The Lord wants to teach us about His authority and His fullness so that we can move into what He has for us, in these last days- His authority and His fullness are really the issue in this day. Our adequacy is never an issue unless we make it one. If we keep feeling adequate, He has to make us feel inadequate, because our moving in God has to be based upon our sense of His sufficiency and fullness in us.
People wonder why they go through certain difficulties as they start to serve God. When God calls a person into a place of ministry, He will shine his light on the areas where they are falling short and that person will feel worthless. God does this to bring them to the end of self-sufficiency, pride, and arrogance, which are evidences of a religious spirit.
When God reveals what a person is to be and to do, the old religious flesh says, “Give me a few minutes, Lord, and I will whip something up for you. I can do it!” Serving God cannot be done that way. If a person does something that way, their efforts are like adding synthetic ingredients. The end result is not a living thing.
God wants us to repent of the dead works that come from ourselves, and to enter into His living works. This is not easy, because we must constantly fight the tendency to become adequate and efficient in ourselves.
Too often we rely on experience, thinking that we know what to do. This is a problem that some of the young pastors face as they try to lead God’s people. They start to come forth with some degree of success, and then they feel that they automatically know how to do certain things; what they need is a complete dependence upon the Lord in everything they do.
Those who feel like professionals need to know that God is getting rid of the professionals in the coming move of the Spirit upon the earth. People who want to walk with God must go through some kind of dealing that will put them into a total dependence upon the Lord, an absolute total dependence upon His sufficiency and His adequacy. If they do not come into that holy place in God, they will not survive spiritually in these end times.
Where ministry is concerned, a pastor must have integrity. He must constantly look to the Lord for what He wants and not allow anyone else to influence him.
There must be integrity in the ministry, and even though there must be confirmation from others, it should not be according to human reasoning. It should be an honest confirmation by the Spirit of the Lord. Something in a true pastor’s heart wants to be submissive and say, “Yes, Lord,” when he hears others speak a Word of the Lord. He should fear a day dawning in which he would automatically go about doing things because he thinks he knows how they ought to be done.
In whatever God sets before us, we need to be faithful to trust Him and to draw from Him. This must be done, or we will go the way of the professionals in denominations.
The moving of God upon the earth today is not a denomination; therefore, the Lord will constantly deal with our heart so that we do not become a professional. We do not want to become so experienced that we automatically know what to do. We do not want to ever reach the point where we serve God by habit, by experience, or by what we know, and by our own wisdom.
We will never be God’s creative people until He tells us what to create. Experience can teach us how to handle situations as we did in the past, but the changing scene demands that we know how to cope with things that the world has never seen before. Experience has no value when we are dealing with situations that have never existed from the foundation of the world until this time. We will face situations which have never been faced before. No one in the whole world has passed this way before.