We are in a period of transition, and it is really working. We are getting out of bondages, and we are getting out of walls and barriers that we have had to each other. We are beginning to feel things more deeply. We are more sensitive.
I don’t know whether you understand how far we have moved into a Kingdom expression of the way we are going to function. Behind all of this is the people’s need to express their freedom, and they need to flow. There has to be the freedom to relate, a freedom to be the family. And I don’t know whether many of you have evaluated the real problem of transition that we have. Look at yourselves. As a church, you are a mess. You don’t have the forms for your services. You have lost your liturgy, whatever that was for you. You don’t know what songs to sing anymore, or who is going to lead them, or who is going to play the instruments for you. You don’t know what you are going to do, and your services don’t start on time.
Behind what I am saying is something very simple. We never did have a formal liturgy as did some of the old denominational churches, and how we rejoiced for twenty-five years that we didn’t have that. We worshiped and we sang in the Spirit; we did many wonderful things. But I want to teach you what the order of this level of the Kingdom is for your services, so that you know how to function. I think all of you have felt that it is wonderful to be free, but after a while you hit a vacuum. Now what do we do? How do we come to church, and what do we do? We have lost position, but we want authority over us. We want to be led by the Spirit. We want to know the things that are really important. We have come through so much, and we are going to have the most wonderful services and meetings together in the world.
What we are learning now we will begin to apply in meetings in the homes—in fact, just within your own family itself. You will learn that there are certain things you can do that God has ordained so richly. He has said that He will meet you in them. At this particular point, we are moving way out of the area where you do things just to get a blessing, or to get yourself straightened out. Something has to happen to get you out of your focus on problems. We are going to get to the place where we come and function as the Kingdom family, and we love one another, and we have faith, and we appropriate, and we know what to do.
One of the things we have learned is how to take our walls down and to be free with one another. And because we have learned to do this together, we will learn to do it on a one-to-one basis, which is still something of a problem, isn’t it?
For years, we had this problem and the brothers would say, “John, we know how to relate to you, but we don’t know how to relate to each other. When you are with us and you talk to us, we are all open and free; but when you are gone, we don’t know how to relate or what to do with one another.” It becomes very necessary that you learn how to express your freedom and the flow. And you are feeling the freedom. You are getting loose.
I recently heard about one of the churches that had just broken loose from having become almost like a denominational church: every week they had a printed bulletin which listed exactly what they were going to do in the service; it was very much old order. The people didn’t know what to do: they had been so locked in and restrained that when they finally felt free, they went wild. They began to speak up; there would be about twenty sermons in a service. Everyone felt that he could preach, or participate in one way or another.
The brother who had been sent there to shepherd the people called me and said, “What am I going to do?” I said, “They have lost the restraint that was on them, and they are feeling free for the first time. Let them feel just as free as they want to be. And after they have blown off all the steam, then you can begin to channel them into the order and the blessing that belong to them. But if you squelch them now, you are doing the same thing that someone else did to them before. They were squelched; and now that they feel free, it must not be that you squelch them too. Let them be free, and then begin to teach them how to flow.” The freedom and the flow become very important to people.
What should your reaction be toward those who have restrained you? “Oh, those terrible people!” No, that happened on a former level; and the restraint of that level was not discernible either by the people who were restrained or by the people who were restraining. No one really knew what the next step was going to be, but we knew it was going to be wonderful.
This is just like someone in Christ’s day saying, “I’m a Jew becoming a Christian. I’m sorry I was under the Law. I’m sorry I was under bondage.” That was all there was until Christ came. You had to do the best you could with what God was doing; and when He did something more, you had to throw the old away and move into the new. The book of Hebrews is devoted to this whole theme, that the old covenant is passing away and the new is coming (Hebrews 8:6–13). And this is what is happening to us now. It has been difficult. You say, “Oh, I wish we had some more of the old services like we used to have.” If they would come, you would not want them, because they would not have as much Spirit in them as you are going to feel in the services now. You are going to feel more of the anointing of the Holy Spirit.
There is a freedom that you feel, the freedom to express yourself, the feeling that the rest of the Body is accessible, available. We can touch one another’s heart. I don’t know whether you feel it or not, but I feel that I am closer to you than I have ever been; the oneness is making me know you better. And you are knowing me better. I don’t put any heavy restraint on you, and you don’t put any restraint on me. We are free; and because we are free, we begin to flow.
In this process, we have shifted away from the traditional structure of a church. The pews are gone; we have some chairs, and we like to sit around as a family. This has been with us for some time. We have been shifting away from being an audience and spectators, where maybe four or five people do all the prophesying. That has disappeared; a lot of things have disappeared. If you had a position of prophesying in the services, that is gone too. Now you are all becoming a prophetic community. You are going to prophesy to one another. Everyone is going to speak. It is an order instead of a form. What is going to be in that order? I will tell you.
First, we are going to have worship—real worship of the Lord.
Second, we are going to have a lot more prophecy on a higher level. We will open the way for the people in the services to let the flow come. There will be a freedom.
We are going to have reading of the Scriptures, or maybe reading of a gleaning that applies to what we are in.
We are going to be into warfare, which is tied in with intercession. We will hit new levels of intercession. I think that sometimes we have been very energetic without being very effective. We are going to really learn how to flow as one Body. You are going to turn me loose.
Another thing we are going to have is teaching. You say, “Oh, what happens to preaching?” I don’t think we need so much preaching anymore. In our services we have had prophecy and preaching, and everything was ninety percent exhorting the people. The services will come in which ninety percent of it will be talking to the Lord, or the Lord talking to us, instead of our exhorting each other, and being harsh with each other, and saying, “You naughty believer, you’re not doing right.” I see that we are going to function and flow as God’s people. We are not going to spend all of our time trying to solve problems, or trying to push one another, saying, “Get with it.” Instead, we are going to speak a Word from the Lord, and speak a Word to the Lord.
There is going to be more teaching than exhortation, because what we want is to get a Word. This is what I do. I just teach you. When I teach you, you get more than when I preach to you. When I teach you, you start listening in such a way that you start walking in it. I believe the Lord Jesus Christ preached a little, but He was called the Teacher (John 1:38; 3:2). And as the Kingdom comes, it is the teaching of the principles of the Kingdom, the truths, that really counts.
We will have the breaking of bread—the agape, the love feast. This is what Jude talks about, the agape (Jude 12). I don’t know whether you know it or not, but our eating together just now was a love feast. That is why you feel so blessed by it. It is an exhilarating thing.
We are talking about something which I think is so serious—the love feast—but attached to this is also the Communion, where we take the Lord’s Supper together. Has this become more real to you lately? We have broken from a form, where we eat a little piece of cracker from the plate and take a sip of juice. The Lord has brought us to the place where we rejoice, and freely we partake together in the Communion.
Something else that is part of this new order is just to be in a service and touch each other and flow. Don’t say, “Well, nobody is going to preach a great sermon to me, so I’m not going to go.” Come and touch one another. Get the walls down; keep them down. The touch and the flow, the thing of just being one with each other, is very important—and to feel free to do it. If someone wants to get up and talk, fine. There is only one thing you should watch. At first you may feel, “I want this freedom,” and so you get up and say something as lengthy as the Iliad and the Odyssey in one service, giving a life history. Instead, you could say a few words, and your heart will touch everyone else and you will all flow together. When Paul spoke of prophesying in the services, he said, “You may all prophesy one by one” (I Corinthians 14:31). This thing of everyone being free is so important—free to flow, free to participate.
Another thing we will have is impartation. This is the first time in thirty years that the tide is rising toward one thing: the people feel free to come and bless me. They don’t feel a reserve; they feel they have access to me. I am the daddy; I am the father. They feel it. They respect me, and they aren’t going to monopolize all my time and everything, but they don’t feel any burden to stay away. They feel the freedom to come. This is very, very important; it is something I have waited for for a long time.
On the former levels this wasn’t true. I have known times when I couldn’t counsel with people except when the pastors would arrange the counseling session and be right there. They did not want the people to be able to talk to me unless they censored who would talk and who would come. This has not been the problem in the Islands, because I have felt free to touch the Island people; but still there are a lot of barriers and great gulfs disappearing. People are feeling free.
Don’t you feel this too? You feel that you are one with me. Whether you come and talk to me or you don’t, whether I do anything for you or not, is not the big thing. The big thing is that we have a relationship of oneness, and that is a very free thing. And I tell you, you have to draw on that. If you don’t draw on it, you are going to be in trouble, because the people here have wounds which are not going to heal unless they accept this oneness. In this oneness we are going to heal up fast.
Do you know what I am talking about? Many people have this feeling: “I have wounds. Things have happened. What do I do about it?” Do you have that in your heart? You say, “Well, I won’t come to services; I’m doing fine.” Yes, but you may have walled yourself off because of it. You may have turned to thinking like a Quaker. The Quaker says, “If thy neighbor cheat thee once, shame on him. But if he cheat thee twice, shame on thee.” So the Quaker doctrine was that someone could cheat you once, and then you had better put up a wall; never let him do it to you again. And I think people have been hurt, and they are saying, “Shame on me if my neighbor cheat me again.” It cannot be that way. Now there has to be the healing.
These are the things that are going to be in a Kingdom service, and I think we should talk about them a great deal. And one by one we should loose them, so that the people will be into this type of flow. We should loose the authority that will be over the services. We should loose the impartation, and talk about the way we can impart to each other. We should get right down to the heart of the way that Communion in the Kingdom will be one of the greatest means of imparting the life of Jesus Christ to our own hearts. We will have good services: they will be busy; they will be full. But we will not be going around the mountain (Deuteronomy 2:3); and we will not look back to some old form and say, “Well, in the good old days that we knew, we opened a song book and we sang this and that.” We have the worship, because we know that is a part of our coming together as one to worship the Lord. But we also come for teaching; we come to listen.
I am trying to get something going which will be loosed very soon. “The Unfolding” was really more a sovereign revelation from the Lord than anything we have had for some time. But the problem is that you come to church and listen to tapes of “the Unfolding” messages for an hour and a half, and maybe the recording isn’t that good; and you try to concentrate, but the babies get restless and cry so you can’t concentrate much. And when an hour and a half is over, you are too tired to do anything about it. That was not the spirit of “the Unfolding.” We came and talked a little bit, and then we functioned and we ministered. So now we have people going through each message of “the Unfolding” and making brief gleanings from it, until we have a few pages of very important things that came in that service. We can have that printed up and read it in the services; then we can start ministering it back. We could take one paragraph, very simply, and it would really work.
You don’t need a great education; you don’t need to be a great preacher or leader or theologian. You just need to get the heart of one Word from the Lord. Then when you speak it, people begin to digest it; it comes alive; they talk about it. And so the services will not be a lot of listening to tapes so much as they will be reading the gleanings of the Word and working with it together. When we come to a service, we can read the Scriptures; we can read gleanings; we can appropriate them. We can worship; we can lay hands on each other; we can bless each other. We can become a nice family in the Spirit, functioning.
The Word began to come concerning how the Lord was removing position. But we couldn’t get out of being locked into position. And so we would say about a particular function or commission, “Well, this is no position”; but it was made a position, and the Lord had to break that, too. Now we know what it means to say that there will not be different ranks—big shots and little shots and no shots. Everyone is important in the family. But as a family, there are going to be big brothers; there will be shepherds over the sheep. There will be authority, but it will be such a thing of love and faith together (Galatians 5:6). We are going to really work together. It is happening already. I have not told you one thing in this Word that you don’t know already. You say, “This has been happening; for months this has been happening.”
We are a free people. We are learning to flow. And the joy of the Lord is going to be our strength (Nehemiah 8:10). We need to take Communion together. We need to lay hands on one another. We need to take our walls down and to relate as a family. There is so much we can do that just doing it will create it. We have to love one another. We have to see that we are going to be one. And when this happens, it will be the greatest strength to me to be that wedge, that firstfruits, and to lead you into everything God has. That is all I want to do. I have no ambition to survive. If I would die tonight, I would be with the Lord; a lot of battle would be ended (Philippians 1:21–24). But I want to bring in the Kingdom. That is the vision. I want to bring in the Kingdom! I will bring you into it.
The Lord spoke to me, very clearly, “I have given you the Word of the Lord, and you have given it to the people and created them to be the instrument of your own deliverance.” I have given you a Word, and now you have become the instrument of my deliverance. I don’t want to survive if I can’t lead you all into it. Survival is not what we are after. What we are after is to get into resurrection life, to lead the people into the Kingdom.
I would like to see the people be flexible. I don’t like the barrier between Island people and haoles, and all of that thinking. I want us to be so one that we just break through. I want the restraints off of the first generation. There are so many things I want to see happen. They will have to come forth where there are people really looking to the Lord. I want you to loose me to do this. I want to know that the authority will be here to loose the Islands from the elemental spirits and turn them loose. The entertainment field, the real estate, the land, the economy—all have been locked in and controlled by demonic forces. We have to loose them.
You are going to free me. You are an instrument of my deliverance. And it is not for me; it is for the Kingdom. You know that I will not take any glory, and I will not take the gold. The Lord will get the glory. Somewhere there has to be an end of the oppression, the bondage, the walls, the barriers. There has to be the initiative of faith that belongs to oneness. If we are one, we can go do this. With initiative we can do it.
It has been about a year since God started opening up “the Unfolding.” You said that “the Unfolding” would be with us forever, and that it would continually spiral up to a new level. And that is what is happening now—there is that spiraling up to where it’s the heart of the Father. I just saw that so clearly again tonight how much He has delivered it so perfectly, so completely and totally, into our hands. I remember all of us ministering back to you a year ago. It was such a thing of faith. It was so bold; it was so audacious. But it was so real. It was so complete, John. We have gone through a year of torment, a year of dealings, a year of great releases. But I am declaring that this whole process that we are going through right now is taking us another level up, to seeing the fullness of the Kingdom.
We are having fun, but there is such a somber reality to what is happening here. We are feeling a joy, which became the vehicle to release us; but the heart of it is the heart of the Father in the earth. And that, I feel, is like an atomic bomb within our spirit; we are releasing it. What we have been speaking here is such a reality for us. And we see you totally breaking through into this.
Don’t you feel that if we just start working at this, with this vision, we are going to see a Kingdom order coming out of this? Maybe “order” is not the exact word, but don’t you feel that we need this? Everything has to fall together. I have felt a little bit at loose ends; but what we are talking about, I am going to walk in. I feel that I am getting it together, thanks to your faith. Do you feel that you are getting it together, too? We are turning it loose. It is so simple.
The healing without scars has started. We can sit here and have fun with one another, because a lot of us are visitors here, and some of us came over from another Island where we haven’t been very long; but there are people in this church who carry scars which no one will know about. We were talking about a love feast here—no one will know the depth of healing that may have happened in this group today. And I am determined to seal the unity and oneness that came and has been so battled. Some people have felt put down in their own minds: they have made mistakes; they have walked another way and have come back. No one is any different than anyone else here. We are starting clean, and there are no scars. And from now on, it will be an absolute, total walk on fresh ground.
Our meeting together here is fun. We enjoy it; it’s a joy. And right now, I am shutting a door, so there will be such a unity that we all will recognize that we all are on common ground now. I don’t want to reach back to problems and say that someone is ahead and someone else is behind. No one is ahead. No one is behind. We release you, totally, from condemnation, from the problems you faced in the past.
The Lord is going to come back and seal something of a healing, even in areas that haven’t been touched. This healing was a perfect provision; it was done, and now the process is going to end. But the question is this: What are we going to do with this release from this time on? Will we be able to flow in a perfect backing of authority to do in the Islands what God called us to do, no matter where we have been or what we have done? This is where we start, and this is where we are going to go: we are going to break the principalities and the powers; we are going to have truths that will help us.
The idea, of course, is not to say, “We are dedicated to see a few half-blooded Hawaiians get their islands back.” It is more than that; it is to see the Hawaiian people become one of the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ (Revelation 11:15). As the Lord’s Kingdom begins to come forth, we don’t want to see that kingdom destroyed. But there are a lot of other peoples, too, that God is going to do this with. You see, we are raised up to see the elemental spirits brought back into a deliverance, and to see God’s people begin to worship the Lord and submit to His Kingdom.
There is so much that God wants to fulfill now. He doesn’t want us to talk about it; He wants us to do it. And that is why these services and what I am going to teach you are so important. You are going to do something. You are not just going to say, “I believe; I believe; I believe.” You are going to do it. You are going to create it. You are going to be the people that God raised up. He has prepared you for this.
You touched on something tonight that was touched on a year ago, about the Living Word and how it was being changed. And you said that it was going to be more than just cassettes going out—it was going to be accompanied by sons. I am feeling that this will all happen as the Living Word is being transmitted through the living vessels, through each one of us. This is the reality. It is more than just having a cassette library; we are being given birth. We are the living cassettes. I believe that all these things you are talking about are going to happen because there is a creation that is coming forth in each one of us.
I have said that we shouldn’t send the cassettes of “the Unfolding” out without also sending people who were in it, who can go and say, “This is the spirit of it. This is what happened.” I don’t know whether you understand this or not, but you can get locked into just listening to tapes and still miss the Spirit. You see, the Living Word is to create a relationship to the Lord; and if you don’t meet the Lord in it, it doesn’t make any difference what you listen to.
We are foolish if we don’t take opportunity, day in and day out, to exercise in the spirit, no matter how strange we feel. If we’re at home or at work or wherever, we can speak the Word and constantly create it. You said, John, that in the early days in South Gate, there weren’t very many people, but you would just walk up and down in the aisles and across the pews and prophesy to the faces that were never there. And you brought them in by a prophetic Word. Are we going to be any different? Are we not going to learn from what you have already exercised and seen happen? We can redeem the time, and we can create the atmosphere; it is retroactive. We can treat a thing as if it already happened and have it manifest before our eyes. We don’t have to wait any longer, if we have the faith to believe. As we speak it daily, with authority, something is going to open up in the spirit realm.
What about prophesying constantly to your own people? I am talking about your own families. Just because they may have oppressed you, have you dumped them? Prophesy to them. By faith, with initiative, we have more control over the lives of children or family than we know.
Way back at the beginning, back in the early fifties, there were people who turned away from me (grandpa). The Lord said, “You will bless them and minister to them.” And I said, “They hate me so much that they wouldn’t let me touch them with a ten-foot pole.” But the Lord said, “You will have to bless them.” It was only a day or so later that one of them was putting a roof on a house, and he rolled off the roof and fell down and hurt himself very badly. So he called and said, “I want you to pray for me.” Before, I couldn’t touch him; but when he fell off a roof, I could pray for him. Things like this happened to others, too.
The Lord promises that He will put people who have been against us in a place where they will say, “Yes, yes, we will be very happy to take your blessing.” Just start believing; the Lord will do it. Don’t say, “It’s impossible; their minds are set.” God can change their minds. Look at Jonah; he said, “I’m not going to go to Nineveh.” Then after a while, he couldn’t get there fast enough (Jonah 1:2–3; 3:2–3). What changed Jonah’s mind?
What is happening here is that we are getting the truth, the Word, and in our hearts we are applying it already. We are seeing that it is true, that it works, that we can do it.
You once said that the day that we think we are something is the day that we are in trouble. The day that we have an exclusiveness within our spirits which locks one another out, which says that we have something, is the day that we are really in trouble. God is showing us that we are being read and known of all men (II Corinthians 3:2–3). And there is a love that we have that isn’t exclusive. It doesn’t lock anyone out. It is a spirit that we are opening up to; and people see it and they are reaching out. It really is just a simple exchange. And you don’t understand exactly what is happening in the spirit, but God is just doing something. It is so simple. We don’t have to complicate it.
That is the word—simple. It has to be kept easy and simple, not complicated. The minute it gets complicated people think you are putting a trip on them. It is just faith working by love (Galatians 5:6). Keep it simple.
And God is just going to do it. We forget the arrogance, and we just love them. We don’t have anything to prove; we just love them. And it is as simple as that.
It is a simple thing of following the Word that we have heard. Just believe it and act on it. But you know, sometimes you need to remind one another how simple the thing is. Accept what God has said; reject what the enemy does. You just stand in it in faith.