A Fresh Move Of God

A Fresh Move Of God

The following post is not an idea as such but is a basic Pastors and Leaders training session I prepared:

25th October 2013

Pastor Garth Clarkson

I keep saying that we are not going to have a revival but we are carrying a fresh move of God. This is a very bold statement. Revivals are awesome but they can be instigated by people in authority. Many people get saved, etc.

The difference with a move of God is that it is usually accompanied by the following:

1. A double-portion anointing.
2. A paradigm shift in keeping with a fresh restoration of lost truth. (Jesus said that He would return after the restoration of all things).
3. Sovereign moves of the Holy Spirit that spill out past the boundaries of the building and the church into the broader body of Christ and into the wider community.

So let's look at these more closely:

1. There is no doubt that we have the double-portion anointing, both in terms of intensity and in terms of range of areas that it affects. We carry the "Jesus" anointing: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor..." etc.
2. There is a paradigm shift in how we do things and how we look at things and how we think. God is restoring Apostolic Authority to the church. He is making adjustments to how the contemporary church operates and relates to Him and others. Some of these adjustments are major in impact but can be brought about by minor attitude shifts. Others do not seem like a big deal and there will be little to observe from the outside that anything is different but it will be produced by a greatly different attitude and world-view. There are many issues that will need to be dealt with, just like Martin Luther and his 95 theses.
3. God is already moving sovereignly to see this move birthed at this time. He is bringing together all the people and resources we need to kick this off with little effort on our part. He is bringing them to us. He is getting all sorts of people involved and contributing to it from believers to atheists and agnostics who can't understand why they are doing it. They just know that it is the right thing to say or to do. Where ever I go revival is threatening to break out and I am having to be very careful with what I do so that it breaks out where, when and with those that God wants it to. This is not being exclusive. This is going to sweep the world but we want to make sure it has good foundations.

SOME OF THE ADJUSTMENTS

1. Reclaiming the contemporary church from the world.

 Rom 12:2 (MKJV) "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind"

 Jas 3:15 (MKJV) "This is not the wisdom coming down from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish"

 2Ti 3:16 (KJV) "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness"

The contemporary church in its quest to be relevant to our current egalitarian, anarchistic, self-absorbed, disrespectful, irreverent, rebellious, narcissistic, isolationist, materialistic (amongst other things) society has become a subset of that same society. The contemporary church has become a consumer oriented business, a self-serving, democratic organisation of groups providing contact points for self-oriented, experientially based worship and revenue raising. Supply and demand. The contemporary church has been swallowed up in worldliness and now preaches secular psychology and philosophy wrapped up in religious terms instead of the word of God.

It is our mission to return to Christ-centred, word-of-God-based worship in the Spirit of God rather than the spirit of the world. We are to make these adjustments without losing relevance to those we are trying to reach.

2. One-Size-Fits-All Gospel

 Heb 6:1 "Therefore, leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ, let us go on to perfection..."

Part of the problem we encounter when attempting to bring the body of Christ into a semblance of "the unity of the faith" is that they all focus on doctrines and teaching that supports their particular focus and often leave the rest to the personal study of the motivated individual. For example, an evangelical church will present the milk of the word as being the whole thing and will virtually ignore or invalidate all sections of the word of God that are difficult to understand and that are off-putting to those who don't know God intimately. Every meeting is geared towards non-believers and getting them saved and so they grow shallow and do not address the things that will take them into the word of God. They begin to compromise and eventually become very worldly. E.g. Joel Osteen.

Another example is where there is an over emphasis on teaching without doing. No matter how much you know, if you are not putting it into practice then it becomes theoretical and irrelevant and then to explain the gap between knowledge and experience a culture of excuses begins to grow, e.g. Calvinism, Reformed Theology (where we don't need the gifts of the Holy Spirit any more because we have science, knowledge and medicine now), Nicolaitanism (greasy grace, turning liberty into licence).

Yet another is where Word of Faith got so caught up in "naming and claiming" materialistic things that they forgot to clothe the naked and to feed the hungry.

Another is the "relationship with Jesus" crowd who don't need the word of God because Jesus speaks to them. He understands them and besides, it says "you have need of no one to teach you because you have an anointing from the Holy One and know all things".

THE ADJUSTMENT

We need to be able to evaluate where a particular person is at in their walk with God and to feed them the diet that is beneficial to helping them fit into their part of the body.

We need to distinguish:

1. Maturity - What stage of growth are they at?
2. Gifting - What are their natural and spiritual gifts?
3. Calling - What part are they meant to play in the body?

And we need to make sure that as each believer grows they are introduced to the harder concepts.

OR

We just get the fine print out there right from the start, up front and preach a mix of milk and meat all the time and hope we don't turn too many off...

Posted by Garth Clarkson at 01:44

TUESDAY, 29 APRIL 2014