are still praying Thy Kingdom Come, in an ultimate restoration of order type sense. This is the sense of the blog series I did on Psalm 24.
What I am steering things to is the prophetic.
This morning I was describing to Allen Mills the acceleration that took place as soon as the disciples received by faith the specific Word and calling that Jesus, operating in the Father brought to them, to make them Fishers of Men, if they
Folowed Him
Now.
We know from Elisha's call through Elijah. you don't mess around when God speaks. You obey. Now.And if you don't, like in the fifth chapter of Song of Solomon....
it's already too late. Jesus has gone.Moved on.
Part of the 1st commandment walk of loving God with all our being is priority. You don't put Him second to anything.And unlike human love for a person making a similar demand, you have the knowledge that God can undergird His call with His Provision.
Half the messes (humanly speaking) that we get ourselves into is that we are obeying a Word before we know for sure where our support will come from. Banks think we are nuts. Other Christians think we are nuts. The rest of our families can think we are nuts. But a call is a call. And the anointing is in that call, and hidden in it too, somewhere in the background sometimes is the provision for the call.
How many ministries have been launched on the back of Peter's walking on Water incident. As an event, it is probably more important historically as a Spirit teaching, than it is for the absolutely earth shattering event that it was. A human walks on water!
So hopefully you caught that. Things only accelerate when a Word comes, but in that Word is also the Power to get it achieved.
1.Churches don't have specificity.
2.Churches chunter along virtually as clubs, without any invasive Word.There has to be a sense of the invasion of the Kingdom into our "norm"
3. The heavenly Pattern
For this one you probably need to shake those arms and hands again, if only to please Jorge, who is now with Jesus thinking....at last....somebody was listening!
The last couple of notes on Facebook refer to the Tabernacle. Nancy Gilmore expressed that knowing the reality of Christ as her, she finds it alien to be thinking about the Tabernacle. I wrote to say the heavenly Tabernacle is the reality. The heavenly reality of this and the 3 Feasts are just how things work. And it is our lack of spiritual eyesalve in these realms that have made our "revivals" so bloomin random.
We are spending all our time building our own earthly conceptions of what revival , and church , and evangelism are.
-So people are all but stillborn
-making up churches that are human clubs
-praying for human concepts of what a revival might be......probably more of the same.
So here in brief is what should really be happening.
People are accelerated into the very Life of God only through the Word, the Living Word...however it comes to them.
This is as true of believers as it is of the living organisms that are the local versions of the Bride, called "ecclesia....called out ones....the Church"
A believer joins the people of God as an individual at the New Covenant equivalent of the brazen altar, the Cross.
They now have a new RESIDENT in their spirit, and fused AS ONE to their spirit; His Name is Jesus. Because Jesus lives there, when they come next to the Laver, they look in its shiny mirror surface and see Jesus.
So the Laver is the washing of water in the Word.... a process that ever continues.The Bible is nolonger a lawbook,but a mirror of the Lawkeeper inside us.
The Laver is baptism in water, which is us saying to God in the Spirit....yes I sign my signature on the dotted line of the New Covenant
This laver experience was something else for Jesus, and can be for us too. Jesus came out of his water baptism, with the Spirit descending on Him like a dove. He was baptised in the Holy Spirit.
We become priests by the Spirit of the Lord. We can enter now into the Holy Place.
Another baptism that is simultaneous to this , which prepares us to function in the Holy Place, is that we are baptised into the corporate Body of Christ. Like Ruth entering as an alien Canaanite into the people of God we say with her, "Your people are my people, your God my God."
Because none of the rest has been true in the lives of other church people, the Body of Christ remains only a somewhat pious concept, having a rather heavy religious atmosphere to it. But not so among those who share these foundations in the Spirit.
The Holy Place or the 2nd Feast experience of Pentecost is meant to be glorious. In the previous post I have described some of the negative aspects which we see manifesting in the disciples' lives in the gospels. This is particularly relevant in our day, because in the Church worldwide we have now thousands of overgrown teenagers who manifest many of the features of "Fatherhood" in the Spirit, but their own innards are so undeveloped, because only a handful of people have known there is a third stage of growth, or third feast experience.
When all functions in the order of the Spirit the "spiritual teenage" or "young men stage" is a glorious affair just as it is in the natural. Get a bunch of teenagers on fire for God even in the natural, and they have a glory all their own....just as newborn babies do. The Holy Place experience in a Living wing of the Body of Christ , the young men stage, IS NOT aligned with an agegroup such as teenage, IT IS a Stage of growth in the Spirit. My hunch is that were we in a culture that just loved Jesus properly from cradle to grave, our stages in the Spirit would be a lot more aligned with the natural growth stages. As it is churches are strewn with 70 years olds still in nappies, being bottle-fed....almost still born actually.
The last Facebook note covered the acceleration in the Holy place. Immature people have their bread cut up neatly for them according to their tribe. On the table of the shewbread in there are 12 loaves all positioned round the table for the 12 tribes.I mentioned that I am not speaking theoretically.
I obeyed God's inner call to me to leave University after the first year only and found myself in an early prototype of a functioning Holy Place Community. (click for pics and more history)They didnt know about the 3rd level.They didnt know all the foundations listed above. But we weren't a community by committee either. Stuff was coming to the surface of people's lives as the Holy Spirit would engineer, and the Body would be covering these members and ministering victory and encouragement. In the worst instances of double leukaemia of a son and later his father, this also was dealt with in prayer. It was the first time such cases had survived anywhere in the world, by giving each other their bone marrow. It was all over the television news. This was our experience in Emsworth.
The foundation that we can now add, is a lot more detail as to how the 2ndlevel works, how it is a time of "reckoning" by faith according to Romans 6 and 7. There is an experience of the Altar of Incense, as we, in a manner very similar to old photography are placed into "FIXER".....remember that anyone? The third level is the fruit of this fixing process.
We know we are Christ in our form. We don't "need" meetings to prove this to us. We go into meetings to take them over for Christ. We are now walkers who practice the verse "Just as you received Christ as Lord, so now, walk in Him."
Anyone who has been with men such as Rheinhard Bonnke,Morris Cerullo, Andy Elmes (local to us) knows there is a Fire anointing that compels others to come to Christ. I have written about evangelists' frustration that so few seem to operate with this zeal to reach more for Christ. There's a truth in this. And there is a Holy Spirit fire which so few have. It is what propelled me into being a catalyst for revival in part of our school when I was 13. But as I have said above there is another very serious point to make.
Morris Cerullo and Rheinhard Bonnke minister unfailingly on the "outward means of growth". They so well know how to minister in the Old Covenant Law of doing Christian things to somehow grow in God. As true fatherhood 3rd level ministries we ARE NOT CALLED TO DO THIS. We impart the New Covenant by the Spirit. We continually impart the foundations above. God's children become young men (understand this is both sexes) who in turn become fatherhood ministries. People who are obviously utterly saved have a testimony to share, they are that Testimony, who is ofcourse Jesus established in us. The thought that this won't have impact is unthinkable. A thirdleveller immediately gets noticed.
In fact in times past, when there were so few, if they wrote books, they'd automatically be high on the Christian bookshelves. Corrie Ten Boom,Oswald Chambers,Spurgeon,John Wesley,Madame Guyon,Dietrich Bonhoeffer,Watchman Nee,Mother TheresaJohn Wimber,Mother Basilea Schlink....the list goes on and on.
I want to temper comments about generals like Morris Cerullo,Benny Hinn and Rheinhard Bonnke with respect for all the ways in which the Holy Spirit has used them to bring a harvest. This has to be weighed in the Spirit with the thousands of believers that are running as fast in the opposite direction from such men. You see apart from individual growth in Christ there is another aspect to the 3rd level Body that was pioneered by John Wimber, and particularly later in 2008 in Lakeland.
If saints have proper Spirit foundations they are catapulted forward in growth. But more than this the BODY BUILDS ITSELF IN LOVE, at apace that is frankly FRIGHTENING. If you could really understand and appreciate what is happening on Facebook and blogs internationally, you would be stunned. But no man has the overview. And that's the point.Morris Cerullo's phrase was always "This is not the Work of a man, but the Holy Spirit." (And by the way, this is an example of specificity in the Spirit."
The problem with Morris - even though he does invite in 12-15 other extremely anointed platform ministries-
it's still Morris Cerullo Ministries.
The true 3rd level stuff is FACELESS.It's going on internationally non-stop around the clock. You can see from my 1989 message that I have been prophesying this but had no clue about Facebook. No man is in charge. Jesus is doing it.
So,we've covered 2 of the points.
People will nolonger be stillborn, but will grow right through to maturity.
The church will not be religious clubs, because they have living stones, and an unimaginable variety of matching wineskins. So much easier to reach people with churches of people that don't have dummies sticking out of their mouths.
But the last point is revival.
Ofcourse Morris,Benny and Rheinhard have to run round at HUUUUGE Kingdom expense like headless chickens. They are not preaching the right gospel. It's hugely incomplete. Nobody can grow. It's not new Covenant, apart from depositing an anointing of the Spirit on their heads, they then dose them up with tons of laws of what a Christian looks like.
BUT a Christian doesn't look
like anything. He is Christ in THAT PERSON'S FORM! What's all this external stuff about then? it's the
very opposite of what James spoke, that's what it is:
Acts 15:9 19 “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. "The Feasts describe the revival cycles that we see at the very outset of the Church.Not only are we growing, individually and corporately , but as natural as waves on the sea, or birth contractions in childbirth, we learn to move with the Spirit's Harvest cycles over localities. The 3rd Feast , Tabernacles,has its own massive Feast of Ingathering built in.
Ingathering follows Trumpets and Atonement. This is typified in Joel with the priests flat on their faces.
Here's a 1960s picture:
Graham Pulkingham, brought to the end of himself on the crypt floor of the Church of the Redeemer Houston for 3 solid months. (His Day of Atonement)
This intercession birthed a whole community that brought thousands into the church, and ultimately affected my life as the whole group moved to England and ministered into places like our school after our revival.Graham was a 3rd leveller bringing forth a group of 2ndlevellers who surrounded him, who in turn would have gone off and done the same.
Are you getting the picture how we have totally missed it? Of how wrong Benny Hinn's,Rheinhard Bonnke's, and Morris Cerullo's pattern is, as we mature into a really Living version of the Body of Christ. We don't have to wander round like a corpse Zombie anymore. Havant doesn't need to have half of its members dosed up on medications in depression, and the rest sick as dogs, all staring at you with bleary eyes. (Slight exaggeration) But you get what I am saying. Enough of this half-gospel,half-church,half-Life. The heavenly Pattern is there for everyone to see. Quit fighting the Spirit, and just do things His way. I mean our way has sure worked well hasn't it? Just read God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
1