Tag Archives: Holiness

The environment that the Holy Spirit desires in the temple of our bodies that He inhabits.

Holiness: You shall be perfect, Knowing God, Walking in the Spirit

Power Stations

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Christmas is always a very busy time in the church calendar, and January is usually when church leaders look back over those Christmas activities and evaluate them. Or at least, one would hope that is the case. But what do we evaluate our activities (Christmas and otherwise) against? In the business world, we look for a return on investment, and in our Father’s business it is no different. Jesus talks about it in the parable of the talents: the master expected a return on His investment. Jesus invested everything in us when He went to the cross, and the Father who sent him is looking for fruit that endures (John 15:16) as His return. Jesus fell to the ground and died to seed a vine that would bear fruit. It follows that whatever activities we do in the name of Jesus (and Colossians 3:17 exhorts us to do everything in His name) should be directed toward His purpose, which is to bear fruit; to give our Master a return on His investment; to see the Kingdom of God extended on Earth.

As far as I can see, the Bible only defines Christ’s purpose in three ways. Jesus himself talked consistently of two of them, which was to reveal the Father and His Kingdom, and John adds a third strand, which was to destroy the works of the evil one (1 John 3:8). These are most famously and succinctly summed up in the best known of all quotes from the New Testament, John 3:16: God sent His only begotten son into the world, that (i.e. with the purpose of) we should not perish (the work of the evil one) but have everlasting life (in the Kingdom Of God). Jesus also defines everlasting life as knowing the Father (John 17:3). John 3:16 really is the church’s mission statement.

So we have a clear lens through which to view the activities in which we invest time, manpower and money. To what extent are they in keeping with Jesus’s mission statement for His church? Are they, directly or indirectly, manifesting the Father? Are they preaching the Kingdom, taking it by force (Matthew 11:12) and destroying the works of the evil one in doing so? Are they equipping others for this work (Eph 4:12)? If they are, then we’re on mission; if not, we need to focus on what is, “redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Ephesians 5:16)

As we well know, the only way we can do the work of the Kingdom is in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus came to give life and that in abundance (John 10 :10) – everlasting Life. Being vessels for abundant life is always the goal of our mission. We are called to be power stations, individually, and as churches, generating that abundant life, bringing the everlasting energia of the Kingdom of God into this world; bringing Heaven to Earth. Our Father, the vine dresser, is looking for fruit that endures on His vine; He prunes the dead wood, and throws it in the fire. Jesus baptises with the Holy Spirit, and with fire (Matt 3:11). Jesus said “I’ve come to set the Earth on fire; how I wish it were already kindled!“ (Luke 12:49). We can only guess at what Jesus was thinking here, but I believe He was looking beyond the cross to the day of Pentecost, when the tongues of fire came and set the kindling wood of His first church alight. Fire burns the fruitless branches of the vine, and it also brings holiness. In a power station, it is the source of the energy. We can’t have the power without the fire. We can achieve nothing for the Kingdom of God, unless it is by the power of the Holy Spirit, and along with the power of the Holy Spirit comes the fire that sooner or later burns up whatever is not of Him.

So let us always that check that the branches in our part of the vine are bearing the fruit of abundant life, and allow the pruning and the fire if they are barren.

Discipleship and witness, Holiness: You shall be perfect

A Royal Priesthood: 1) The Hill of the Lord

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“Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord?
Or who may stand in His holy place?

I am currently re- reading my own book, Two Seconds to Midnight – not out of vanity, but because I felt God gave me that message and I want to be sure I am practising what I have preached. I have just finished the Chapter on our calling as a royal priesthood, and since it follows on well from the picture of the Narrow Way I am posting it here. It’s in two parts: this is the longer section.

Fire from the Lord

I think that one of the most shocking stories in the Bible is in Leviticus 10, when “fire went out from the Lord” and consumed Aaron’s two sons Nadab and Abihu because they offered the wrong type of fire to burn incense on His altar. Later, Moses told his dumbstruck brother that this was what the Lord meant when He said He would have the people recognise His holiness. Any reading of the Law pertaining to the priestly ministry in Leviticus yields a recurring theme, which can be summarised something like this: “I am the Lord who brought you out of Egypt to be My own possession among all the nations on earth. You must be Holy because I am holy. If you obey My laws and don’t defile yourselves or My sanctuary, My presence among you will make you Holy. You must distinguish between the sacred and the profane and keep yourselves holy, because I am the Lord, the Holy One who is in your midst.”

Be holy, because I am holy

We don’t have to drill far down into the detail before we agree that the flesh cannot adhere to the external requirements of holiness that the Law demands; that the Day of Atonement and the release of the scapegoat is no substitute for the blood of the Lamb, and therefore we cannot know God’s presence in our midst without Jesus. But I think that we would be wise to remember our calling as disciples of Jesus, which is to be “a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9), “kings and priests unto God” (Revelation 1:6 KJV). We have a high calling, and the church will be recognised in these last days as a people “set apart unto God” among those of us who rise up to it. Although Jesus has fulfilled all the Law pertaining to Temple sacrifice on our behalf, God’s requirement of holiness hasn’t changed. God said to the Israelites, “Be holy, because I am holy” (see Leviticus 19:1-2), and Jesus repeated it under the New Covenant. The worldwide Pentecost that arose out of Azusa Street was rooted in the Holiness movement. Under the Law, nothing and nobody unclean could come near the Holy Place, but whoever and whatever was acceptable to God was made holy through contact with the altar and the sacred objects around it (Exodus 23 – 31). The priestly garments also had the power to transmit holiness (see Ezekiel 44:19).

Cut Flowers

So we come to the question: why was the Holy Spirit sent – whether at the first Pentecost, or any subsequent move of God, be it the Moravians, Azusa Street, the Hebrides Revival, or Toronto 1994? Yes, He comes to equip the church so that we receive the promised “power from on high” (Luke 24:49), without which we can accomplish nothing lasting. But the Holy Spirit also comes to make us holy, and to enable us to walk in holiness. Power from on high is not just power to work miracles in the world; it is power to walk in the holiness of the Spirit. To follow after a move of God without understanding that He requires His Temple to be a holy place is like cutting flowers off from their roots and placing them in a vase of water to be admired. They will last a few days, but they will surely die. While they remain rooted, they will produce seeds and multiply.

The Promise of Blessing

Our primary calling as priests is to serve the Lord in His holy Temple; and as kings it is to exercise His authority in whatever domain He has given us. There is an overlap here with the theme of provision: Just as the Aaronic priests received their portion from the offerings made by the people at the altar, so we too can expect God to provide for us as we minister to Him. But for our ministry to be acceptable, the requirement for holiness is no different from what it was in the days of the Tabernacle, for “I am the Lord, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6). Because we now live under grace we no longer die if we ignore the rules, and we can still be certain of our heavenly inheritance whatever mess we make of our earthly ministry. But Psalm 24:3-5 says:

“Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord?
Or who may stand in His holy place?
He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
Who has not lifted up his soul to an idol,
Nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive blessing from the Lord,
And righteousness from the God of his salvation.”

God’s word wraps up a promise of material blessing (bread and fish*) in the assurance that our heavenly Father will always “give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him” (Luke 11:13). We cannot clean our own hands or purify our own hearts: the blood of Jesus is the only cleansing agent that will wash away our sin, and only the Holy Spirit can lift us into this holy place. He longs to bless us, and He wants to see us walk in His provision because we are His children. Therefore He will always give us the Holy Spirit when we ask, so that, transformed by His holiness, we can ascend the hill of the Lord, we can stand in His holy place, and we can receive the blessing of our portion as priests.

(*This refers back to the previous chapter in the book)

Walking in the Spirit

Of His fullness we have received…

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“Of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1: 16-17)

Any Christian who believes that the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit are available and operational in the Church today will know of, and quite possibly tell others of, the need to be filled with the Holy Spirit, as Scripture exhorts us in Ephesians 5:18. But as I’ve become more aware lately of what it is to be standing under the waterfall of God’s Grace, (see the last article, Mountains and Waterfalls) I’ve been considering what it actually means to be filled with the Spirit.

If all the fullness of God dwells in Jesus (Colossians 1:19), and Christ, the Hope of glory, is in us (Col 1:27), then how much of Christ dwells in us? Do we believe that it is a fragment? A cell? Maybe just a fragment of a cell? Or do we dare to believe that our loving Heavenly Father will answer Paul’s prayer for every Christian of every age, that we would be “filled with all the fulness of God?”

We are called to love one another; to have grace in our dealings. Jesus made in clear in the Sermon on the Mount that Kingdom relationships are characterised by the fact that what we give does not depend on what we receive: “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?” (Matt 5:46) On the contrary, if we “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you,” we have the astounding promise that “You shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Verse 47) We won’t just be good, because we have obeyed the rules, but we’ll be like God – because actually, as far as the rules of the world are concerned, we have broken them.

So a basic principle in the Manifesto of the Kingdom is that what we give to men does not depend on what we receive from them. We don’t love according to the tit-for-tat rules of the world, any more than we are to depend for what we need on the get-what-you-pay-for provision of the world. When Jesus preached repentance unto God, it was more than an exhortation to stop behaving badly: it was a call to throw out man’s rulebook and embrace God’s – whose book consists basically of two sentences: love God, and love one another. If we seek this Kingdom, everything else will be given to us.

“Of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.” Just as we have received out of the fullness of God in Christ, so it is only out of our fullness that others can receive grace from us – the grace that rises above the tit for tat of the world, that enables us to overcome negative reactions to damaging words and quench fiery arrows with living water. The Grace that enables us to be perfect, just like our Father in Heaven.” The purpose of being full of the Holy Spirit is not so much to have access to supernatural gifts, but to have access to supernatural love, supernatural gentleness and supernatural generosity. If our Saviour had not been filled with all the fullness of God, Satan would have shown Him a good carnal reason to disobey His Father; but He could say that Satan “has nothing in me” because He was completely full of God.

So two questions. The first is this: how full of the Holy Spirit are we?  Because if we are really full, like Stephen was, we don’t run away when the stones start to fall, but we “see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” (Acts 7:55)  It’s often said that we leak, which is why Paul’s exhortation is the present continuous tense – “Be being filled.” But I don’t think it’s true that we leak, and every now and then have to go back to the fountain (often at Church) for a top-up. We can’t fill the flesh with the Spirit. I think we are more like completely broken bottles, and  the only way for Scripture’s present continuous tense to operate in our lives is to stay under that waterfall, standing permanently in the Grace of God, morning, noon and night; work, rest and play. And at church as well. What a blessing we could be at church by just staying soaked all week. And if we can do this, out of our fullness others will receive, grace for grace. At church, in the home, and in the workplace.

And here is the second question: what is our expectation of the “fullness of God” in our lives? I was in a zoom gathering last night, and the word that Father spoke to us by His Spirit was that He wants to bring a new level of creativity to His people: that the atmosphere of Heaven is the Beauty of Holiness, and that He wants us to release that beauty into the world in all that we do – our work, or pastimes, our creative projects, our relationships of course – and that He would bring us new gifts, new resources, new skills, new levels of faith, in fact all that we need out of the infinite unseen storehouses of Heaven to start bringing this about. It was a beautiful, encouraging Word, and I do not do it justice with my single-sentence paraphrase. And it would be so easy for it to remain on the shelf, along with the library of other beautiful encouraging words that I have heard over nearly 40 years in the faith. Except for one thing. If you know me or follow my site, you will know that I am a “birder”: I love watching and photographing birds. I was sitting in the sunshine in my garden this afternoon, enjoying a cup of tea, when I heard a birdsong in the tree that I did not immediately recognise. I managed to get a picture, and I identified it as a female linnet. The linnet is a little finch with a sweet song, which the Victorians used to keep in cages as songbirds.  Linnets are not particularly rare, but I do not recall ever seeing one in my garden before – and we have lived here since 1998. It was something unexpected, beautiful, and new.

This was the linnet: not just a little brown bird, but something beautiful, unexpected and new.

I believe that little bird was a sign from the Lord of all Creation to remind me, and you, that He has so much more for us than we could ever ask or imagine, and that even now, as the world seems to be rushing to pull down its tents, He wants us to stretch forth the cords of ours and enlarge our vision of who He is and what it means to be filled with all of His fullness. If we do this He will fill whatever we give Him with more of who He is so that when the needy come to us they can be filled in turn from our fullness, grace for grace. Whatever your garden is, and whatever those linnets might be for you, watch out for them, because the Holy Spirit is releasing them from their cage.

Discipleship and witness, Holiness: You shall be perfect

Ready to give a defense…

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When we are talking about sharing our faith, we often quote the apostle Peter, who wrote “Always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you.” (From 1 Peter 3:15). Many people who don’t know the peace and blessings of knowing the love of Jesus Christ have been turned off Him by well-meaning Christians who have been so focussed on the first part of this scripture that they have ignored the second: they have been given the reasons why it’s so good to know Jesus without ever having asked for them. Peter is basically saying that we should always be ready to answer questions about our faith to everyone who asks them. The challenge here, as I see it, is not so much having reasons that answer the questions that people ask, but to give people a reason to ask the questions. If they don’t ask the questions, they aren’t ready for the answers. If the hope that is in us isn’t evident to the people we are with, why should they be asking about it?

The fact is, that we tend to only quote half of the scripture. The full verse is this: “But sanctify the Lord God  in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defence to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15) Being ready with answers to questions about our faith goes alongside a mindset of holiness (having the Lord God “sanctified” in our hearts) and an attitude of meekness towards others and reverent fear towards the God who has commissioned us with this task.

I am not the greatest living example of these attitudes, but I do have a story of one occasion (there aren’t many…)  where I definitely had “sanctified the Lord God in my heart,” and as a result was asked a question about my faith which led to an opportunity to minister to some strangers. I have written about it in “Two Seconds to Midnight,” so if you have read the book you will recognise it. Here’s the extract:

“I sat down to start this chapter on January 4th; my eldest daughter Shelley, her husband and their three children had gone home two days earlier after spending ten days with us. Lisa, our middle daughter, her husband and their two-year-old were also with us for three days over Christmas. So the holiday was noisy and messy, with lots of clearing and washing up, governed very much by the routines of the children and punctuated by the sound of their unwillingness (the older ones anyway) to comply with them. Now I love my family, and Anne loves to be surrounded by them; but I also like to spend time in quiet solitude, reading, writing, birdwatching, doing photography or listening to music. As you can imagine, there is a clash of interests here, and I have to confess that at times in the past I have let my irritation at the level of mayhem in the house when my grandchildren are roaring around get the better of me. So I had really been asking the Lord to help me, and particularly to give me wisdom throughout the day if any tensions or difficulties arose, so that I didn’t get bad-tempered and spoil the atmosphere for everyone else.

In my morning quiet time I had been reading through the gospel of Matthew. About a week earlier I had been struck by Jesus’s words to a would-be follower: “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest His head” (Matthew 8:20). The Holy Spirit showed me that as soon as things got noisy I was looking for somewhere to “rest my head”, but that this wasn’t an option for me any more than it was an option for Jesus. Instead I was to seek His peace, which as we know is “not as the world gives” (John 14:27). This verse became a great support for me in the ensuing days, and when the family had gone Anne remarked how well I had coped with everything, and (although she didn’t specifically use the word) how much more pleasant I had been on this visit than on some previous occasions. God had sent me His word as I spent time with Him reading through Matthew, and it had been living and active through my circumstances, bringing His peace into my spirit when my flesh could find no rest:  “Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.” (Prov 3:17)

But the story doesn’t end there. Anne had seen some furniture on eBay that was perfect for her plans to do some redecorating in our living room. The complication was that it was in London, and I would need to drive our company van (not my favourite driving experience) down to pick it up – three hours each way. In addition, it became clear that I needed to go immediately. It was the weekend, and I had planned to spend it recovering from the busy week before going back to work on Monday. But after Anne and I had discussed it, I was able to give the whole thing to the Lord, and I had an assurance that it was right to go. I felt a real peace about the trip which dispelled all my anxieties (I drive an automatic and the van is manual; I was worried about driving the big van through London streets; I was worried about getting too tired to drive safely, etc.), and I even started to look forward to it. A total turnaround.

Bear in mind here that I had been reading, thinking and praying about God’s peace for this chapter of the book. The furniture (it was a three-piece suite) was being sold by a Greek family. I spent six months in Greece in my backpacking days before I met Anne and had learnt to speak it fairly competently, so it was a touching point that I was able to say a few words to them in their language. Soon we were sitting down and drinking tea in the kitchen. One of the first things that the man I had been dealing with (I’ll call him John) said was how much more peaceful I seemed than other people. (Interesting, I thought. “My peace I leave you . . .”) We chatted a little more, and soon they were telling me how John’s sister had died suddenly, aged 21, less than two years ago. The mother – I don’t know her name, so I’ll call her Mama – was fighting to hold back tears as she talked. I told them about our baby Miranda who died at ten weeks. I began to feel that this visit was not just about a three-piece suite. Then Mama said something really unexpected. She said, “As soon as you came in, I saw that there was something about you, and I got goose-bumps all down my arm!” John then repeated to Mama what he had said to me earlier about the peace that he saw on me. I explained that what they felt was the presence of the Holy Spirit, and soon I was praying with them, asking the Lord to comfort them in their grief, and that they would know His presence. Then I was on my way home.” (Adapted from Two Seconds to Midnight by Bob Hext, Malcolm Down Publishing)

The chapter goes on to develop other points, but I think this is a helpful real-life example of 1 Peter 3:15 in action. Because I had sought God to put my heart right in an area where I knew my behaviour could easily become ungodly, the light of sanctification that shone in me as I submitted to the word of God also shone out of me onto other people.  I’m not aware of any other occasions when the presence of the Holy Spirit on me has given anyone goose-bumps, but one is a start… The point is this: we are called to be light in the darkness, but unless we have our light switched on nobody is going to ask us why we are shining. Being a witness is drawing others into our light; witnessing is shining a torch in their faces.

Be prepared; hold on., Holiness: You shall be perfect, Prophesy and the prophetic

Not by might nor by power

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We know that “nothing is impossible with God,”  and that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. We also know that it’s “not by might nor by power” that the Kingdom of God is established on Earth, and we know that we walk by faith and not by sight. The stories and the imagery of Scripture is full of the opposition between flesh and Spirit, or the kingdoms of the world and the Kingdom of our God and His Christ; Saul and David; Babylon and Jerusalem; Egypt and the promised land. We only have to spend a few minutes reading the news headlines to have an idea of what is happening and, sometimes, what to expect in the world of the flesh. But there are headlines being published in the spiritual realm as well, and if we pay attention to them we can also have an idea of what is going on in that dimension, which is important as It will directly affect what we see on the news. As Amos 3:7 says “Surely the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets.”

The headlines in the spiritual realm

Just as we don’t believe every newspaper headline we read, there are some “prophetic messages” that have more credibility than others. Nevertheless there is a clear narrative from recognised individual prophets and groups that has two main threads. One is that we are moving into an unprecedented time of darkness and chaos, most probably that which Jesus prophesied in the “wars and rumours of wars” passage recorded in Matt 24: 4-25. Woven in with this thread is a second one, announcing that a great revival is coming onto the Earth as prophesied by Smith Wigglesworth in 1947, and that it this outpouring will be unlike anything hitherto experienced. Both these headlines can be found in Isaiah 61:1-3:

“Arise, shine;
For your light has come!
And the glory of the LORD is risen upon you.

For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth,
And deep darkness the people;
But the LORD will arise over you,
And His glory will be seen upon you

The Gentiles shall come to your light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising…”

The point is not that these words have been around for thousands of years, but that, as Peter declared in Acts 2 when he preached at Pentecost, “This is that which was spoken of.” The headlines of prophesy today are essentially this: now is the time that was spoken of by Isaiah in verse two. It’s now. And in this context, it’s imperative for the church to separate itself from the darkness. Just as God separated the light from the darkness at the dawn of creation; just as Jeremiah – and the voice from Heaven heard by John (Rev 18:4) – called God’s people to “come out of the midst of Babylon” (Jer 51:45), so it is time for the church to separate itself from the world and be serious about consecration to a holy God.

Swept up, or swept away

As we allow God to reveal more of His holiness to us, so He reveals more of His majesty, and as He reveals more of His majesty so He reveals more of His love. The attributes of God are bound up in His identity, and we find them all in Jesus, “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), and equally in the Holy Spirit, whom the Father “sends in the name (the identity) of Jesus” (John 14:26). The Kingdom of God is established “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit” (Zech 4:6), and His Spirit is holy. Holy comes before Spirit: as the Holiness movement preceded the Pentecostal revival at the beginning of the last century, so the “story” behind those prophetic headlines today is that God is calling the Church today to wake up to His holiness: those who do will be swept up by the power of His Spirit, but those who do not will be swept away.

Under the Old Covenant, the only route to holiness was through obedience to the many external requirements of the Law.  In Christ, holiness dwells within us by His Spirit and we are given just two commands to obey: to love God, and to love one another. When we obey these two, we “obey the whole of the law,” (Romans 13:10) and the holiness that dwells in the immortal part of ourselves, our spirits, can reach out through our mortality to bring light and life to a dying world. In calling the church to holiness, God is calling us to love: to worship Him and to love one another. It is where “lawlessness abounds” that “the love of many will grow cold,” (Matt 24:12) and it is because of that lawlessness that “darkness shall cover the earth and deep darkness the people;” and it is when we separate ourselves from that darkness by submitting to the Royal Law of love that “The Gentiles shall come to your light, And kings to the brightness of your rising.”

There is no other way. It is not by might, nor by power, but by the Holy Spirit that this prophesied revival will come. To bring these thoughts to land in Scripture, 2 Cor 3:18 spells out exactly how it will come about:

“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”

We will see the Holy Spirt at work through us and the light of Christ reflected in our faces when we remove the veil that separates us from His holiness.

Holiness: You shall be perfect, Prophesy and the prophetic, Pursuing Love

Our eyes will see the King

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The river of God’s mercy flows from Cross, and because we stand in that river we are able to come before a holy God. But as we stand there God is doing a new thing in us: He is bringing us to a higher level of sanctification. He is bringing us to a place where He will say “Take off your shoes, for the place where you stand is holy.” Our shoes have walked in the dirt of the world, but His presence in us will become so strong that we will be able to separate ourselves from the sin that has stalked our lives and so often overpowers us.

When that time comes we will be able to say with David: “I was also blameless before him, And I kept myself from my iniquity,“ but it will not be because of our own righteousness, but of the righteousness of the God that dwells within us.  Our eyes will see the King, and conviction of sin will be strong in all who are submitted to Him, as it was in the days of Azuza Street; but the Lord says that Azuza Street was just a forerunner of what is to come: as we stand in that place of sanctification He will lift our eyes to new heights of love that only a very few prophets and apostles have known until now. What a few have just glimpsed, many will grasp, and those who do will know His power going before them and into the fallen world to establish His Kingdom.

We are standing before the walls of Jericho, and He says to us now “I am drawing you into the Holy Place, where I will give you your instructions and prepare you for moving into the land ahead.” For when we obey the commander of the Lord’s army we will see the walls come down.

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple. Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one cried to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
The whole earth is full of His glory!” And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. So I said:

“Woe is me, for I am undone!
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;
For my eyes have seen the King,
The LORD of hosts.” (Isaiah 6: 1-4)

“And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, a Man stood opposite him with His sword drawn in His hand. And Joshua went to Him and said to Him, “Are You for us or for our adversaries?”
So He said, “No, but as Commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped, and said to Him, “What does my Lord say to His servant?” Then the Commander of the LORD’s army said to Joshua, “Take your sandal off your foot, for the place where you stand is holy.” And Joshua did so” (Joshua 5: 13-15)

“For I have kept the ways of the Lord,
And have not wickedly departed from my God.
All his judgements were before me,
And I did not put away his statutes from me.
I was also blameless before him,
And I kept myself from my iniquity.“ (Psalm 18:21-23)

Holiness: You shall be perfect, Walking in the Spirit

Being Filled with the Holy Spirit

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The roar of rushing waters at Lauterbrunnen falls.

There is a waterfall in Switzerland called Lauterbrunnen, where the glacier melt from high mountains pours down through the rock into the valley below. The water pours at a rate of 30,000 L per second: the roar of those rushing waters and the power of them is breathtaking. Yet when you look at the stream in the valley that runs away from the foot of the waterfall there is nothing impressive to see. It is just a little river running over some stones.

We often sing in church of the greatness and all surpassing majesty of God; the God of the heavens, the creator of the universe. When I look at Lauterbrunnen I am reminded that the same power and majesty dwells within us in the person of the Holy Spirit. All the power and resources of the kingdom of heaven are within us, yet most of the time our experience of the God who lives within us is more akin to that trickle over the stones than the roar in the rock. In our awareness of this reality, we cry out to the Holy Spirit to come – even asking him at times to “come down“ – and fill us some more; to pour in the waterfall to cover our barren stones.

Yet he has already come down: we don’t need to ask Him to come again – He hasn’t left part of Himself behind. When God pours out his Holy Spirit He doesn’t pour it from a cloud that somehow floats our head; He pours it from His own presence that is already here on Earth, living in every believer that makes up the church. When God pours out his Holy Spirit he pours from us, not into us. Rivers of living water flow out; they don’t flow in. We are exhorted to be filled with the Holy Spirit – that is, to be filled on a continual basis, not just once – so we tend to carry some sort of picture of a jug full of Holy Spirit pouring down into our rapidly emptying bowls a we hold them up to him. But I don’t think it’s like this. I think the space He fills is the space that we give Him. If we aren’t full of the Holy Spirit it is because we are full of ourselves. We must decrease, as John the Baptist said, so that He increases within us. God prepared the church for the Pentecostal revival at the beginning of the last century with the holiness movement: His people sought to make room in their lives for the presence of a holy God, and the result was that the Holy Spirit filled the space they gave Him, resulting in an outpouring of His love and power that has gone round the world ever since and brought millions of lost souls into the Kingdom of the living God.

Today, prophetic voices all around the world are declaring by the Holy Spirit that a new and even greater outpouring is on the horizon. But before Pentecost comes holiness. To be full of the Holy Spirit we need to be empty of everything else; otherwise we are not full, we are only partly full. But the Bible tells us to be filled, and keep on being filled. Jesus wants to operate through the Holy Spirit to be Lord of all of our lives, not just bits of them. He wants to be Lord of our thoughts, our emotions, our plans, our motivation, our will, our bodies; worshipping with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls, all our strength. The extent to which we are filled with the Holy Spirit is the extent to which He is Lord.

He is calling the church today into a renewed commitment to His lordship, and when we respond to the call He will reveal Himself in a way that is unprecedented In the history of the church. Filled with the Holy Spirit, we will know the roar of the waterfall instead of just the trickle of the stream. And when we do, we will no longer be satisfied with anything else.

Living by Faith, Walking in the Spirit

Purpose, provision, our Promised land and Holiness. Extracts from Two Seconds to Midnight

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Our purpose
To be yoked to Jesus is to be yoked to His purpose. John tells us that the purpose for which the Son of God was made manifest was to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). Our purpose is to bear fruit. Think of the parable of the sower: the seeds sown in and through our lives can’t bear fruit if the devil snatches them away, if they have no spiritual nourishment in which to put down roots, or if they are choked by worldly distractions and worries. The “good ground” is where these works of the devil are being or have been destroyed: this is where we bear fruit and where we find our promised rest. Because rest follows work: we enter into the Lord’s rest when we stand in the victory wrought through the work of the cross. Whatever we are seeking to accomplish in the kingdom of God must be a work of the Spirit: unless we truly believe that Christ has already accomplished at the cross the work we are walking in, we will achieve nothing. If it is not a work of faith, it is a work of the flesh and will simply burn in the fire of testing. The rest that is born out of walking in the purpose that God has birthed in us is the rest that is found in the place of victory on the other side of the cross.

Our Promised Land
Our promised land – the “exceedingly great and precious promises that have been given to us” – is this: to be “partakers of the divine nature”. If we allow ourselves to be invaded by the Spirit of God, we not only find ourselves starting to really know Him – to know His heart, His character, His desires for us, and above all His voice – we start becoming like Him. We will do what He did, and we will do the “greater things” promised in John 14:12. We will start to feel His compassion, so it won’t even occur to us to want to feed ourselves before feeding the 5,000. We will speak out of His love instead of our self-interest. Our promised land isn’t our city, the mega-church we want to build, a worldwide ministry, or 10,000 views on our YouTube channel; it’s to be partakers of the divine nature. The prerequisite to entry is that we have “escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust”. All that leaven has to go. Only Jesus can make this happen, because “if the Sonmakes you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36) and He will do it by the power of the Holy Spirit, because “the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17). Peter needed Pentecost to be yoked to Jesus. And if it was necessary for Peter, it is necessary for us.

Holiness
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 – 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.

God’s Provision
The important lesson for us is that God’s provision is in His very presence. What He wants from us is our hearts: a willingness to trust Him with what is ours, and to place it in His hands. We catch a glimpse, literally, of God’s perspective on our economy when we see Jesus sitting outside the Temple watching people putting their gifts into the treasury. We know the story: the poor widow, whose two mites represented all she had, had put in far more than the wealthy who gave leftovers from their abundance. We don’t see that widow again, but we can be sure that God gave back to her in the same measure that she had given to the Temple. Wealth and poverty have traded places. Our God is a creator, and loves to create, and we can so easily forget that when we look at our bank statements. But if our hearts are rich towards Him, we will see Him create in our material circumstances and fill our baskets, whereas if our hearts are bound by our bank accounts we remain in poverty, and will only ever see the loaves and fishes that we can provide for ourselves.

Holiness: You shall be perfect, Prayer and Spiritual Warfare, Prophesy and the prophetic

Entering the Land 3: Gilgal (Teaching)

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We are the new generation, and we are camped between the Jordan and the Promised Land. We have not been this way before. Some of us feel we have been here a long time, waiting for everyone else to catch up; others are just arriving. Ahead of us we see the promise of many prophetic words for this coming season being fulfilled. But as we look into the promised land we see the walls of an enemy stronghold before us. Each of us is facing a wall: it may be in our ministry; it may be in our personal lives; it may be the strongholds we are seeing in the nations, and it may be any combination of these. But the Lord says: “Because you are seeing Jericho, it means you are about to enter the Land.”

And we ask: “Lord, how?”

And He answers: “Gilgal. I will roll away your reproach as I did at Gilgal. Make yourselves vulnerable Me, and rest in my presence. And then in that place of peace I will bring you my word, and you will move out on my word to enter the land with a trumpet sound and a shout of victory, and you will see the walls of the stronghold collapse. Where is your reproach? I will roll it away. What stronghold do you face? You will see its walls collapse.”

And some of us might say: “Lord, I’ve been staring at that stronghold for years, even for all of my life. How come I’ve never yet seen the victory in this?”

And He replies: “Because only now are you at Gilgal. But you need to take off your shoes, for you stand on holy ground.”

Whatever shoes we have worn to take us to this point must be removed: from here we move forward in the holiness and the beauty of His presence. When that stronghold collapses it’s because of the unassailable victory of the cross. It is not about us, it’s about Jesus. And if it’s taken us most of our lives for him to get the glory, that’s fine, because that is our purpose and the point of our lives. It doesn’t matter how long it’s taken to get to this point: it’s the glory of the cross that counts.

Walking in the Spirit

The Bread of the Presence

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Come into my presence


I believe that the Lord is calling His people into His presence, and to renewed holiness. He would say this at this time:

“As the world shudders under the changes that are coming upon it, come and sit with me in the beauty of holiness. Come and eat the bread of my presence. I have prepared a table for you where all clamour is silenced and my light breaks through the shadows. As you sit with me and eat the bread of my presence I will give you seeds to sow, for my seeds are in the bread. They are the words of life that only I can give you, so come into my presence and sit with me, find peace with me and let me feed you. You desire to sow my word, so let me sow in you first; then when you speak my word you will take with you the peace that I will give. Freely receive, then freely give. As it was with the first apostles, so it will be with you, and it will be known that you have been with me.”