Mark 12: 30-love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.
As we make honest attempts to live where God has placed us in Christ, abiding in the fruit of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit’s grace and mercy will overwhelm us, fill us up and enable us to become the people we are called to be.
The love we can feel and experience in God’s heart towards us, we reflect back to Him, so that we are enabled to love Him.
In a way, we are like a barrel of God’s Spirit, a container which is supposed to be continually overflowing. We’re not called to leak; In fact, the mission of the Holy Spirit is to help us plug up all those holes.
Instead, we are called to overflow with the goodness and grace of God. Most of our holes come out of the theology or doctrine of a twisted view of who God really is.
We face many choices of what we really believe, but by allowing the Holy Spirit to establish his truth in our hearts and lives, we can make the correct choice and take a step forward in our growth in God to see him for who he truly is, and then respond with the same spirit. But to do this, we must spend time with God and cooperate with the Holy Spirit in his transforming work.
I would love to be a part of a church where the majority of people arrive refreshed and leave more anointed. Mature people have a passion for the presence of God which is greater than their zeal for ministry.
People who are wonderfully anointed in ministry, but very average in intimacy, are not mature. People can flow in a gift from God, but it is a gift. That gift needs to be used to bring us into maturity or our core character will not change. At some point their lack of intimacy will betray their anointing.
The enemy will draw them out beyond their sphere and isolate their gifting. Lack of intimacy often means we have no protection against our own arrogance. Appreciation, approval and applause of others are seen as a right by these people, and their status in ministry cannot be challenged. Lack of humility makes us immune to personal correction.
I thank God for the council, and sound advice I have had through the years when my own stupidity has been the biggest thing I have had to deal with.
At times I have humiliated myself because of my own words and actions. Now I choose to continually humble myself before the Lord, so that he can exalt me at the proper time. Humility is a byproduct of real intimacy.
The enemy loves to accuse us of our shortcomings. Intimacy allows us to take that accusation and turn it into astonishment at the goodness of God, and his unfailing love towards us. Humility lies in knowing what we are like in Jesus and what we can be like without him. Humility keeps us camped out near the fear of the Lord.
Constraint or restraint without development is punishment.
Many people use meetings as a pick me up. I have no problem if those people are new to faith or those going through major transformational dealings with the Lord. In those instances, meetings should be a lifeline because we need the support of others either to achieve a breakthrough or sustain the follow through.
The difficulty comes when people live this way indefinitely in their dependency upon others. Some churches establish a culture of dependency so that their people never seem to grow up.
A Christian industry has grown up around this culture that enables consumerism to be elevated to an art form. Everything is provided for people so that they don’t have to go anywhere else. It’s a full service, Christian cocoon. We are shielded as much from the culture of heaven as we are from the influence of the world.
When we touch heaven, the influence of the world decreases dramatically. As heaven increases, other things are reduced.
When we say yes to Jesus we also must learn to say no elsewhere. If our yes is not followed by no, then it will lose its power. John 3: 30-he must increase, I must decrease. This becomes our delight.
There is a cult of consumerism in the western church in marketing the gospel. When people are continually dependent upon us, we empower their disability. We enable their immaturity.
I love the multiplicity of ministries that are available in the Kingdom to ensure that people are set free by offering their materials free of charge. We must keep a watch on pastoral ministry to ensure that it empowers people to stay free themselves.
Pastoral ministries, when not overseen by Apostolic and prophetic leadership, can, on their best day, only take people so far in the purposes of God. Without the benefit of real apostles and prophets, churches become settlers with no heart to explore what else is out there.
Pastoral and teaching ministries are brilliant at establishing the breakthrough. Prophets see far and have foresight; teachers dig deep and have insight. Teachers establish what prophets reveal. Pastors provide follow through. Apostles take new ground, and they hold it. When people are set free, pastors ensure that they remain free. A release must evolve into a freedom, or it returns to captivity.
Pastors need to be concerned that people did not just have an encounter with God, but they were empowered to turn that encounter into an ongoing experience. We do not want to see people touched, but not changed.
Ministry is to release a place of encounter for people that will lead them into ongoing experience. Maturity is receiving and establishing our own personal breakthrough from within the place of our own personal relationship with God.
We can and do receive freedom, help, and breakthrough from other ministries and movements, but we are not dependent upon them as a lifestyle. There are too many conference junkies looking for the quick fix, the impartation that will catapult them into a meaningful place in the Spirit without the need to work out and walk out their salvation in Christ.
The church is responsible for setting a corporate culture that produces personal freedom and responsibility at all levels in our growth in God: freedom to hear the Lord and obey, freedom to worship God and pursue him, freedom to explore the word of the Lord and seek its fulfillment- these are all precious and vital freedoms there must be upheld. People need development that allows them to be responsible for their personal walk with God.
There must be freedom to worship creatively, freedom to be led by the Spirit, freedom to challenge inauthentic belief in lifestyle, freedom to pursue dreams, freedom to develop accountable relationships of mutual respect and integrity and freedom to resist overbearing, manipulative, coercive oversight that constrains people without facilitating their development.
Good shepherds do not treat people like sheep. They understand that shepherding is a metaphor, not an office. Shepherds are sheep also, and they need to lead people in the same manner as they themselves are led by the Lord.
Part of the development in our corporate culture must be founded on the freedom of the individual. Constraint without development is punishment. All around us people are learning about God and about themselves. It is vital to respect that learning, and as much as possible, empower people to love the learning process. Of course, people are going to resist personal change, blame others, and not take responsibility for their own stuff.
Leaders create the culture that shapes people as they grow from moody children to mature sons in Christ.
The goal of God is to bring us to a place where we abide in Christ, where we get our needs met by him, and where we can help meet the needs of others. He wants us to be at the pinnacle of our giftings and callings, so that we can find him in whatever is happening around us.
It shouldn’t matter how much the enemy spins us around; if our heart is fixed on God, we are immediately focused back on him. When this happens, the church is going to grow up. We’ll live by the book. We won’t question the will of God because we will become the will of God, we will be in relationship with him.