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40-Day Focus Week 3: God First

Posted by Tim

One of the best descriptions I’ve heard for what’s beginning to take place in the Western church is ‘a Copernican revolution’ – the center of our universe is about to change. Copernicus was the scientist who made the audacious claim that it was not the sun that revolved around the earth but the earth around the sun. Similarly, one of the single biggest heart shifts implied in “My house will be called a house of prayer” is in God taking His place at the center. As much as we understand the importance of God – how His light lets us see, His nearness comforts us and His continual presence allows life to continue – we are still prone in our human pride (and particularly our Western culture) to place God in a revolving role in our world rather than our world revolving around Him. God wants to change that… and there is no more glorious change. Nothing so drastically impacts our corporate and personal relationship with Christ as when He takes center stage.

In the beginning, God…
It begins with a simple revelation – God is the beginning, the middle and the end of the story. “For of Him, to Him and through Him are all things.” Romans 11:36 His desire is the initiative, His grace the vehicle and His pleasure the end of it all. It’s a crucial revelation – to the way we understand the gospel, to the way we function as a church, and to the way we relate with God. Our culture would put a humanistic slant even on religion – making it begin and end with us: we do our best in this life, God responds and we are either blessed or cursed accordingly. It’s a model that fits perfectly well with the religions men have created, but it’s totally contradictory to what God has done in Christ. God is the divine initiator – He moves and we respond.

It’s what makes the gospel message what it is – a divine invitation that must either be accepted or rejected. The emergent watered-down gospel that teaches there are many ways to God makes the very wrong assumption that it is God who responds to us – we behave in a particular way, and God doles out salvation in some formulaic manner. From that framework it’s hard to see why God would respond more positively to a good atheist than a bad Christian. The truth of the Biblical gospel is that God, who had no requirement to interact with man at all, by His own initiative reached out to humanity and extended an invitation – an offer of covenant. Like every covenant, the New Covenant was not a negotiated contract between two parties but a one-way offer from God to join us to Him and His eternal life through His extravagant offer of love on the cross. Because God extended the invitation we are left with only two choices – accept His open arms or scorn them.

It’s not just our gospel that errors without this understanding, though, it is the very way in which we live out Christianity. The silence of our prayer rooms makes a terrifying contrast with the busyness of our church programs. We suffer from a profound over-abundance of services, programs, teachers and ministries, and a profound lack of the voice and activity of God. We will never regain the activity of God in our midst so long as we maintain a system where we’re so busy doing what we’re doing we can give only a small portion of our attention to seeking what God is wanting to do. We won’t regain the voice of God in our midst so long as our pastors are so busy managing all of the programs needed to keep everyone happy that they’re not spending long hours in prayer receiving the word of the Lord. There’s coming a return to God as the divine initiator of every good thing – a shift from a programs-based culture to a prayer-based culture. Every program, no matter how good, will eventually fail to satisfy, because Christianity was intended to be an ongoing interaction with a living God, and God is too jealous to let anything else work for long.

Perhaps most critically, though, I’ve found this revelation to be the single greatest factor in my relationship with God. The more real this truth is in my heart, the more I find myself able to cease from striving and connect with God. Without it we are open targets for the chains of empty religion. Ours is the God of the first move. It is no mistake that He is pictured as the Bridegroom and we are the Bride. The whole of redemption’s story testifies to it – He has set His affections on us and is courting us. It is Him knocking on our door, not us knocking on His. He created us by His own initiative, revealed Himself by His own initiative, redeemed us by His own initiative and joined Himself to us by His own initiative. The trap of religion is sprung loose at that revelation – “we love Him because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19 We love Him not to earn His affections, but because we already have them. It makes all the difference in the world when we come to God not because we need to (though we do), but first because He wants us to. “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory.” John 17:24

Regaining our fascination
The tragedy of getting things in the wrong order is not just that we spend far too much effort trying to win God’s affections when we already have them, it’s also that we pay far too little attention to allowing God to win our affections when that’s what He most desires to do. Jesus says it clearly – “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.” Matthew 22:37,38 It’s not a command to work ourselves up to acts of extravagant devotion out of our own strength – God wants to fill our hearts and minds with a genuine passion for Him that overflows into a life of devotion. Right now much of the body of Christ in America is bored with God and so we find ourselves powerless to overcome the struggles of our hearts and minds. We get our entertainment and our passion from the same place the world does, and then we wonder why it’s so hard to live as a child of God rather than of this world. It is only in feeding our hearts and our minds upon the glory of God and the wonders of His love that we will truly find power from the inside out to be the set-apart people we are called to be.

Much of what has been introduced in the Western church in recent years for the sake of ‘relevancy’ is a thinly disguised effort to make church more entertaining – a tacit admission that we don’t really know what it means to be fascinated with the superior pleasures of knowing God. God wants to take us there, but we won’t force it on us. He’s doing the courting, but we have to say yes when He knocks on the door, give Him the face-to-face time He wants and pore again and again over the letters He has written us that tell us what He is like. Jesus knows exactly what it takes to produce love in us, and He is committed to do it – “And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” John 17:26 It was what He came to do as God-incarnate on the earth and continues to do by His Spirit in us: proclaiming the glory of who He is. There’s a fresh wave of that coming… God is stirring hearts to the high calling of beholding Him and adoring Him. He’s raising up messengers whose central message is proclaiming Him – His beauty, His power, His love. He’s raising up singers, musicians and songwriters who will declare the goodness and greatness of God in a way that stirs the hearts of men. God is releasing a worship movement.

Regaining our passion
When God takes center stage, our passion will be rekindled – not only for God, but for the things God is passionate for. Confronted with an expression of Christianity that is lacking in passion for the many good things that God has called us to – loving our neighbors, acts of justice, giving to the poor… – the response of the emergent church has been to deemphasize the message of God and emphasize the message of passion for godly activity. This may bear some fruit in the shortterm and certainly has popular appeal with a generation that has been called the most socially conscious generation in history, but longterm it’s a disaster and a totally unnecessary one. When we divorce the things of God from God Himself they not only lose their effectiveness, but we begin to rely on human passion and not on God’s passion.

God is raising up His own move of passion for the things of God, but His move stems from passion for the heart of God. From the furnaces of the prayer movement, God is releasing a justice movement, a missions movement, a compassion movement, a signs and wonders movement… No one is more passionate for the things of God than God Himself. If we find that our expression of Christianity is largely devoid of passion and purpose, the answer is to stare into the heart of Christ and find His passion and purpose. No one is more committed to the lost, the poor, the oppressed and the hurting than Jesus. As God’s holy, jealous desire gains entrance into our hearts, we find a sense of purpose in our journey – both inward and outward. It was Christ’s relentless, passionate love for the world that stirred men like Paul to not only reach out to the lost and hurting, but to pursue them relentlessly even when rejected, scorned and persecuted. There’s a fresh wave of that coming… God is stirring hearts to the high calling of inquiring of His heart and becoming friends of God. He’s raising up messengers who make known His heart – His passion, His plans, His purpose. He’s raising up intercessors, evangelists, justice workers and missionaries who will be gripped by the heart of God and labor to see that heart manifest in the earth. God is releasing a prayer movement.

Responding to God’s initiative
What would it look like if God were exalted to the center in this way? What if we could actually offer each other and the world something that was initiated not by men but by God? What if we lived in the place where our hearts were fascinated by God and His story? What if we found our identity and our purpose by diving deep into the heart of God? What would it look like if the people of God came face to face with God… who He is, what’s on His heart, and our place in it all? What would it look like if we lived there in a Christianity that was not about activities but an ongoing encounter with a living God?

What will it look like when… God is zealous for it. He’s committed to it. He will not rest until He has it, and the Divine Initiator has already set things in play to bring it about. The only question now is how will we respond? Will we be early-adopters that press in to the new thing God is doing and lead the way? Or will we wait until the old really falls apart and the new becomes urgent? ‘Jesus, come and take Your place in the center of it all.’

One thing I have desired of the LORD,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the LORD,
And to inquire in His temple.

Psalm 27:4

Scriptures for meditation: Ps 27:4, Col 1:14-16, Ps 16, Mt 22:36-38, Phil 3:7-12, Eph 4:11-16

40-Day Focus Week 2: A Bride Made Ready

Posted by Tim

As we begin looking at the broader picture of what God is doing and where it’s all going, we are zooming out from what is taking place immediately in this nation and the nations of the earth. There is a broader move of God present in the earth that is global in its scale and decades in its duration. As I mentioned in introducing this topic, the better way to define this move of God is not by what people are doing, but by what God is saying. Hearing what the Spirit is saying is our means to get our hearts ignited for what God is doing, then the activity will surely follow. On the other hand, we can push ourselves to fast and pray, to worship, to evangelize, to do works of justice and every other activity that God is emphasizing right now, and still miss getting touched by what God is actually doing.

The Heart of the Matter
One of the most common stated or unstated missions among church communities these days is to recover what the Acts church looked like, which is certainly not the worst of aspirations. Our tendency, unfortunately, is to go about that by attempting to copy what the Acts church was doing (i.e. their method of ‘doing church’). When in reality it wasn’t the methodology of the Acts church that made it so dynamic. What defined and empowered the apostolic church in Acts was how they understood and lived their relationship with God, and the power of His presence in their midst. The apostles carried a deep-seated revelation from years of being with Jesus as to who He was and what His purpose was, and therefore who they were and what their purpose was. They oversaw a church born in the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost and continually lived in a consistent pattern of being filled with the Spirit day by day. These were the realities that made possible both its inward success as a community and body, and its outward success in winning souls.

The point being to attempt to imitate the activity of a move of God without giving ourselves fully to the heart of it effectively separates the move of God from God Himself. In doing so, the purpose and the power behind it are lost. We lose the relational aspects of what God is doing – what He’s revealing about Himself and about us – and we lose the priority of His presence. Hence our focus in these 40 days is on the heart of what God is doing and on the presence of God Himself. As we watch the “prayer movement” begin to sweep the earth, it’s easy to say this move is about prayer, but it’s so much more than that. This is not simply an increase in the quantity of prayer going on around the globe. God is revealing something about Himself and about His purposes that is motivating believers to pray like never before, and God is calling His church into a new revelation of who we were created to be that in turn is causing us to find our corporate and individual identity in the place of prayer. When Isaiah prophesied about God’s house being called a house of prayer (Isaiah 56:7) it was more than just a promise that God’s people would pray. It was looking to a day when the church would find it’s identity as a house of prayer – when connecting with God would become the center of who we are and what we do. And it was looking to a day when God would make us joyful in His house of prayer – when we would so connect with what prayer is really about that we would find fullness of joy in that time in His presence and that connection with His heart.

It’s About the Bride
When I look at what God is doing I am convinced this move of God has Revelation 19:7 squarely in its sights – “the marriage of the Lamb has come and the Bride has made herself ready.” It’s a promise echoed frequently throughout Scripture that is the final climactic conclusion to the story of redemption. All of human history marches towards that day, creation longs and groans for it, and Jesus Himself awaits it with great expectation. There is a real day coming in which Christ will return to claim for Himself an inheritance from the people of the earth – a pure and spotless Bride fully given to Him in love. As Revelation 19 makes clear, though, His return does not happen in a vacuum. The marriage of the Lamb is waiting for something… the Bride is going to make herself ready. As we look around the world, we see much that indicates we are drawing near to the end of the story, but this one sign seems noticeably lacking. At least in the Western world it would be hard to point with any confidence to a pure and spotless Bride appearing on the scene. More than that, though, we seem to have lost our motivation – rarely can you find anyone who is even consciously working towards that goal. Before that day can come something has to happen – God has to stir His people to begin making themselves ready as a Bride for her Bridegroom.

What would such a move look like? What would stir the Bride to begin making herself ready? Two simple revelations: the Church beginning to see herself as a beloved Bride, and seeing the beauty of her Bridegroom and longing to be with Him. All across the earth and in all different streams, a common theme is beginning to be heard. It sounds different when spoken by different voices, but its heart cry is the same: God delights in and is jealous over humanity, He made us for Himself and is drawing us to Himself, and nothing will satisfy as much as being with our glorious Creator – it is our purpose and identity now, and our destiny at the end of the story. And increasingly alongside that cry you hear another: the wedding day is coming soon and it’s time to make ourselves ready.

This is what’s at the heart of what God is doing on the earth right now: the Church catching a revelation of God as a jealous Bridegroom, and the Church stepping into her identity corporately and individually as the Bride of Christ. It’s not that either of these revelations are new, but that He is preparing us to begin understanding them and walking in them at a new level as we come nearer to the day when the Bride welcomes her Bridegroom as He returns. It’s not the language of the Bridal relationship that’s important but rather the reality behind it. It is a description of God that reveals Him as passionate and purposeful: He loves, delights in and is jealous over those willing to be called His, and He is relentlessly in pursuit of love – drawing hearts into it, bringing hearts to fullness in it and preparing for the day when God and man will be fully joined in it. It is an identity for the Church that reveals who we are now and forever as the one creature made to be joined with God: in intimacy as we delight in Him and He in us, and in partnership sharing in the secrets of His heart and the labors of His soul.

Catching the Vision
We want to set ourselves before all of those revelations over these next weeks, but for this week I want to ask God to seal us with a vision:

That He would mark us with a vision for what He longs to do in the earth. That our spiritual eyes would be opened to see a glorious Bride made ready, a great harvest from every tongue and tribe and nation, and a people prepared for the Lord. Let our hearts be stirred for God to move in a way that touches all flesh – not one stream or movement, not a remnant but from weakest to strongest every believer swept up into knowing His love and walking in the kind of relationship with Him that He created us for, and from one end of the earth to the other every heart hearing the invitation “come to the wedding!”

And may He mark each of us deeply with a personal vision to lay hold of the invitation that God is extending in our day. That our hearts might yearn to go deep in the reality of His love and enter into a relationship with Him that brings us the heights of joy and the heights of fulfillment. May we enter in to living as a Bride being made ready for Jesus – allowing Him to draw us in His love and wash us with the water of His Word. May our vision and ambition in life be no lower than His vision for us – going on a journey of love that leads us into the depths of relationship with Him.

Some Scriptures to meditate on: Eph 1:17-19, 3:14-21, 5:25-32; Rev 19:6-7; Isa 62:1-5; Jn 17:21-26

40-Day Focus: Week 1 – The Hour

Posted by Tim

While most of this 40 days is going to be spent focused on the heartbeat of the broader move of God, I want to take this first week to lay hold of the significance of this current window of time. There is real reason to enter this 40 days with tremendous urgency… and with tremendous expectation. This is a critical hour for our nation – the signs of spiritual crisis abound, but so do the signs of a Holy Spirit answer.

Our hour of need
Opening our eyes to recognize our hour of need is not our favorite part of revival, but its a critical one. When God wants to give birth by the Spirit, He searches for the barren. It is the poor in spirit who receive the kingdom of heaven. When we are desperate for something that we have no means of obtaining except by the grace of Another, we are in the right place for God to show Himself strong. We may be in favor of revival, but are we desperate for it?

Kenneth Copeland prophesied on July 4th, 2009 that a ‘Great Awakening’ is hanging heavy over America, but it will come to the praying churches first. “And they’ll say, ‘My, revival broke out over there.’ ‘No, answered prayer broke out over there.'” This current outpouring in Kansas City can be traced back to 10 years of night and day prayer in a community that, even while ministering faithfully in the day of small beginnings, refused to quiet the cry that there must be more and instead diligently pressed in with a cry for more of God. More specifically, it came on the tailwinds of a spontaneous movement of prayer and fasting among the IHOPU students that started following a blunt analysis of America’s spiritual crisis and desperate need for revival by Daniel Lim (read a summary article here or the full transcript here). Staring in the face of our hour of need is often just the incentive we need to drop our crutches, our good ideas and our stable attendance and admit that we need God.

There is no doubt that our nation is in a moral crisis: rampant consumerism, abortion, sexual immorality, humanism and relativism have not only been fighting to define our culture, they’ve become our primary export. The most terrifying signs, though, are not the direction of the culture, but the direction of the church. As darkness in the world around increases and a generation desperately needs the light of Christ, they have not found it. The statistics on church engagement reveal a terrifying reality – church engagement is steadily and rapidly declining. Generation after generation is failing to find answers inside the church and is turning to other sources.

  • Builders generation (1924-1944) – 65% church engagement
  • Boomers generation (1945-1965) – 35% church engagement
  • Buster generation (1966-1983) – 15% church engagement
  • Bridger generation (born after 1984) – 4% church engagement

Every generation faces its giants, but for this generation staring into the face of a culture that bombards it with false ideologies on every side the real crisis is not that they are faced with problems… it’s that they have not been able to find answers in the church.

God’s provision
I am completely confident that God has the answer to the cry of this generation. More than that, I am confident that God is the answer to the cry of this generation. God wants to give this generation something more than the answers that have been offered – a smoother presentation, a friendlier theology, a more comfortable structure. God wants to give a generation the supreme answer – Himself. The power and presence of Christ is the only real answer to this generation’s problems as God is powerfully demonstrating in Kansas City. Since November 11th, the Spirit has been moving in a powerful way there particularly among the students and interns. God is delivering a generation: from low self-esteem, depression and anxiety, from addictions, sin and condemnation, from physical and spiritual bondage, a generation is experiencing the love of God and finding the freedom that comes in walking in that love.

Already, this move has touched places all across this nation and the globe through the webstream. Several college campuses have experienced the love of God, healings and boldness for evangelism as they join in. Now, after a series of prophetic leadings, IHOPU leadership is sending out the third and fourth-year students for a ministry trip among New England colleges. Over these forty days as many across the nation join in prayer and fasting for an awakening to hit America’s campuses, they will be leading prayer meetings and awakening services, and witnessing on the campuses of the Ivy League schools (more info). It is a strategic assignment from the Lord: to redeem the Ivy League schools many of which have Christian roots from the strongholds of intellectualism that have been prevailing there. What if the next generation of lawyers, doctors, politicians, teachers and leaders of all spheres walks away from their time in college having encountered God rather than high-minded humanistic philosophy? What if they take their place in society filled with the Holy Spirit rather than the empty philosophies of men?

Standing in the gap
Rarely do we get to see our options for the future so clearly – the direction this nation is headed absent a move of God, and what it would look like if a generation experiences the touch of God. It’s gaps like these that are our natural home as a kingdom of priests – to stand between a nation in desperate need of God and a God desperately longing to reach out to a nation, and to cry out for a move of God in our day – with urgency, and with expectancy.

Understanding that another Great Awakening hangs over this nation both as its desperate need and God’s chosen answer, it is not a time to sit and wait but to set our face in prayer and fasting as Daniel did (Dan 9:2-3). First because the promise is real but not yet realized, and we stand in a transitional time for this nation where we could see the great shift we need, so we press in for all of what God would give. Second because it is a transitional time for us as well – it is a time to position ourselves to be touched and to be used as the Lord moves in our day.

Lets start this fast allowing God to grip us with two realities: that we are in desperate need of nothing short of a great move of God, and that God desperately wants to give us nothing less than Himself.

These are not new, but lets focus for a week on the God who longs to answer: Joel 2:12-17,28-32; 2 Chr 7:14; Luke 11:9-13; Heb 4:1

40-Day Focus: This Present Move of God

Posted by Tim

As we enter this 40 days of fasting, one of my primary objectives is a heart awakened more fully to what God is doing in our day. One of the great prayers of my life is that my heart and the hearts of everyone I know would be caught up in the story of all that God has done, is doing and is going to do in the earth – the grand drama of redemption. The human spirit was created to be a part of something bigger than our own self-preservation, we long for a sense of purpose and significance that’s meant to be found in the plans and purposes of God. It’s in setting ourselves in that story that we’re prepared to see it unfold with no offense and no confusion, just a heart in awe of what God is doing and a life lived in partnership to see it done with Him.

Though we’re prone to live without giving it a moment’s thought, we are living in one of the most significant hours of history. The Greatest Story Ever Told is unfolding before our eyes its final climactic chapter… and almost nobody is paying attention… yet. What’s beginning to unfold will demand the attention of all in time, but for now it is an open invitation for any who are willing to stop what they’re doing and ask the Lord what He’s doing. Now is an opportune moment for us to step back and take in what God is doing in the earth and to not let it pass us by unnoticed. It is a glorious time to be alive and in Christ, and we are robbing ourselves if we carry on business as usual and miss what God wants to give to this generation.

When I’m speaking of this present move of God, I’m talking about something bigger than the outpouring that began in Kansas City and is now touching different places across the nation. I’m talking about something bigger, even, than what we have seen to this point of the global prayer and worship movement. There is a move of God stirring in the earth right now that promises to be one of the most significant the earth has ever seen, filling the body of Christ and the ends of the earth before it has run its course. It’s been called a prayer movement – and it is… it’s been called a worship movement – and it is… it’s been called a missions movement, a justice movement, a prophetic movement, a signs and wonders movement – and it’s all those things… but it’s bigger than that. What really defines this present movement is not what the body of Christ is doing, but what the Spirit is saying that is stirring us to do all of those things. Proverbs tells us “for lack of vision the people cast off restraint,” but let us catch sight of a little of God’s vision and you will find laborers rising up in all spheres longing to serve God’s purpose in their generation. The lifestyle of prayer and worship, and the outworkings of evangelism, prophecy, healing, missions and acts of justice are all symptoms of a particular heart condition that is beginning to spread throughout the body of Christ.

Without a doubt, it is spreading – at an “only God” rate. In 10 years time with no human oversight or planting program we have seen the emergence of hundreds if not thousands of houses of prayer where previously the concept was virtually unheard of. In 10 years more time the major missions organizations are telling us that over half a million houses of prayer will be planted throughout the earth. As we watch night and day prayer begin to cover the earth we naturally make the connection to verses like Isaiah 62:6-7 that promise the coming of watchmen who “give the Lord no rest day or night.” What’s happening behind the scenes, though, is hearts getting struck with the revelation contained in Isaiah 62:1-5 – the God who “will not rest until,” burning with a glorious agenda for the earth and its inhabitants; and the Bridegroom God who rejoices over His people, delighting in them and longing for them to be with Him in His zeal and in His rest. It’s that revelation that produces in us a burning heart, and it’s that burning heart that thrusts us into the heart of God in intimacy and into the activity of God in partnership.

This move of God is about “until.” It’s about a Bride made ready, a harvest from every tongue and tribe and nation, and a people prepared for the Lord. Its heartbeat is a fiery core of revelation: of the Bridegroom God who is zealous for His people, of the Church’s identity as the Bride of Christ, and of where it’s all going as the King prepares a wedding for His Son. It’s that Spirit-breathed revelation, identity and purpose that is sparking what is taking shape in various streams all across the earth… and it’s that same heart that has the power to touch and shape not just a minority movement of intercessors and worshipers, but the entire body of Christ and the whole of church life… and it’s that heart burning within the church that then equips us to begin lighting fires of change in our communities and our nation. For these 40 days we are setting ourselves before those fires of revelation and asking the Spirit to breathe upon them that our hearts might burn still more and more.

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