Dangerous Roads Ahead

There are some interesting roads ahead of us. Dangerous roads.

Some will choose not to walk the roads, because there is danger there. But to fear to go in that direction because there is danger somewhere down that road, well, that's the mistake that the Pharisees made, and that didn't turn out so well for them.

Someone spoke of vomiting out lukewarm believers in Revelation.  "I wish that you were hot or cold!" he said.

No thank you.

I will guard against error, against danger, of course. I trust my brothers and sisters to help guard me, as I help guard them. (Thank you for your help!)

But I will travel the road that my Father lays in front of me. If I fall, I fall, and I will get up and go on. But I will not be one who avoids the way my ever-loving Daddy has laid out before me, merely because it's dangerous. I trust him to help me travel this road. He has not promised that I would never fail; he has promised that he would never leave, and that he would provide all that I need. I can trust him.

Do you remember what Bilbo used to say: "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."

We must not hide indoors, simply because it's dangerous out there.

Learning From the Book and Beyond

I’ve been talking with a bunch of very cool people about the Gospel of John recently. It’s important to me to be fresh with what I’m talking about, so I’ve been burying myself in the first part of the book recently, more listening than reading this time, just for a new perspective. And indeed, I’ve heard things I’ve never seen in there.

I’ve been attracted to the very fascinating story of Nicodemus in John 3. There are so many interesting things in that encounter! Specifically, I’ve been watching how Jesus and Nick interact, and frankly, I’ve been sympathizing with Nick’s confusion in that conversation. We teach regularly from some of the contentof that conversation. I’d like to look at the nature of the conversation itself, the context of it. 

A little background: Nicodemus is a Pharisee, which means he’s spent his life studying the Bible of his day, our Old Testament. Moreover, he’s “a ruler of the Jews,” which means that he’s been studying the Bible for a very long time, and that he has the additional weight of leading the People of God, by means of his immense knowledge of the Book. He’s probably a member of the Sanhedran, and he probably teaches teachers in Israel. 

I was taught from Sunday School on up that Pharisees are “the bad guys,” but Nick embodies all that is good about them. He comes to Jesus, seeking, recognizing God’s presence in Jesus’ miraculous ministry. He’s teachable! And so Jesus, who is the Word of God (John 1:1), teaches the teacher of the Word of God.

And Jesus is dropping some pretty heavy stuff on him. In a few short paragraphs (which may merely be a condensation of several of hours of conversation), Jesus introduces him to the concepts of being born again and being led by the Spirit. We think of these subjects as relatively foundational in the church today, but these would be revolutionary to a Pharisee who has only had the Old Testament to study. He’s studied the Word all of his life, but it hasn’t prepared him for the topics that Jesus is opening up to him. I’m impressed that he stays in the conversation; he doesn’t blow Jesus off, which tells me that he tastes some truth, some life, in it.

In the midst of this earthshaking conversation, Jesus drops in the fact that he, himself, makes visits Heaven while he’s on Earth (verse 13: “No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven,” whom he clarifies as being himself.) Even in our post-Resurrection era, the idea of visiting Heaven one is a bit of a stretch for many Christians. Fortunately, it allows us to experience a tiny bit of the paradigm shift that Nick was reeling under: this Man, clearly from God, is teaching some things that are waaaayoutside the lines of Nick’s religious experience, just as most churches would consider visiting heaven at least “outside the lines” and possible “heresy.” This is what Nicodemus is dealing with.

This is no light conversation between Jesus and Nick. In this context we find the archetypal New Testament verse, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” This is thatconversation: foundational.

Let’s look at our context: Today, we live in a season that has a lot of this kind of conversation in it. For decades, even for generations, we’ve known what we believed; our theology was settled, grounded, not really subject to change. And then Jesus steps in and suddenly it shifts. Suddenly, those theological foundations are remarkably less solid than we thought they were. Nicodemus experienced that shift, and we are also dealing with the that kind of shift, as the Holy Spirit brings up new topics for us as well. Think about the subjects of revival, apostolic ministry, street-healing, visiting Heaven, even translocation; things these were even not part of the conversation a few years ago. Like Nick’s conversation, these also are topics that are not easily supported from inductive study. 

Then verse 10 of Nick’s conversation with Jesus hit me: “Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Are you the teacher of Israel, and do not know these things?’” Jesus acknowledged that he was speaking to “the teacher” of Israel(the definite article really is in the Greek), and knew that he was speaking of content that was not supportable from exegetical or inductive study of the Old Testament, but He expected the teacher to know anyway. The topics did not reveal themselves in the Word, but Jesus expected “the teacher of Israel” to know – or at least have some familiarity with them – anyway. 

 

If an Old Covenant teacher (“the teacher of Israel”) was somehow expected to understand things that were not directly supportable from the Scripture of the day, is it not reasonable that we who are teachers, leaders, thought-shapers of the New Covenant may likewise also be expected to draw some of our understanding from sources OTHER than strict didactic study of the Word? 

If we stop and say it slowly, it’s not quite as scary: “There are more places to learn things than the pages of the Bible.” But we have a hard time with the subject. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “Show me that in scripture!” (Comment: they said that to Jesus too. He gave them grief for it.)

Now, I am NOT suggesting that we teach – or personally hold to – any doctrine or practice about which the Word says “Don’t do it!” We don’t contravene scripture. End of story.  

Nor am I suggesting that we listen to every self-appointed spiritual authority out there. I’m suggesting that the Bible is about God speaking to us: let’s listen to God. I’m am suggesting that we allow ourselves and others to draw from non-Biblical sources – including personal revelation, supernatural encounters, and interesting conversations after hours – in order to correctly form our understanding of what the Spirit is doing and saying to the churches today.

Am I saying “The Bible is not enough”? Not quite. I’m saying, “Jesus seems to be declaring that there’s substantially more to learning than just the Bible.”

It looks to me as if Jesus doesn’t believe in the concept of “Sola Scriptura,” the doctrine that the Bible contains all knowledge necessary for salvation and holiness. The amazing thing about the Bible is that God is speaking. Why do we assume that just because we wrapped it in leather, He has stopped speaking?  The more I know Him, the more I am inclined to follow Him instead of the Book. And I'm coming to the radical conclusion that he has more to say than merely what had already been said and recorded

Personally, I am feeling challenged by the Spirit: that if I do NOT stretch my learning – more than just the Word, not replacing learning from the Word – at least in the data-gathering phase of my study, that I am short-changing what He can do in me and say to me. It is fine to teach from the Bible, to teach what God has said. But I suspect that we’ll be more and more relying on what God is saying. And I believe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

The real issue with Nicodemus was that the Spirit alone can unlock scripture; Nick’s head knowledge could never reveal mysteries of the Spirit. You know, I really don’t want Jesus saying to me, “You’re my child, and you still don’t get it?” 

I Have Peas! (I Have Revival!)

I have Peas!

Some time ago, I planted peas in my garden. This is what they look like now. I'm so excited! I have peas!

Actually, to state it precisely, I don't really have peas. I have sprouts. If I care for the pea sprouts and pull out the sprouting weeds, if I train the tiny plants to climb the poles, if I keep the slugs and beetles away, if I water them with some regularity, then I am likely to have peas next month.

But I have peas! I know I have peas. I just can't see them yet.

Father spoke to me through this. "It's only those who recognize my move when it is in its infancy, who bless it when it's only a sprout, who will be qualified to be a leader in the movement when it is bearing fruit."

There was a gathering last weekend, a convocation, of some of the prophetic folks of the Northwest (notes are here: http://nwp.link/If5Xgl). The one thought I heard over and over again was different prophetic folks saying, "It's here. The move of God has already started, but it's only in sprout form just yet.

Now my job is to recognize the peas, the awakening, the move of God. My job is to to nurture the tiny sprouts, to train them to climb the poles on their own, to keep the pests away, to water them once in a while.

It's going to be a glorious harvest!

(Hint: This is not about gardening. This is about partnering with God. :-)

Guard Against Counterfeit Grief

We’re in a season of transition. The old leaders are being replaced by new leaders: we knew that was coming, though we may not have considered that the old leaders might be going home in the process. In addition, the battle has been heating up for a while, and more warriors, more bystanders, are getting hit by an increasingly desperate devil.

As a result, there are a lot of us still in the battle who are grieving: for fallen brothers & sisters, dying fathers & mothers, wounded family members, and more. (There is a reason someone said, “War is hell.”)

I felt the Lord warn me this morning: Son, grieving is a good thing; it’s a good and healthy response to fallen comrades. But Son, watch out for the counterfeit: sometimes sadness slips in and the enemy tells you that you’re grieving.

Grieving is a process, and being sad is part of that healthy process. But it’s not hard to get stuck in just the sadness, and then the process stops. Instead of moving on, of resolving into healing, sadness just sits there; the longer we stay in the stationary place of sadness, the more difficult it is to choose to move beyond it.

The result of healthy grieving is healing. If we don’t see the process heading towards healing, we might have lost our way, and we may need help finding it again. Don't be afraid to ask for that help.

If we don’t keep moving through the grief process, if we get stuck in sadness, then sadness wants to bring forth fruits of bitterness, or of depression, or of some other unhealthy bondage and keep us in chains. The result of a derailed grieving is bondage, and nobody but the evil one wants us in bondage.

Grieve, brothers & sisters! Weep where you need to: even Jesus wept when his friend died. But guard against getting stuck along the way. 

A Basic Introduction to Prophetic Giftings

There is Not A Gift of Prophecy.
The prophetic is not one gifting, it’s several related ones. First the basic ones, available to anybody:

• Every believer can hear God’s voice. John 10:27 speaks to this.
• Pretty much anybody can prophesy when they’re in a prophetic environment. King Saul did in 1 Samuel 10:11.

In addition to those, some people get specific gifts. In fact, the whole Trinity gets involved: each person of the trinity gives their own version of the prophetic gift:

• Holy Spirit’s gift is described in 1 Corinthians 12:10. It’s a “tool in the toolbox” kind of gift: pull it out & use it when you need to.
• Father’s gift is in Romans 12:6. It’s a “This is how some people are built. This is how they relate to the world.” kind of gift.
• Jesus’ gift shows up in Ephesians 4:11. He gives some people as prophets, and their job description (v12) is “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.”

Prophecy is much more about knowing what’s on God’s heart than it is about predicting the future. But the future is on his heart, so they do in fact go together.

Final word about it: 1 Corinthians 14:1 says we must “Pursue love, and desire spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy.” We are commanded to want to prophesy.

Left Turn: Discernment:

First cousin to the gift of prophecy is the gift of discernment. Both are critical in this day and age, and it appears that you have both gifts.

Properly called “discerning of spirits” (from 1 Corinthians 12:10), the gift has a few highlights:

• First, it’s about judging spirits. It’s not about judging people. When you heard noises and saw creepy things on that person, I suspect that what you encountered was demonic spirits showing off, not something weird that weird guy was doing.
• It means that you might see things that not everybody sees. That’s OK. It doesn’t make you weird (though you may be weird on your own…); it means you have a gift from God.
• The gift of discernment is mostly about being able (with experience) to identify, “This is from God,” “This is just them,” or “This is demonic.” You may develop to the finer discernment: “This part is from God,” “This part is not from God.” I have observed that not everybody gets there.
• The word means literally, “To know all the way through the thing.” As you mature in the gift, this aspect comes into play: as you discern gunk (like the creepy thing on that guy), you have authority over it: because of who you are in Jesus (and the “in Jesus” part is the biggest part), you can tell the creepies where to go and what to do. Mark chapters 5 & 9 have some cool stories illustrating this.
• Note: guard against interpreting the gift by what other people tell you. Let the Holy Spirit tell you (remember John 10:27). He’s the one who gives the gift, so he’s the best source of training for it. There are a whole freaking lot of ignorant ideas floating around out there.

Neither of these gifts work all that well without practice, even training. I encourage you to use the gifts, and to talk with other folks who use the gifts. Growth is necessary. Without growth, the gifts will likely kind of fade into obscurity.

On the other hand, even with pursuing the gifts, the experiences we have in God will likely be less dramatic than the early days, not more so. The goal is to focus on the One who gives the gift, not the gift itself, and so he whispers, so that we have to snuggle closer to him to hear. That’s because it’s safer for us there, it’s better there, and frankly, he really likes it when we snuggle close to him. He’s that kind of God: he likes his kids close.

Note that the gifts - all the gifts - are tools, not toys. But nobody said that you can’t have fun with the tools. Just know that there is no “kid’s size” version of the gift of God; they still have the power to change a life forever while you’re learning. Have fun with them, but have fun carefully! By all means, play! But play safely.

Oh yeah, the gifts are to you, but they’re not for you. 1 Corinthians 12:7 says, “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” The gifts are more for the people around you than they are for your own benefit, like Jesus did: he was always healing other people, doing miracles for other people, not all about himself.

Correcting Prophetic Inaccuracies

I was asked the other day, "When a well known prophet gives a national prophetic word and it ends up being completely wrong, how should the prophet address it?" Excellent question.

This strikes me as another way to ask the question, “Who is responsible for inaccurate prophetic words?”

If there was such a thing as an ideal world, everybody would take responsibility for their own stuff. But that doesn’t happen, and there are at least two ways that it doesn’t happen that make this a complicated question:

First, it has appeared that prophets with big public ministries don’t often take responsibility for their prophetic words. There are a few that DO take responsibility when they find out something was predicted correctly, but most don’t slow down enough to even recognize either when a word is fulfilled or when it’s proven inaccurate.

The other side is that I can’t really affect whether the national prophet will, in fact, acknowledge and respond to an errant prophecy. National prophets generally haven’t made themselves accountable to me, so my expectations have no real effect on their actions.

Second issue: so many prophetic declarations are worded in such a way (I make no statement about intent here: this is just the way it is) that it’s hard to clearly interpret and apply portions of the word, and therefore, it’s hard to judge the word (1 Corinthians 14:29). For example: the word is about an earthquake: but is it a literal, physical quake, or a metaphor for God shaking things up? And does a 3.4 quake that knocked a pencil off of a teacher’s desk somewhere qualify as fulfillment when we were all clearly expecting the earth to open swallow a region whole?

But let’s face it, the people receiving a prophetic word are more likely to be invested in the word than a prophet that’s travelling through, heading towards their next meeting. That’s not a criticism, it’s just recognizing how the “real world” interjects itself into the ideal.

This leads me to a third issue. I’ve long been an advocate of the concept that when a prophet gives me a word, it’s now MY word; it isn’t theirs anymore. And therefore I am the one who needs to take responsibility for that word: I need to nurture it, feed it, cherish it, and help it grow to fruition.

And I need to discern it. It certainly saves time and energy if I can successfully discern a word BEFORE I encounter the conditions stated in the word. I’d much rather recognize beforehand if a prophet was adding something of himself into the revelation, rather than wait till afterwards.

Note that it may not be the prophet that’s adding something to the word: it may be my own expectations. I met a woman who was praying for the death of her pastor’s wife. “But God said I could have anything I want! I want him, and she’s in his way!” And I’ve run into lots of prophecies that have been taken way beyond the original word that was spoken.

So yeah: if the prophet is aware of having given a word that turned out to be inaccurate, it would be appropriate for that prophet to take responsibility for the mistake, acknowledge it, and (how does one do this?) apologize to those who were misled by it.

But whether or not they take responsibility for a word that they’ve given to me (or to a group of which I’m a part), still I have responsibility for the word, which is now mine. I need to discern it (“judge it”) even if I’m late in doing that, and if it’s bogus, I need to toss it out.

I’ve done that with a lot of words recently. I find myself frustrated with a number of national and regional prophets who drop a prophetic bomb and move on, or who prophesy so vaguely that they are essentially mumbling gibberish in God’s name.

More than once, I’ve stood with a group of people (the prophet having never left their home, on the east coast, or wherever) and renounced a prophetic declaration that we’ve judged to be inaccurate, false, mistaken. Sure, it would be better if they did it. But if they don’t, then somebody needs to. I often find myself following these sessions up with prayers for the prophets whose work we were just correcting.

Your Town's Move of God

I'm hearing something in the Spirit, feeling an unction in the Wind. It's time.

If you've been seeing the move of God in other regions, and hoping for it, praying for it in your own community, I believe this is the season that God is blowing on that, encouraging that hope, encouraging that vision, because it's on his heart too.

May I encourage a couple of first steps that you might consider on behalf of your town, your region:

• Pray for the leaders – especially pray for the emerging apostolic leaders – that God is raising up in your region (and note that it may be YOU that he’s raising up for such a time as this). When God does things, he often works through leaders, but those leaders are often not the people in “positions of leadership,” or the people you’d expect.

• Expand your relationships with God’s people in your region. It doesn’t matter if they believe what you believe, or if they worship like you do, as long as they serve the same God you serve. Some don’t, you know. Some serve the agenda or structures of man. But don’t shy away from people who are within those structures, people who do things waaaaay differently than you do.
  
  (Note that "build relationships" is not related to "attend meetings." It probably has more to do with the local coffee shop, or the dinner table, than it does with church meetings.)

• Give thanks for that which is not yet happening, as if it were. Give thanks for the barest little sprout of the thing that God has promised, even if (possibly especially if) it looks completely different than what you expected. The business of expanding the Kingdom is a work of faith, not sight. It’s when we can recognize and bless the tiniest hint of revival that revival is really planted.

• You pursue God. Fan your own passion into a good, healthy flame. Set your own heart to pursue the Kingdom, to expand the Kingdom, regardless of whether anyone else comes with you.
  
  Interestingly, it’s often when we declare that we’re moving forward, whether anyone else comes with us, that people decide they want to come with you. They can’t follow unless someone is willing to lead the way.

• Take ownership. Understand that you are God’s representative in your community. As you take that seriously before Heaven, your prayers will change, and you’ll have more authority in Heaven to move Earth. If you’re praying as a resident of the region, you have more authority than a stranger. But if you’re praying as Heaven’s representative in the region, accountable before God for what happens here, you’ll have both more authority and more passion.

• Recognize the strengths of who and what is in your region already. There’s nothing wrong with driving to another area for a conference, or bringing guest speakers in, but God wants to raise up His voice in your region, not just to your region. Look for “the voice” of your region. Look for the gifts that God has given your community. You’re not above others in the purposes of God, of course, but neither are you below them. God is at big in your little town as he is in New York or Seoul or Redding.

I believe that there is a grace available for this, for spreading the fire, for infecting the entire Northwest (well OK: the whole world, but the Northwest is my focus!) with the move of God. I believe that the time is right to move from a region with a handful of campfires, to an entire region on fire in God.