Some people think God only speaks in scripture. In fact, if pressed, they may even admit they believe He only speaks in the words of the Authorized Version (King James Version). After all, it is authorized and none of the others are. In case you are confused about that, the King James Version of the Holy Bible was authorized by, you guessed it, King James of England in the wee, morning hours of the 17th century.
Interestingly, the title of this post comes from the same historical period. It is, of course, a take off from the opening line of Shakesphere's Play, "Richard The Third." When the line came up in my spirit the other morning I thought I was going to write about having a bad month starting around Thanksgiving. Judi asked me last night if it were true I had not written a post in a month. It is. I was even surprised it had been quite that long. I thought when Richard spoke this line he was talking about a winter of discontent. Now you know how well Shakesphere and I are aquainted. Of course that is only half the line. The remainder of the line is, "Made glorious summer..."
I did have something of a winter of discontent. Thankfully it only lasted about a month. For those of you who do not know, I am not really a fan of winter. No offense to those of you who are. I simply prefer the sunshine and warm days. I would rather wear shorts and flip flops than parkas and boots. Anyway, I am proclaiming today that my winter of discontent is now past and my glorious summer has begun. What does that mean? Let me try to explain.
Sometime around January 1 of this year, I felt I needed to fulfill another part of my anointing and, "...proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:19 NIV) I am only about two weeks behind on that. Two weeks behind really is not that bad lately. I had a fever about three degrees above normal on New Year's Day. It only lasted about fifteen hours. My last fever was two years ago and lasted over a week. Things have changed. Things have improved. This is the beginning of OUR glorious summer. It is the year of the Lord's favor. As with everything else in the Kingdom of God, we have a part to play in that as surely as someone had to bring Shakesphere's words to life by playing the part of Richard and speaking those lines.
Last Sunday I listened to my pastor give his "State of the Church Address" to the assembled body. One of the things that caught my attention is that he said God wants to do great things in the church. How he said that also struck me. He said God not only wanted to do great things at Church for Life, but also in "the church in Santa Maria." That phrase kind of sounded familiar to me.
Indeed, God does want to do great things in the church in Santa Maria in 2010. It is to be our glorious summer. It will be the year of the Lord's favor on all who believe and work to make it happen. Have we talked about the works of God? I will have to go back and look. I barely remember last December. I have no idea what all this blog contains without looking. Let me at least give you a teaser, "God works". That is from Romans 8:28 in the NIV. But wait, you get more. God works and we work. See Philippians 2:12-13. Oh great, now we have to discuss what salvation really includes. My guys at the mission do this to me too. Just as I am making a cogent point or trying to wrap up a class someone asks a question that requires a more detailed explanation than I have time to give. If we do not get back to that sometime soon, remind me. (Ok, I looked and we did already discuss salvation. Check out the post from 9/6/09. Those last couple sentences were just too good to delete so I am just adding a little to the end here.)
Showing posts with label William Shakespheare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Shakespheare. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Cause and Effect
In the physical world we are pretty good at understanding cause and effect. We know, for example, that if we do not take care of our bodies, we will suffer various health issues. Likewise, if our car breaks down, we can often trace the problem to a lack of proper maintenance. Most of still have a problem believing that if a butterfly flaps it's wings in an Argentine rain forest the effects will be felt very far from that butterfly. Although, of course, that action is a micro-example of the chaos theory which is used to determine the effects of seemingly random occurrences. I really do not know exactly what I am talking about there, but I hope it sounded good.
When it comes to the world of the spirit, that realm where God lives and functions, we are a lot less capable. We tend to think things just happen and sometimes there is simply no explanation for them. We see things happen in the physical world and often do not consider that we are seeing things with spiritual roots or origins. We need to clear that misconception up right now. Nothing happens for unexplainable reasons. The closest that concept comes to reality is if we change a few letters and make the word "unexplained" rather than "unexplainable". Sometimes we simply do not know the reasons. God always does. Not only does He know the reasons things go right, He knows the reasons things go wrong. If we are able to tap into the Spirit of God, we then become privy to things that are beyond our scope of knowledge or understanding.
The purpose of this blog is to make The Church in Santa Maria aware of the presence of a religious spirit over this valley. We are delighted to have people reading and praying and agreeing with us to win the victory in seeing this spirit vanquished. It is interesting to us that, at least to this date, we have not had a backlash from the religious spirit, or have we? I am doing a little "writing therapy" right now. I do not expect to hit the publish button before I go back to bed. It is shortly after 1 AM. I do not do well with much of anything at this time of day. Right now I have an unusual amount of stress to deal with. I will not give details except to say yesterday's staff meeting, my email box, and a bunch of whining from adult men almost did me in yesterday. I actually got angry for a moment and said something I had to apologize for. That has not happened for awhile. That is either confirmation of my humanity or spiritual warfare or maybe both.
Remember, the religious spirit is insidious and entrenched to the point that people who know there is spiritual warfare going on think they are winning. In fact, there can be no victory as long as the religious spirit is holding the reigns. It allows a victory here and there such as happened recently when a large church was given a very large check to pay off the mortgage on their building. God is still working. Make no mistake about that. He could simply wave His hand and vanquish the religious spirit. He does not work that way. He works through His Church to accomplish His will on the earth. He is literally waiting for us.
We have given a lot of information over the past several months about the religious spirit, it's works, and a little bit about how to defeat it. This will be the 47th post to this blog. God bless you if you have read them all! Something tells me that number 50 will be somehow significant. I hope it is the Holy Spirit I am hearing. The stress I mentioned earlier is either going to cause things to get better where we are or move us along to who knows where. It is almost time to rise up and join the battle.
I just received an email from Dani Johnson inviting me to her Los Angeles seminar. I am not going, but part of me would certainly like to. Dani is an awesome business woman and carries a definite, prophetic anointing as well. I mention that because, as a business woman, she mentioned in the email that it takes around ninety days of hard work to know if you are going the right direction in a new business venture. We know we are going the right direction in this spiritual venture. So far we still do not know how well what we are doing is working. We are simply being faithful to our plan, which is to do as the Holy Spirit directs. We are just not quite sure at this point what the next step is. We will be giving definite strategies for winning spiritual warfare possibly as soon as the next post. One thing about being led by the Holy Spirit is there is no point in concerning ourselves with the future because He is holding it and only revealing it at the proper time. I suppose we could worry about it. You know, just because it is unknown and all, but what a futile, waste of time that would be. God has it all under control and His promise is that He will cause everything to work together for our good. (Romans 8:28)
I am not sure whether to call this an exhortation, a word of encouragement, or perhaps even a little bit of comfort. Then again, what is in a name anyway? (That was William Shakespeare was it not?) We are going the right direction. It looks like this time is the time to come together as those who see the battle. Others will join one or two at a time. We might even win the battle and no one will know what happened, how it happened or who was involved. Who said, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."? Oh yes, it was President Harry S. Truman. He was president when I was born, you know. See you soon. God bless.
When it comes to the world of the spirit, that realm where God lives and functions, we are a lot less capable. We tend to think things just happen and sometimes there is simply no explanation for them. We see things happen in the physical world and often do not consider that we are seeing things with spiritual roots or origins. We need to clear that misconception up right now. Nothing happens for unexplainable reasons. The closest that concept comes to reality is if we change a few letters and make the word "unexplained" rather than "unexplainable". Sometimes we simply do not know the reasons. God always does. Not only does He know the reasons things go right, He knows the reasons things go wrong. If we are able to tap into the Spirit of God, we then become privy to things that are beyond our scope of knowledge or understanding.
The purpose of this blog is to make The Church in Santa Maria aware of the presence of a religious spirit over this valley. We are delighted to have people reading and praying and agreeing with us to win the victory in seeing this spirit vanquished. It is interesting to us that, at least to this date, we have not had a backlash from the religious spirit, or have we? I am doing a little "writing therapy" right now. I do not expect to hit the publish button before I go back to bed. It is shortly after 1 AM. I do not do well with much of anything at this time of day. Right now I have an unusual amount of stress to deal with. I will not give details except to say yesterday's staff meeting, my email box, and a bunch of whining from adult men almost did me in yesterday. I actually got angry for a moment and said something I had to apologize for. That has not happened for awhile. That is either confirmation of my humanity or spiritual warfare or maybe both.
Remember, the religious spirit is insidious and entrenched to the point that people who know there is spiritual warfare going on think they are winning. In fact, there can be no victory as long as the religious spirit is holding the reigns. It allows a victory here and there such as happened recently when a large church was given a very large check to pay off the mortgage on their building. God is still working. Make no mistake about that. He could simply wave His hand and vanquish the religious spirit. He does not work that way. He works through His Church to accomplish His will on the earth. He is literally waiting for us.
We have given a lot of information over the past several months about the religious spirit, it's works, and a little bit about how to defeat it. This will be the 47th post to this blog. God bless you if you have read them all! Something tells me that number 50 will be somehow significant. I hope it is the Holy Spirit I am hearing. The stress I mentioned earlier is either going to cause things to get better where we are or move us along to who knows where. It is almost time to rise up and join the battle.
I just received an email from Dani Johnson inviting me to her Los Angeles seminar. I am not going, but part of me would certainly like to. Dani is an awesome business woman and carries a definite, prophetic anointing as well. I mention that because, as a business woman, she mentioned in the email that it takes around ninety days of hard work to know if you are going the right direction in a new business venture. We know we are going the right direction in this spiritual venture. So far we still do not know how well what we are doing is working. We are simply being faithful to our plan, which is to do as the Holy Spirit directs. We are just not quite sure at this point what the next step is. We will be giving definite strategies for winning spiritual warfare possibly as soon as the next post. One thing about being led by the Holy Spirit is there is no point in concerning ourselves with the future because He is holding it and only revealing it at the proper time. I suppose we could worry about it. You know, just because it is unknown and all, but what a futile, waste of time that would be. God has it all under control and His promise is that He will cause everything to work together for our good. (Romans 8:28)
I am not sure whether to call this an exhortation, a word of encouragement, or perhaps even a little bit of comfort. Then again, what is in a name anyway? (That was William Shakespeare was it not?) We are going the right direction. It looks like this time is the time to come together as those who see the battle. Others will join one or two at a time. We might even win the battle and no one will know what happened, how it happened or who was involved. Who said, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."? Oh yes, it was President Harry S. Truman. He was president when I was born, you know. See you soon. God bless.
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