The Plan

“His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms,”
‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭3:10‬ NIV

I keep coming back to the subject of The Church In these blogs. The title of this Website is about the Church being ‘out there’. By that I mean that a large part of what the church does should be outside of the walls of wherever they meet – whether that is a large building or a small home. It is not my desire to be negatively critical of any church or style of church, but rather to point ahead to where I think we all should be. My heart is to call the Church up to where it needs to be to meet the challenge that lies ahead.

The verse above shows very clearly that God intends to reveal Himself, His wisdom and His power to the world and to all of the supernatural realm through the Church. His plan is to work through the Church. He is passionate about the Church. It is to be the Bride that His Son is coming back for. Ephesians 5 tells us that Jesus loves the Church, gave Himself for her, and that she will be His pure and spotless bride.

There have been countless prophetic words talking about a coming time of outpouring of Holy Spirit and a harvest of billions of people into Gods Kingdom. I believe we stand on the threshold of this unprecedented move of God. At the same time, we may well be on the threshold of a time of unprecedented pressure on the Church. The removal of freedoms and liberties around the world in the last 18 months could well be a sign of things to come.

The prophet Amos said, “surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants, the prophets” (Amos 3 v 7). Now Satan can understand the prophetic flow. He is worried. He will push back. Whether we like it or not folks, we are in a fight. The Church is in a fight. As part of that fight we can expect to come under pressure, and the agents of that pressure will be other human beings. Authorities, powers, governments, public opinion, media, crowds, even neighbours and relations. We should not be surprised if that happens. It is normal in more than a few countries in the world already.

If we don’t understand Genesis, we won’t understand where we are now. Genesis tells us that we were created to drive evil from the earth, and Jesus confirmed that we were to do this by extending His Kingdom.

We, the Church face an unprecedented harvest and unprecedented pressure from the enemy, and we need to be ready for both.

Only a Church (we are talking about the whole Church) that has Jesus firmly established as its true Head and Source will do. Nothing else will cut it. Only a Church that is desperate for Him to move in power will do.

In the science fiction series Star Trek a famous phrase on discovering a new civilisation was “Its life….but not as we know it”. The early church knew the Kingdom mandate that they had from Jesus, and they knew what opposition was. In a matter of forty years, they managed to spread the gospel throughout the whole of the known world. They were radical. I wonder if they looked at particularly our Western Church, whether they would say “It’s Church…..but not as we know it”.

So, if there needs to be change, where should the change be? It’s too easy to expect the change to happen in others. I’ve been in meetings where the prayer has been “Lord, come in mighty power and change this town”. The expectation was that God would visit and change unbelievers’ hearts so that they would flock to churches, and we would suddenly find ourselves overwhelmed with people wanting to be right with God. Too easy. Wrong prayer.

God does not intend to simply visit. His intention is to dwell here. Dwell with whom? Who does He want to live with? He wants to live with us, His Church. That is a little different from us going to meet with Him once or twice a week. There is a whole new level of God living with us that is available. Are we up for that? If we are, we need to ask Him, to invite Him, to open our doors and give Him full access.

That process of asking and inviting Him to come dwell with us is done out loud in words. (Prayer). We won’t see any great outpouring of His Spirit and Power until we, the Church, start to ask, beg, nag, ask again, beg again and keep on asking – because we have become desperate for more of Him and we know that nothing else will do. Nothing else will cut it. We need Jesus as our only Head and our only Source, not just for our sake, but for the sake of the world.