Month: February 2022

During worship yesterday at church the call for healing went forth and the Lord spoke to me and said, “Words have become familiar to my people so they do not say or hear them as though they have power.” An exhortation about healing was given, communion was taken, the song I Speak Jesus by Here Be Lions was sung, but the words of God were piercing my soul. As we sung I Speak Jesus, the Lord said, “The name of Jesus has power!” I listened, knowing this was not a dialogue but a correction and the Lord said again, “Every word I speak has power and My name has power!” It was a strong correction that He wanted deep in my soul. I thought about it all night and woke up praying about it this morning.

We are inundated with words, so much so, we read words and we like, share or even subscribe, but we do not let the words we read, the words we hear penetrate, transform, affect us in a deep way. We just scroll on to the next prophetic word, the next funny meme, the next testimony. We have become so familiar with words, they no longer carry power in our lives to transform us. The same is true with words we speak. We know the right thing to say, so we say it, but it carries no weight, no authority, no anointing. People may call us wise or witty, funny or fierce, but words have become so commonplace they no longer impact us the way they used to. Remember the first time you said the name of Jesus, it carried a reverence and sense of awe with it, it had power, now it is just a tag line on the end of a prayer.

The Lord is calling us back to the weightiness of words. Especially to God’s words and God’s names. They are to be sacred to us, holy, set apart, valuable. With all of this on my heart, I opened to Psalm 97 to pray and the first line stopped me and I let the weight of these words penetrate me and I pray you do the same, “The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad!” The Lord reigns and because He does I am glad. There is so much weight in those words, they consume my thoughts and direct my prayers, I want the Lord to reign over me, I pray you feel the same way. Let His words regain weight in your life, for this correction is going to change everything.

No agenda just a love for the Lord my God and His word. When we approach the word of God to hear the voice of God we then can speak the words of God. This morning the Lord reveled to me that we as the nations have been under the oppression of a Midianite spirit. This spirit has released emotional, physical and spiritual oppression upon the nations, but God has plans for the spirit of the Midianites.

The spirit of the Midianites is a spirit of robbery and thievery. It robs you of joy, steals your faith, takes your harvest, plunders your peace and so many other things. The oppression of this spirit is all encompassing and very difficult to get out from under. People can’t explain it in words, they just know they are under the weight of oppression and it manifests in a variety of ways. This my friends is the spirit of the Midianites and God is dealing with this spirit of oppression that has been sitting on the nations.

If you want to do a Bible study on this spirit, it begins in Judges 6, then is traced to Joel 1. Once you reach Joel 2 the answer to this spirit is revealed, the sound of the shofar in Joel 2 points us back to Judges 7 where we have the sound of 300 shofars and this sound breaks the power of the spirit of Midian and sets the people free. The freedom manifests in rain which is a sign of God’s presence over the nations and this leads us to Zechariah 10:1.

Now, this is what I hear the Lord saying, “It’s about to rain! The spring rains will come early and they will be a sign of the spirit of Midian being broken off of the nations. Get ready for a downpour of God’s reign in the nations.” We don’t like the idea of someone ruling over us only because we have never been under the reign of King Jesus, but we are about to be under His reign in the nations and we are going to love His leadership style. It will be evident in so many ways, get ready, get ready, the enemy has been defeated and the sound of the shofar is bring the early rain of this reality.

Praying the Psalms yields many truths that reading it alone does not release. Prayer is a different way of reading and releases another way of receiving. This morning Psalm 95 was my prayer partner for the day, verses 3-7 unlocked truth I never put into words before. “For the LORD is a great God And a great King above all gods, In whose hand are the depths of the earth, The peaks of the mountains are His also. The sea is His, for it was He who made it, And His hands formed the dry land. Come, let us worship and bow down, Let us kneel before the LORD our Maker. For He is our God, And we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand.”

God knows everything; He sees it all. Whether in the heights of the expanse or the depths of the earth, He sees and He knows all that is going on. If I know God and God knows me, I don’t need to know it all, I just need to know God. Sounds so elementary right? Yes it should be, but we love to be in the know about stuff. That’s why people watch the news everyday, scroll social media continually, follow the stock market or read magazines about people they will never meet.

One reason we like to know so much is so we can self-protect; self-prepare; self-preserve; and then we don’t have to depend on or trust God. Knowledge becomes a way to “feel” like we are in control; not caught off guard; or ready for whatever might come. But if I know the One who knows it all, I can trust Him to tell me what I need to know and where I need to go. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, didn’t have access to excess knowledge so he could protect his little family from big Pharoh and his decree to kill all babies two and under, but God knew, so God gave Joseph a dream and said go to Egypt until further notice. God is still in the business of letting those who trust Him know what to do and where to go. But to hear these things you must depend on God not on your need to be in the know.

The enemy is stealthy in his strategy against us individually; against us corporately; and against us nationally. One of his stealthy strategies is that of silencing us. Most people do not see silence as a strategy of the enemy, but if he can steal your voice and get you to be silent he can work his plan in your life, in a corporate bodies life or in a nations life. Yahweh does not shut you up, He encourages you to speak up, speak out, sing, shout, praise, decree, pray, prophesy, all words the Lord uses to say, speak my child, speak.

Psalm 94:16-17 says, “Who will stand up for me against evildoers? Who will take his stand for me against those who do wickedness? If the LORD had not been my help, My soul would soon have dwelt in the abode of silence.”

One of the evidences of God moving in your life, in your corporate setting, in your nation is the breaking of the silence. The sounds that come out of nations reveals the Lord working in that nation. In Canada we hear the sound of trucks and truckers; in Australia we see the signs people are carrying; wherever you hear a sound, you are seeing God helping that nation. While the enemy will use silence to control, the Lord will use sound to liberate. Listen for the sound coming out of your life, out of your corporate setting, out of your nation. The sound is evidence of the Lord’s help.

I lived in Malaysia for nine years, I am married to an African and I am American. I learned very quickly while living in Malaysia that going to visit another country is fun, but living in another country is work. My American culture was not identifiable to me when I lived in America, but when I married an African and lived in Malaysia my culture that felt so normal was now evident to me in ways I never saw before. The challenge I went through was my unwillingness to lay down my culture in order to live in another culture. Malaysia was not going to become American for me, so I had to either submit to their culture of live frustrated. Honestly, I lived frustrated for at least three of the nine years I lived there, because I did not want to conform to their culture.

I look back on this and laugh at my unwillingness to budge, for I created for myself unnecessary challenges, but once I surrendered to their culture I began to enjoy the people, the foods, the smells, the culture, I even enjoyed and benefited from that which used to frustrate me. The same is true in the kingdom of God, we try to bring our culture, American culture, African culture, Australian culture, Asian culture, European Culture, Canadian culture, into the kingdom of God and we get frustrated because God will not change His culture to fit us. If we are going to live in the kingdom we must submit to its culture. Once you do, you will enjoy the benefits of that culture. The kingdom culture is the best culture I have ever lived in by far, I hope you will submit to it and then you can benefit from it.

Proverbs 2:21-22 “For those who live right will remain in the land and those with integrity will endure here. But not the wicked they will be forced out and banned from this promised land, and those who deal in deceit will be plucked up like the weeds.” The Bible is filled with the culture of the kingdom, today in Proverbs we learn the kingdom is a culture of integrity. I love the kingdom culture because I have conformed to it.

Today is the first day of February on the Gregorian calendar, at sundown today is the first day of Adar on the Hebrew calendar. The aligning of the calendars on the same day is significant, because it speaks of an alignment of time that is happening in the spirit which is manifesting in the natural. We are living in the days of divine timing and in order to understand these days in which we live, we must be worshippers of Yahweh, Yeshua, the only true God.

Proverbs 1:7 says, “Let us begin. The worship of the Eternal One, the one True God, is the first step toward knowledge. Fools however, do not fear God and cannot stand wisdom and guidance.” If we want to be people that understand the times in which we live, we must be worshippers of God. Worship includes but is not limited to singing on Sunday morning in church. Worship is hearing and obeying the voice of God. Worship is spending time in the Word of God and ministering to God. Worship is prayer and praise. Worship is investing in our relationship with God, every day.

Christians have been taught the importance of ministering to people, but how many Christians are ministering to God? Ministering to God is our first call as a royal priesthood. Priests first call is to minister to God and out of that ministry we minister to people at work, school, church, the marketplace, anywhere we go. It all starts with worshipping God, ministering to God. The reason we lack wisdom is not because we are not intelligent, but because wisdom comes from ministering to God, worshipping God.

Worship God and you will learn wisdom, worship God and you will understand the times, worship God and you will come alive and stay alive. The key is to be a worshipper of God.