In the middle of God’s dealings, it is very easy to become evasive and to rationalize those dealings and try to talk your way around them. However, as long as you stay in that rational field of logic and reasoning, you will never come into the revelation of what God is doing in your life. You will never figure out what is happening to you or analyze exactly what steps God is leading you through in order to complete His work in you. It does not happen that way. Your breakthrough comes because of something that happens in your spirit; and no matter how good you are at reasoning; your spirit is not that much under the control of the rational process. A revelation from the Lord does not come up through reasoning; it comes down from God. Then, as you move into it, it becomes well explained to you.
We must reach a higher level of revelation and authority in our intercession. We are on the verge of a breakthrough into a whole new dimension, a new process that the world, including the Christian world, has never seen before. Much of it will be found in the flow of joy, in the flow of song, in the way we learn to sing, and in the way we learn to distract our minds from reasoning out our circumstances.
We know that Satan tries to distract us from trusting the Word; but God distracts us too—in a good sense. He distracts us from our reasonings that would cause us to mistrust the Word, and He brings us into a total reliance upon Him. This is very simple, but an effective step into revelation.
The Lord gave us minds and He intends for us to use them; nevertheless, the mind has to be limited. How can you know all that God knows? How can you be in tune with the mind of Christ? The independence of your own thinking processes throws you back into a reasoning of things that always colors the revelation you receive and causes you to miss the exact revelation just a little.
However, you must not miss it even a little. You must be able to receive the exact revelation of the way you are to go.
The first step in receiving an answer from God is to dismiss the problem from your mind. As long as you dwell on a problem, you cannot receive an answer. The answer comes when you lay the problem before the Lord, when you trust the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding (Proverbs 3:5). You must step out of your own understanding. Paul exhorted, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.” Then he added, “The peace of God will keep your heart and mind” (Philippians 4:6–7). This shows that you have committed it to the Lord. Then the answer comes. Believe God for the answer. Tell Him that by faith you have the answer. Then dismiss the problem from your mind. When the time comes, you will have the answer.
You must learn how to get out of the reasoning process and into the flow of revelation. This does not mean that you become “spooky,” or get into mystical meditation. After you receive revelation, then you can analyze and reason out everything. After you know what the Lord is showing, then you can write books which explain your revelation very logically and coherently; yet that will not help the next person to receive revelation. Reading a book which logically explains a subject does not help a person get into the process of revelation. Do you understand this? There is no procedure of logic—step one, two, three—that will bring you into what God wants to show you. That is not the way.
Something very creative is coming forth. We will be able to teach our children a whole new concept of prayer, of receiving answers from the Lord. After a problem is given to them, we do not even try to teach them how to solve it; instead, we help them go into a receptive period in which they are totally distracted from the problem for a time. Music, art, and quiet meditation could be incorporated with this. Then we can encourage them to write down the answers to the problem just as they receive them. We can teach them to bypass reason and get into revelation while they are learning to write. We must find the way to stimulate the creative process, because all revelation is creative.
If you receive a revelation from God about something, that revelation is creative. The thing that God shows you can come to pass. You cannot dissociate the creativity of God from revelation. His creativity is wrapped up in His revelation. That is why something happens when He speaks a Word. Something is created. You are born by the Word that He speaks to you. A revelation of a Word comes to your heart and creates you. We will reach into a new creative process, a new way of moving in God which will open the door for an effectiveness that the world has never seen. God can teach us how to do it. It can happen.
We must continue on the course that the Lord has laid before us. We humble ourselves, and that is tied into this process. The more we humble ourselves, the more we become the people God can bless. “We are the circumcision who worship God in the Spirit and rejoice in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:3). That is humbling. We put no confidence in our flesh. We do not lean upon anything other than the Lord. We do not try any method other than what He shows us.
Concerning the Pharisees Jesus said, “In vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Matthew 15:9). Another time He asked them, “How can you believe? You are seeking the honor that comes from man more than the honor that comes from God” (John 5:44). Do not feel that you must have a degree or a title to minister in God. Do not seek the honor that comes from man. The Lord has made it very clear: Either you will move with men acknowledging you, or you will move in His revelation. You cannot have both. Forget what anyone else says or thinks. Forget about any honor before man. Find the ways to humble yourself before the Lord. When you deliberately humble yourself before God, you close the door to the blindness that comes through the reasoning and the pride of man. That reasoning and pride will stop you from walking with God.
That is often the problem in the Christian world. They try to win converts through logical arguments or through man’s wisdom, and that does not bring a revelation of God. If we could tune in and preach by the revelation flow, we could change the whole world! We would see the miracles happen as we preach. Peter had not prepared the sermon he preached on the day of Pentecost; it was a flow of revelation. In the book of Acts every time the apostles spoke, they were in tune with a flow of revelation.
The Lord told His disciples, “When they bring you before the rulers and authorities, do not give thought as to what you will say. The Holy Spirit will teach you in that hour what to say” (Luke 12:11–12). You may think, “That does not sound right. Shouldn’t I prepare some defense? Shouldn’t I work it all out in my mind?” No! If you do, you may be making a defense that is not by revelation. “Shouldn’t I reason it out so that I have the answers when they ask the questions?” God did not say that. Notice the way Christ answered His opponents and the adversaries who questioned Him. It is not the way a logical man gives an answer. It is the way God gives an answer. There is a difference between a logical man and God’s man.
A man of God may not know much about business or manufacturing, but if he is moving in revelation, he can give a Word from the Lord to businessmen and manufacturers and tell them how to proceed when they face a problem. He does not have to lean on what he knows, for they have him outclassed. Their knowledge and training and experience are superior to his, and they also have much more money than he has. But if he can move in revelation, he can give them the answers they need. Then God gets the glory. That is the only way God can start getting the glory—when ignorant and unlearned men give profound answers that come from the Lord Jesus Christ. The wisdom of this world leads men to become puffed up. “Knowledge puffeth up, but love edifieth” (I Corinthians 8:1). The more you know, the more conceited and arrogant you become; God wants us to get rid of that arrogance and conceit.
God can speak to us. We can walk in revelation. Let there be no fear in our hearts. If we fear, the enemy will twist and interpret situations for us until we think that what God sets before us is impossible. However, instead of reacting to situations, we must find out what God is doing. We must learn to exercise faith. God’s work will be completed by faith, not just by our diligence. Everything that we do, we must do with faith that God will help us. God will show us how to do what He wants; and by the time we are finished, we will finally have learned how to take orders from the Lord.
The process of revelation is related to faith, and we will learn how to move in it. I wonder why we have not seen this before now. How many times did the Lord tell a person exactly what he had to do! At the marriage in Cana Jesus told the servants, “Fill the waterpots with water; then take some out and bear it to the governor of the feast.” When the governor tasted it, it had become wine (John 2:1–10). We have often emphasized the importance of absolute obedience: “Whatever He says unto you, do it” (verse 5). It is true that they had to learn absolute obedience; but that obedience was to an unreasonable command, one which did not appeal to the processes of reason or to the understanding they had of the situation. They had never seen water turned into wine. It had never been done before, and there was no process for doing it. Their obedience had to be a reliance upon faith and trust in God, not upon what they could see or reason out.
Whenever the Lord deals with your heart, the enemy comes in like a flood and tries to get you to analyze and reason out your situation, and every time you are defeated! Why? Because you try to figure something out. When Satan tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, he asked her, “Hath God said? Let’s reason this out.” Then he started to work, throwing lies into the situation. “Doesn’t that fruit look good? If you eat it, you will be as wise as God. But God does not want you to be like Him, so He told you not to eat it” (Genesis 3:1–6). It sounded logical. Eve probably thought, “If I were God, I would not want anyone to be like me. I would want to have it all by myself. So I am going to reach in. I am going to share God.” Because of that, Eve fell.
A person is defeated because he is threatened by something that seems to be logical or reasonable, something which is produced by insecurity or fear. To the disciples it did not seem logical to let Jesus sleep in the boat when the storm came up. They were fishermen and they knew what a terrible storm could mean, and so they woke Him up, crying, “Master, don’t You care that we perish? How can You sleep in the boat while the storm is raging? The way we have it figured out, we are in trouble. Wake up and help us!” He responded, “O ye of little faith” (Matthew 8:23–27).
Here is the faith we must have: We must break out of the reliance upon reasoning in a situation and come into a total reliance upon whatever God has said, a reliance in which we refuse to lean on our own understanding. We have bridged the gap into the field of revelation, of creativity, of the greater works. Now, instead of talking about it, let us take a step into it. We are to be a prophetic community, led by the Spirit of the Lord.