All posts by Bob Hext

I am an author and bible teacher, and lead the prophetic ministry at Wildwood Church (A New Frontiers church) in Stafford, UK. I founded Crossbow Education Ltd, an educational supplies company for supporting people with dyslexia, in 1993, and retired as CEO on March 28th 2025. I married Anne in 1980: we have three children and 7 grandchildren. As a disciple of Jesus, my motivation is to see the Kingdom of God advance in every walk of life: workplace and business as well as marriage, family and church, and I write to fulfil Ephesians 4:12 - "for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ." Because the work of ministry is for all of us, all of the time. I don't spend all my time doing "spiritual" stuff though: I like to spend time with friends, to travel, and - my main hobby - to watch and photograph birds.

Aslan is on the move

Markus and I were talking about this week’s church family meeting a couple of days ago, and the book “The Lion, the witch and the Wardrobe” came into the conversation. For those who don’t know the story (if you don’t, you must read it, however old you are. It’s a wonderful, Holy Spirit inspired piece of writing!), the land of Narnia is in the grip of an evil spell that has made it “always Winter, never Christmas.” Four children arrive through a magic wardrobe, and with a lot of help from Aslan – who represents Jesus – the children lead the army of Narnian talking beasts and various mythical creatures to defeat the witch who cast the spell and come into their destiny as kings and queens of Narnia. At the beginning of the story, one of the characters says “Aslan is on the move!” Soon after that, the thaw begins, Father Christmas comes with gifts, and the battle for Narnia commences. Markus quoted  “Aslan is on the move!”, and I felt as he spoke that the Lord wants to say this to us as a church. Here is what I feel He is saying in more detail:

“At the moment it seems that you are frozen in a coronavirus Winter. But trust Me to provide for you in this time, and allow Me to prepare you for what is to come. I will prepare and strengthen your hearts, and I will also bring you gifts that will equip you for the unique part you will have to play in the battle that is to come. For I am on the move, the thaw is coming and Winter will be over; but battle is coming also. Know that I will be with you in the battle, and in My strength you will be victorious and you will come into the plans that I have for you and for My church.”

“The best, or nothing”

Jake has felt that the Lord has given him the following words over the last week or so. There is a definite theme to them, which fits in well with what I believe God is saying to us at Wildwood and to the wider Church.

The best, or nothing

The Mercedes slogan is “the best, or nothing.” God wants us to think in these terms for ourselves: let’s be the best, which of course we can only do as we yield to His Spirit. Jeremiah 29 11 says “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” (This is the New King James version. NIV says “the plans I have for you…”)

A note from Bob: God’s thoughts towards us for our future in Christ are nothing less than perfection. We all love to quote Jeremiah 29 vs 11, but we would do well to keep verse 11 in the context of what the Lord goes on to say in vs, 12-13 “Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.” If we want to walk in the fulfilment of God’s perfect plans for us, we need to seek Him with all our hearts.

White Hot Metal

In Rev 3: 15-16 Jesus says to the church at Laodicea “”I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot,  I will vomit you out of My mouth.” Jesus wants a church He can work with, writes Jake. He is spurring us on to be “white hot for Him”. White hot metal is pliable and can be purged of impurities. When we are white hot the Holy Spirit can shape us and mould us to reflect His image, the way He originally intended.

The Old Wireless Set

Jake writes: “I have a picture of an old fashioned wireless set, that you have to tune into each station. I feel God saying, ‘How clearly do you want to hear my voice?  Are you satisfied with background noise, or even huge amounts of interference so that you have to strain to hear what I am saying? Or are you focused on hearing me? Do you want clarity enough to be prepared to spend time fine tuning into me?  I have given every one of you interests: I will use your interests to link with what I am saying to you. Are you prepared to fine  tune in to what I am saying?'”

face time

“Seek the LORD and His strength;
Seek His face evermore!” (Psalm 105:4)

We can have zoom meetings with each other; but God wants face time.

When Jesus was on His way to the house of Jairus to heal his daughter, someone in the crowd reached out and touched Him. We know the story. Jesus was on the way to an Important Meeting, but He stopped. “Who touched me?” He said (read the story in Luke 8 43-48). When Peter pointed out that they were surrounded by a crowd of people pushing and shoving, Jesus explained that He knew someone had reached out and touched him intentionally: “Somebody touched Me, for I perceived power going out from Me.”

How often have you had your head full of a big project (or maybe not such a big one…); someone has wanted your attention, and you haven’t had time to stop for them because of what you were on your way to do? Jesus had a crowd following Him and was on His way to perform a miracle for one of the leaders of the synagogue.  If Jesus had been like you and me and listened to His flesh He might have thought something like this: “This could be a strategic moment in My ministry! This Jairus guy is one of the leaders of the Jews! This could be a big chance to win them over!” But instead He stopped, and was drawn by Love to the person who had reached for Him and received some of the Life that He carried.

God want us to seek Him and His strength. There was no conversation between Jesus and the woman until after she had received her healing: she just sought Him in faith, connected, and received. If we spend time seeking His face and connecting with Him, power will go out from Him into us. If we seek His face we will receive His strength, we will be filled with His Spirit and His fire will come and purify our hearts. I believe that God is preparing the Church for a new outpouring of His Spirit, when we are fully loving the Lord with all our hearts, all our souls and all our minds (Matt 22 37); when there is no room in our thinking or our emotions (soul) for anything that is not Him. Just as the woman’s faith had made her “whole” – Greek sozo, which is also the word used for salvation – I believe that it is God’s desire for our faith to make us whole – wholly in love with Him – as well.

If we commit ourselves to seeking His face “while He may be found” – for some of us, this is an opportunity that lockdown has uniquely provided – I believe He will do this in us, and our often carnal thinking will be replaced by His heavenly perspectives:

“Seek the LORD while He may be found,
Call upon Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way,
And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the LORD,
And He will have mercy on him;
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the LORD.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55: 6-9)

We may read this as an unattainable impossibility, and so it is – for the flesh. But when Jesus comes for His bride, He will want her to be on the same wavelength as He is: wouldn’t you? So for our Groom, this means us, the bride, thinking heavenly thoughts, not earthly ones. All Spirit; no flesh. New thinking and new ways. As perfect as He is. We may not be there yet, or anywhere near, but now is the time to make that the desire of our hearts, to believe that it is possible, and to keep face-timing the Lord until it is fulfilled (Matt 7: 7-8). And then the power that has gone into us will flow out of us as well, bringing healing and salvation to whoever stops us on the way to our meeting.

Shoes of the Gospel of Peace

I enjoyed Markus’s teaching from Ephesians 6 on Sunday about having our feet “fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace”. If you’re anything like my vintage you will remember the chorus “Our God Reigns”, that begins with an adaptation of the words from Isaiah 52:7

How beautiful upon the mountains
Are the feet of him who brings good news,
Who proclaims peace,
Who brings glad tidings of good things,
Who proclaims salvation,
Who says to Zion,
“Your God reigns!”

This person with lovely feet is obviously wearing those shoes of the gospel of peace. Paul may even have had it in mind when he wrote about them to the Ephesians (and to us). I have  a prayer-zoom every week with Bernard (who used to lead our church if you have joined us since he moved on), and last week The Shoes of The Gospel of Peace came up, the shoes worn by messengers of the gospel. I felt the Lord gave me a picture of the shoes worn by Mercury, the “messenger of the Gods” in Greek mythology. They looked like this:

In my picture though, the wings were wings of fire. God has been speaking about fire: there is the fire of Pentecost that we are eagerly waiting for, and there is the fire of purification that destroys the virus, as Andrew Baker has written about (“Fire kills viruses“). If we want to be effective messengers of the gospel, we need them both: the fire of the Holy Spirit to empower us, and the fire of purification to ensure that we carry that fire without it going out.

Bernard said last Tuesday, “If we want the fire on our feet, we need to go through the fire ourselves.” He’s been through it, as he contracted COVID himself and is still recovering. But we can be comforted in this, too, for the Holy Spirit says in Isaiah 43:2:

“When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned,
Nor shall the flame scorch you.”

So if you feel you are going through the fire, I hope this will encourage you: not only does the Word say that you won’t be burnt because the Lord is with you, but it’s also possible that as you walk through the flames some of them will stick to your feet, and become for you the “Shoes of readiness that comes from the gospel of peace”.

They’re better than a Roman soldier’s sandals, and even better than Markus’s running shoes…

The real you

Earlier this week Jake sent me the 1942 prophesy below, from CS Lewis; and a word he felt the Lord gave him as he was looking through his inbox. Although he sent them separately, I think they go together. CS Lewis knew nothing about coronavirus, but God clearly did.

I was browsing my emails and came across one for rituals cosmetics.
I felt the lord saying “I am not interested in a church that ritually puts on cosmetics; I am interested in the real church, the real you. I am using this time to strip my people and my church of their cosmetics and to get its focus back on Me”.

Holiness: you shall be perfect

You shall go to the ball…

If you are married, it is very likely that you and your spouse became man and wife because you loved one another. If your marriage is successful, one of the reasons is probably the fact that you were attracted to the qualities you saw in your spouse. You loved – and hopefully still love! – your spouse because of who they are, and because you love the qualities and the attributes that characterise them. We worship God, and tell Him we love Him. It’s reasonable to say that God’s standout attribute is His holiness. So do we love holiness?

If we put a poster on the wall saying Be holy, for I am holy,” our response to it at any given time would be a good litmus test of whether we are walking in the flesh or in the Spirit. The flesh is corrupt so it will always want to avoid even the thought of holiness, so in the flesh we would most likely just want to take it off the wall and put a photo frame there instead. If we want to run from the poster there is no point praying about anything, because we won’t be praying in the Spirit and our prayers will have no Life – unless of course we are praying about not wanting to run from the poster. However in the Spirit we will see those words and be drawn to Jesus, and coming from our heart will be a cry that He will continue to work in our lives to remove anything that stops the light of His holiness shining in our lives. That would be a good time to pray.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus sets us a goal which is more or less interchangeable with Holiness, when he says “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matt 5:48) Seated in heavenly places, as we are, it is true that our spirits are “the righteousness of God in Christ,” and when the Father sees us in His Son all He sees is perfection, and the Beauty of Holiness. But earlier in the same chapter (verse 16), Jesus exhorts us to “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Our mission on Earth is to live our lives in such a way that the world also sees what God sees. Paul uses the same Greek word for perfect – telios – when he writes to the Ephesians that the purpose of ministry is “the edifying of the body of Christ till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” (Ep 4: 12-13)

As we have already explored, the words of Life that Jesus is sowing, the seeds of the Kingdom of God, would not be activated until the Holy Spirit came and watered them in. So we too need to hear them in the Spirit: perfection, just like holiness, comes by faith and by intimacy with Jesus – “the knowledge of the Son of God.” The pursuit of perfection is for the Church on earth: now, so that the light of Christ in us is not clouded by the flesh but shines strongly into the darkness that covers the nations; and ultimately so that when the groom returns He finds His bride pure, spotless, and “without blemish.” In these last seconds, (see “three seconds to midnight”) the Holy Spirit is reminding the Church that Jesus meant what He said in the sermon on the mount. And if we listen with the hearing of faith, we hear the promise as well as the instruction: “You shall be perfect, just as your Father in Heaven in perfect.”

Cinderella church, you shall go to the ball. But in our story, the ball starts at midnight…

The vision of a theatre

This is a prophesy that Andrew Baker received a few years ago and that the Holy Spirit quickened again to him just recently. As Andrew says at the end: “Many have prophesied it, but now it is upon us. This is truly the season of moving out of the old and into the new.”

Andrew writes:
Several times, over the years, I have received a vision of a theatre. I sense that this vision was prophetic of the time we are now living in, especially from now until, and including, Pentecost. It was of the interior of a theatre with the curtains down, waiting for the show to begin. All was in place behind the curtain ready for the proceedings, but people were still taking their places in the auditorium which was filled with those called to play a part in the new: those who would go on with God. They were being positioned by God to receive revelation of the matter and their part in it. Here is a part of the descriptive text from that vision:

“The whole theatre set appeared as filled with God’s glory, and for those who took the trouble to watch and attend to what God was showing and doing, the greatest blessing came. (This didn’t indicate that everyone should completely cease from every work that they were involved in, but rather that they should pay attention). As the curtain would lift there would come a day when suddenly the fullness of the glory of God would shine over all who were in the auditorium.

There were some empty seats where the people who were called to attend, but chose not to, should have sat. Instead, these people insisted on continuing ‘good’ or ‘religious’ activities which were part of their old calling. Other seats were empty where people had arrived as called but had got impatient with the waiting time and had left.

This covering of the glory would be like Pentecost. The fire of God would rage and burn up all the old. I saw charlatans appearing in this fire as hollow creatures. Many in the auditorium had already shed the old or were in the process of laying it down, this was burned up by God’s fire and then they received this powerful covering of the Glory on them, thus taking them into a new dimension of anointing and enabling for service.

Revelation is now coming of the new and it becomes clearer and clearer as the days go by. Jesus would again become the focus of leaders and of the church, and revelation of new callings would come. Understanding of God’s vision would come to leaders and called ones, because this glory would enable them to make a fresh start at a higher level in the Spirit.

When this mighty coming, infilling, impartation, envisioning and anointing of God’s glory had penetrated and permeated all who were seated in the auditorium (and this was over a period of time), the doors of the theatre were opened and the leaders and saints were let loose on the earth, filled with such glory and enabling that they could handle their part in the latter day harvest. The equipping was all in ‘the glory’ and not in systems. This equipping was stirred up, received and understood in full by those who took the time to answer God’s call to the theatre and pay attention to this matter. Out of the glory came salvation and healing. It did not come from man’s systems and ideas from the soul, nor out of old callings from God, but out of the glory and anointing which God poured on those who took the trouble to discern these matters and who took their place in the auditorium. These sat and watched as the revelation of God’s new moves came into view on the stage. These were touched by the glory, understood the new direction and walked in it.

Many have prophesied it, but now it is upon us. This is truly the season of moving out of the old and into the new. Many are now being unearthed from their old situations and find themselves ‘in transition’ as their journey begins towards the new.”

On reflection, we see in this prophetic vision something of God’s ‘glory fire’ which will fall upon believers to empower them and we also see the future ‘destructive fire’ that will fall upon that and those that reject the Lord. The present season is to prepare us for the entirely new territory that we are now entering into. It is step one.

I do realise that everything prophesied about end times will not necessarily happen in the next few weeks, but I do believe that this is a very significant time on God’s calendar.

Andrew Baker

Commit to the lord whatever you do…

Here’s an encouragement for all of us all to be bold in our witness to Jesus and to our faith, and a testimony to God’s faithfulness to His word.

Proverbs 16:3 says “Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.” He WILL establish them. That’s not a “might”; that’s a promise.

If you use a computer, you will probably use the font “calibri”. It’s the default font for Microsoft Word, and is one of the most used fonts in the world. It’s created by a Dutch font designer called Lucas de Groot. If you click on the“fonts” page, showing all the different font families created by his company Lucas Fonts, you’ll see this, right in the middle:

Lucas teaches typed design at Potsdam University in Germany, and lectures all over the world. It would seem that he doesn’t do it alone…

So commit to the LORD whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.

The Quest for the Presence of God

The Winepress

It’s 23rd March 2020, and the world is in the Grip of Coronavirus. This is a Christian bog, and I’ve launched it today because I wanted to open a channel whereby I could still continue to encourage and edify the church even though that is no longer an option, for the time being, on a Sunday morning.  If you don’t know me I’m a member of Wildwood Church, Stafford, UK – a Christ Central Church, part of New Frontiers. I lead the prophetic ministry there.

And here’s the first encouraging thought: whenever the devil thinks he can blow out the flame of the Body of Christ, all he does is blow away God’s dandelion seeds, and they spring up and multiply in different places. As it was in the time of Nero’s persecution, so it was in China in the late 20th century, so it is in Iran today, and so it will be during this coronavirus pandemic. We’ve been praying for revival, and I believe we’re going to see it soon. We just didn’t expect it to start with a plague. But then the journey into the Promised Land started with a plague as well…

So why the winepress?

Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches (John 15: 1-5). The purpose of the fruit – the grapes – is for them to be turned into wine. I believe this is what God is doing at the moment: he’s cut us off from our Sunday morning routines so that the good stuff that He has been growing inside us can be extracted. The winepress is not a very comfortable place for a grape, but it’s the purpose that we have been called to. And He is calling us to know His presence and His peace – “peace not as the World gives” – in the midst of the pressure.

We can expect transformations. I also think that we will find a new Unity in the Spirit, even while we are physically separated from one another. We have a message for the panic buyers in the supermarkets, which is that we have a Father who knows our needs, and whose Son taught us to pray “Give us TODAY our daily bread/pasta/toilet roll”-  not enough for the next six months.  If we go into that madding crowd as grapes, we’ll just get squashed and trampled on; but if we let the Lord transform us by His presence and go as wine, they will want a drink.

Finally, if God is transforming His church, we can’t expect to go back when this is all over and find things just as they were. Because I don’t think they’ll be there any more: they will have been blown away.

“Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. (I’ll be using the Kings James version here, as there are no copyright restrictions.) Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. The beast of the field shall honour me, the dragons and the owls: because I give waters in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people, my chosen. This people have I formed for myself; they shall shew forth my praise.” (Isaiah 43 18-21)

So as the winepress does its work, let’s remember whose hand is on it. What comes out is going to be different, and it’s going to be good!