The leaders carry the service, but the people must also be aware of what is taking place. When you stand in the service as individuals who have come in with all your thoughts going around in your mind, the service will not reach a very high level. As you wait on the Lord, there must be a united focus, all in one flow and in the way the service is to go as God shows what He wants to do. When you settle back to just listen and watch, without participating with faith, then the level of the service goes down. You must learn that there is a great deal that goes into these fantastic miracle services. They don’t just happen. They come about because you are all focused on the Lord. Your faith is as important as anything else that is involved. You never become an audience of spectators. You may not say a word, but your faith is focused on the service. You are participating with all your heart as a member of a body that is focused on the Lord.
The percentage of members who are focused on the Lord determines the effectiveness of the service. If the body is half-paralyzed through a lack of consciousness or an awareness of the Lord or of what He is speaking or bringing forth, then the body just limps along. The service is effective to the extent that the leader is able to bring everybody into focus. The first thing he must do with the congregation is to change it from a congregation of individuals into one body, focused on the Lord. That’s why I often tell jokes and do things that are completely unconventional and unorthodox at the opening of the service. After the people are one body focused on the Lord, then we go into worship and prophecies.
When the prophecies become a matter of one person doing his own thing and everyone else listening and evaluating them, the effectiveness is gone. As the people participate with faith, they bring forth the prophecies of many individuals. After they have exercised themselves in that for a while, then the Word becomes extremely effective because the one who speaks the Word has an audience that is believing and bringing it forth with him. That Word is actually doubly effective in their lives because they are hearing it and bringing it forth by faith, while another is speaking it and sending it forth by faith.
Although the apostle may have spoken a word that brought people into the Kingdom, still he turned and said, “Pray for me that a door of utterance may be given unto me that I may speak the Word as I ought to speak it” (Colossians 4:3). There’s a way that the Word has to come forth and we all must participate in it. This participation is very important.
It is just as important that the Lord anoint the ears to hear as it is that the utterance be anointed. You’ve already experienced the truth of that. Many times you open your Bible and read along for a while, and then all of a sudden you’re aware that you have read a chapter or two and you don’t know what you’ve read. Remember that Satan is always working to bring division. When he can bring distracting thoughts into your mind, then the Word is not fruitful. God is trying to bring the unity and the oneness in you so that your focus is right there upon the Lord and upon His Word.
What a blessing it is to read the Word of the Lord with an anointing upon you. The words just leap off the page and bless you. Other times you may say, “Boy, I’d better read that chapter over again. I don’t even know what I read.” There wasn’t the proper focus on it. The same thing is true in a service. When I preach to people, I see some whose faces are blank, while others are very receptive. I continually pray, “Lord, give them an ear to hear. Let them be open and focused upon the Word.” If we only understood what to do, we could prepare our hearts before we come to the service. We would gain one hundred times as much out of the service through a little previous preparation of our heart. The Lord help us to see that and to walk in it.
A group of people can come together and just kind of worship along, on and off, on and off, for an hour or two and then go their way without too much having been accomplished. It’s in focus that you really dial in to the Lord. When we wait on the Lord, we are not passively waiting for revelation, waiting for the Lord to speak. Think of it as a focused prayer of listening. The word “waiting” has passive overtones and we may define waiting on the Lord in terms of passivity. Those in the occult do that. People who delve in the mystical realm do that until they finally tune in to the spirit of some old Indian. You don’t want to hear what some dead Indian has to say; you want to hear what the Lord has to say. Intensely you focus upon the Lord until the Spirit speaks. With a focused attention you wait on the Lord. You do the same thing when you worship. At no time do you allow yourself to just drift in passivity.
God gave you the control of your faculties. I Corinthians 14 talks about individuals who speak in tongues and tells us that even the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. God never puts you in a position where He takes over and you can say, “I couldn’t help myself. The Lord just took over.” When speaking in tongues, you always remain in possession of your faculties; you are not under a form of hypnosis. Every person that I’ve ever heard talking in tongues was aware and could hear what was going on around him. All of his faculties and senses were alert.
God didn’t make you the way you are so that He might suddenly invade your life and take over, making you a little mechanical man. He has angels that do His bidding and serve Him, but He’s looking for something else from you. He’s trying to produce sons. He wants to bring you to the place where you determine to think God’s thoughts. You determine to react as God reacts. You determine to be focused upon Him. You determine to appropriate Him in all that He makes available. His plan is that in all things you’re going to be conformed to the image of His Son. This is what He’s after. You’re not to become a mechanical man or a passive person who goes along waiting for a signal, “Beep, beep,” to tell you when the Lord is speaking. Most of the time the initiative is yours. Draw nigh to the Lord and He’ll draw nigh to you.
Someone may say, “I’m waiting to have a meeting with the Lord. I don’t know when it’s going to come.” What a sad state that is—waiting for God to meet you. You go to meet Him. He’s there all the time. He’s just waiting for you. He’s waiting for you to take the initiative. He said, “Draw nigh to Me. Call upon Me and I’ll answer you, and show you great and mighty things you know not.” He didn’t say, “I’m going to hit you over the head with a miracle.” He said, “Call on Me. Ask of Me. Whatsoever you ask, you shall receive.” The initiative is yours to focus on the Lord and to believe Him to meet you.
This aggressive initiative is what makes a service, too. I don’t have much ministerial dignity left from the old order; most of it is gone. But many times when I come into a service, I want to lose all the dignity that I do have left and shout, “Get off the dime! Move into God. Do something!”
Notice what the Lord did when He wanted to heal or deliver a man. He asked a blind man, “Do you want to be healed?” Then He spit on the ground, made a little mud, and placed it on the man’s eyes. How unsanitary. Then He told the blind man to go to the city reservoir and wash. Of course, today you would probably be arrested if you washed in the city reservoir. With all the zoning laws and restrictions in effect today, about half of the miracles of the New Testament couldn’t happen in our present society.
How could that blind man find his way through the narrow streets, congested with traffic, with no one to lead him, not even a seeing-eye dog. He had to find his way as best he could. And he did make it clear across the city. He found the reservoir, washed, and came back with his sight restored.
Why did the Lord make it so difficult for him? Is it by works that we are saved? Is it by works that a miracle is wrought? No, but when a man begins to focus his efforts and his attention upon one thing because of his faith in God, something happens. Jesus said to the man with the withered hand, “Stretch forth your hand.” To the palsied man, “Pick up your bed and walk.” These commands were given in order to produce a response of faith that was focused upon the Lord.
The command may seem very unreasonable. It’s not made to seem reasonable; it’s made to focus your attention so that you’re not confused any longer, but you’re focused on the Lord. Banish the confusion by becoming an organized spirit before the face of the Lord.
Don’t be an octopus with tentacles reaching out in every direction, feeling everything that’s around you. A free spirit often has no focus. When he meets someone who is troubled, he reaches out and draws the problem to himself. He goes to the hospital to visit a friend who is sick and when he leaves, the friend says, I’m so glad you came. I feel much better.” But the man walks out of the hospital thinking, “Maybe I should have a checkup. I feel sick.”
Don’t be an octopus and don’t be a sponge. Don’t tune in to everything around you. You say, “I want to be able to be aware; I want to discern. I want to be a prophet.” You may have that gift confused with tuning in to the vibrations of people’s minds. I would absolutely refuse to do that. If I were to tune in to your mind, I wouldn’t know any more about the will of God than I did before. I probably know more about the will of God for your life than you do. No doubt you’re confused, so why would I want to read your mind? What I have to do is tune in to the mind of the Lord and His focus upon you. This is where discernment begins.
When the Body is all focused on the Lord, like a fine radio that is tuned in just right, then the anointed prophecies come forth. You don’t just look around, tune in to someone and say, “Oh, I want to prophecy to him.” You tune in to the Lord and see what the Lord has for him. We have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches. There isn’t any greater thing for you to learn than to learn to focus on the Lord. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed upon Thee, because he trusteth in Thee (Isaiah 26:3).
It’s this focus that also enables you to endure difficult experiences. When you focus on a certain problem, it has even greater significance for you. It becomes an end in itself, and often almost intolerable. Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame, because of the joy in the things that were set before Him (Hebrews 12:2). He was focusing upon our redemption, upon the many sons. Therefore He was able to endure the cross. You can go through hell if you don’t focus upon it. Focus upon the Lord and on His will.
When you come to the house of the Lord and say, “Here I am, Lord. I hope You meet this problem and that problem, you do not have the proper focus. Many of your needs that you think require personal ministry do not need to be ministered to at all. One worship service, in which you are totally focused on the Lord, would bring you such a blessing of the Lord that you’d be able to minimize and put down and cast off every problem and need. What if Paul had focused on the viper when he was gathering the wood for the fire after the shipwreck? “Oh, look at that. A viper, a viper! Oh, everybody look at that viper!” Paul didn’t say that; nor did he say, “All right now. Let’s all rebuke the viper.” He just flipped it into the fire, and went on to worship the Lord.
When you become focused on the devil, you have more trouble than you can imagine. Keep your focus on the Lord. It should only be incidental that you look around and see a demon. “Oh, I’ve discerned a devil. Thank You, Lord. You’ve shown me where he is, so I can rebuke him in the name of the Lord and send him into the abyss.” Devils are only discerned so you can cast them into the pit. That’s the only reason they come against you. They’re defeated already. His is the authority and the rule and you’re moving in Him.
Your focus must be on the Lord from the minute you come into the house of the Lord. You are not to be individuals with scattered focus, but you come in together; and as the leader leads you into worship, just reach out and flow with your brothers with one thought: “Here we are, Lord. Our hearts are set upon Thee.”
David had a number of problems. He was a fugitive and an outcast from the very nation over which God had anointed him to be king. He could have been bitter. He could have complained, “Oh look at this trouble. Oh, Lord, what am I going to do now?” The thing that brought him through was the fact that he came before the Lord and said, “My heart is fixed. O God, my heart is fixed on Thee” (Psalms 57:7). That’s the key. You fix your heart on the Lord. Set it! That is the focus you need.
When you come into the house of God, cooperate. Don’t break ranks. The leader should say to the army of the Lord, “Fall in.” (That doesn’t mean in a hole.) That is a military term, meaning “Everybody line up straight.” Why? It’s time for regimentation; they all have to do the same thing. You say, “But I want to be an individual.” Well, then go and fight your own war. We’re the army of the Lord; we’re not individuals. We’re His Body, and though it has many members, yet it is one Body.
The carnal mind tends toward individuality, but the spirit tends toward unity. That’s why we talk about unity of the spirit and yet we exhort the people to be of the same mind. We can have the unity of the spirit long before we all have the same mind concerning a matter. If you want to divide the Body, just put this Walk on an intellectual basis and pass out a questionnaire throughout the Walk, asking, “What do you think about this problem and that situation?” You’ll get many different answers. But if you send out a letter, asking everyone to pray about the problem and get the witness of the Lord concerning it, the answers will come back with a unanimous witness of what should be done. Unity comes first in the spirit. You come and draw close to one another in the spirit as you focus on the Lord.
That’s why the Bless-in is probably the deepest service, and yet it seems so simple. The first thing you do is to take your walls down to one another and open your spirit to the Lord. We’re emphasizing the same thing: become one functioning body in your worship and in your praise. When you do, what happens? More miracles have taken place in the Bless-in than in any other service, because there your focus is on the Lord. You’ve taken the walls down and the Spirit of the Lord flows freely through you as though you were just one body, one unit before the Lord.
The worship leader should do all he can to get the people’s attention and to bring them into worship immediately. Sometimes one chorus can do it. The Spirit has inspired a number of choruses that end on a higher note where it is very easy to go right on into worship.
You may be so eager to be the first one to prophesy that you move right in without knowing what God wants in that service. You don’t know what He is speaking there; you only know what He has been blessing you with. Suppose you have been reading the Word and God has spoken to your heart out of the book of Ecclesiastes. So when you come to the house of the Lord you automatically prophesy to the whole body out of Ecclesiastes. That’s really very foolish.
I go into the Word for the Lord to speak to my heart. I never go into the Word to get sermons. I won’t do that, for then I’ll be preaching to you what the Lord has spoken to me, and automatically I will fall into the error of trying to make everyone measure up to the dedication God is asking of me and to the consecration that He expects of me. And they may not be ready for that. I have to get the Word of the Lord for the sheep and then I come and prophesy it. God may not even be dealing with me, as a leader, about that thing at all. He’s probably dealing with me about something else that I need to have dealt with. But the flock needs certain other guidelines, and so I find the word that God is speaking for them.
Pray that the Lord will make you a lead sheep, one who can lead the rest of the sheep with a word from the Lord that is a word of guidance. This first guideline should come by the Holy Spirit through the prophets of the Lord, those who really have perception. They should wait upon the Lord for that guideline before they come into the service. If God is speaking about unity, tune in to it. Then let the other people prophesy. Those who didn’t have any prophecies at all now know where to turn the dial, and the prophecies start bubbling forth. The Holy Spirit speaks many things to you when you get on the main line of what He is speaking about. That may sound like a cut-and-dried process, but it is not. That’s where the miracle flow comes.
Without that guidance, one person may get up and say, “Rejoice in the Lord.” The next one gets up and says, “Repent, repent.” There’s a time for rejoicing and a time for repenting. Perhaps the first one is supposed to rejoice and the second one is supposed to be repenting, but that has nothing at all to do with what God is speaking to the Body. If they wait to hear what God is speaking to the Body, and they all listen to it, then the one who is supposed to rejoice will end up rejoicing, and the other one will end up repenting. Because they are both open to the Lord, He will make applications as it pleases Him.
There must be a focused awareness of the Lord and of what He wants, rather than just a general awareness. I don’t know if you ever exercise yourself in these things, but if you are at all sensitive, you can tune in to anyone who is close to you. Should you do that? No, not unless the Lord leads you. Sometimes when I look at an individual, he may assume that I am reading him and become quite perturbed, “Oh, dear, he’s going to see what I did.” I promise you that I don’t do that.
If I don’t feel the leading of the Lord, I won’t make an issue out of some problem which I think is just growing pains that you will grow out of. In a growing, functioning body, nine times out of ten, the individuals will grow out of their problems if you give them a little time and if you set the positive goal before them. You don’t come up to a person and say, “Boy, I’ve discerned something in you.” First determine: Is it necessary to speak it? Is it something he is overcoming? Is it something that God is helping him grow out of? If it is, leave it alone; he will make it all right.
Even if you have the ability, I don’t think you should tune in to anything unless the Lord leads you. Just tune in to the lord. I’m more concerned about the positive thing, and therefore I’m constantly looking for the Lord in His moving. I’m not looking for the satanic oppression; I’m looking to see the gifts and the ministries that are coming forth. I would rather focus upon that and bless it and bring it forth. So much of the flesh is overcome by the moving of the Spirit. If we walk in the Spirit, we’ll not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. If we focus on the flesh, we have a way of emphasizing it. If we focus on the devil, we have a way of becoming devil-conscious until we see a devil behind every pew and behind every pillar. I don’t want to be devil-happy; I want to be Christ-conscious. I want to continually live with a set fixed focus on the Lord. Only incidental to that is the fact that I am able to discern and cast out devils and to move in other gifts.
Comment: “If you’re focusing on the Lord and refusing to focus on Satan or the issues of the flesh, that in itself is a way of seeing those problems defeated. If you don’t give Satan any ground, if you’re not focusing on him, if you refuse to magnify anything he’s doing, then he has no foothold.”
When the devil manifested himself in Jesus’ life, even through the unwitting declaration of Peter, Jesus said, “Get thee behind Me, Satan.” He was saying in effect, “My focus is on the Lord. Get behind Me.” Why? “I can’t see you back there.”
When Satan came to Eve, his first tactic was to get her to focus on the fruit, “Look at this. See that tree? Isn’t that beautiful fruit? Look at it.” Next he tried to get her to doubt, “Now, hath God said…” Step by step he proceeded, but first he had to get her focus. Get your focus on the Lord. Satan is always trying to distract you. If he succeeds, then he has chosen the area of battle and you are battled on the decision of whether or not you’re going to eat that apple. But if you determine, “I’m going to do the will of God,” then Satan has to do something stupid, because he has to fight you on the grounds of God’s perfect will for your life. Right there you have a lot of leverage.
Comment: “How can we know what the Lord is doing right now and what we should be putting our focus on at this time?”
Listen to what I say, because I will never deliberately mislead you. I’ll never promote a project because I think that now it should be promoted. Many projects have come up that we know are going to be of the Lord, but I won’t push them until the hour comes that we know: now it’s of the Lord. When that time comes, then you begin to pray along that line.
At the present time, the School of Prophets should become an object of intercession for everyone. We should be praying and believing for it. The School of Prophets will literally bring forth the sons and daughters who shall prophesy and those who will dream dreams and see visions, as Joel prophesied. We focus on that. We don’t just accept the prophecy; we focus on its fulfillment. Whatever the Lord says to do, that’s what we do, and we do it with all of our heart. When I find out what the Lord is saying, then I prophesy it, encouraging and exhorting the people to get themselves in the flow of it. And before long everyone is moving in it. That’s the key: we move as a Body.
One of our pastors is being criticized because he has been so aggressive to do certain things. He has told me that he accepts the apostolic authority and two years ago when I prophesied certain goals and projects that his church was to enter in to, they set about to accomplish them almost immediately and God has blessed in a fantastic way. They have rented a farm, started a garment industry and a business of making various gift items. As a result, not only are the members of that local body self-supporting, but they have turned money back in for the missionary work of the church. When I give them a word from the Lord, even if it is only a hint, they set about to pray and believe and battle through to do it.
This is the action of faith. Faith is really an activity, an aggressive action to appropriate a truth, not just a passive assent to a truth. The devils have that passive assent to it. They believe and tremble, knowing that it’s true. We’re not devils, and we don’t believe that way. We don’t say, “Oh, I believe and tremble because terrible things are going to happen.” If something is going to happen and God tells us what to do, then we take a step to do it. When God says, “Fire, fire!” we head for the door. Our action corresponds to what we believe. That’s what James meant when he talked about faith without works; he meant faith without corresponding action. If I believe, I move. My faith has to be an activity.