“Oh God of burning, cleansing flame,
Send the fire!
Your blood-bought gift today we claim,
Send the fire today!”
(William Booth)

Before Jesus saved me back in 1984, I was a New Ager. An old friend who knew me then – in fact he was one of the people who were praying for us at the time – has just sent me the following email: “Thought this might grab you.  Two New Agers moved to Stroud because they thought that’s where they’d find the answers.  Eventually, they turned up at John Street Baptist Church saying, “The New Age hasn’t worked.  What have you got to offer?” They became Christians and brought lots of friends along so that the New Age enquirers started to outnumber the members…”

God is clearly starting to move. People are hungry. But unless we are hungry for God ourselves we cannot expect to share our bread with others. The following is an extract from Wheat in The Winepress: I wrote this passage in 2017, but I’ve been feeling for the last couple of days that it’s appropriate to release it again now.

Our element
The zeal of the Lord of Hosts, the fire of the Holy Spirit which Jesus sends onto the world, and the perfect love, the agape, that casts out fear are all bound together: zeal expresses agape, agape sends zeal. Together they express the passion of the heart of God that yearns for the restoration of His Kingdom and the marriage of the Lamb. This is the Love that Jesus tells us to abide in. Like water to fish, as I’ve already said, the “sea of pure divine love” that they experienced at Azuza Street is actually the element in which we are called to live. It is no coincidence that the greatest miracles happened there when the fire was visibly present.

It is often said that in the developed, “free” world we don’t see the miracles of healing that seem to be much more the norm in third world countries and the persecuted Church. I, for one – and I think I speak for many here – have always explained this by saying “we think we don’t need faith: we have medicine!”   But as we know, Paul tells us that what counts – the only thing that counts – is “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). Even if I have the faith that moves mountains, without love I am nothing (1 Cor 13:2). I don’t think it’s the faith that sets these churches apart, so much as the love through which it is working. They “love each other fervently, with a pure heart.” They need each other, are committed to each other, and are contemporary expressions of the Church of Acts 4. They are one as the Father and the Son are one. Their unity commands the blessing. Because they are obedient to the command to “love one another” they receive what they ask from the Father. They are swimming in that sea of perfect Love; they are abiding in Christ, immersed in the river of Ezekiel 47; they are in their element. Am I? Are you? Or are we fish out of water, flapping about on the deck, gasping for Life in the Spirit, knowing that there should be more but somehow unable to reach for it? 

The longing of the Bride and the Groom
Wherever it is that we see the fire burning today, or if we look into history and see where it has been, we find the same initial spark: Christians who are hungry for more of God. Not just a little bit more – “If I clear the cluttered desk of my life – actually no, just my church meeting as long as You don’t stay too long – a bit, I can fit a bit more of you on this corner, God” – but really MORE; the more that will take us from our dimension into His. “Lord, I’m sweeping everything off my desk. Will You come and fill it? Nothing else will do!”

The cry of the heart, a two-word prayer, that went out from Toronto in 1994 and still goes out today was “More, Lord!” Another two-word prayer that I remember singing as a worship song in a UK Catch the Fire meeting in 1995 was “Yes, Lord!”. If we want More, first we really need to be hungry: it’s “the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man (that) avails much” (James 5:16); and second: God wants our total Yes.

The story of Gideon shows us how we can respond when God’s fire begins to take hold. If we want to see in the Word how the fire starts we need to look elsewhere: not to a New Testament treatise on the Holy Spirit, or to an Old Testament prophesy of Holy outpouring, but to the love poem on the longing of the bride and the groom for one another. As the unfolding of the intimacy between the Shulamite and The Beloved draws to a close, the bride says, in words that encapsulate the essence of the zeal of the Lord:

 “Set me as a seal upon your heart,
As a seal upon your arm;
For love is as strong as death,
Jealousy as cruel as the grave; 
Its flames are flames of fire,
A most vehement flame” (Song, 8:6)

The jealous, passionate love of the Father and the Son, burning in the fire of the Holy Spirit: for the bride of the Bible, nothing else will do. Before the Beloved comes to her, He asks for one thing:

“You who dwell in the gardens,
The companions listen for your voice –
Let me hear it!” (Song 8: 13)

And the bride responds, to end the poem:
“Make haste, my beloved,
And be like a gazelle
Or a young stag
On the mountains of spices.” (Song 8: 14)

Not even Jesus could tell us when He is going to return, but we know two things. One is a collection of signs of the end of the age that He gives us in Matthew 24 – signs which many would say are being fulfilled in our day. The other thing that we know is that He will come in response to hearing our voice. “Let me hear you call me!” says Jesus, the Beloved. ‘Let me hear you say the words “Make Haste, my Beloved!” I want you to be hungry for Me!’ At the very end of the Bible we hear the echo of the Shulamite’s response: “And the Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come!’” And we hear the Beloved say: “Let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.” (Rev 22:17)

It’s not just the Bride who calls out; it’s the Spirit and the Bride. Just as Jesus completed the work that the Father gave Him to do at the cross, the Holy Spirit will one day complete the work that He has been given to do on the earth: the preparation of the Bride for the marriage of the Lamb, and the handing over of the kingdoms of the world to the kingdom of our God and His Christ. And as individuals and churches, we are ready when we hear Him ask us to call out to Him. We are ready when we acknowledge that we are thirsty. We are ready when we desire to freely take the water of life. According to the Song of Songs, this will be when we say “More Lord, Yes Lord, nothing but the most vehement flame will satisfy!” 

The Fullness of God
One final thing we can be sure of is this: when holy fire does bring revival to our street, it won’t be anything like what we expect. However in the parable of the ten virgins (Matt 25: 1-13) Jesus does make it clear what we have to do: we need to be ready for Him with our lamps trimmed and full of oil. This isn’t just about trimming wicks: it’s about the whole lamp. The Strong’s definition of the Greek word for “trimmed”, kosmeō (from which comes our word “cosmetic”) means to arrange, decorate, adorn, or put in order. In the book of Revelation the seven lampstands represent the seven churches that the risen Lord is walking among (Rev 1:20). Jesus wants our churches to be brimming with the oil of the Holy Spirit, and beautified with all the fruit of lives laid down, hungry for Him.

The last words of Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane were this: “I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which you loved Me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). The Greek word onoma, name, means more than just the epithet by which a person is called – it refers to everything associated with the name, including character, rank, and all attributes. Jesus is saying that He has revealed the fullness of the Father to His disciples: as He said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” And He says He will reveal the fullness of the Father in the future: “I will declare it.” How? By the Holy Spirit, whom He will send to bring the same revelation that the twelve had when they were with Him. Why? So that His agape may be in us. The agape of God being poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us is the fulfilment of John 17:26. Jesus tells us that it is by our love that the world will know we are His disciples. I don’t think that this is about the world looking at us and just seeing how much we love each other, or even looking at our humanitarian efforts and seeing how much we love the world. It means that when we truly walk in His agape WE WILL DO THE WORKS THAT HE DID, and revival will follow. This was Heidi Baker’s experience in Mozambique, and surely this is true discipleship.

Paul prayed (Eph 3 14-21) that we would be filled with all of God – the “fullness” of God, meaning that no aspect of the Divine nature (see 2 Peter 3-4) would be missing from our lives. This fullness comes from yielding our vain understanding to the truth that the Agape of Christ goes beyond anything we can humanly grasp; that it surpasses or goes beyond anything that we can call knowledge. Paul begins by praying that, with all the riches of His Glory at His disposal, God would give us the supernatural ability, the dynamis power, to enable the faith to rise in our hearts that Christ will make His home there as He promises (John 14:23). Paul uses the word katoikeō, meaning to dwell, inhabit, be always present. This prayer, for them and for us, is that the indwelling Christ would become a present, manifest reality in our lives so that agape can become the foundation for all we are and all we do; that Jesus would hold our gaze with that most vehement flame, reaching out through us with supernatural gifts to the people we are with, lifting our hearts into heavenly glory as we worship, and opening the storehouses of Heaven to all our needs as we bring His fire to the earth.

We are rooted and grounded in agape when the manifest presence of God is a reality in our lives and we walk in intimacy with Him, and this can only happen when we fully die to ourselves and yield our hearts to the mighty power of the Holy Spirit. Without dynamis there is no Gideon’s army and there is no agape; and without agape there will always be wheat in the winepress.

A picture has been with me as I have been thinking about this over the last few days, and it’s that of a bonfire that has burnt down from its original intensity and where the burning sticks have been scattered on the ground, charred black in places, still glowing red in places with a few small flames licking around them. I believe this is a picture both of the Church – where the sticks are individual congregations – and of churches, where the sticks are individual believers. For centuries the devil has been poking and scattering, isolating people, isolating congregations, always working to destroy unity and weaken the Church. I believe that God is gathering those burning pieces of wood together. He is leaning over them, His heart bursting with love, the marriage of the Lamb bright in His vision, blowing, blowing, blowing. As He rearranges those embers and burning brands new relationships will be formed and old structures broken. To be an army of Gideons in these last days we need to let Him gather us where the flames are and let His agape fill our lives: then we can set our world on fire.

(Adapted from “Wheat in the Winepress,” MD Publishing 2018)