Let us be determined that we’re going to declare war and overcome everything of the spirit of this age, and walk with God with all the aggressiveness of the kingdom.
And when He had finished speaking, He said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” And Simon answered and said, “Master, we worked hard all night and caught nothing, but at Your bidding I will let down the nets. And when they had done this, they enclosed a great quantity of fish; and their nets began to break; and they signaled to their partners in the other boat, for them to come and help them. And they came, and filled both of the boats, so that they began to sink. Luke 5:4–7.
Do you like that idea of receiving too much? God never moves entirely within the human capacity to receive His blessings. There always has to be a little more. Both boats began to sink. David said, “My cup runneth over.” God never knows when to stop pouring. If we are not getting all God has for us, we had better find the key that will bring us into the blessing that overflows. God gives the promise, “See if I will not open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it” (Malachi 3:10).we do not want to live on limited rations, when we can have all the trimmings of a big meal that we cannot finish.
But when Simon Peter saw that, he fell down at Jesus’ feet saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord! Luke 5:8. The Lord is trying to teach us something in this passage. We have to readjust our thinking, because we’re so used to looking to God for just enough help to get us out of a difficult situation. “Deliver us” means that we want to get our foot out of the trap, but we fail to see what God is trying to deliver us into. He’s not only eliminating some negative factors in our life, but He wants to bring something positive to us. This happens like an avalanche.
An avalanche is an action that precipitates actions that gather momentum and force. The key to an avalanche is the fact that certain forces dislodge a stationary object into the field of gravity or into a stream or a flow of cause and effects. Whole communities and cities have been wiped out in a matter of seconds by an avalanche. Way up high a little rock becomes dislodged, it hits another rock, and that rock hits a few more rocks, until suddenly things that were stationary are no longer stationary. The forces of gravity and many other combined forces cause such a tremendous flow of power that it sweeps away everything before it.
In the scriptures we see examples where God would dislodge a person from his own passive state of just sitting and doing nothing, knocking him off his perch of indifference, and thus start a whole process moving. We need to learn the principles of an avalanche, so we can start one any place on the face of the earth. One person begins to move in God and then a dozen move in the Lord, and before you know it, wow! Something carries us along like a flow. It can be done.
Looking back in history, we see that this is exactly what happened when revivals came. Some people prayed and believed God. They threw themselves in a place where they were dislodging others from their stationary position where they couldn’t move or do anything, and after a while everyone was moving.
We need to become an avalanche starter. If there’s anything we want it’s for the Lord to get us off our backsides and get us moving. We do not want to just sit in church the rest of our lives; we believe for something that precipitates us into action. We have to say, “Lord, hit us with something that dislodges us from that stationary position.” The law of inertia says that objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and stationary objects tend to remain stationary. That’s why, when we run into the side of a wall with a car, the wall tends to stay stationary and the car tends to keep on moving. What would happen if we reached the ultimate of an irresistible force hitting an immoveable object? And then that object would start moving with the same force? We can become a force that moves things, and yet round about our lives we find many things that just don’t seem to want to move; they don’t want to go.
We must learn to jar ourselves out of any rut, and recondition our minds and spirits to enter into a real flow of the Lord. Anything can happen within us, and all about us, if God will start something to dislodge us. Once we’re in motion, everything we hit will be put into motion too. Something must move us out of the stationary program we’re in. We must find ways to blast churches out of their ruts. Every church has to operate at top efficiency all the time, moving in God and walking with the Lord with all of their heart. This business of just half worshiping is out. We are to worship with all of our heart! As worshipers of the Lord we will break through and see things happen.
The Lord must jar us and rock us enough to get us in motion. These ruts of conditioning are deadly. They bring us to the place where we’re not even expecting anything to happen because we have learned to exist with our problems. We cannot do that; we must have the life that changes things, that sees ourselves being changed from glory to glory, transformed into the same image as the Lord. In other words, we must learn how to start an avalanche. After the Lord hits us and gets us into motion, we in turn will hit other people and get them into motion, too.
There needs to be something in us that rocks people; the Lord jars them. He makes them either mad or happy, but they don’t ignore him because there’s a violent force of the Spirit in us.
Paul says, “So fight I, not as one that beats the air” (I Corinthians 9:26). When I swing, I want to hit something. I want to get something done. I want my prayers to be answered. Believe the Lord to see things changed.
There are people so deeply rooted in their traditions and the ruts of living that it is hard to change their thinking and ideas. After you preach to them, they turn around and go right back to their same old rut. That is a human trait; but in the name of God we declare war on it and determine to eradicate it out of our own lives.
We won’t change other people until we become so flexible that every time we worship the Lord, every time we wait on the Lord, we are changed into His image from glory to glory. We worship Him and something happens. We’re not merely putting in our time and going through motions. We’re not in a rut, building new traditions that will have to be torn down in fifty years. We are going to be flexible, a people who can change. When a person can change to do the will of God, then they can change anything else.
In the city of Thessalonica it was said, “These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also” (Acts 17:6). When Paul was on his way to Jerusalem he was warned, “They’re going to put you in prison.” He replied, “None of these things move me” (Acts 20:24). When we get to the place where nothing moves us, then we will be that irresistible force.
If we can become an immoveable object, we can also become an irresistible force, and turn the world upside down. Then the people of the world can’t change us or discourage us. They can’t beat us down or cause us to become disheartened, because there isn’t anything in us to respond to the assault of the enemy. We need to learn how to stand fast! No matter what our problems are, we stand there and prophesy against them. We believe God to bring them down, and then we walk as a free person who has access to the greatest power of the universe—the creative power of the Father invested in His Son by whom all things were made, and for whom all things consist (Colossians 1:17). When we move in that authority and power, we make a difference in the world.
We will change churches. We’ll change people’s lives. When we say something to someone, we need to believe it will affect them. We believe that we are going to reach them. We believe for change in ourselves, and we believe in change for others. That’s what this is all about.
“Can a leopard change its spots or an Ethiopian the color of his skin? Then may you do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jeremiah 13:23). When the prophet says that you can’t change he is referring to the human nature, not to what God can do. God takes the old nature, which is inflexible in itself, and by recreating and regenerating, He changes a person. If we believe in the miracle power of God to recreate us, we must also believe in the miracle power of God to make us His creative force in the earth to change things. Lets’ see it happen.
Jesus was an agitator. He was a revolutionary. He probably went around just looking for someone He could heal on the Sabbath day so He could provoke the Pharisees. We see in the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15, the way Jesus rebuked the Pharisees with the example of the older brother. He created a chain reaction. As they walked away, they were either grinding their teeth in anger or worshiping the Lord. Jesus started many an avalanche.
What starts an avalanche? Faith and a word from God—that’s all. Believe what God says and voice it. If we dare to believe, to act recklessly for the Lord, soon we’ll have an avalanche going because we believed God’s word. Once we’re in motion, everyone will get knocked off their perches and get into motion too. It’s fantastic! Let’s start an avalanche.
Young people struggle with a problem that exists universally: people have walls up to God. They are conditioned by society and the times in which they live, by the unbelief that is being fed to them constantly, and so they have a wall up to God and a wall up to each other. It goes without saying that people are at the place where they can’t even stand themselves; how can they stand someone else? People get married who are strangers. People work together who are strangers. They’ve never bothered to learn to know each other. They couldn’t know each other because they have walls up to each other. When people start taking their walls down for the first time, they really move into something.
We’re at the dawning of a new day. How do we shake this old world? How do we shake this conditioning in our minds that causes us to walk around with defeat? The truth of God must be buried in the inner man until we think and breathe and talk the promise of God and the truth of God. No matter how fantastic it is, it’s our truth, and we live it, we believe it, we rehearse it in one another’s ears. God loose us from negative thinking.
Our vocabulary in the future will involve one principal word, “WOW!” because we will be so filled with amazement and wonder, as we constantly rejoice in what we see the Lord doing. We’re going to see it. Just think—this generation is going to see it!
God is getting us ready to use for His purpose. We need to blast the unbelief our of one another, that doubt, that conditioning, so that we can believe in our destiny as a child of God, to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ who dwells within us and the Holy Spirit who dwells within us to empower us, to make us believe that eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has it entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for us. God will reveal them to us by His Spirit and we will walk in them (I Corinthians 2:9, 10). Greater works than these shall you do. Our thinking needs to be jarred? Does the Lord have to shake us until we rattle? We need to be shaken and moved by the Spirit of the Lord.
What a generation this is to live in. God is going to change us from a bunch of wishers into people who worship in the midst of plenty and walk in His fullness. With humility and faith we can be anything under the hand of God, if we believe. If we go at it with pride, self-seeking, and ambition, we will get nothing, but if we go at it with faith and humility, God will take you, you little worm, and make you into a sharp threshing instrument, having teeth, and cause you to thresh a mountain and beat the chaff. God will do that with you.
We must learn to walk in the Spirit, and be continually filled with the Holy Spirit and have a spiritual awareness. Lord, put a powder keg with a short fuse in each one of us. Taking a person by the leg and trying to drag him into the kingdom won’t necessarily get him there. There must be a force that takes hold of us and causes us to believe God’s word.
Take those walls down and get rid of the things that separate you from God and from your brother and sister. Open your heart to the love of God. Lift your hands and worship the Lord. If something is wrong, get down on your face before God and repent. Don’t expect someone else to help you limp into the kingdom of God. The kingdom is preached and every man must press into it.
“The first thing John the Baptist preached when he began his ministry was, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ When Jesus began His ministry after the temptation, His first words were, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ When Jesus sent out the twelve disciples, their first message was, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.’
“Every one of us has had walls up to God. We’ve been taught a lot of religious precepts, catechism, and doctrines, but we haven’t been brought to that full awareness that Jesus is the kingdom; He is the King. When there’s a full acceptance of Him, we are automatically a part of the kingdom of God.”
In their thinking people are afraid to face what God really wants of them and what he wants to do in them. Some people feel that going all over the world and preaching the Word is an end in itself. But Jesus wants us to be the living epistles. He wants us to become the word of God. One reason they killed Jesus was because He came as the Word of God. Many people who call themselves Christians are running around, saying, “I’m preaching Jesus, who came as the Word of God.” But Jesus is also coming in us, that we become that living epistle of Christ, read and known of all men.
We need to be the Word to other people! Let it be written on the tablets of our heart. Let it not be a doctrine coming out of the mind that you’re trying to sell to someone. We dare to be the word of God! We dare to seek the Lord until this repentance has been worked deeply in our life, so that there isn’t anything preventing us from being a channel for God, speaking right through to the world.
We’ll live with protest, protesting against the sun setting on any day that things we are claiming are not fulfilled. We are going to do our utmost to walk in and appropriate as much as we can each day, for the glory of God. I don’t think there’s that much time left.
Nothing is more important to us than a right spirit before the Lord. God keeps dealing with us, and we want our hearts right with the Lord. We don’t want anything to be in the way of what He’s going to do. We must constantly storm heaven with a good conscience, laying everything before Him with all humility and all faith, believing the Lord to really move on the scene.
What is your thinking about God? Do you believe that the God you serve is eager and anxious to fulfill, as soon as possible, every promise over you? Or do you believe God is dragging His feet? A lot of people believe that God isn’t too concerned, that He doesn’t really care much whether anything happens to them or not. We have to decide what we believe, because it is a strange thing that God accommodates Himself to our faith in Him. To the forward Thou wilt show Thyself Forward; to the merciful Thou wilt show thyself merciful (II Samuel 22:26, 27). If we believe God is merciful, He is merciful; but if we believe God is up there breathing fire on people, ready to consume them, then we will get scorched from God’s dealings with us. Open your heart and say, “God is going to meet me, and He is going to meet me soon. I will seek Him and He will meet me.” That must be our way of thinking.
We have been conditioned to believe in a God of delays. This is the day that the Lord is doing a quick work in the earth and cutting it short in righteousness, because if these days were not shortened there would be no flesh saved alive. There were times when we preached the opposite, “Let’s walk with God. Take it slow and God will work it out.” That’s not the strategy of the end time. God is condensing the days into a quick work or else the timetable of Satan would overtake God’s timetable and there would be no flesh saved alive on the whole earth. That’s what Jesus said.
How can these days be shortened? By a concentration of glory, a concentration of answers, a concentration of ministry. It will happen in our generation, and it’s up to us to be a part of making it happen, walking in it with all our heart. By seeking the face of the Lord we can turn our hearts away from the conditioning of our mind that says that our God tarries, that He lingers. And we can begin to believe that the Lord shall make haste in the earth, that these days are going to be shortened, and God will move upon our hearts in a special, real, living way.