Desiring One Thing by David Nelson-Chapter 4-Book

Posted: 2007-09-12 12:39:37

Where has the Church gone and how does the Lord want to turn it back to where it ought to be? The Lord wants to baptize us in fire and bring us to real revival (close to Him). There will be a feast in the wilderness or a table set there for us to be seated with the Lord.

In Exodus 10:3 & 9 a theme has been set forth that is both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. We have talked about how the Lord is guiding us out into the wilderness at first, to show us the way to walk with him and to follow his voice completely.  When there is nothing around us, no water and no goods and no food and no resources and no nothing, we just listen to his voice and he is going to protect us and help us and show us the way and show us what to do and how to survive in the wilderness. 

Now, we are going to talk about the Church, where the church has gone, how far it has gone away from what the Lord wants, and how the Lord wants to bring it back to what he wants it to be.  In Exodus chapter 10 Moses is calling the people out of Egypt and he has to release the people from the hold of Pharaoh.  So, Pharaoh is a type of Satan, who wants to keep people in bondage.  The Church has come into bondage or what I would call, a Babylonian captivity.  They are entrenched in ritual. Look at how a church service progresses, the format of the service, sermons, songs, announcements, etc.  Is the Evangelical Church really very much different than the Roman Catholic Church in that we have our own ritual? Is our ritual any more alive than theirs?  In reality the Church has moved closer to being a show, like let’s say, the Johnny Carson Show or the David Letterman Show, or other shows like that. We have become like the world craving an exciting extravaganza.  Some church leaders have tried to break new ground with “Christian comics,” with humor and jokes, skits, and other types of entertainment. Some of this may be God’s will but there is an attitude of “let’s keep the show moving along, let’s keep the upbeat music moving along,” and so much of what is going on has still become a format of music first, leading in to some quieter, “high worship,” or a time of moving in the gifts of the Spirit, and then a time of announcements before the sermon. But is it really anointed, is it really where God is going, is it really what God wants?  In Ex. 10, Moses told Pharaoh, we are to go out in the wilderness and we are to have a feast to our God, God is wanting us to go and he wants you to let his people go.  “Let my people go,” he says to Pharaoh.  Let the people go, they need to be free to do the Lord’s will.  They needed to be able to serve their God the way He wants.  We need to serve God with our animals.  We need to serve God with the women and the children and anything else He wants. We need to take a 3 day journey into the wilderness to serve our God.  The idea was that they must be free to do what God wants them to do and not be under bondage anymore.  It says in Ex. 10:9, Moses said, “We will go with our young and we will go with our old.  We will go with our sons and daughters and with our flocks and with our herds we will go, but we must hold a feast onto the Lord.”  But Pharaoh said unto them, “Let the Lord be so with you….”  What Pharaoh was basically saying, as it says in the Amplified Bible, “If ever I let you go with your little ones…, see, you have an evil purpose in mind.  Look to it, for evil is before you.”  So, in the King James version, Pharaoh is saying, I’m not going to let you be completely free.  In Exodus 10:11 it says, “Not so, go now, the men only, and you can serve the Lord….”  Pharaoh wanted to still have control.  As the verses continue, there was a discussion back and forth, with various plagues and so on, where God was moving on Pharaoh to break his will and his control over His people and yet Pharaoh keeps hardening his heart and keeps saying to Moses you can’t do this and you can’t do that and trying to have control over them.  As we move down farther in the chapter, down to verse 24, it says, “And Pharaoh called onto Moses and said, “Go ye, serve the Lord, only let your flocks and your herds stay here, and your little ones also can go with you.”  But Moses said, “You must give us, also, our animals for sacrifices and burnt offerings, so we may sacrifice unto the Lord our God.  Our cattle must also go with us.  There must not be a hoof left behind.  Therefore, must we take these to serve the Lord our God and we know not with what we must serve the Lord until we come….”  Here is the important part right here.  Verse 24 says, “We know not how we must serve the Lord until we get there….”  In other words, God is going to be in control.  We as a people are not to live under the control of Satan.  We are not to live under the control of a Pharaoh.  We are not even to be under our own control.  We are to live under the control of God and he has called us out into the wilderness to have a feast with him.  We don’t even know what he is going to require of us until we get there.  Whenever the church has come into real revival, become on-fire, and has come into the things that God wants them to come into, they are always being changed from the old, stale ways toward something new and fresh.  God wants to do something new.  God is a God of creativity.  God wants to show us what He is going to do.  God wants to break all of our molds and he wants to wipe away and sweep away the old patterns and show how every day can be new.  Every service can be new.  Every church can be different.  The Lord says, I want to show you, when you come together, how I want you to do things.  I want to lead you.  I want to be in your midst.  I want to show you how I can orchestrate as you gather and move in my gifts and bring you into higher places, not what you create but what I create when you come together. Would this not be a great feast with Him?  Whenever the church has experienced moves of God, such new things happen that people are shocked and they say, we never did anything like that, we never saw anything like that before.  If something is of God, we really shouldn’t want to fight it.  If there is a real move of God we’d better not fight it.  Some people who are unspiritual are always going to fight the new things because they are not spiritually discerning.  They may say, “We need to keep doing it the old way, we don’t like this new stuff.”  But people who are perceptive might say, “God is doing something new and we need to find out what He is doing and be open.”  But what always seems to happen in the church when we experience something new is, we try to “can it” or “put it in a box” or overly define it, or try to put a name on it.  As soon as you put a name on it or try to define it or put it in a box, it can come under YOUR control.  God may leave what was yesterday’s move and say, “I’m going on to something new, will you follow or will you stay in your own comfort zone? (your own control and security)  We need to be open to what the Lord will do new today and what He will do fresh each new day. 

In Isaiah chapter 1 we read a very strong prophetic word.  Many people say that prophecy should be encouraging, that prophecy should make you happy or make you feel good. Here we have the prophet Isaiah and what he prophesied in the first chapter of Isaiah. He didn’t start out encouraging and then say, “OK, I’ve buttered you up with a lot of good stuff and now I am going to give you the real deal.” He just started off the chapter with the real deal, a strong word.  He says in Is. 1:2, “Hear, Oh heavens, and give ear, Oh earth, for the Lord has spoken.  I have nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against me.  The ox knows his owner and the ass his master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not consider.  A sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evil-doers, children that are corrupters, they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy one of Israel unto anger, they have gone away, backward.  Why should ye be stricken anymore?  Ye, will revolt more and more and the whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint.  For from the soul of the foot, even unto the head, there is no soundness in it but wounds, bruises, putrefying sores.” 

Remember, we said in Rev 3, that the church thinks that it is prospering and needs nothing and is doing great, not knowing that it is blind, naked, and not doing good.  The “sores” have not closed.  They have not been bound up.  They have not been mollified with ointment.  Your country is desolate.  Your cities are burned with fire.  Your land, strangers devour it in your presence and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers—and the daughters of Zion are left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge out in the middle of a garden of cucumbers.  Except the Lord of Hosts had left us a very small remnant, we would have faired as Sodom and Gomorra.  Is.1:10 says, “Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom.  He is even saying to the leaders of God’s people, “you are rulers of Sodom.”  “Give ear unto the law of our God, you people of Gomorra.”  He is even calling his people the people of Gomorra.

What I would like to show in the next couple of verses, is all the things that the people of God do (and the church does) that they think are pleasing to God, but these things have become empty of their meaning.  These things are not spiritual anymore.  We are going through the motions of prayer, going through the motions of songs, going through the motions of all the things that we have done for weeks and months and years and they have lost their meaning.  They have become empty and vain activities, and also many people are living worldly lives after they leave church, lives corrupted with various types of sins, the church people with soars from the top of their heads to the bottom of their feet.  They are not spiritual in their daily lives and when they come to church, everything is just a pretense about being close to God.  God lists all the things that people do in the church, and he says, a number of times, he is tired of it, he is sick of it, he is not interested in it, he is turning his eyes away, it is an abomination to him, he doesn’t want it anymore.  He says, “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?  I am full of your burnt offerings.” Is.1:12 says, “When you come to appear before me (as at a church service), who has required of you this repeated trampling and treading of my courts?  Who required of you to have your 3-day meetings?  Who required of you to meet 2-3 times this week or even 2 times on this day?  “Bring no more vain oblations, incense is an abomination to Me.”  In Is.1:13-15, “Your incense is an abomination to me (a type or symbol of prayer). Your prayers I will not hear.  I’m tired of your meetings (the calling of your assemblies).  Away with them!  Even your solemn assemblies, where you REALLY get down and are REALLY serious, I’m sick and tired of these too.  “When you spread your hands before me,” in other words, when you lift up your hands, I will hide my eyes.  Even though you make many prayers—I’m sick of it.  I don’t want to hear them.”   

This is what God has always had to do through history.  When the people have gotten away from God, and they think that they are still close to God, he raises up prophets to tell them—you are just playing a game.  This isn’t pleasing to God.  THEY will argue and say, “You are wrong, we HATE you, you are criticizing us, you are criticizing our buildings, you are criticizing our meetings, you are criticizing EVERYTHING and we don’t believe that you are hearing from God.” But God is trying to get their attention, saying, “Thus saith the Lord, this IS GOD, I am trying to get your attention.”   

In Matthew chapter 21 we see that God wants to take back his church. He wants to be in our midst at our church services and have the services under His control. When we are at a church service, God wants to orchestrate what is going to happen at that service. How are the gifts supposed to flow by His leading? The Lord should decide if we are going to have songs at our service.  He should decide if and when it is the time to have a song.  If there is to be a song it may only be one song that will go on for a half hour or more and many different variations of that song may emerge as the Spirit leads. God will teach us and move us along.  He may move us into intercessory prayer or put a burden on us for foreign missions or some foreign country or somebody who is in trouble and we will move into a season of intercessory prayer, with burdens from the Lord. Or it could be that we will have a time of rejoicing so much or God will give us so much joy that we will be dancing and singing, exuberantly, and the whole service will be song after song after song that the Lord is bringing together, and he builds it higher and higher and higher.  But how is the Lord going to do this?  What does he want to do?  In Matthew chapters 21,22 and 23, God is warning the churches that they have strayed from where he wants them to be and he wants to bring us into real revival, and so he has to set an alarm clock to wake us up from our slumber and from where we are now as the church. A prophetic voice is like an alarm clock.  Nobody wants to hear the alarm clock waking them up early in the morning. Can we not sleep a little longer?  Nobody wants to wake up, wake out of their dream world to say, “Oh, I was so happy in my dream world and in my rest and NOW it is the reality of the morning.” But, the reality is, in our own hearts we know we are tired of “business as usual” and the “same old stuff.”  We are going to services and we are saying, “This isn’t satisfying anymore.” It is because God is not satisfied and he is making YOU not satisfied.  The youth are not satisfied with the way that the church is, and so, they are trying to break out of the old mold, and this is good.  Prophetic voices are starting to help to break the church out of the old mold and the Bride is beginning to hear the voice of the Bridegroom saying, “This is where we need to go and where we need to be.”  We need to move on.  And so, the Lord is changing us to feel like God himself felt in Isaiah chapter 1. He was dissatisfied with what was going on—no matter how many meetings we have, no matter how many prayers, no matter how much we lift our hands, he says, something is wrong in our hearts.  Your hearts are somewhere else.  You are worldly, and you can’t hear Me, and what you are doing isn’t even spiritual anymore.  It is not even close to me or to what I want. The Father wants to bring us out into the wilderness and lay a table before us that He creates, a feast that He creates and orchestrates, and show us when we get there what He wants to do.  This is not an easy thing for a church to change their format to follow the Spirit of God.  In Matthew chapter 21 the Lord sends out prophets to warn the churches and the churches don’t want to hear, because they want their buildings, they want their money, they want their people to keep attending services, they want their organization, they want their business to keep succeeding and this is a risk, to go out and begin to follow the Spirit of God 100%, to cast everything to the wind and say, Lord, “What do you want? We will do it.” It will take a great risk for a church to decide that they want to follow the Lord in this way.

If you were to imagine the Father standing up and saying, OK, we had the Jesus movement and people got excited about being like Jesus and there was a certain emphasis there.  Then, we had a healing movement.  Then, we had a gifts of the Spirit movement.  We have had many different things to move the Church along.  Now, the Father stands up and says of all these wonderful things that have happened through the years and different phases of the church, now he says, I am preparing my church for the Bridegroom.  The Father and the Bridegroom want the Bride to be pure.  Just like in the book of Esther, the women were to be prepared to come in to be seen by the king, and they had to take baths with perfumes, and they had to have nice clothes on, and they had to be prepared with their hair done just right, so that they could come and be with the king, see the king, and that the king would look at them to have his queen. The Bride, now, has to be prepared for the coming of Jesus.  And, the Bride has a certain dissatisfaction with what they are seeing around them and within themselves, and they are hungering for more, because Jesus, the Lord, and the Father are creating in them a hunger for more and wanting to bring them out of immature thinking, such as, we can do this and we can do that as we please, but now, the Lord is preparing us to think we must do more as He pleases. We are being smitten with a stronger desire to go after Him and be pleasing to Him.  It is the emerging of a purer church and a more sanctified church. Not a holiness that makes you sniff at people or that gives people the cold shoulder, but a holiness that causes you to love people more.  A Bride so holy that you can feel their love and you can feel their compassion and you can feel that they are being changed into the image of Jesus, and they are being changed into having the Father’s heart. The children’s hearts are to be turned back to the Father.  Even as people are being formed into the image of Christ and are getting the heart of the Father, they are showing forth this heart so much that it is touching other people and it is drawing them to the Lord.  That is what Malachi chapter 4 is saying, “The Father has turned toward his children, the hearts of the children are turning back to the Father, and now in turn even more children will come to the Father.”  (also there is the sense that physical fathers and physical children will turn back to each other). 

In I Corinthians 12:6 it says, “There are diversities of operations, or diversities of gifts, but it is the same God who is working all that it is going on, in all.”  Another word for this in the Greek would be, he is inspiring what is going on in you, in everybody, as they are flowing in their gifts and in the operations of the Holy Spirit.  Then, it says in verse 7, “But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man so that all may profit.”  In verse 11 it says, “All of these gifts are working and they are working by the inspiration of the same Spirit who is dividing to every man severally as he wills.”  What this means is, at the Feast in the Wilderness you do not know what God will require of you until you get out there.  You do not know because he is going to lead you along day by day.  You do not know what this feast is going to entail.  You don’t know what God wants you to do.  You don’t know whether he wants you to sacrifice, whether he wants you to have a table, whether he wants you to have a Holy of Holies, whether he wants you to burn a fire.  Whatever he wants you to do, he is going to show you when you get out there.  Because if everything is cut and dried, then you can do it without God, and this is what continually happens in the history of church. If people are falling down on their faces and they are getting close to God, and they are seeking God, and God is starting to move in their midst, then they will want to sustain that move of God.  But sometimes people try to sustain it by just copying what they did yesterday, or the day before, or last week and pretty soon it moves into a pattern where God will leave and we just keep going on with the pattern of yesterday. We must live every day and every hour, dependent on the voice of God to show us what to do next.  God can change what he wants to do next and not do the same as yesterday.  Every time we get together he can change things.  It should be a living thing.  It doesn’t have to be dry teaching, empty teaching, always the same pattern, always the same, 3 fast songs, 3 slow songs, and then a time where someone speaks in a tongue or gives a prophecy, and then announcements and then the sermon and then a prayer line and then a closing prayer and then do that week after week after week.  It says in I Cor. 12:11, “The Holy Spirit will divide up, severally, as he wills.” He will show the order.  Now it is time for a song, and someone comes forth with a song.  Now it is time for a prophecy, maybe a season of prophecy will come forth.  Maybe the whole rest of the service will be prophecies and there won’t be any sermons or songs or anything else that day.  If the Holy Spirit is leading, what happens will be inspired by the Holy Spirit, it will be a movement of the Holy Spirit, it will be inspirational, it will be fire, it will be manifestations of the Spirit.  It will not be, “Oh, that song was pretty good, nice try—keep practicing, it’s going to get better,” etc., etc. Or you might say, “They were polished musicians and singers but I sensed some pride attitudes.” Or you might say, “Wow, they were really good, they were very good singers, but something was missing.” Maybe, they were not close to God, maybe they don’t have any prayer life at all.  You might say, “Well, it is nice that you have such good skills—but was that a manifestation of the Holy Spirit?  Where really is the anointing of God in all these things we are doing? I have heard people who sing off key but they sing with an anointing that touches you keep in your spirit.  I’ve even seen people who are mentally challenged, who don’t seem as smart as others, something is “wrong” with them as the world sees things, but they come with such sincerity, that you can just feel the anointing, that it flows from a vessel that is more clean in God’s eyes than we can see.  That is what God is looking for, real love, real anointing, purity of heart.  He is looking for manifestations of the Holy Spirit.  He is looking for the Holy Spirit to inspire, the Holy Spirit to love through you, the Holy Spirit to manifest himself and to work in people. If you are not moved to do something, why should you do it?  You should do what you do because the Spirit has moved you, because He is the one who is doing it as He wills. If you do it by your own will it is a manifestation of human effort, human work, or human flesh, and that is what happens so much in the Church—it is just one thing after another, lots of human effort. That is not to say that God can’t take a sermon and move you and touch you and train you through sermons, but it might even be in spite of the vessel that is being used.  He can take a sermon and interpret it to you and bless you, regardless of who is giving it.  Wouldn’t it be better if the person who is preaching REALLY heard from God?  Is the person who is preaching doing it because God said this is the message for the hour and it will be anointed and it will be something that will flow and will bless the people. This is the level that he wants us to come to, that the services in our churches come to the level where the Lord guides us 100% and where he is in our midst.  We want to have a feast in the wilderness where we don’t know what God is going to do next:  We don’t know what he is going to do tomorrow?  We don’t know what he is going to do tonight?  Wouldn’t there be a much better anticipation if we said, “GOD is going to MEET with us tonight and we are expecting Him, we are anticipating Him and when we leave this place we will say, ‘God was here and God did things, and God changed our lives.’”  If God is allowed to do this somewhere, that place is going to be known for being a place of his presence and people will say, “I don’t know what is happening over there but I think that the fire of the Lord is there.”  Whether it is a small group or a big group or a church of 1000, is doesn’t matter,  God is wanting to be the King over our gatherings. 

In the history of the Church and in the history of Israel, prophets or prophetic voices would rise up when God was wanting to call his people back to Himself.  He might even let his people go down their own path for a long time, but it would always come to a certain point where He would say, enough is enough.  The time right now is a distinct time in the history of the world where the world is getting so wicked that it is like a whirlpool pulling us down and if we are not already too contaminated we will hear his voice calling, “Come out of Babylon.” But if you are so entrapped in it that don’t even know what Babylon is, you might say, “What’s Babylon?” God says that I should come out, but I don’t know what people are talking about.  So, I’m just going to stay where I am.  God is calling to his people to get closer, to get on-fire, to not get weighed down by the world and, so on. Hear this warning, it is the time right now that things are getting worse. We are in a serious time of separating and we need to be part of the separating that is toward God and hear the voice of what God is saying. He wants to speak to your heart of hearts as you seek him more in prayer.  He might be saying it through others.  He is wanting to bring His people together to understand what he is doing and to be strengthened to move closer to what God wants to do.  In Matt. 21:33 it says, (as Jesus was telling them a parable) “There was a certain householder who planted a vineyard and he hedged around about the vineyard and he dug a winepress in it and he built a tower.  This householder, or house owner (Jesus), leased the vineyard or rented it to a farmer who was to be the leader of that vineyard, and then the owner went into a far country.  He leased it to a farmer to take care of his vineyard.  The point of the passage, as it goes on, is that God sent servants to the vineyard after some period of time, to tell the husbandman (farmer) that he now wants the fruit of his vineyard.  Each separate vineyard had a winepress and a prayer tower.  You are going to get wine here and you are going to have crops and you are going to produce something.  It is like a local church which has the purpose of producing something.  He sent servants to them to say, we want you to turn the fruit over to the owner.  Jesus wants them to turn the vineyard back into the Lord’s hands and he wants the good fruit. He wants the vineyard to be run right and to be productive (for his glory).  The people who were leasing or renting the vineyard from the owner who was away, rejected the servants, treated them badly, beat them, drove them away, would not listen to them.  In other words, they want to keep the vineyard for themselves.  They think, now, that they own it, but they don’t.  They think they are not going to give up the fruit because it is their tithes and it is their business, and they have put their blood, sweat and tears into it. They put up the signs and they laid the carpeting and they did all the stuff needed to make it grow and that it is theirs. But God says, “NO, the time has come to announce, it is mine.”  I’m sending my servants to tell you that it is mine and I want it back into my hands, back to be my house with my purposes, but the farmers won’t do it.  So, there is a rejection of God, and if you read on you will see that God sent prophets again and they were rejected again, and then he sent his own son and they rejected his son also.  This is the pattern, they are rejecting the ones who are coming in the Name of the Lord to speak, to help them, and they are rejecting the ones that are sent from God. 

In Matthew chapter 22 the same thing happens again.  In Matt. 22:1 it says, “And Jesus spoke unto them through parables, and he said, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a king who made a marriage feast for his son and he sent forth his servants (the prophets and prophetic voices) to call them that were bidden to the wedding but they would not come.”  This, again, uses the word servants.  He is sending servants to invite people to the feast, to a wedding feast, and the people invited are saying, “No.”  I believe God is preparing a feast in the wilderness, and he wants to release his people to come.  He said to Pharaoh, “Let my people go, that they may have a feast for me in the wilderness—a 3 day journey into the wilderness—and I will be their God.  I will be with them.  I will show them what to do.  Now, I want them to be free to serve me.”  Here again, he is saying, I am calling through my servants to come to this feast but they say, “No.”  The Word says that they would not come.  Now, why wouldn’t they come?  It says again, he sent forth other servants, “Tell them that they are bidden to the feast, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen, my fatlings are killed, all things are ready, come unto my marriage feast.”  What the Lord, the Father, is saying, it’s hot, it’s on the table, it has all been prepared, but they made excuses.  They made light of it, they went their own ways.  One went to his farm, another to his merchandise, they made excuses like this, “I just bought a field and I need to go look at it.”  And other excuses were given, “I need to do this and I need to do that.”  It is just like when Lot warned Sodom and Gomorrah, when he tried to tell his family and his relatives that God was going to destroy things and they needed to get out, they thought he was joking.  They didn’t take him seriously.  And that is what is happening even now.  God is coming to his church to tell his church, this is what I want to do, I want a feast, I want a revival, I want my church to be this way, I want it to be back in my hands, and the churches are saying, we don’t want it to be back in God’s hands.  Now, they are not going to say in front of their congregation, WE DON’T WANT OUR CHURCH TO BE IN GOD’S HANDS, WE WANT TO RUN IT THE WAY WE WANT TO RUN IT, DON’T WE?  No, they will say, we want to do God’s will and we will pray at the beginning of each service, “Oh, Lord, may we do your will in this service, may we do what you want—but is this goal realized, does the life of God really flow in that service?  Is God outside the church building, wanting to be in charge and that is not really happening?  The services are not open to God’s leading (as He wants), there is not the freedom that God wants, and when the voice of one of his servants rises up they are silenced. This is not right.  This is what God is doing but they are not listening.  They have closed the doors and they want you to leave, just like they want God to leave.  Although they will say, over and over again, oh, we want God, God is right in the center of everything we are doing, but is He REALLY in the center.  Do you feel he is in the center?  Do you see him in the center?  Is what you see revival?  Do you see the fire of God or do you just see a little fire that is just a token of what should be, and the world is not waking up when they see that “little fire,” the world is not being turned upside down because of “that fire.”  Cities are not being turned upside down, because what the church is doing is a substitute for what God really wants to do and God is saying, “I’m not satisfied with what you are doing and I’m going to tell you but you are not going to listen.”  You are going to say, “We don’t need to do that.  We will not come to the feast—we don’t want God’s revival that is all hot and is all ready.  Do you know who is going to come to God’s revival? The lame, the blind, the good, the bad, the stupid, the ugly, the no-names, the un-wanted ones, the rejects, the ex-cons are going to come, because God said, the people that should have come said, “No.”  What I am finding in my life and in the ministry that God has given me, is that God is showing in our heart of hearts, when we meet people, that he is going to take such and such person, that everyone thinks is nobody, he does stupid stuff, he does this and he does that, and God is going to take somebody like them and they are going to come to God and be great for God.  So, the Lord says, “Go out into the highways and byways, and compel them to come in.”  You are going to compel them to come in, the blind, the lame, the stupid, the bad and the good.  I don’t care.  If they will come, I’ll change them.  If they will come—if they have no potential, no education, all that will say in there simplicity, “Oh, I think this is good”—and they will come.  He will fill His hall with people that will come to His revival (His feast), because this revival is going to prepare the Bride.  If you don’t come, what is going to happen will be as it says in Rev. 3, you thought you were rich, you thought that you were prospering, and you thought you needed nothing and God says, “You are blind, naked, pitiful, sickening, and lukewarm, and I am going to spew you out of my mouth.”  Who will come and get hot?

In Matthew chapter 23 the Lord describes some of the problems in the church today and you will be surprised to see that the things that Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Woe unto you Pharisees…,” are the same things that he is saying to the church today.  Matthew chapters 21, 22, and 23 are tied together by one theme, that the Lord is wanting to turn his church around and that they are saying “no,” and that he will then turn to those who are “not recognized,” who will say yes.  He is also confronting the Pharisees (in chapter 23) and saying, ”You’re the ones who are the established ones and look what is wrong with you, point by point by point, and really he is saying all these same things to the church today.

In II Chronicles 36:15 &16 we find a word that is a continuing theme throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.  It is a theme all the way through even to the book of Revelation.  It has always been the theme of God, because he says, I do nothing unless I reveal My will to my prophets first.  So, if I’m going to change things, I’m going to reveal it to them and they are going to rise up.  Prophets have always been hated.  They always have been rejected and stoned, imprisoned and killed.

In II Chronicles 30:5 concerning King Hezekiah it says, “They established a decree to make a proclamation throughout all Israel—all the way from Beersheba to Dan, that people should come to the Passover feast, unto the Lord God of Israel, for they had not had the Passover feast for a long time.”  At this time, God was doing something very special and God put it into the heart of Hezekiah to invite people from all over the land to come.  So, they sent messengers out (verse 6).  It almost gives the idea here of a postal service.  They went with letters from the King and the princes throughout all Israel and Judah, according to the command of the King, saying, “You children of Israel, turn again to the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel and he will return to you, the remnant, who are escaped out the hands of the Kings of Assyria. And don’t be like your fathers and like your brethren who trespassed against the Lord God of their fathers, who therefore gave them up to desolation, as ye see. Now, be ye not stiff-necked but yield yourselves unto the Lord, enter into his sanctuary, which he sanctified forever, and serve the Lord your God, that the fierceness of his wrath may turn away from you, for if you turn again unto the Lord, your brethren and your children shall find compassion ….”  So, the messengers with the letters passed from city to city through all the provinces, but it says, “They laughed them to scorn and they mocked them.  Nevertheless, a few came from Asher, Manasseh, Zebulun, they humbled themselves to come and they came to Jerusalem, but God also had his hand upon the people in the area of Judah and he gave them one heart to come.” 

I believe that these messengers are like prophetic voices going through the land to call the people to the feast.  Yet, the people aren’t coming.  They think it is stupid.  They scorn them.  They mock them.  They ridicule them.  They say, We are not coming.  But, somehow, God has his hands on somebody that says, we are going to come.  We are going to humble ourselves, I think this is right.  It might be just a few and it might be “the rejects.”  But there is going to be somebody that is going to come, that God is going to raise up.  He gathers together this group in Jerusalem that grows and grows and grows into a beautiful group and the others are going to miss out, but it is because you heard and you came that you are going to be blessed.  You are going to be blessed coming to the feast, coming to Jerusalem, and experiencing what God is going to do and he brings forth a mighty revival that is so wonderful for seven days that they say, “Let’s do this for another seven days,” and they don’t want it to end and that is what the Lord’s revival is going to be like.  It is not just going to be for a few days and be gone but it is going to go on and not stop, and you are going to love being close to the Lord and you are going to get into it and not come out.   

In II Chron. 36:15 it says, “The Lord God of their Fathers sent to them messengers, rising up early, and he sent them, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place, but they mocked the messengers of God and despised his words and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against his people, till there was no more remedy.  Therefore, he brought upon them the King of the Chaldees who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary and had no compassion on young man or maiden, old man, or him that stooped for age, and gave them all into his hand.”  This is not the time to harden our hearts to what God is saying. We must not harden our hearts to the point that God sends upon us a strong delusion and there is no more remedy. We must not be so encrusted with the world. But if we will soften our hearts and listen to what God is saying, He will change us.  This is a prophetic move of God.  Listen to what God is saying and open your heart.  He is saying to ALL, COME, but who is going to come?  I hope this is an encouragement to you to press in to God and seek His face.