n 2008 God accelerated His people into a new place. We have been positioned beneath heavens that have been opened by the very hand of God. We are now standing under unrestricted heavens. This is the time to order all aspects of our lives to reflect this reality.
As I pondered this word for 2009 I sensed three assignments for the Church as she stands under the open heavens:
Praise it down! - 2009 is the year that worship will be experienced in a new dimension. Praise is the music that adorns the stairway of heaven that connects this earth with the heavenly realms. As we praise we will be taken into new dimensions of “stairway worship” that will join our voices to the voices of heaven. Praise under the open heavens will allow us to hear the sounds of heaven and bring that sound down upon the earth to displace the sounds of fear and sorrow. The sound of praise will push back darkness and create a new space into which the miraculous works of God will be poured out.
Pray it down! - 2009 is the year to pray down supernatural provision with a greater boldness. Heaven is waiting to hear our petitions. The provision of 2009 is hanging like a swollen water droplet that is about to fall to earth and splash all around. Our prayers will shake loose those drops of promise that will water our communities, our nation and the world.
Pull it down! - 2009 is the year to activate heaven through unusual prophetic acts. These prophetic acts will declare the intentions of God upon the earth before they become visible in the natural. Individuals and ministries will at first look foolish taking these postures, much like Noah did when he built the ark. Endure the ridicule because the rescue of heaven is on the way and heaven's target will be your act of obedience. As the flood waters rose in the time of Noah, so the flood waters of fear are rising in many hearts. Unusual prophetic acts, that at one time looked ridiculous, will become postures of promise.
God is calling His people to “speak” in a language that will be seen more than it will be heard. This is not a year to be timid. Pull it down! Pull it down! Pull it down!
A prayer for 2009 - “Father God, I am standing beneath Your open heavens. You have brought me to this place for a time such as this. Thank You that the open heavens are not effected by a closed earth. I shout out to You, my Jehovah God, Here I am. I am ready to engage Your open heavens! For 2009 I will praise it down! I will pray it down! I will pull it down so that Your Name is glorified upon the earth! I pray and declare this in the Name of Jesus Christ Your magnificent Son. Amen.”
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
"This is the Season for Miraculous Multiplication" by Garris Elkins
As the situation on Wall Street develops many Americans are becoming nervous about their finances and their future. The foundations of financial security are now shaking.
The kingdom of this world functions with a system of mathematics that is based on the equations of natural addition and multiplication. This system draws its data from what can only be seen and understood. God's Kingdom invades what is known and violates the rules of natural addition and multiplication with miraculous multiplication.
One of the most profound narratives in the Word is the feeding of the 5,000. In Mark 6 Jesus takes what amounts to a kid's lunch and turns it into a miraculous feast for a crowd many believe was in excess of 20,000 people, when you take in account the women and children who were also present that day.
34 “Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped from the boat, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.
35 Late in the afternoon his disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. 36 Send the crowds away so they can go to the nearby farms and villages and buy something to eat.”
These people had been following Jesus for hours and made no provision for an extended outing. Have you noticed that our greatest needs sometimes surface in the most remote and resourceless places? That was what happened in Mark 6 – there were no backpacks filled with camping supplies or stores nearby from which to buy food. People had been following Jesus across the countryside. The place was remote and the need was overwhelming.
Do you have a remote and resourceless place in your life? Has your retirement fund taken a dive? Is your marriage in a challenging season? Are the partners in your ministry diminishing? Are you clueless about the next step in your life? Maybe you find yourself in a remote place and the little resource you have seems ridiculous to meet your current need.
The disciples saw the need of this immense crowd of people and provided their own solution. They said to Jesus, “Send the crowds away...” In other words, we are tired and hungry and our patience is thin – make this problem go away. But Jesus invited the disciples to participate in a miracle that He was about to set in motion. In verse 37 Jesus spoke, “But Jesus said, “You feed them.” “With what?” they asked. “We’d have to work for months to earn enough money to buy food for all these people!”
This is natural addition and multiplication speaking. “With what?” is a phrase that is spoken when we take a look at our remote place, and our lack of visible resources, and assume that the source and supply for our miracle is only what we can see.
Then Jesus asks a question.
38 “How much bread do you have?” he asked. “Go and find out.” They came back and reported, “We have five loaves of bread and two fish.”
Miraculous multiplication begins with what we have now. There were thousands of hungry people in this remote place. The disciples went out to see how much food they had to work with. They came back with only 2 fish the size of sardines and 5 loaves of bread the size of muffins. This was all the disciples could find among all these people!
39 "Then Jesus told the disciples to have the people sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups of fifty or a hundred. 41 Jesus took the five loaves and two fish, looked up toward heaven, and blessed them. Then, breaking the loaves into pieces, he kept giving the bread to the disciples so they could distribute it to the people. He also divided the fish for everyone to share. 42 They all ate as much as they wanted, 43 and afterward, the disciples picked up twelve baskets of leftover bread and fish. 44 A total of 5,000 men and their families were fed from those loaves!"
If you do the math on how many groups of 50 and 100 there were within all these people its not unrealistic to conclude that it would take several hours to distribute this miraculous meal. Can you imagine the cheers of excitement as the miracle begins to sink in! This was not a single moment of miraculous multiplication - it went on and on. When we begin to live in the environment of miraculous multiplication, there will be heard, similar to what must have echoed across the fields that day, shouts of astonishment and joy at what God was doing.
There is coming a season when these sounds of joy will be heard in those who do not yet know the love of God. God will miraculously multiply provision within His Church and then move into the streets where supernatural evangelism will take place. Can you imagine what would happen in our cities if miracles of miraculous multiplication began to take place in the town square? God's goodness is our best advertisement for His Kingdom. The Word tells us that it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.
There are two postures we can choose when we find ourselves in remote and resourceless places.
WE CAN CHOOSE TO LOOK DOWN
Jesus told the disciples to feed the people. Like the disciples we can look down at the kid's lunch in our hands and ask, “With what?” and only see our lack in comparison with the impossible need before our eyes.
WE CAN CHOOSE TO LOOK UP
Jesus modeled a different posture - He looked up. Mark tells us that Jesus took the lunch, held it up to heaven, blessed it and then began to give it away. Jesus reached up and away from that remote and resourceless place and touched heaven.
Our provision is not what we hold in our hands. Our provision is not what the current situation on Wall Street reveals. Our provision is waiting in heaven to be laid hold of and pulled back into our lives. Everything we are and everything we need exists in and around God's Throne.
If we believe our provision is only here amidst the current signs of doom and disaster then we will reach towards that limited resource. God is asking us to take our finances, our broken bodies and our failed relationships and raise them towards heaven and choose to bless them. The blessing of a raised need connects that need with the glory of God. His glory is what transforms the little we have into an overflowing abundance. Once our need has touched the hem of heaven's garment we then pull down that transformed need back to earth with the glory of heaven upon it. While the kid's lunch is still in our hands, unyielded to God, it can only remain a lunch and not a miraculous feast.
We need God for miracles in remote places that seem like dead ends. The church can live in fear like the world, or she can raise what she has to heaven and bless it expecting our loving Father to send the little we have back to earth transformed by the glory of God and ready for a supernatural transformation.
Today, take the need you have, no matter how small it may be , and raise it to heaven and choose to bless what you have. Ask God to touch your need as it is raised to His Throne. Then bring your need back into your remote and resourceless place and begin to give it away. Heaven's touch on what you have is never to possess, but to release. What you give away will begin to multiply into a new and on-going provision.
Each time you sense fear trying to raise itself up, say this in the face of that fear, “I have raised this circumstance to heaven and God has touched my need. I am pulling down from heaven a miraculous multiplication of what I have. I am expecting a miracle in a place that the world says is impossible. I am believing that with God all things are possible – even turning a kid's lunch into a feast of miraculous multiplication.”
The kingdom of this world functions with a system of mathematics that is based on the equations of natural addition and multiplication. This system draws its data from what can only be seen and understood. God's Kingdom invades what is known and violates the rules of natural addition and multiplication with miraculous multiplication.
One of the most profound narratives in the Word is the feeding of the 5,000. In Mark 6 Jesus takes what amounts to a kid's lunch and turns it into a miraculous feast for a crowd many believe was in excess of 20,000 people, when you take in account the women and children who were also present that day.
34 “Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped from the boat, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.
35 Late in the afternoon his disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. 36 Send the crowds away so they can go to the nearby farms and villages and buy something to eat.”
These people had been following Jesus for hours and made no provision for an extended outing. Have you noticed that our greatest needs sometimes surface in the most remote and resourceless places? That was what happened in Mark 6 – there were no backpacks filled with camping supplies or stores nearby from which to buy food. People had been following Jesus across the countryside. The place was remote and the need was overwhelming.
Do you have a remote and resourceless place in your life? Has your retirement fund taken a dive? Is your marriage in a challenging season? Are the partners in your ministry diminishing? Are you clueless about the next step in your life? Maybe you find yourself in a remote place and the little resource you have seems ridiculous to meet your current need.
The disciples saw the need of this immense crowd of people and provided their own solution. They said to Jesus, “Send the crowds away...” In other words, we are tired and hungry and our patience is thin – make this problem go away. But Jesus invited the disciples to participate in a miracle that He was about to set in motion. In verse 37 Jesus spoke, “But Jesus said, “You feed them.” “With what?” they asked. “We’d have to work for months to earn enough money to buy food for all these people!”
This is natural addition and multiplication speaking. “With what?” is a phrase that is spoken when we take a look at our remote place, and our lack of visible resources, and assume that the source and supply for our miracle is only what we can see.
Then Jesus asks a question.
38 “How much bread do you have?” he asked. “Go and find out.” They came back and reported, “We have five loaves of bread and two fish.”
Miraculous multiplication begins with what we have now. There were thousands of hungry people in this remote place. The disciples went out to see how much food they had to work with. They came back with only 2 fish the size of sardines and 5 loaves of bread the size of muffins. This was all the disciples could find among all these people!
39 "Then Jesus told the disciples to have the people sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups of fifty or a hundred. 41 Jesus took the five loaves and two fish, looked up toward heaven, and blessed them. Then, breaking the loaves into pieces, he kept giving the bread to the disciples so they could distribute it to the people. He also divided the fish for everyone to share. 42 They all ate as much as they wanted, 43 and afterward, the disciples picked up twelve baskets of leftover bread and fish. 44 A total of 5,000 men and their families were fed from those loaves!"
If you do the math on how many groups of 50 and 100 there were within all these people its not unrealistic to conclude that it would take several hours to distribute this miraculous meal. Can you imagine the cheers of excitement as the miracle begins to sink in! This was not a single moment of miraculous multiplication - it went on and on. When we begin to live in the environment of miraculous multiplication, there will be heard, similar to what must have echoed across the fields that day, shouts of astonishment and joy at what God was doing.
There is coming a season when these sounds of joy will be heard in those who do not yet know the love of God. God will miraculously multiply provision within His Church and then move into the streets where supernatural evangelism will take place. Can you imagine what would happen in our cities if miracles of miraculous multiplication began to take place in the town square? God's goodness is our best advertisement for His Kingdom. The Word tells us that it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.
There are two postures we can choose when we find ourselves in remote and resourceless places.
WE CAN CHOOSE TO LOOK DOWN
Jesus told the disciples to feed the people. Like the disciples we can look down at the kid's lunch in our hands and ask, “With what?” and only see our lack in comparison with the impossible need before our eyes.
WE CAN CHOOSE TO LOOK UP
Jesus modeled a different posture - He looked up. Mark tells us that Jesus took the lunch, held it up to heaven, blessed it and then began to give it away. Jesus reached up and away from that remote and resourceless place and touched heaven.
Our provision is not what we hold in our hands. Our provision is not what the current situation on Wall Street reveals. Our provision is waiting in heaven to be laid hold of and pulled back into our lives. Everything we are and everything we need exists in and around God's Throne.
If we believe our provision is only here amidst the current signs of doom and disaster then we will reach towards that limited resource. God is asking us to take our finances, our broken bodies and our failed relationships and raise them towards heaven and choose to bless them. The blessing of a raised need connects that need with the glory of God. His glory is what transforms the little we have into an overflowing abundance. Once our need has touched the hem of heaven's garment we then pull down that transformed need back to earth with the glory of heaven upon it. While the kid's lunch is still in our hands, unyielded to God, it can only remain a lunch and not a miraculous feast.
We need God for miracles in remote places that seem like dead ends. The church can live in fear like the world, or she can raise what she has to heaven and bless it expecting our loving Father to send the little we have back to earth transformed by the glory of God and ready for a supernatural transformation.
Today, take the need you have, no matter how small it may be , and raise it to heaven and choose to bless what you have. Ask God to touch your need as it is raised to His Throne. Then bring your need back into your remote and resourceless place and begin to give it away. Heaven's touch on what you have is never to possess, but to release. What you give away will begin to multiply into a new and on-going provision.
Each time you sense fear trying to raise itself up, say this in the face of that fear, “I have raised this circumstance to heaven and God has touched my need. I am pulling down from heaven a miraculous multiplication of what I have. I am expecting a miracle in a place that the world says is impossible. I am believing that with God all things are possible – even turning a kid's lunch into a feast of miraculous multiplication.”
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