November 7, 2010 New Life Fellowship Chris Strong

Today was a ‘kairos’ moment. A God appointed time and place for meeting when life and all that I perceive about it changed.

The lesson started with worship. With an open heart and hearing a call to worship like I have not heard since David left the platform. Instead of an entertainment group doing a song and dance, it was simple and to the point worship. I don’t know if it is I, or if it is some spirit within the church itself, but I truly have not felt this reaching out from God or the desire to reach back until today for several years. The songs were old, but full of life and power and the Spirit. Perhaps there is a spirit that prevents the way we once were called to worship, or perhaps my heart has just been so hard that I could not hear it there, but today I heard that call so clear. Today, I communed with God, and it was all that I remember and more.

The teaching today began with a note that we are being called to sanctification. Within the body, and within our personal lives God is calling us to cleanse and sanctify ourselves.

Isaiah 60
1 “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you. 2 See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you and his glory appears over you. 3 Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Darkness means a lack of clarity and purpose. Darkness also means the loss in sin and death of the world. God is calling His church and His people to cleanse and sanctify themselves for He is preparing to shine His “light” into the darkness of our world and the way that He will do that is through His church and His people. The church will be the light; therefore the church has to learn how to spiritually eat.

How prophetic for me. I have had to learn how to eat as if from the beginning; a physical representation of a spiritual truth. I have had to learn to eat food to remain healthy even when I cannot see the effects, so too I must learn to eat healthy spiritually to remain healthy even when I cannot see the effects of my “eating”.

God showed me that the light coming to shine to the world would shine through His servants, not His heirs. Being an heir to the Kingdom of God is for our benefit, being a light in the darkness is for the benefit of the world, therefore we have to walk as servants, not heirs. For this is not about us, it is about what God is doing through us.

Acts 1:7-8 (NIV)
7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Amplified
7He said to them, It is not for you to become acquainted with and know [b]what time brings [the things and events of time and their definite periods] or fixed [c]years and seasons (their critical niche in time), which the Father has appointed (fixed and reserved) by His own choice and authority and personal power.
8But you shall receive power (ability, efficiency, and might) when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends (the very bounds) of the earth.
TRUTH!!!

We received power (defined by the amplified as ability, efficiency, and might) when we received the Holy Spirit. Therefore, I received the flowing power of the living God when I received the Holy Spirit. I have the ability and the might to accomplish whatever God sets before me.

I can be deceived. The Bible says the heart is deceitful, so my feelings cannot be trusted on matters of Spirit, but the Holy Spirit that resides within me will ALWAYS know the TRUTH. Therefore I MUST establish a close and personal relationship with the Holy Spirit if I wish to know the will of God and to be able to discern TRUTH in a world of false hopes and dreams.

Scripture can reveal something new every time you look at it, therefore the Holy Spirit can reveal what was hidden in the scripture and it can change how we see everything that went before. Revelations of scripture do not change what the scripture previously said, but reveals the hidden messages that were waiting for the God appointed time to be revealed.

We are to guard our hearts against deceit and despair. There are things that the God of Heaven does not WANT us to know before His appointed moment of revelation. No one on this earth can know everything God is planning, so beware those who would speak of the end times as if they KNOW the TRUTH. Only God knows the TRUTH and He will reveal it as He has ordained in the amounts that He ordained.

Even those who are in err in their “prophecies” or teachings; can still grant us revelations from God. God’s question to us is, “who is your (my) teacher?” If the answer is God, and not man, then we can learn from ANYONE, even one who is in error about some of their message. Again, this is why we have to have our own personal relationship with the Holy Spirit and the Father, we HAVE to be able to go to God ourselves or check in our Spirit to determine what nuggets of truth to keep and what to refuse.

One thing Chris said was that he was once told, “Keep all presented TRUTH from trusted individuals as ‘probably true.’” But we are to question and seek God’s counsel on our own.

In the world to come we will not always have a Godly counsel or friend to rely on.

I was very addicted to relying on others to clarify and speak to and from God for me in the past. During this season of my life, God has made sure to remove any possible crutches from me. Not because the people in my life were bad or ungodly, but because He wants me to come to Him and Trust Him and no other for a FINAL word. God was tired of my using others to build a bridge to His word and wisdom and used my situation to remove those crutches so I would truly see that men (and women) will ALWAYS fail. But He will NEVER fail and NEVER leave me to walk along, EVEN through the valley of the shadow of death and through the halls of death itself.

John 7:17 (NIV)
17 Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.

Amplified
17If any man desires to do His will (God's pleasure), he will know (have the needed illumination to recognize, and can tell for himself) whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking from Myself and of My own accord and on My own authority.

Chris said, “The secret to knowing God’s Will is to know God.” Again, who is my teacher? If the answer is God (as it should be), then we must accept that God can teach us through anyone, or anything for that matter. Again, this is why we MUST have our own personal relationship to the Holy Spirit and God, because we must be able to ‘test’ the “Truths” given to us from ANY source, because God teaches using both the divine and the mundane.

A good personal example is Moco and Melody. God used Moco to teach me a lesson about faith. Moco who is most likely demon possessed, asked me the Spiritually inspired question about why I believe, when it didn’t seem to make me any happier in life, and taught me a very personal and powerful lesson in faith and the real meaning of salvation.

Now, based on the scripture given today:

I have POWER!!! Because I have been claimed by the Holy Spirit!

I have authority in Christ to claim in His name as well as to bind or banish according to His Will. All things in earth have been ordered to subject themselves to me if I walk and speak in the Will of the Living God.

This is all in the name of Christ who gave me His authority on earth and using the literal Powerline of the Holy Spirit. It is a time to renew and empower. The time of being a victim is over; victims don’t have the kind of power and authority that we do. Whatever we speak or claim in God’s name according to His Will, will be done. Therefore we HAVE to accept that when those things we speak or claim do not come to pass, that God had another plan and all is still working according to His divine plan, premeditated and preordained.

Revelation to me today:
My heart attack was a literal death to self. I have struggled with that concept my entire Christian life. I could not let go of the things “I” wanted to accept that God might have had another path because it was not the path “I” wanted. So, I followed a life that had consequences and suffered a heart attack at 44. But what life and the devil intended for evil, God intended for Good, for God works ALL things to the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. Despite my unbelief and lack of faith and unrecognization from anyone around me, God HAS called ME to service. By definition of that verse, I AM CALLED according to His purpose, set aside and preordained for me to accomplish. If not, I would be dead, because there is no other point or purpose in my surviving and the circumstances surrounding my survival are too specific and obviously appointed to be anything else.

I have been allowed to “die” and be “re-born” to a new life to become whatever I will allow God to make me.

I was broken before. Broken by a sin cursed world that chewed me up and spit me out and I only longed for death. From my earliest recollections of around 13 years old, I have wanted to die. Life was simply too painful to continue to exist and I endured a lifetime of pain and suffering and loss because I simply did not know how to let go of myself. A lifetime of rejection and inconsolable despair eventually wore down into a broken Christian limping along with only hope for a future that I wanted with no real belief in it’s fulfillment.

Until God allowed my bitter, broken mind, body and soul to die, and now that I have pushed through the bitterness of the painful ripping apart of the life I was so entrenched in, God is beginning to reveal the process of rebuilding a NEW creation in me.

God is using this season after my heart attack to cleanse me of all my misdirected “ties and trust” in those around me and as I have learned about forgiveness He is beginning to show me the process of recreating something new out of the shattered pieces of the old. The old had to be completely shattered (like the Alabaster box the perfume which was used to anoint Christ for His burial was shattered) before I would actually let go enough for God to begin a new work in me. God knew I had to have NOTHING left before I would allow Him to begin to craft my life into His mold rather than the mold I had chosen for myself.

I have died to self. My heart literally stopped beating while they operated on me. The person I was, the life I have lived, the dreams and hopes that I held on to have died. It is a new day and I am being formed into a new vessel for a service that I have not yet been told, but I have no doubt that there is such a service because of the revelations that God has been showing to me as I open my heart and mind to His TRUTH.

Seeing the TRUTH about forgiveness while still understanding that the facts were not the TRUTH was the first of a major step for my re-birth. I had to be able to grasp that there were things that are facts, yet are still not TRUTHS!! A concept that has always eluded me until now, opening the door for the Spirit to rise up and truly begin a NEW WORK.

Our stuff is what keeps us bound. Our stuff, (our possessions, our hopes, our dreams, our fears,) these are the things that keep us bound up and inefficient servants of the Kingdom. It was only when God forced me to give up my “stuff” through a painful shattering experience that I am becoming able to allow God to begin to shape me as He Wills, instead of crying because He is not shaping me as I Will.

Acts 8 again says:
…you will be my witnesses…

Chris said, We (I) are called to witness the TRUTH of Jesus for the Kingdom of God. To Witness is to be master of, to accept our crosses, (burdens, debts, losses, unfulfilled dreams and hopes, singleness, etc…) with the peace of Christ.

It is not simply our words to the “lost” that make us witnesses; it is how we walk through everyday life that is our true witness. That is how we will be the “light” of God to the world.

How do I live with the burden of being single and alone? In the past, my answer was to cry and bemoan and pray and hold on desperately to the hope that it would someday change. But that ended with the old life. MY life is over, it died in a hospital in North Carolina, this new life is a gift from a Heavenly Father, not for me, but for those around me. (Trust me, this keeps blowing my mind every time I look at it). This life is not about me or the things I want or feel, but about God’s Kingdom and what He has planned for me to do in it.

My “death” is behind me now, both spiritually and physically. Everything going forward from this point on is a gift from God to the Kingdom. Weather I “feel” it or not, my dreams, hopes, joys, and sorrows died in Wilmington, North Carolina and from that moment forward I am living on God time and no longer my own. My time is over; God’s time is just beginning. Until God is through with me, I cannot die. There may be moments of struggle with old ghosts of feelings and thoughts, but that is all they are, simply ghosts of a person that was and they have no more substance than a whisper of a memory no longer valid.

And THAT is the biggest revelation to me of all. The gifts of the Spirit are all gifts, not to those with the abilities, but to the church and the world around us. Gifts are given to the Kingdom for the Kingdom’s use rather than for our personal gratification and use. God loves us, but that is a totally separate thing from the Gifts of the Spirit. For the first time in my life I see clearly that I have been “claimed” by the most Holy God. He “took” my life when it was over because of my poor choices and “gifted” my life back. But my life is no longer about me. I am not a “gift” for myself, I am to be a “gift” to the Kingdom and therefore I need to cleanse, sanctify, and allow God to rebuild and rebirth me in the image He has chosen to represent His light to His Church and to our dark and dying world.