the true message Inbox x Clint Saxon Sep 28 (4 days ago) to clintsaxon We want the reader to understand that we are not among those who have rejected the Fathers who have gone before us, nor have we discarded or amended the great doctrines of the church which have carried the Body of Christ from New Testament times until now. Stated in short form, g2k holds passionately to “the faith once delivered.” Our concerns are with supra-biblical or non-biblical structures and forms that hold back, prevent, that frustrate true seekers of God and of Truth. Our mission is to expose for what they are “the traditions of men” and to allow the liberty, freedom and power of an effective church to emerge – to come forth and for a new generation of followers of Jesus to “become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom [they will] shine as lights in the world.” With all my heart and soul I believe this: We are currently living through a most critical and significant hour in earth’s history, and that the Holy Spirit of God is leading those “who have an ear” into a new dimension of revelation and glory that will catapult the Church of Jesus Christ into her true, God-ordained destiny in the earth. Any return to the status quo, and desire to hold onto the vestiges of that which God has passed by; any business-as-usual church experience will sound the death-knell to the full desire of the Spirit of God. As surely as I know Him I am convinced that God is raising up a NEW VOICE, a NEW FACE and a NEW HEART in the earth. In 2008, Great Britain reports less than 2% church attendance. Having spent a good deal of time in Britain, I can attest to the veracity of that figure. Something is gravely wrong when the land that felt the footsteps of Spurgeon, Whitefield, Wesley, Wigglesworth and other powerfully anointed men and women of God has deteriorated into the state it currently languishes. In America, the echoes of Azusa Street have faded into oblivion. The times of Jonathon Edwards and the Great Awakening have become merely historic and not dynamic. Dwight L. Moody, Aimee Semple McPherson, John G. Lake, Billy Sunday, Oral Roberts, all shook the land, but as someone has aptly commented, “America is overwhelmed today with dime-a-dozen preachers.” Those who seek to plumb the depths of God’s Spirit and to tap heaven’s well of wisdom must look beyond former personalities and movements for direction and understanding. What God is doing is BEYOND. What God is doing is BEYOND denominations and conventional fellowships. Where heaven is leading is BEYOND corporations, programs, preaching services, man-made agendas, strategies and designs. God told Daniel to “seal up the prophecy” because it would require a future generation to understand. That future generation has been birthed, but where are the fathers, where are the leaders, where are those with “understanding?” Ezra chronicled the personality of “the sons of Issachar who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.” These sons understood the times, and knew what to do! That same “Issachar spirit” is being placed within a generation which has awakened to a new day of God’s anointing for the earth, and that “spirit” must be recognized and given freedom to speak. A nucleus of fore-runners is rising in this hour. These “sons of Issachar” have understanding and those who will hear “what the Spirit says to the churches” and who will make a difference for heaven in this time must listen intently. I sat recently in a staff meeting in a world-renowned church. As I watched the faces of the young leaders who had gathered there and I listened to the “orders of the day” being given; the drone of the minutiae of running a huge enterprise we call “mega-church,” my heart ached and I wanted to just get up and shout to them, “This is NOT “that!” This activity does not bear the imprint of the Holy Ghost of Acts 2. This programmed “service” does not have the unction of a church that “turned the world upside down!” Get Up! Get Moving! You can change your nation! Get up! Get full of God! Get His Power and His Resource and His Word and His Wisdom and His Enablement and abandon these man-engendered, man-enabled systems and storm the nations with His love and grace and mercy!!!!!!!!!!” I love the men and women God has raised up in past generations. God uniquely placed and used them for their hour. I love and respect the men and women God raised up in the most recent past generation. But I wonder, “Could it be that God intends to use the former generation to provide strength and stability to the church, while an entirely new generation rises up with a completely different and new concept of changing the earth? The church of Jesus will never vanish away so long as the Holy Spirit remains in the earth; but the expression of His church is surely in the midst of tremendous transition. Old systems are indisputably falling away, cleaving away like a disused shell to reveal an inner vitality of the Body of life in God. An old wineskin, unable to contain New Wine is rotting before us, and a New Wineskin, capable of containing New Wine is about to appear. Emerging ChurchI believe something significant is contained in Darlene Zscech’s song, “Touching Heaven, Changing Earth.” We must place greater concern on “touching heaven” if we are to “change earth.” Where we have spent inordinate sums of money and time and energy with our buildings and carpets and music and preaching programs, we must place our resources on “touching heaven” because if we can touch heaven, if we can see heaven, if we can hear heaven, if we can understand what the Spirit is saying to us, to our generation, to our hearts, we will witness a changed earth. The focus has been on doing “things.” Our energies have been consumed with developing programs, producing strategies, and doing things the way they always have been done because, our logic tells us, “if they worked for the church of the 1960’s and 1990’s, these things should work for us.” But to follow a former generation’s example without hearing the current whisper of the Spirit will cause us to miss what God is doing in our midst. If somehow we can shift our concerns from the next popular ministry emphasis or what is happening in this geographical location or that arena to an emphasis on heaven, to an emphasis on worshipping the God of glory without concern for worshipping the way somebody is worshipping in America or England or Canada or Australia; if we can focus on hearing God and not hearing what a man here or a man there is saying; if we can focus on building deep, real and spiritual relationships with others in the Body of Christ, the resulting transformations in our own lives would have a powerful impact on the earth without the systems and programs and mega-construction of the conventional church! We’ve got to touch heaven! We’ve got to become more connected with heaven than we are connected with a denomination or church or a treasured way of “doing ministry”! Until our supreme connection is with heaven, all our best attempts to change our world will fall ridiculously flat. The emerging church – the true church of Jesus Christ cannot be as churches have been, or we will no longer possess a reason to exist. Let God lead us into the deep, into uncharted waters, into latitudes no one has explored. Let God’s Spirit and God’s Wind carry us into a destiny heaven determined before the foundations of the world were laid. God is building something far more substantive than an organization or a building. He’s building His church. Observing the “machinery” of a great church is instructive, but let me be clear: It’s not about machinery, systems, models, imitations. It’s about touching heaven and touching one another. Let us refuse to imitate yesterday’s anointing and discover fresh unction for today.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 17:44:59 +0000
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