'What I have I give unto you'

Please take the time to read this word in its entirety.

I do hope this isn’t a bit premature, but I feel as though I will explode without releasing it. To some, this may be common sense, to others, as it was to me, complete revelation.

I have been praying and fasting for certain spiritual gifts. I would list them all but I almost feel greedy in doing so. And in light of that, God has showed me to a certain extent that I have been. Not in deed but in motive, in the heart. Here is the beginning.

No where in scripture do I see where Jesus handed someone a church tract and they got saved. Jesus never brought a person into the kingdom without some spiritual gift being present. Jesus operated in the same promise he gave to us. Signs and Wonders follow the followers. In speaking to the woman at the well Jesus didn’t say my church is awesome, you should come this Sunday and get saved. We have x-box if you have some kids, we have eight departments and ten classes and the nursery opens twenty minutes before the service.

He said ‘you have well said you have no husband,’ you have had five and your shacked up with the sixth one right now. Then she said ‘I perceive you are a prophet.’ He didn’t give her a revelation of the church, he operated through the spirit and the gift of the word of knowledge and gave her revelation about who he was by telling her who she was. And with a conversation he turned an adulterer into an evangelist.

I see this repeated throughout the scripture. Oh how I want that anointing. To be able to say through the spirit to someone things that are only known to them in the shadows of their life. Just someone on the streets of Dallas. To be able to walk up to a woman in a wheelchair and say ‘what I have I give unto you’ and take her arm as she stands and begins to run down the aisles at Wal-mart.

So I set my face as flint and began to seek this power, this gifting. And as I did the Lord began to show me the darkness in my own heart of hearts, and my lack of genuine compassion for the lost and the hurting and the sick and the dying. He revealed to me the corruption of what seemed to be a genuine cry. I desperately want these giftings, I desperately wanted to see people healed, saved, and delivered! But to what end? To God’s end, or the furtherance of my ministry? To mine and God’s exaltation, or solely to God’s?

You see I read these accounts of Jesus healing the sick and them becoming followers of Him, but I leave out a very important verse that follows many of them. Something to this effect. “Then after He had healed them, He told them to depart and tell no one.” That’s bad PR! That’s not how to get your ministry known. I have been seeking a gift to put my ministry on the map. I’ve been hero minded and not kingdom minded.

God spoke to me and showed me that He did that not for His own elevation, but out of genuine love for that one person, out of true compassion for that one person’s situation. Compassion and passion for the furtherance of God’s will cannot coexist with pride and a desire to see my own purposes fulfilled.

I wrote these next few words a few days apart in prayer.

3 Dec 2008

I need to know Gods voice more. I prayed for a man last night that was sick and had diabetes and he is still sick and still with diabetes. God...why? You said signs and wonders would follow. I have even had that specifically prophesied over my ministry, so when God. I hear you saying I am still lacking, but lacking what.

Then God spoke this to me a few days later.

8 Dec 2008

You will never heal the sick without compassion. And you will never have compassion while pride exists. Because pride won’t let faith in God flow because pride is a self righteous sin, about your capabilities and not God’s. And since you can’t heal the sick, when you operate without genuine compassion, they remain unhealed, but when you begin to move and pray with compassion, pride flees, and you operate with God’s faith.

I hope and pray that you will take hold of this word, and begin to seek God’s heart that you might have God’s heart. Begin to seek to have the compassion God has. Make this your prayer.

If you can love like God loves, you can heal like God heals!

“God, teach me to Love like you Love!”

Intercession

“Your words were heard, and I have come in response to your words.” I often wonder how many promises of God are left unfulfilled because of the lack of human involvement. Gabriel, in the verse above, would not have been dispatched had Daniel not been bombarding heaven with prayer concerning Israel’s captivity. God doesn’t act independently of man. He has intentionally limited himself. Does that mean an omniscient God lacks the ability to personally step in and take over a situation. By all means no, but he rarely does without an intercessor asking. It is our job, as Christians to intercede and ‘loose’ God. “Our calling and function isn’t to replace God, but to release Him.” I believe one apostle said that if you are in right standing with God, your prayers can accomplish a lot.
Dutch Sheets tells a story about the importance of intercessors in spiritual warfare with regards to missions. In the 1970’s he and his team arrived in the capital city of Guatemala, and were to be flown out to do work among tribes up and down the river. The owner of the aircraft said that he wouldn’t take him that day, that he would have to wait until tomorrow. His team argued for three hours with the man to be taken at the time they had scheduled. They only had a certain amount of time to work before the return trip. Eventually, the airport conceded and flew them out as scheduled. That night an earthquake in the capital city killed 30,000 people, and the motel where the missionary team would have been sleeping was completely destroyed. When Dutch returned home he spoke to an intercessor in the church who said that she had prayed for them while they were gone, in fact she prayed exactly three hours one day before she felt a release. Can you guess what three hours that was?
Although speculative in nature, I believe that women’s intercession had a direct impact on the teams survival. No where in Daniel does it say that his prayers ended Babylonian captivity, it just says he was studying Jeremiah and saw that Israel was supposed to be in captivity for 70 years and prayed for it to end. But the question lies in this: if Israel’s captivity had already been prophesied at lasting 70 years, and that seventy years was up, why did Daniel see a need to pray for the inevitable? The answer is simple, our participation is met with God participation. We cannot expect God to move on our behalf, if we aren’t willing to move ourselves! Dick Eastman, of Every Home for Christ, says, “In no other way can the believer become as fully involved with God’s work, especially the work of world evangelism, as in intercessory prayer,” and I am more than inclined to agree.
Prayer is relying on God to do what he does best, the impossible. We are to pray at all times. This is the most effective way that I can provide for the Kingdom. I have a calling to intercessory prayer. I will bombard heaven with petitions as the persistent widow until God intervenes.
“And I searched for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the gap before Me for the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found none.” Essentially God is saying that His justice demanded judgement, but at the same time His love wanted forgiveness. He is saying that, “if I could’ve found one human to ask me to spare these people, just one person, it would have allowed me to show my mercy.” But he found none, so His justice obligated him to judgement.45
I refuse to not stand in the gap. The world’s blood will not be on my hands. There is a gap that I stand in as an intercessor. I want to be the person God sees asking for mercy to spare the world. “You and I have the chance of a lifetime. We can rise to the occasion and embrace the incredible invitation to be co-laborers with God, to be carriers of His awesome Holy Spirit and ambassadors for His great Kingdom.”
Take missions for example. I like to think of my prayers for missionaries and the peoples they try to reach as a missiological chaos theory. Much the same way as the chaos theory hypothesizes that a butterfly’s fluttering wings can eventually produce a typhoon halfway around the world, I feel as though my intercession can cause a spiritual tidal wave for the causes of missionaries in ways I will never even know.

διακονία The Mission

“I have set you and example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things you will be blessed if you do them.”1 Jesus spoke these words just after humbling himself and washing the feet of his disciples, telling them that as he had done unto them so should they also do unto each other. This is the most beautiful picture of ministry to me in all of God’s word. Ministry is not religious calisthenics on Sunday morning, its not developing better outreach posters on photoshop, its not modern ministry at all. It is washing feet. It is becoming nothing so He can become everything. My philosophy of ministry is simple. It is a philosophy of, above all else, servanthood. In fact the words ministry, servant, and their derivatives come from the same root word, diakonia. “What we label ministry should be normal Christian living.”2 But to whom am I a servant? First I am a servant to God, and through service to Him I am a servant to man, then through faithful servant hood to both I become a servant-leader.

A Bond Servant to God

“My sons do not be negligent now, for the Lord has chosen you to stand before Him and serve Him, to minister before Him and burn incense (emphasis mine).”3 Above all else our duty is to God, not to man. We are to serve Him. We are to be obedient to His will. If first we don’t seek to serve God somewhere along the line there has been a perversion of the gospel into seeking the favor of man. The essence of the ministry is to serve God, and in doing so, be obedient to His will in service to others. Paul said it plainly here. “For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond servant of Christ!”4 We are supposed to love the Lord God with everything in us.5 To Love God means to serve and Obey God. What an honor and what a humbling thought. Daniel Webster said, “The most important thought I ever had was that of my individual responsibility to God.”6We are not to seek to serve man without first serving God, because to do otherwise would be to seek man’s approval, making you a slave to the wrong master.
A servant’s purpose is to be obedient. One could say that this is a servant’s only job, that of performing his master’s bidding, be what it may. God’s bidding is His will. We are to go about fulfilling that at an individual an corporate level. Obedience on the broadest scale I can imagine would be consecration to the purposes of God, being set apart to accomplish them through my obedience. What this obedience encompasses would require volumes to complete, assuming that it could in fact be completed.
A high position on this earth does not negate one’s service in the Kingdom. The Hebrew word ‘eved was originally applied to a slave, but came to mean a trusted servant. Eventually it was applied to those that did a work for a ruler or for God.7 Kings and prophets, people of high earthly standing, were often called ‘eved, or servants, of the Lord. Through this service to God, this upward ministry, we, through obedience serve those around us.


Washing the World’s Feet



“The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He waken me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught” (emphasis mine).8 Isaiah painted many other pictures of servants who, through serving God, serve others. The fundamental spirit of a servant first embodies a deep and intense feeling of serving God. “Through mediating the covenant and bringing others into God’s will, biblical servants had a consuming desire to flesh out essential service to God through ministry to the world around them (Isaiah 52:7-11). Formationally speaking, biblical servants first anchor themselves in service to God and stand ready to serve and lead others.”9 The beauty of this is that even in service to man we are not serving God indirectly, it is still a direct act of service to Jesus! “For what you have done unto the least of these you have done unto me.”10The master hasn’t changed. We are obedient slaves to the Lord, and His commandment is to wash the feet of the world.