This is God coming to His people in a personal presence..... a new and greater presence of GOD WITH US............ The cry is no longer, send us revival; it is come Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!
AMEN!!!! As Ron Kenoly sang....we seek the giver, not the gifts, our heart's desire is to lift Him high above all earthly kings (including ourselves).....
This response that we see of the tangible manifest presence of Jesus on earth recently is as a result of the hunger in the surrendered hearts who have cried out for more of Him....it is the purity of the cry of the two or three that were gathered in His name that brought the presence in the midst of the gathering...extrapolate that to multiples of two or three and we will understand the reality of His presence that is in the earth.
We must never lose sight of the fact that the supernatural follows His presence..... When Jesus came as the Lamb, He was clear that His mandate was redemption...His work was the Cross ..and He set His face as flint...the healings, signs, wonders and miracles happened because He, the Word that heals and delivers and saves, walked amongst them in human flesh.
Jesus said in Mark 16:17 that these signs will FOLLOW them that believe. .....(signs usually point you to a destination) but what Jesus was saying was .....once you are already at the destination, there at the point of belief and in the reality of His presence and you are walking on with Him because it is Him that matters to you and nothing else, then signs follow....come after you..... because He is there with you and in you.....
With the mentality of the old wineskin, we worked hard to produce the supernatural as evidence that He was to be believed, that He was true .....so that we could persuade people to believe in Him....but Jesus said that these signs would follow those who believe (already persuaded, fully confident in their conviction, completely and fully trusting of and in Him)....
We understand now that all He was asking us to do was to simply live like He was real...in all our choices, moment by moment ....when we who say that we love Him and believe Him, live like He is who He says He is and that every Word that He spoke is truth.....the indisputable, unmistable, undeniable presence of the living Jesus Christ will become real to every person on the planet.
When the only thing that connects all these spots on the earth where the real Presence, the fire of God, the Shekinah Glory, the Ruach of God is being made manifest in a nameless, faceless group of Holy people, is the fact that they are identifiable only by His presence in and amongst them....no other form or system, no other banner or name, then we will see Jesus walk in His corporate body and the supernatural will flood the earth....and ALL that are sick and oppressed will be healed and delivered...
When we were in worship together a few weeks ago, I heard the Holy Spirit ask me the question: Prema, why was Jesus walking on the water the day Peter saw him?
I have heard that sermon preached so many times from Peter's perspective..... for the first time i reflected on what Jesus did.... with the understanding that has come about where we dwell...in eternity...in His presence....I understood that Jesus just went for a walk that day (probably like He did on many days without being seen and on more than land and water)........He wasn't trying to do anything supernatural.......He was just walking and when He got to the edge of the water, He just continued walking, because He could, because nature was subject to Him....He was the Word that was holding up the land and water anyway and making it real in the first place!
If He was not the truth and His Word was not the truth, the land and water would have been nothing but an illusion....and while Jesus was out walking Peter saw Him and saw that He was doing something supernatural.....even when He calmed the storm......He was sleeping right through it, unaffected by nature, He responded to their need but was not in awe of what happened.......with the old wineskin, we saw these events from the disciples and Peter's perspective.....with the new wineskin, we realise that the only truth is Jesus...He is real....the supernatural will happen when He is around...and the impossible is possible to us as well, just as it was to Him, because of who we are, not because of what we do.....
Even though I know there is a mixture in the motivation of our hearts still in seeking after Him....there is hunger for Him, there is love for Him, there is compassion for the lost, there is mercy for the sick and suffering yes....but there is also our own stuff in there......
We must leave behind the old wineskin mentality of seeking for bigger and bigger miracles and signs and wonders to justify to the world that our formula (our seven steps, forty days) works, we must not see His presence as a vindication of us, our ministry, our faith in Him, the fact that we are right to say that He exists, to prove our case, to be politically correct in church.......
Father, hasten the day when we all recognise that seeking You for what You can do, even if that seeking is for others, is no different than the relationship that the children of Israel had with You.....
With the present "revival" we may have spent longer hours in seeking, our hearts may be more purified in our motives, and we may stay longer in His presence, but there will be little difference between this and the picture that the Holy Spirit once showed me of the local church, being like a house to which He was invited where once He got to the door, it was opened, the gifts He carried were taken out of His hand....and the door was closed on His face.... unless we allow the river of fire that is flowing to purge us, to sweep away every platform, every veil, every soulish motive, every selfish intention.....
We cannot seek Him in the same way as before....no matter how much we feel the world needs a "revival".....it is not what the world needs that matters....who the world needs is Jesus
Love always
Prema
------------- God has us in mind...
No eye has seen, no ear heard, no mind conceived...
|