We need to see the kingdom; we need to enter the kingdom and abide there, we need to understand the kingdom and we need to preach the kingdom.
The kingdom is not something we are looking for when Jesus returns. The kingdom is present right now.
We need to understand the kingdom, and where it is at in its development at this time. It is our responsibility to advance the kingdom and we have to do it forcefully. Some of us are going to lay our lives down for the kingdom. It is going to be that kind of war. There is a harvest of such proportions to be reaped that it is unbelievable.
Jesus is building his church, and through the church the Lord is going to show the enemy the power of His kingdom. The kingdom is a much more powerful and much more invincible force than anything any government can do naturally.
A visitation of God’s Spirit will change us significantly; when he visits a church his presence will change it. He stands at the door of the Laodicean church knocking, let him in.
I have been in two different churches and the Lord would come and visit me, His Spirit would come upon me, and then flow out of me and hit everyone in the church and significantly change the whole church service, they would never forget that service. But then the church would gravitate back to where it was.
I use to think I knew how to dance in the Spirit, but when the Spirit of God came upon me, I would start twirling in and around people and never bump into them, being lost in the Spirit. When the Spirit of God is upon you, you are invincible you can pull people out of wheel chairs and the power of God will hit them and heal them.
Through our worship and praise we can create a portal over us, a gateway, a door way, in which the manifest presence of God will fill the atmosphere in the natural realm.
The manifest presence of God can fill your bedroom, when I was baptized in the Spirit I was all by myself in my bedroom.
The manifest presence of God can fill your house and anyone who steps into that house will suddenly become aware of the Lord.
The manifest presence of God can fill your church, and anyone who steps into it will get saved.
The manifest presence of God can fill your city and anyone who comes into that city will get saved, or leave the city.
In the manifest presence of God all the devils will leave, they do not like that kind of atmosphere.
We need to see the priority which was given to the kingdom in the written word.
The first recorded words in the new testament-
Math 3:2 and it came in those days that john the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
He was the voice of one crying in the wilderness prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. I baptize you in water for repentance, but he who comes after me baptizes you in the Holy Spirit and fire.
This is the beginning of the kingdom in the New Testament. God sent John out of heaven into the earth to prepare the way of the Lord, the spirit of Elijah was upon him and he was filled with the Spirit from the womb.
John saw the kingdom, and preached it.
And will turn many of Israel to the lord their God. He will go before the lord in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just. To make ready a people prepared for their God.
Mathew is quoting directly from the book of Malachi. We see the promise of the restoration of fatherhood and that a disobedient people are going to become obedient. And thus make them ready for God.
As the kingdom comes one of the things that is going to happen to our churches, including ourselves, we are going to discover how much of our lives are not as obedient as we thought they were.
The devil never was or will be the problem to God. It is God’s love for lost men who allows the activities of Satan to continue for a while. We live in the dispensation of man, God has to work through the agency of man, if he is going to keep the door of salvation open to man. Gods channel for dealing with Satan has got to be obedient man.
God does not have any problem with the devil, the problem that he has is with the obedience of man. If we become obedient we are going to see a tremendous transformation in our cities and nations right across the face of the earth.
In the first announcement of the kingdom there are two things emphasized by the prophet Malachi and repeated by the angle Gabriel. There has to be and will be a strong restoration of fatherhood which has got to operate in the kingdom.
The kingdom is the Fathers family.
If we turn the kingdom into a military regime where we have delegated authority then we have lost the heart of God. The heart of God is a father. It is essential that the disciples of Jesus had a revelation of the father. One of the major prophesies of the Holy Spirit was when he comes he is to show us the father.
When we have a revelation of the father it will completely change us. Not the theology of the father, but having a meeting with the father.
When we meet the father we will be dancing around our study, saying he loves me, he loves me, he loves me. We will never get over it, but it will totally transform us. We revel in the love the father has for us.
In the natural we may not have had an example of the heart of a father, they may have provided for us, but they were remote and never put their arms around us saying I love you. We may not remember one single act of affection. There was no intimate relationship. We tend to learn from our natural fathers. We become to our children, what our parents were to us.
We can become consumed with our career, or when we become a Christian consumed with our ministry. And our children never know the love of a father as God wanted them to because we were incapable of being that kind of person.
Our children may become teenagers or adults before this transformation takes place in our lives. It was too late for them to know the fatherhood of a really loving Godly father as children.
The Spirit of God must come upon us where we weep and pray over missing the will of God in our lives in the relationships that could have been, until the scares are gone and as far as possible we have recovered and been restored to the relationship God desires between the fathers and the children. Until we have a fantastic relationship. We will become known as a wonderful spiritual father. And we become this through the impartation of the Spirit of God.
The day the father is revealed to us and we begin to relate to God as a father is the day that we will begin to understand what fatherhood is all about. What we then become to those we disciple, is what the father first put into us.
We need to comprehend how important it is for us to get hold of the father. We may be able to represent to others what the father is like, but it is better for us to know him for ourselves. When we are satiated (to satisfy hunger or another appetite completely) and filled up with the revelation of the father then it will flow out of us without any effort.
The kingdom does not run satisfactory except by the power of fatherhood. To Jesus it was the most important thing. To the apostle John it was a very important thing. To Paul it was an important thing.
When we have a revelation of the father whether we are a male or a female, it doesn’t really matter we still need to know the father. It is a satisfying and amazing love because it is by fathering that we are brought to maturity in the spirit.
If we learn ourselves to receive the fatherhood of God and we become filled up with that fatherhood then it flows out from us to the people, we don’t just teach them or pastor them, but we father them, then they will come to maturity.
In scripture it is the father who takes babes and brings them into warrior sons. It is the process of fatherhood that does it. Hebrews 12 is a good chapter which illustrates this particular point.
What God wants is not a lot of babes. Who only drink milk and have a pastoral team to meet all their needs. He wants to wean them from the bottle, to become men of war, which can go to war in his name. And never again be defeated by the devil. This is what the kingdom is able to do.
We need to hear the kind of word that brings us to maturity. We do not just want to teach the word we want to father people into the word. This is the main thing this forerunner ministry will do. We cannot have natural fathering without the revelation of spiritual fathering. One is just the expression of the other.
God has created society to run on fathering, it is not just our Christian families, it is not just the church, it is when it gets out into society and we have father’s rather than professional politicians, or business men, then society runs the way it was intended to.
We need to seek the lord until we know him as our father, the beginning of the revelation of the fatherhood of God, where our spirit cries out daddy-father, we are told this is why the Spirit has been sent to us. He has been sent to us as the spirit of adoption as sons. So that we might cry out as those adoptive children of God who now know that our sonship, male or female is as real and as unbreakable as the sonship that Jesus enjoyed with his father all the days that he was upon earth.
One of the affects that it will have upon us is that we will stop trying to be like someone else. We begin to like ourselves. Psalm 139:13-17, tells us how wonderfully we are made. When we look in the mirror we say, you did an incredible job.
The only thing that temporarily clouds the beauty is the temporary aberration of sin, a departure from what is normal or desirable. That is not us but a temporary aberration abnormality (optical defect), an optical illusion like a bad dream. That person does not exist in eternity, but a temporary vapor that passes away.
When we do what we don’t want to do, it is not I but sin. Paul makes a clear distinction between sin and who he fundamentally and truly is. We need God’s image of ourselves. When this becomes a real revelation, all we want to do is to get rid of the sin to be fully who God gloriously created us to be, and we don’t want to be anyone else.
When people first get married they try to change one another to the way that we would like them to be. But when we get this revelation, we realize that they are just gorgeous the way that God had made them. People are supposed to be different and to react differently and think in a way that we find absolutely strange. We begin to see the beauty of God’s creative handiwork. There are aberrations that have to be dealt with but they are so peripheral. They are so small compared to the beauty of which God made that person to be.
This revelation affects our relationships, we can work with all kinds of people, we can see their strengths and weaknesses, but we can see the gold that God has put in them. We only think upon what is good, lovely and of a good report, and the God of peace will be with us. All of this flows out of the total satisfaction of being a loved son of the living God.
The second reason the forerunner was sent was to turn a disobedient people to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people for the lord.
If God can get his people to do precisely what he is telling them to do, we would have the devil licked all over the world in no time. The fundamental issue of the kingdom is- are we prepared to live this way, And to get the people to live this way. John proclaimed the kingdom but was not able to enter it.