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a NEW VOICE, a NEW FACE, a NEW HEART

06 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Apostolic, Ekklesia

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With all my heart and soul I believe this: The citizens of planet Earth are currently living through the most critical and significant hour in human history. Further, the Holy Spirit of God is leading those “who have an ear” into a new dimension of revelation and glory that will catapult the Church of Jesus Christ into her true, God-ordained destiny in the earth.

With the infinite array of information, speculation, myriad “prophetic” voices; voices of doom, voices of encouragement, voices of sheer, emotional fantasy there remains one true, sure and unalterable word. That word proceeds from a heavenly and not an earthly Source. That word is the living, eternal and supreme word of God. It is from this word that all my belief and anticipation emerges.

As Christ’s church moves forward, we must recognize that our enemy is as much the “status quo” as it is Satan. The desire or need or penchant to return to past experiences, or the vestiges of that which God has passed by; any business-as-usual church experience will sound the death-knell to the full desire of the Spirit of God.

As surely as I know Him I am convinced that God is raising up a NEW VOICE, a NEW FACE and a NEW HEART in the earth. In 2008, Great Britain reported less than 2% church attendance. Having spent a good deal of time in England, I can attest to the veracity of that figure. Something is gravely wrong when the land that felt the footsteps of Spurgeon, Whitefield, Wesley, Wigglesworth and other powerfully gifted and anointed men and women of God has deteriorated into the state it currently languishes.

In America, the echoes of Azusa Street have faded into oblivion. The times of Jonathon Edwards and the Great Awakening have become merely historic footnotes in the anthology of the church. Dwight L. Moody, Aimee Semple McPherson, John G. Lake, Billy Sunday, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham all shook the land, but as someone has aptly commented, “America is overwhelmed today with dime-a-dozen imitator preachers.” Those who seek to plumb the depths of God’s Spirit and to tap heaven’s well of wisdom must look beyond former personalities and movements for direction and understanding. What God is doing is BEYOND. What God is doing is BEYOND denominations and conventional fellowships. Where heaven is leading is BEYOND corporations, programs, preaching services, man-made agendas, strategies and designs. God told Daniel to “seal up the prophecy” because it would require a future generation to understand. That future generation has been birthed, but where are the fathers, where are the leaders, where are those with “understanding?”

Ezra chronicled the temperament of the sons of Issachar “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.” These understood the times, and knew what to do! It’s the knowing of “what to do” that is critical and essential. The same “Issachar spirit” that placed the Tribe in holy writ is being placed within a generation that has awakened to a new day of God’s anointing for the earth, and that “spirit” must be recognized and given freedom to speak, to be heard, to be heeded.

A nucleus of forerunners is rising in this hour. These contemporary “sons of Issachar” have understanding, and are hearing “what the Spirit says to the churches.” It is these who will make a difference for heaven in our time and we all, who would follow Christ and who will be His body must listen intently.

I sat as an observer in a staff meeting in a world-renowned church. The church had grown rapidly, even miraculously when leadership surrendered their positions of power in favor of the power of the Holy Spirit among them. Yet once the church had experienced sudden and God-engendered growth, the leadership had turned to formulae and program and methodology to continue what had begun in the Spirit. The Apostle Paul identified the tendency when he wrote to the Galatian church, “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” (Gal. 3:3).

I watched the expectant faces of the young leaders who had gathered in that staff meeting as the “orders of the day” were issued. The meeting soon descended into the drone of the minutiae of running a huge enterprise called “mega-church.”

My heart ached until I wanted to just get up and shout to them,

“This is NOT “that!” This activity does not bear the imprint of the Holy Spirit of Acts 2. These neat and impressive programmed services do not have the inscription and the unction of a church that turned the world upside down! Get Up! Get Moving! You can change your nation! Get up! Get full of God! Get His Power and His Resource and His Word and His Wisdom and His Enablement and abandon these man-engendered, man-enabled systems and storm the nations with His love and grace and mercy!

A Vital Question –

I love the men and women God has raised up in past generations. God uniquely placed and used them for their hour. I love and respect the men and women God has raised up in the most recent generation. But I wonder, could it be that God intends to use the former generation (my generation) to provide strength and stability to the church while at the same time an entirely new generation rises up, in union with the former, in a coalition of those who understand the times and who know what to do? Unless one is spiritually blind and deaf it is obvious that a rising generation will possess a completely new and different notion of changing the earth? The church of Jesus will never vanish away so long as the Holy Spirit remains in the earth, but the expression of His church is surely and essentially in the midst of tremendous transition.

Old systems are indisputably vanishing, cleaving away like a disused shell to reveal an inner vitality of the Body of life in God. An old wineskin, unable to contain New Wine is rotting before us, and a New Wineskin, capable of containing New Wine is about to appear.

I believe something significant is contained in the Darlene Zscech song, “Touching Heaven, Changing Earth.” We must place greater concern on “touching heaven” if we are to “change earth.” Where we have spent inordinate sums of money and time and energy with our buildings and carpets and music and lighting and preaching programs, we must place our resources on “touching heaven” because if we can touch heaven, if we can see heaven, if we can hear heaven, if we can understand what the Spirit is saying to us, to our generation, to our hearts, we will witness a changed earth.

The focus has been on doing “things.” Our energies have been consumed with developing programs, producing strategies, and doing things the way they always have been done because, our logic tells us, “if they worked for the church of the 1960’s and 1990’s and 2000’s, these things should work for us.” But to follow a former generation’s example without hearing the current whisper of the Spirit will cause us to miss what God is doing in our midst.

What God is now doing is unlike what He has done in other days. What Heaven is now doing is visibly and essentially different from what He has done. God is leading us, as He led ancient Israel into a place from which we one will testify, “When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests, the Levites, bearing it, then you shall set out from your place and go after it. Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure. Do not come near it, that you may know the way by which you must go, for you have not passed this way before” (Joshua 3:3,4).

If somehow we can shift our concerns from the next popular ministry emphasis or what is happening in this geographical location or that arena to an emphasis on heaven, to an emphasis on worshipping the God of glory without concern for worshipping the way somebody is worshipping in America or England or Canada or Australia; if we can focus on hearing God and not hearing what a voice here or a voice there is saying; if we can focus on building deep, real and spiritual relationships with others in the Body of Christ, the resulting transformations in our own lives will have a powerful impact on the earth without the machinery of the systems and programs we have known in the conventional, institutional church.

We’ve got to touch heaven! We’ve got to become more connected with heaven than we are connected to the earth and its dying systems. We’ve got to become more connected with heaven than we are connected with a denomination or a treasured way of “doing ministry”! Until our supreme connection is with heaven, all our best attempts to change our world will fall ridiculously flat.

The emerging church – the true church of Jesus Christ cannot be as churches have been, or we will no longer possess a reason to exist. Let God lead into the deep, into uncharted waters, into latitudes no one has explored. Let God’s Spirit and God’s Wind carry us into a destiny heaven determined before the foundations of the world were laid.

God is building something far more substantive than an organization or a building. He’s building His church. Observing the machinery of a great church is instructive, but let me be clear: It’s not about machinery, systems, models or imitations. It’s about touching heaven and by virtue of God’s indwelling Spirit, touching one another.

Let us refuse to imitate yesterday’s anointing and discover fresh unction for today. When His Spirit indwells His church, His systems and models, His eternally creative beauty and brilliance will cause the earth (to) “be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, As the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14).

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The Universal Quest for Relevance

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Discipleship

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discipleship, kingdom of God, master, servant

I do not know if ever I have met a man or a woman who did not at some place and for some purpose desire to be relevant; to be of some value to someone. Even the several disheveled, aimless and mentally detached men and women I have met in more than six decades of life have at some time and in some place and manner wanted to know that their lives meant something to someone.”

Simply stated, all of us enter this world with the embryo of desire for relevancy

What is it that makes a man truly a man or a woman, essentially a woman? Biology indicates gender, but gender does not inevitably denote “maleness” or “femaleness.” These qualities are much more than physical attributes or timbre of voice.

When we speak of “manhood” and “womanhood” we nearly always have more in mind than physical appearance. Masculinity and femininity do not derive from the blue or pink colors or from our attraction to toy trucks or Barbie dolls or a wardrobe of blue jeans or dresses. The qualities of maturity appear as a person develops, as he or she grows, matures, changes, and learns.

The Strong Submit; The Weak Resist

A key to becoming a mature, fully developed man or woman lies in the seeming contradiction of submission. A mistaken philosophy of life teaches that a man or a woman should never submit to any external force; that maturity and strength are manifested in resistance to submission. Those who would forge their own unique destinies, those who would move through life giving no quarter to anyone and requesting none by any are held up by society as the strong men or women of a culture.

Up is Down and Down is Up

Jesus Christ brought to earth a Kingdom not of this world. He said, “ . . . he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

The greatest of men ever to appear on earth’s ageless stage appeared as a servant of all. The inescapable reality of human maturity and purpose is found in this:

“Whoever wants to be first must take last place and be the servant of everyone else.” Jesus not only said it, but He did it; He modeled His teaching by laying down His life in the most painful and horrific manner our minds might imagine. He who was and remains the greatest among us served us, making Himself “of no reputation,” humbling Himself.

He, the King of all kings, the Lord of all lords and the very maker of the universe humbled Himself, laid down His rights, His position, His crown, His life and suffered humiliation, mockery, horrendous physical abuse and watched His very life flow from overburdened veins and from pierced flesh until all that remained were the words, “It is finished.” Jesus, the Master of all that exists, submitted to death, became its Prisoner, was held in death’s spiteful grip – God Himself submitted so that we could reign; Heaven’s great Architect drew the very blueprint of our redemption through the strongest act of history – through submission, obedience and full surrender He became Master of all.

There is something intrinsic within the heart of man that struggles with the idea that someone or something may hold mastery over us.

Jesus appeared among us as a servant of all, while at the same time teaching us that in order to find true freedom, true liberty of the soul He must be Master over us. In His mastery and in our submission to His rule He promised that His yoke, His burden would be easy to receive and would be light to carry. His Mastery is not burdensome, yet the stubborn heart and the unsubmitted soul resist surrender at virtually all cost.

If only we might have eyes to see and ears to hear: Jesus is the Master Who enables man to master the base things, the fruitless, the profitless things; those things that would ensnare and quite literally master us. The subtle yet undeniable truth is this: Only in submitting to The Master do we find true freedom from the bondage of the profitless and the peace of true mastery of life’s deceptions and snares.

Relevancy is Found in Relinquishing our Rights

We must learn the hidden truths that stand in stark relief against a desolate and gloomy landscape of mediocrity: It is in surrender that we find victory; in losing, we win. It is when we concede defeat that we discover conquest. In giving up our rights we find new privilege; in yielding we learn to bend but not to break. In dying we find new life.

A Child of the King

No position is so powerful and no place is so secure as recognizing that one is the child of the most benevolent and authoritative King of all that exists, both in this world and in worlds to come. There exists no higher position or greater station than to know that one is a child of the King; and not a king such as has been represented among fickle and capricious men. The King of which I speak is the Faithful God and the Lord of glory. He is the “Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” He is “the bright and morning star” and “He is fairer than ten thousand.” “He is fairer than the children of men: grace is poured into His lips: therefore God has blessed Him forever.”

To surrender to one so majestic, to submit to one so pure, so holy and so just, so loving, so kind, so humble and so great is more than wisdom; surrender to Him is life itself.

A man more brilliant than the catalog of scholars and thinkers of earth’s ages identified himself as “bondservant.” The Apostle Paul defined his very relationship with Jesus as one of servant and Master.

In the ultimate search of the human heart for relevance in this life, the starting point, the genesis must be submission, surrender, yieldedness to the Master, the One who laid down His rights, His position, His power and His life so that you and I might live and move and have our being as bondservants, and as true examples of men and women made free by our willing captivity to the King who truly makes us free.

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