Getting Perspective on Death

Recently I was talking to a friend, his friend had died just a day or two before. It was hard for him because he had great affection for his friend. He knew, however, that his friend was with the Lord in Heaven. My friend is wise enough to realize that mourning was not for his friend, but for our loss of a great woman of God. That seems like just using logic to suppress the pain of loss, but there was something that gave us even greater hope. We realized that his friend simply moved to a new City far away, and that City will soon come to Earth.

During Jesus’ first preparatory visit to the Earth, He said that He was going away to prepare a place for us. That was not a cliche or a figure of speech. He was explaining one of the reasons why He had to leave His disciples, that He had to go back to the Father to finish up the construction of the Holy City – Zion, The New Jerusalem – where the redeemed will live in the Millennial Kingdom. We know that for 1,000 years we will live in a City whose Architect and Builder is God (Hebrews 11:10), from here the redeemed of history will rule over those who made it through the Tribulation without swearing allegiance to either the Christ or the anti-Christ. These mortals, for the redeemed will have indestructible and glorified bodies, will repopulate the Earth for 1,000 years and will be ruled by those who were meek in their time before the Second Coming of the Messiah (Matthew 5:4).

So we have hope to see our friends and family again, those who are redeemed and remain in the faith. They are simply changing addresses from Wherever, USA to Zion, Israel. There is the tough reality that there are those who do not enter through the Narrow Gate, for them I have no consolation. God is a God of Justice, and though He waits on high to be gracious and compassionate (Isaiah 30), He will not wait forever. The wages of sin truly is death, apart from the redeeming Blood of Jesus, we all deserve the Lake of Fire with no exceptions.

Our God is both all-powerful and good, if He were one but not the other, He would not be worthy of all praise. If He were all-powerful, but not good, He would be a tyrant. If He were good, but in any way inadequate, He would be unworthy of worship because He would just be impotent. Our God is both loving and righteous, the Cross proves that. He satisfied His own wrath, His absolute requirement that man be like God, by being a sympathetic High Priest and the atoning Sacrifice. But He is love incarnate, which answers the question of WHY He died on the Cross.

Justice is displayed at the Cross, end of argument. And because He took the wrath for us, when Judgment is released on the earth -whether in history or eternity – He has the right to administrate the judgment of God. All this is to say, if my brother goes to Hell and ends up in the Lake of Fire after the Millennial reign, God is STILL good. If my Grandfather did not trust that Jesus’ death on the Cross was good enough to cover all his sin, he is right now being tortured in Hell, even though he lived a good life and went to church and raised godly children. I say that, knowing that I loved my Grandfather and he may actually be in eternal judgment.

We must think eternally in all we do. What fruit are we producing in our actions? What will the end-result be if we take our words and actions to the extreme? We will be held accountable for every decision we make, every word that we speak and every intent of our hearts. If you think you can make amends for all you’ve done and all you will do, feel free to keep your wrong opinion.  Trust me, you do not want to be responsible for all of your unrighteousness, your debt is far too great.

Enjoy the Grace of God.  When you sin, repent fast.  Walk in the Grace of God.  When you feel your freedom you will live in Happy Holiness, Joyful Righteousness and Giddy Godliness. Madam Jeanne Guyon said “Love God and do as you please for if you love Him you will not desire to offend Him.”

*Oh God Eternal, Immortal, set eternity in our hearts.  Amen.*

A Deeper Life and Experience of the Divine Touch

This afternoon I was teaching a seminar for a group of teenagers at the International House of Prayer’s Summer Teen Intensive. The allotted time I was given was about 2 hours. I have been teaching for the last week or so a series of seminars called “Eat the Scroll”. Essentially the material has been how to read, study, meditate on and enjoy the Word of God. It has been great as 2-3 dozen teenagers have consistently shown up to learn how to “Eat the Scroll”. The STI schedule has been flipped around a bit this week because the Prayer Room had to be moved for construction and enhancements related to the IHOP-KC/GODTV convergence. So I wasn’t sure if I would be teaching or not.

Over the last weeks as a STI Prayer Room Leader and the Resident Director of the dorm living for the young gentlemen, I have not gotten a lot of sleep. I’m the last to bed and the first to get a phone call in the middle of the night and have to get up early and be ready to direct 300 teenagers in various ways and still encounter the Lord personally and deeply. A challenge not easily surmountable.

So today as I was preparing to teach I had an epiphone, “Teach on Meditation and then meditate and rest in Him.” GENIUS, I tell you, genius! So I taught a quick lesson on how to meditate, gave the two dozen teens three meditation options, and then threw on my favorite instrumental CD and we went for it. Regardless of what they felt or learned, I got rest. I was able to enter into rest, and I was actually visited by an angelic presence and got translated to a room in Heaven called “Rest”. I found that we have to be aggressive in our pursuit of the things of God, including rest – we must strive to enter rest.

Here is what I really touched, though. I found that I knew of a place to which I had access, I place in the Lord that I had forgotten. There is a place that I had once visited in a former season of life that I had become aware of a level of connectivity to the depths of Our Lord, which I introduced the teens to and re-introduced myself to. This place is a place of true love with God, worship in Spirit and Truth, emotional wholeness, sweet brokenness and abandonment. Few have come to this place in their life in God, some have seen it at a distance, but it is our inheritance. It cannot be easily explained, but it can be experienced by the diligent seekers.

What is needed in this time in history is not another sermon or service, we don’t need another alter call, we need God. Our generation is sick of people trying to stuff moldy manna down their throats when the world will give them all the junk food they can stuff in their pockets.

Ministers of the Glory, I address you now, get the Presence in your life. The teens and younger are not impressed with nor are they fooled by our fake religion. They will get encounter because they are hungry for it, the question is not IF it happen or not, but WHO will be the source of the encounter. Will they encounter the prince of darkness or the King of Light. If we bore them with another lifeless, spiritless worship time, a stale revelation echoed from a pale neon pulpit and a generic, powerless “ministry time”, we will see this generation turn to what genuine spirituality that they can get.

*Father of mercies, have mercy on us and give us what we do not deserve, give us encounter. Amen.*

The Transformation of a Life Marked by 2 Peter 1:2-3 ::part three::

“Grace and Peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.”

If you read my first post on this site, you know that I’m starting to write my first book soon.  The subject of the book and the obsession of my heart is the Names and Titles of God.  And what a doozy we have in this verse!  The name that Peter, a friend of Jesus while He was on earth, uses for the Lord is “Him who called us by His own glory and excellence”.  There is something powerful about what the friends of the Lord call Him.

W e see, here, that it is in the true knowledge of this Person that we receive everything we need to live in the realm of godliness that is granted us by His divine power.  But who is this Person?  He is the one who called us by His own glory and excellence.  The uniqueness of the way that He calls us out of what we are in is staggering.  He doesn’t call us out by showing us how bad off we are, nor does He call us by showing us where we could be.  Rather, He doesn’t even address the issue of our proximity to destiny, His primary strategy in moving us towards the Light and out of darkness is to use His glory and excellence to shine Light into our darkness.

It is by displaying His glory that we realize we are living in darkness.  His Light shines in our darkness and the darkness does not overcome it (John 1:5).  By the “un-overcomablity” of His Light we become overcomers because the Light comes with the indestructible, supernatural seed of the Holy Spirit (1 Peter 1:23).  This seed transfers us to the Kingdom of Light by the adoption as princes.  As we live like the royalty that we are, we are transformed and made like Him as we behold Him.  With the supernatural seed of the Spirit in us we are not only adopted, but reborn and made into a new creation.  We are made like Him, like Father like son, and we grow in likeness to the Son of God.  As this happens, we stir the pleasures of the Father because we remind Him of His Son.  This gives Him great pleasure, we know, because every time He spoke in the gospels of His Son, He was always saying things like “This is My Son in whom I take great pleasure”.

His ultimate goal for us is not to make us a better us, but to make us into His Image.  That is why He shows us His glory and excellence, to show us what we can enter into.  It is a prophetic mirror He puts in front of us, showing us what we will look like.  Something in us, then, jumps and we turn and embrace our destiny, our mandate and purpose from the beginning – to be made in His image and likeness.

*Oh Excellent and Glorious One, draw us to Yourself like a moth to a lamppost and let us burn as we touch You.  Amen*

The Transformation of a Life Marked by 2 Peter 1:2-3 ::part two::

“Grace and Peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.”

A continuing look at this passage gives the fuller understanding of the point that Peter is making. Verse 2 is not a full sentence, the thought continues in verse 3. There is a single word that links two sets of thoughts, and in Greek that word is only two letters, but it carries great responsibility and purpose.  The word that in the above translation is translated “seeing that” is in a few translation is completely ignored and disregarded.  Essentially the word is a “reverse ‘therefore’”, meaning that it links the two sets of thoughts in such a way that the first assertion is contingent upon the foundation of the reality described in the second assertion.   Let’s put that in context.

As we saw in verse 2, Grace and Peace are multiplied as the recipient of Grace and Peace knows Jesus more intimately – as they grow in the knowledge of God.  But that transitional word explains that Grace and Peace only happens because of what Peter explains in verse 3.  What the Holy Spirit explains through Jesus’ friend Peter is that His divine power has handed us everything we need to for living with the reality of Christ in us (our Hope of Glory) – that is, godliness in our lives.  He also says that it is only in the context of the TRUE knowledge of God that we receive what has been granted to us.  In other words, it is in knowing Our Redeemer that we can receive everything we need to live godly.

So we have been given everything necessary for godly living as we increase in intimacy.  That makes the event called “multiplying in Grace and Peace” possible because everything has been presented to us to walk out godliness, therefore Grace (the divine influence) and Peace (proximity to the Prince of Peace) can be increased.  If we do not have an ever increasing reality in verse 3, the multiplication of Grace and Peace is nearly impossible.  Verse 2 cannot happen if verse 3 isn’t true.  Also, the walking out of verse 3’s reality is verse 2’s multiplication of Grace and Peace.  We know that we are living in the realm of verse 3 if we are seeing verse 2 happen in our lives.

*May the Lord multiply our Grace and Peace to live godly as we worship Him in Spirit and Truth.  Amen.*

The Transformation of a Life Marked by 2 Peter 1:2-3 ::part one::

“Grace and Peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.”

The concept of the multiplication of Grace and Peace has been haunting me for the last few days. What struck me was that when you multiply something the result is not a slight increase of that object of your multiplication, but rather at least a doubling of the original. In other words, if I have have one pen in front of me and the number of pens is multiplied, then I will not have a pen and then a chunk of another pen. I will have at least two pens in front of me after the multiplication happens, if not many more than two. Likewise, if Grace and Peace is multiplied to me, then at the point of multiplication I will have at least twice as much Grace and Peace, if not far more than 200% of my current state of either Grace or Peace.

The question, then, is: what exactly is “grace” and “peace”? The best definition I have found thus far for “Grace” is “the divine influence upon the heart, and its reflection in the recipient’s life”. Though we use the term “peace” more than sporadically, I doubt that we truly understand what it is to have peace – let alone have peace multiplied to us. “Peace” is not simple “wavelessness” on the sea of life. Peace is rest, prosperity, quietness and “being made one again”. Peace is unity with the Prince of Peace who calms storms with a word and is threatened by no one in Heaven nor Earth.

So imagine if you were fasting for a breakthrough for salvation in an unsaved family member’s life. If you had a level 4 grace for fasting, meaning that the Lord had anointed you with the ability to fast easily up to a certain point. If your grace and peace was multiplied in this situation, your grace level would be at least doubled and you would be able to fast longer and with more focus. less distraction and increased effectiveness. Also your peace would be at least doubled, meaning that you would be so much more connected to the Prince of Peace that you would know that He will accomplish His Word in your family member’s life. Doubt goes out the window. Faith goes through the roof. Hope wells up in you and you pray with confidence.

Note that “grace and peace are multiplied” in connection to another reality. Multiplication occurs in the context of “the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”. It is in knowing the Lord that grace and peace are multiplied. There are degrees of increase, as we draw closer and closer to Jesus in the knowledge of God we maximize the multiplication of our grace and peace. The truth of this revelation is great and makes perfect sense. If grace is defined as “divine influence”, then it will naturally follow that if we are more connected to the divine source then we will likewise be closer to source of grace and will only increase in our expression of that grace. And it goes without saying that if one stands in the courts of the Prince of Peace, his peace will only increase that much more. It is in the knowledge of God that we walk under the influence of the divine source and we will thus be in the grips of the Prince’s peace – of which the increase will have no end (Isaiah 9:7).

In part two of this blog we will look into the foundation that has been laid that makes the multiplication of grace and peace possible. I have seen in my own life that as I have gotten the revelation of what grace and peace are and that they can be multiplied in my life, I have found that grace and peace are the motor oil of living a victorious Christian life.

*Lord Jesus, Prince of Peace, God of Grace, multiply grace and peace to us in the enthroning of Yourself in our lives. Amen.*

Strategic Ministry

It is one thing to be ABLE to do something, even anointed to do it, it is a whole other thing be told to do something. Paul wrote to the Roman church saying that “the gifts and callings are irrevocable”, meaning that we have the anointings we have forever. God, as a good father, doesn’t take away our toys when we are bad. People can have power marking their lives without actually knowing God.

The time is soon coming when most of the Body of Christ will have power operating in their lives, but it will not be a matter of IF you can heal someone, it will be a matter of WHEN, HOW, WHERE, etc that you heal someone. It will not be a matter of IF you can prophesy accurately, it will be a matter of when and how you prophesy accurately. We must become far more connected to the Holy Spirit.

Think of it this way. There was a basketball game in which the home team was down by 2 points with 23 seconds left in the fourth quarter of the state championship game. The home team has the ball at half-court to in-bound it. Would it be wise for them to quickly hurry and score a lay-up? Absolutely not. Then the other team has time to score and win. What is wise in this situation? To wait until the most opportune time and score with as close to zero time on the clock as possible so that there is more of a chance of victory.

Obviously the analogy breaks down. But the truth is that we must be submitted under the leading of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise we will miss out on huge chunks of what He has for us and for others. Sometimes people ask or require things of us that God does not, we need the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of the Son of God to keep us from going beyond what the Father is doing. Jesus only did what He saw the Father doing. He did His miracles based on a strong dependence on Heaven. If we are to fulfill John 14:12, it will only be by dependence on Heaven.

New Blog for a New Season

Thank you for joining me in my current project. I have recently been challenged to write more consistently and found that if I wanted to fulfill a major part of what I want to accomplish in life, I would have to become much more aggressive in my pursuit of authorship. Whereas MySpace is sufficient in some ways to do writing and get some feedback, I find myself straying far from MySpace purely out of frustration with the advertising, spam and lack of professionalism therein. Thus I have turned to WordPress to help me on the road to publication.

This will be just a short entry to introduce you to what you ought to expect in the near future. I will begin writing meditations on the Names and Titles of God in the New Testament starting August 7, 2007. My intentions are to daily write an entry that will draw the reader into more depth of love, admiration and worship of our God. This will be a year-long project and will hopefully be published soon after in hard-copy. Each day will have a distinct Name or Title of God from the New Testament, walking chronologically through the New Testament. This is how it will go: on August 7, 2007 we will start in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 1, Verse 1 and if all goes according to plan on August 6, 2008 I will write about the Name in Revelation 22:16 – “The Root and the Descendant of David, the Bright Morning Star“. Since 2008 is a leap year, this will work out very well.

So please stay tuned for a long drink of the Name and Character of God.