This afternoon I was carrying onto the next bit of John Crowder's "Miracle Workers,Reformers and the New Mystics" and I reached the section I reproduce below. It is like a huge section of today's church script - both meetings - if we worked from one, with other sections from my series on Third level Approach to Ministry. Havant Church is going through a bit of a change. When we went to RIVERcamp and heard Mark Stibbe on "The Second Seal", (you can order this from the RIVERcamp website)Peter Stott felt a release of a word he first began sharing over 20 years ago.
2 Timothy 2:19 Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal,
"The Lord KNOWS those who are His" and
"Let everyone who names the name of the Lord abstain from wickedness."
In short....after intimacy....comes a tremendous cleansing. But as well as this message, there was a sense of us as men being Gatekeepers to this new move. Perhaps that is the real reason for the current all out war on our minds to try to paralyse us. I'm talking about the floodgates of the availability of porn, and unhealthy media.
Really, the true battle is right here....men standing up and pulling a fresh wave of the Holy Spirit straight out of heaven!!
Here is the John Crowder extract:
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Extract from Miracle Workers, Reformers and the New Mystics by John Crowder. Chapter 5 Hidden Streams page 122
ANCIENT DESTINY
We can't keep our pulse on everything the Lord has done throughout history. But the first step to catching up on the groundwork He has laid for us is simply to draw close to Him. In this day and hour, we are being given the key to open and close gateways of good and evil from the past. We are being given the Key of David, which unlocks doors that no man can close and closes doors no man can open. That key is rooted in intimacy. David was a man of worship—a man after God's own heart. Jesus is the Son of David. The fruit of one who walks intimately with the Lord will always be Jesus. The church, like Mary, is called to give birth to an expression of Jesus on the earth. We are a womb to release the invisible into the realm of the visible. To do so, requires intimate union with the Holy Spirit.
Restoration of these ancient streams is our legal due in this hour, but moreover, it is God's loving desire for us. Above all, He wants to restore intimacy. How is this divine passion being revived in our day? The Lord's hand has been restoring the Tabernacle of David (Amos 9:11) through the worship and intercession movement of recent decades. David's Tabernacle was a place of 24-hour praise and worship, where one could have open and intimate access to the presence of God before the Ark of the Covenant, without going through the Mosaic rituals.Worship is a powerful place of intimacy which engages our hearts (in Isaiah 6, we read that a hardened heart is the first step in blinding our spiritual eyes and ears). Out of this intimacy, we learn to hear God, and prophecy is born. Out of prophecy, we learn to obey God's specific directives that release miracles, healings, signs, and wonders. And out of the miraculous, evangelism and harvest are released. Revival starts with worship.
The harvest boils down to intimacy. Why does God want souls saved anyway, except to draw hearts back to Him?
It is beyond belief what is coming to the face of the earth. Beyond articulation. The intensity of spiritual activity will make us either great men or crazy men. By the end of the age, men will be fully possessed by God or they will be fully possessed by the devil. But it will be impossible to live in those days without being possessed. We are designed to be consumed by God's love. We have a choice to be fully consumed by Heaven or hell, but we will be consumed.
With this full consummation of love, we are about to see the reproduction of every Spirit-filled ministry from the time of creation poured out in one lump sum. God is redigging old wells because the destiny of many ministries were cut short. When God plants a ministry, His chief intent is to see it multiply and reproduce.The work of a minister is not just to evangelize, prophesy, pastor, or teach. The work of a minister is to duplicate himself—to raise up other evangelists, prophets, pastors, teachers, and apostles. In fact, such reproduction is specifically a chief focus of apostolic ministries, since apostles are called as fathers, who raise up children and establish churches as "wise master builders." But all of these fivefold office gifts were given "until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). Surely, countless ministers have gone on before us without reaching this ultimate level of success: Bringing unity and maturity to all, and causing all to attain to complete fullness of Christ. Not all have fully reproduced.
Of course, the success of a ministry is not measured by how many people we have in our services—not even necessarily by how many people we have raised up to function at our own level of gifting. True success comes when the baton is passed on to the next generation and they exceed our level of ministry and gifting. The true test of adequate equipping is when the successive generation takes more ground than we did. The children must reach further than the fathers. They must go farther-build higher-on the foundations we have laid.
ANCIENT DESTINY
We can't keep our pulse on everything the Lord has done throughout history. But the first step to catching up on the groundwork He has laid for us is simply to draw close to Him. In this day and hour, we are being given the key to open and close gateways of good and evil from the past. We are being given the Key of David, which unlocks doors that no man can close and closes doors no man can open. That key is rooted in intimacy. David was a man of worship—a man after God's own heart. Jesus is the Son of David. The fruit of one who walks intimately with the Lord will always be Jesus. The church, like Mary, is called to give birth to an expression of Jesus on the earth. We are a womb to release the invisible into the realm of the visible. To do so, requires intimate union with the Holy Spirit.
Restoration of these ancient streams is our legal due in this hour, but moreover, it is God's loving desire for us. Above all, He wants to restore intimacy. How is this divine passion being revived in our day? The Lord's hand has been restoring the Tabernacle of David (Amos 9:11) through the worship and intercession movement of recent decades. David's Tabernacle was a place of 24-hour praise and worship, where one could have open and intimate access to the presence of God before the Ark of the Covenant, without going through the Mosaic rituals.Worship is a powerful place of intimacy which engages our hearts (in Isaiah 6, we read that a hardened heart is the first step in blinding our spiritual eyes and ears). Out of this intimacy, we learn to hear God, and prophecy is born. Out of prophecy, we learn to obey God's specific directives that release miracles, healings, signs, and wonders. And out of the miraculous, evangelism and harvest are released. Revival starts with worship.
The harvest boils down to intimacy. Why does God want souls saved anyway, except to draw hearts back to Him?
It is beyond belief what is coming to the face of the earth. Beyond articulation. The intensity of spiritual activity will make us either great men or crazy men. By the end of the age, men will be fully possessed by God or they will be fully possessed by the devil. But it will be impossible to live in those days without being possessed. We are designed to be consumed by God's love. We have a choice to be fully consumed by Heaven or hell, but we will be consumed.
With this full consummation of love, we are about to see the reproduction of every Spirit-filled ministry from the time of creation poured out in one lump sum. God is redigging old wells because the destiny of many ministries were cut short. When God plants a ministry, His chief intent is to see it multiply and reproduce.The work of a minister is not just to evangelize, prophesy, pastor, or teach. The work of a minister is to duplicate himself—to raise up other evangelists, prophets, pastors, teachers, and apostles. In fact, such reproduction is specifically a chief focus of apostolic ministries, since apostles are called as fathers, who raise up children and establish churches as "wise master builders." But all of these fivefold office gifts were given "until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). Surely, countless ministers have gone on before us without reaching this ultimate level of success: Bringing unity and maturity to all, and causing all to attain to complete fullness of Christ. Not all have fully reproduced.
Of course, the success of a ministry is not measured by how many people we have in our services—not even necessarily by how many people we have raised up to function at our own level of gifting. True success comes when the baton is passed on to the next generation and they exceed our level of ministry and gifting. The true test of adequate equipping is when the successive generation takes more ground than we did. The children must reach further than the fathers. They must go farther-build higher-on the foundations we have laid.
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