Would you like to learn more how to beam a blessing to someone or how to tune in to someone and find out what their need is? I will give you a little procedure that should work, one that will be a practical application that you can exercise and be able to move into some spiritual perception or some spiritual focus of blessing upon an individual and see if you can’t take a step in the Lord.
The Lord has given me by revelation some simple instructions to show how an individual who had never moved in revelation might first begin to tune in to another individual. It is an exercise that might not work for several tries, but after a few days suddenly you will find it beginning to work for you. It is so simple that anyone who loves the Lord should be able to at least make an effort to tune in to another individual.
The principle behind all that the Lord wants to do today is based upon the fact that He is not doing it sovereignly, apart from a human channel, apart from the initiative of some human spirit that is learning the ways of God and moving into it. The Old Testament said that God made known His acts unto Israel, but He made known His ways to Moses (Psalm 103:7). The acts were made known unto the people; they saw it, they could see the mountain shake under the fire and the earthquake. They heard the voice and entreated that it should not be spoken to them. They partook of the manna; they loved to drink the water that was following them out of the rock, but they did not know how it was done. But Moses learned how to do it! He learned how to move in authority, in the obedience to the Lord’s Word and to do the thing.
I believe that it is more that way today than ever. God is going to do many things in the earth, but in my opinion, He is not going to do them sovereignly. I can’t give you chapter and verse for this, but I can give you a lot of experience. There may be a thousand churches talking about restoration and the great gifts and ministries, yet the people do not move in anything because they are waiting for the Lord to come and bring rain, just rain the blessing on them, and they think it automatically will happen.
The reason that we have elders and ministries moving here is because I have laid before them the principles and the ways of action, told them from the beginning that they were attainable, and they have moved into it. The reason all of us have moved into something is that we believe the initiative is pretty much on our part.
I can show you how this works, using a glass of water as an example. The Lord provided the water, but the glass is not floating around, sustained by some ghostly ectoplasmic hand that comes and puts it to your lips. You still have the initiative to take the water. So it is with the things of the Lord. Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation, Isaiah 12:3, and we praise the Lord for the blessings that He brings to us. The Word says, “By His stripes ye were healed,” I Peter 2:24b, but the principle is this: Do you want to appropriate the healing? Do you draw it? The woman said: “If I can but touch the hem of His garment, I’ll be every whit whole.” And, if you remember, in spite of all the wisdom that Christ had, He said, “Who touched Me?” because it was at her initiative that she drew the virtue from Jesus Christ which healed her. Therefore He said, “Who touched Me?” Finally realizing that she could not be hidden, she came and confessed that she had been the one who had drawn the healing from Him. He blessed her in it and let her go her way (Matthew 9:20–22). Many times, this initiative has to be manifested. I know that God honors faith, but sometimes that faith has to be drawn out with a great deal of effort on our part to show God we really believe—not with dead works, but by actions that correspond to faith, actions that exhibit our faith so we can get into it.
I believe the same thing is true of the Holy Spirit. I do not believe that we should pray and pray, “Oh, Lord, please, would You sign an order in triplicate that I’m to receive the Holy Spirit? I seem to be left out of things.” No. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. Acts 2:39. If we believe all that is for us, then we do not beg God for the Holy Spirit; we just open up and receive Him. Or, with hands laid upon us, the Holy Spirit is imparted, because it is an attainable, available blessing that can be appropriated by us.
Now that I have moved into another realm, I realize there must be hundreds of things that God has promised which do not work for an individual until they are appropriated. One verse of Scripture that bothers me is John 15:7. I do not know any passage of Scripture that I have meditated upon more than the fifteenth chapter of John, especially the first part about the vine and the branches. One year it constituted my entire devotional life. All I could see was one thing—that He was the vine, I was the branch, and the life that was in Him was flowing into me. This would be the fruitfulness that I wanted; the fruit would come forth. I saw that the commandment was given to me, Abide in me, and I in you. John 15:4a. In the Greek original it is in the imperative mood. He commanded it! Then He gave a promise, If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. John 15:7.
He commands you, “You abide in Me and I’ll abide in you.” He was commanding Himself—in other words, He was commanding us to see that He would abide in us. That means that at our initiative we say, “Lord, abide in us.” It is our initiative to abide in the Lord. When we do this and begin to live in the Lord and His words live in us, then we come into a powerful place: … ask what you will and it shall be done unto you.
The presence of the Lord does not automatically happen, but the intensity and the force of God’s presence around us is appropriated. We draw it. The Psalms refer to how the Lord is our refuge, our strength, our high tower, our wall, and our defense; we take all these things. All of this is leading to one thing: What we will walk in is not a luxury bestowed upon a chosen few, it is available and attainable by everyone who will believe God. All the provision is made.
I believe that ninety-nine percent of all the blessing of redemption that we can have is not to be prayed for and begged for, like people standing in the corner and saying, “Please, Lord, give me some crumbs,” but we are to appropriate a provision that is ours! We do this every day in so many ways. It is like electricity. When we come to open the church, we don’t say, “Please, Lord, I pray that today the exhaust fan will work, I pray that the light switch will work, or I pray that the organ will work.” We have a wonderful privilege—we plug in or switch it on; the electricity is there anytime we want to use it. If you doubt it, grab a couple of wires and it will be proven to you finally and definitely. There is electricity flowing in that can handle almost any problem. Or like water; you never think twice about it when you turn on the faucet and the water is there. But have it turned off and everyone thinks he will die of thirst before it is turned on again.
Think of how much you appropriate the blessings around you. If you don’t think you do, go out into the wilds someplace, and suddenly you begin to appreciate the simple comforts you have. Have you ever slept on an army cot? You go to bed and you look at your feet coming right at you. When you get home and stretch out on your king-sized bed, suddenly you have an appreciation for what always before you had taken for granted. You had appropriated it. But the problem with people is not taking God for granted, but that they are not appropriating the blessings that are there all the time. They could tap into them anytime they wanted to but they don’t take advantage of it.
This is the line of teaching we need. How can we take a step? You have been taught how to appropriate the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues. You have been taught things that have been a real blessing for you. You have learned how to sing in the spirit, how to worship the Lord and to get into the flow. Now would you like to know a simple little process so that you could begin to tune in to your brother, see what he needs and minister to him? It is a very simple process.
Let me lay a simple foundation with a few verses: For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ. I Corinthians 12:12. Here we are assured that we have a unity. We do not have to strive for it; we are one Body in Christ Jesus. We may contend and strive for that unity, but what we are really striving for is an awareness of it so that we might bless. In other words, I don’t have to plead, “Lord, make me one with my brother so I can bless him.” We are one; he is a member of the same Body with me. All I have to do is to tune in to an awareness of him. This is something that exists for us more than we realize, and we can appropriate it.
For the body is not one member, but many. “Not one member, but many”—this is the Body; many members—all in one Body. But now God hath set the members each one of them in the body, even as it pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? (He made it so plain.) … that there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. I Corinthians 12:14, 18–19, 25. We are to have that care. The Word also says we can bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). It just means that we are to actually be able to find if our brother has a need and carry that for him.
Now let us see how we should go about that. In the first place many people cannot do anything about this because they have a cloud over them. One of the first things you have to do if you want to learn to tune in to your brother is to get rid of the cloud of condemnation. Any time self-condemnation is ministered to you and there has not been with it a revelation of the Lord’s grace and mercy, you know it is from the pit. There is only one who is the accuser of the brethren (Revelation 12:10). The Lord never reveals a need and He never condemns a person unless He exalts Himself as the one able to meet that need. Self-condemnation can rest like a cloud over you. The thing to do when you come to the Lord, if there is a reason for that condemnation, is confess your sin to the Lord, ask Him to forgive you, and see the thing made right.
I noticed that as I was teaching young people this, several began to cry. I looked carefully to see what it was about, and I saw that God was dealing with their lives about dedication. They couldn’t put their finger on it; but they were under conviction. They had been moving in and learning to bless each other, and in the midst of blessing one another, the claims of the Lord on their own lives became very real.
Now this is the way I think it should be done: First, we give ourselves to worship. There is an inner preparation we must have if we want things to really work for us in blessing others. We confess and get things moving right, and we enter into a worship of the Lord.
Second, we focus upon the Lord’s presence. Do anything that helps you to bring the presence of the Lord to you so it is so real that you have hold of the hem of His garment with one hand. You are so close to the Lord in that you can almost feel His heartbeat.
Then, with your mind or your spirit, focus upon someone else. What you literally do is make contact. I can show you how that works. There is a dynamo somewhere in the area, generating a lot of electricity. Then outside the building is a special transformer to step down the electrical current for what we need. The current is brought through wires in to some little switches, and when that switch is thrown, it comes to the light and turns the light on. So it is with spiritual things. There has to be some intermediary to make the contact, and you are to be the one. You tap into the dynamo, then you reach out and make a connection with the brother or sister who has the need! There is a lot of wisdom in the Lord, and soon you are aware that His wisdom is coming to your mind, and you know what that person needs. His blessing comes through, focused to meet that need. You are the little in-between switch. You reach out, you make the right connection, and it flows through you. That is the whole secret of it.
Be sure that you don’t concentrate on meeting it yourself because then you short-circuit the thing and it doesn’t work. It has to be a living contact with God and a living contact with that individual. If you do that, there is no reason why blessing cannot flow to you. That is what we do in ministry services that are so fantastic. We just have such a live contact with the Lord, and the blessing is so great that it is like a Holy Presence roundabout. Then we can just reach out and point our finger at somebody and instantly make contact with them. It is so highly developed that some reel under the power of God.
It is easy to make contact with those who are normally close to you anyway. Husband and wife should be able to do this very well; brothers and sisters should be able to do it. But everyone in the Body of Christ should have a living connection between themselves and their brother and sister, and they should be able to focus upon the Lord until it is very real and then bless someone else.
Here is the way I taught the ministers to bless: visualize yourself raising one hand to make contact with the Lord. Then imagine reaching out to a brother with the other hand. If you try to do it simultaneously, it would be like an electrical short circuit, and you will miss it, because the human mind flits from one thing to another. Let the flow go from the Lord to the individual, as if you are switching current back and forth between them and the Lord—dumping the cares on the Lord and bringing the blessing down to them—and you can reach out to them each time with the impact of it.
One person was hard to meet because he had been a notorious problem and never had any experience with the Lord. But we formed a circle and beamed upon him and literally brought everything to focus right there at one time.
That individual received the greatest blessing that he had ever received.
I explained to the young people how to learn to tune in to the Lord, then tune in to somebody else and bless him. They seemed to grasp it almost in a few minutes’ time. They could not wait for me to stop talking so they could do it, and they began to really bless! They just loved each other and blessed each other and melted down. They really came to a dedication to the Lord. Where problems had originated among boyfriends and girl friends, or one girl taking a boy from another girl and there was jealousy, they determined that they were going to love the Lord and love one another so much that their own personal relationships would be subordinate. They may have a hard time doing it, but they really want to do that. It is a wonderful attitude that the love, the care, the concern, and the focus upon one another’s needs would be the whole occupation of their thinking and their love. Their own personal selves would come last.
I had to teach the young people the difference in levels of experience. One time they might just stand there weeping, seemingly without any boisterous emotions, with tears just streaming down. The next time it was different, and some became disturbed about it. But it is not always going to be the same way, you will not experience the same thing each time. The essential thing is that you touch the Lord, that you make your contact with God until it is very real, the flow of worship is there, and no cloud is over you. Just keep appropriating the presence of the Lord.
You can be sure that automatically the devil will try to cloud you; automatically he will try to oppress or restrain your spirit. In this world people you contact will automatically hit you and react to you. Very few people will really open your spirit up to worship and praise. They don’t have it themselves, so how can they give it to you? Out of every five hundred people you meet, you will be lucky if there is one person who really blesses your spirit. The others will have a dampening effect because that is what is in their spirits.
So when you come before the Lord, you just automatically know, “I must throw off a few clouds. I must get rid of some cobwebs here. I feel a little lazy, spiritually. I think things aren’t working as they should.” That is automatic; you have to do that. Now, the presence of the Lord does not come automatically, but the oppression of Satan does. The only way I can put it is this way: you cannot automatically go up in the air. But if you are up in the air and nothing is holding you, you will automatically come down. The gravity is working at you; there is no way to turn it off. If you jump off a platform, you will go down to the floor. But it is not normal to leave the floor and come up to the platform. That takes thought, you must focus your attention. Give a big jump and there you are on the platform.
Likewise, a spiritual gravity is always working against the flesh. Satan is always trying to pull you down, but one of these days the gravity will be reversed. Micah 4:1 speaks of how the Lord’s House will be established on the top of the mountains, and all the nations will flow to it. That is when the gravity is reversed; right now it’s going the other way. You don’t have to do anything to backslide, you don’t have to do anything to lose out with God. By just doing nothing, it will happen—the force will pull you down. But if you want to move up in God, if you want to focus in God, if you want to be blessed, it requires a focus and attention on your part. So when you start to worship, you have to throw off the oppression, throw off the cloud, and start reaching into the Lord. When you reach up to the Lord and know everything is there, then you are in a position to turn and bless somebody else. Does that sound simple? It is easy.
We enter into a dedication that we shall not do anything or partake of anything that will dull our spiritual senses. We are not going to accept any cloud to rest over us. We have to keep our spirits free so that we can move out to bless people. We absolutely must do it, for there is such a need of blessing.