With so much of Holy Spirit, there is an impartation that is being released as you join us in meditating on this Secret Place. There is something being given, so receive the Holy Spirit as you enter in. He is here to bring faith and with faith, comes the ability to receive, as the door is opened up to you.
I am personally undone lately, as we are moving toward March 6, at 7pm and March 7, from 10am to 4pm, which is our CHOSEN Gathering. This is the beginning of a new place where God is calling us all into. Right now, we have been moving with an intentionality for forty days toward this weekend, which comes just after Purim.
March 8 will conclude our forty days of prayer and meditation. In these forty days, we are looking into the life of Saul. In particular, the pattern his life represented in his conversion of longsuffering and the power of God to save. We invite you to enter into the life of Saul becoming Paul. Coming from an eschewed life into complete yielded-ness.
If you would like to receive the meditations and scriptures that we have been sending out, please email us at prayer@jubileechurch.org. You will be included in Champions, the group. If you would like to register for CHOSEN Gathering, in March, click here.
In my season of being undone, the Lord has started talking to me about unbelief.
Unbelief will either be surrendered to in prayer, or it will rise up as persecution against the voice that is being spoken. Prayer is the way unbelief is dealt with, while persecution is the way unbelief is expressed. When we are in the place of change, it is imperative that we yield in prayer. Prayer and yielding is a different prayer than prayer and receiving, or doing. It is a surrendering. We give permission to God to come in. We have great honesty with God.
Every new season with God starts with a greater honesty than the last one. Each season that I enter into is really honest and face to face. It is meeting God and being met by Him.
In reading the New Testament, we read that most of the encounters that God had with His apostles, were Him telling them something that they initially argue with. This gives us an idea that for all of us, our first response to God’s new is “no. It can’t be, I never will, I never have”. Then we pondering as we come into it.
In Acts 9, Saul was in Damascus. He was blinded. He saw the Lord and he heard His voice. He was told to get up and go to Damascus, and there, he would be told what to do. He couldn’t see and was there for three days and three nights without food or drink.
In Acts 9:10, the Lord came to a certain disciple, named Ananias.
10 Now there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias; and to him the Lord said in a vision, “Ananias.” And he said, “Here I am, Lord.” Acts 9:10
The New Testament was communicated through,
- Visions
- Dreams
- Expressions of God
- Manifestations of Holy Spirit
- Demonstrations of the Lord
- Prophetic sound.
So, for all of us, to come into all that God is doing, we are going to receive God in those means. It can be in a corporate setting. In Acts 2, the church began with one corporate vision. Everyone heard the same wind and everyone saw the flames of fire land on each other’s head. They all entered into speaking in other tongues.
It can also happen individually, like here on the road to Damascus. But it always has something profoundly supernatural happening. It is actually wrong for us to think we could become something without a supernatural encounter.
- We can’t get into the new without a new encounter with God.
- We can’t get out of the old with a good explanation of the past.
- We must come into the new with a new experience.
- The new experience will override all the questions lingering from the last season.
This is the good news about an encounter.
Ananias heard in a vision. Paul saw in a vision. We can hear in a vision and not see.
We must just keep opening our mind to new ways of God talking to us. Ways in which we might not have heard Him talk to us in the past, or ways He is encountered, or what is happening when He is doing it with us.
11 So the Lord said to him, “Arise and go to the street called Straight, and inquire at the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus, for behold, he is praying. Acts 9:11
This phrase just won’t leave me—For behold he is praying. God told Ananias, “Look, behold, he is praying.”
Putting ourselves in Saul’s shoes, what if our entire world had just changed because we met the Lord, and we didn’t know what our future would be like? What if, like Saul, we were shocked into fasting, but it was more than just the abstinence of food and water? Like him, we would be just processing and praying. We can take taking some time to think about,
- What might he be praying about?
- What would his conversation be like for three days?
- What would he be doing?
I have a feeling it would be something like Isaiah, in chapter 6. It was the undoing prayer.
So I said: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts.” Isaiah 6:5
Ananias argued with the Lord. The vision came, and basically he said, “I’m glad You told me first, because You’re about to make a big mistake,”
13 Then Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to Your saints in Jerusalem. 14 And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on Your name.” Acts 9:13-14
But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen vessel of Mine to bear My name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel. Acts 9:15
So, in God choosing us, appointing us, identifying us and commissioning us—all things originate from Him. They will never have any greater authority than what comes from God. We can look around and say, “I want to be this or I want to do that.” But it doesn’t really matter. It is what God chose us for that we will find both His and our satisfaction fulfilled.
Ananias then says, “I’ve come so you can see, I come so you can be baptized in the Holy Spirit, and it’s time to get baptized in water too.”
The scales fall off his eyes, and all of a sudden he is filled with the Spirit, speaking in other tongues, and goes out to the water and gets baptized. After he gets some food and starts processing with the initial company of believers, he starts going to the synagogue. He starts arguing and convincing everybody that Jesus is the Son of God.
This is the model of the conversions that are coming upon the earth. These are the terrorists of yesterday. The terrorists of today will be coming in the same kind of encounters.
Saul’s conversion is a great place, where I can look at, because my own life has gone longer than that. I am in my 39th year in the Lord, entering my 40th year. I have had enough history. I’m like Moses – I’ve had a few ups and downs, bumps and bruises. I’ve had some moments to advance, and have had moments to have been undone in my advancement. So, to look at an event and have the sovereignty of heaven say, “This is what I’m going to begin to do again,
God is going to:
- Awaken people from the inside out
- Call them
- Free them and call them forth in their destiny
- Do it because they cannot do it for themselves
- The world is in more captivity than it’s ever been in the history of the planet and I’m going to come in proportion to the captivity
- I’m going to break into the midst of people’s lives
The people are going to:
- Be going that direction and I’m going to turn them around to go another
- Encounter repentance, conversion, forgiveness and inheritance
- Come into repentance, conversion, the blotting out of their sins from the origin point
- Enter into refreshing from the presence of the Lord.
- Come into “Woe is me. I am undone because of what I just saw. I saw something new. I’m repenting. Woe is me, I’m undone
- I’m converting and now comes the cleansing of my lips from coal on the altar which is now my forgiveness, my freedom”
Then comes this whole new calling forth that says, Go, who will we send and all of a sudden, we say, “Send me, Lord.” It’s just the four winds of salvation.
A few weeks ago, God brought back to my remembrance about how unbelief finds its way into our lives.
Unbelief of Ignorance
There is the unbelief of ignorance – “I never knew. I never knew there was a Holy Spirit.” Or Paul said, “I receive grace because I did so in ignorance in unbelief. My unbelief had a basis of ignorance, so I was running stupid.” That is probably the easiest unbelief to release.
Unbelief of Familiarity
The kind of unbelief that is difficult to extract out of our lives, or recognize in our lives, is unbelief that comes through either familiarity, because we’ve always known the people (“You grew up in my family or on my street. Jesus, we knew You when You were a kid. We watched You in Little League. How can, all of a sudden, You tell us that You have the words of eternal life?”) This is the unbelief that went into persecution.
Unbelief of Prolonged Trauma
Then you have the unbelief of the disciples after a traumatic catastrophe like death. They could not embrace it. They couldn’t hear testimonies of women seeing visions of Jesus. Their hearts were hardened. They were in unbelief. They were going to be peculated and prepared for the new faith, through prayer. Ten days, they wouldn’t go anywhere. They were to stay there and get the Holy Spirit. They were to yield, yield, yield and pray, pray, pray. Then we have the father of the son with the deaf and dumb spirit or the epileptic spirit, depending on which of the gospels you’re reading and how they describe him.
Mark 9 describes that when Jesus came down from the Mount of Transfiguration, His disciples, and some of the scribes, were arguing. This is probably the worst kind of unbelief, because it is the one that has been exposed to prolonged trauma and abuse. It is where the history of hell has become more real than the history of heaven. It is where the works of darkness have put an inroad into our souls and we have simply endured.
This father had endured that his child, at a young age, had been demonized. The demon would take the boy and throw him into the water to drown him. Or, it would take him and throw him into the fire and he would get rigid, froth at the mouth and fall on the ground.
In Luke’s account, it says, “With great difficulty” we got this thing off of him. Obviously, it would come back.
And behold, a spirit seizes him, and he suddenly cries out; it convulses him so that he foams at the mouth; and it departs from him with great difficulty, bruising him. Luke 9:39
There is no parent that hasn’t felt that over their kids. We all may think our kids are demonized at some time, or perhaps someone in a marriage that is difficult, or never yielding any grace in business or finances.
Someplace, in all of our lives, there is a cross. A cross is a place where we cannot deliver ourselves, and where usually we were put there without our choice. Someone else made the decision for us and we can’t get our self out of it. It is where others look at us and think, “How stupid. Why don’t they just get off the cross?” This is because they don’t understand the contents. Others might say, “Look, you did it because you overstepped your boundaries. You made yourself out to be like the Son of God, so God’s now punishing you.”
It just gets really squirrely in the brain because the intention of hell is like the bulls of Bashan* that come along and they begin to curse us, our identity, and our sense of ever having heard or venture in the presence.
* Many bulls have surrounded Me; Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled Me. 13 They gape at Me with their mouths, Like a raging and roaring lion. Psalm 22:12-13
So, this kind of unbelief can happen in a prolonged exposure of abuse, drama or trauma. It can happen in the case of a death of a loved one. It also could have been there just through familiarity. Others may see a person they know and think, “There’s no way you could be anything different. We have always known you the way you are, so how come Jesus can all of a sudden be so big inside of you?”
It can also be in ignorance. It is basically the four ways we will find unbelief origins.
There is one thing I now understand from the Lord. In the scripture and through many, many years of practice, I understand that unbelief comes out by way of the mouth. We cannot put faith on top of unbelief, and be okay. We have must get the unbelief out before we can get the faith in. We must process from where we got the unbelief.
If we are disciples on the road to Emmaus, and Jesus comes along side of us and says, “Why are you so sad?” We don’t immediately say, “Oh it is Jesus! I can’t be sad! I’ve got to be happy!”
Jesus would probably disguise Himself and we won’t even know it’s Him. We would just start complaining.
But this is so that we can unpack the past, in order to can pick up the new, and He redefines it. That’s where He puts this new frame around the picture and says, “Let’s look at it this way.”
25 Then He said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?” Luke 24:25-26
All of a sudden, Whoa.
- That wasn’t a failure. That was strategy!
- That wasn’t defeat. That was victory!
- That wasn’t happenstance. That was sovereignty.
The whole picture just starts changing right before us. It is the same story line, and the same elements, but rearranged. Like it says in Isaiah 61:3, “To console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes,” Or, beauty will come from underneath the ashes. Or, from the ashes will come beauty.
The Hebrew word for beauty and ashes are the identical three or four letters, but in different order. Let’s just say that ashes and beauty are three or four Hebrew letters.
- All you have to do, is rearrange the letters of ashes and they turn into beauty.
- All God has to do is rearrange the letters of your life and they turn into beauty.
- All He has to do is reorganize the way you have read the story and the story becomes something wonderful.
This is the processing. So, Jesus is inviting the father to tell Him how long this has been happening to his son. – To tell Him what has been happening. Jesus is basically saying, “Talk to Me.”
Finally in exasperation, the father says, “If You can do anything, Have compassion on us.” (Mark 9:22)
22 And often he has thrown him both into the fire and into the water to destroy him. But if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” Mark 9:22
The essence of the cry of our soul when we say, “I know You can do something. But it has gotten to the point where I really don’t know if You can do something. And I’m not even sure if You’re willing to do something.”
The two most important things that we must have established, for faith to be there, is that
1. God is able, and
2. God is willing
When we lose that faith, we ask, “If You can…”
Jesus then said,
23 Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” 24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” Mark 9:23-24
The father answered with a powerful, honest prayer. Like Peter when he was sinking in the water, what he really was saying was, “Lord save me, I’m perishing,” It is both reaching forward and acknowledging, with tears, and the sense that something is happening. This is a very emotional moment.
25 When Jesus saw that the people came running together, He rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it: “Deaf and dumb spirit, I command you, come out of him and enter him no more!” 26 Then the spirit cried out, convulsed him greatly, and came out of him. And he became as one dead, so that many said, “He is dead.” 27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. 28 And when He had come into the house, His disciples asked Him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” 29 So He said to them, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting.” Mark 9:25-29
Matthew’s version gives us a little more details in that when they said, “Why could we not cast him out?” He said to the disciples, “Because of your unbelief.” And then He said, “This kind does not come out but by prayer and fasting.” It does not come out without a new encounter or surrender with God—however you find that and however God finds you in it.
You could argue that it’s not the demon that comes out, it is the unbelief that comes out. Just as much as He is talking about getting rid of the unbelief, He is about the demon.
The mindset that we currently hold is not going to work where we are going.
We know this. We see where we are going, but don’t know how to get there. We see what God is going to do, but don’t yet have the ability to say, “What I have, I give You.” We need to have it happen to us anew, in order to give it away to others.
We need to encounter Jesus anew for us to come out of what has worked well.
For me, I have walked a four-year cycle that has helped many wonderful things for me. I’ve grown in many wonderful ways through many horrific things. So, it’s all good. But all of sudden, the landscape changes. The Lord starts to speak to a new day, a new thing He is doing, and a new thing He wants to bring on the earth.
We can get really big and prophetic about it or we can get really simple and small. I always tend to personalize what God is saying big so that I don’t politicize the personal. I’d rather stay on me than on them. Because them I can’t help, but I can help me. Let it happen to me because then it is freedom. It is not “You ought to be, you need to be, or you gotta do, you gotta be…”
Isaiah is a perfect picture because Isaiah is this prophet who is very powerful, and pointing out many situations in Israel. “Woe, woe, woe” is what he experiences for five chapters, until he sees the glory of God. Then, all of a sudden, he says, “Woe is me, I am undone.”
Now, if we were to all be given a new set of clothes (mantles, new ministry titles, or a new anointing), we would have to take the old ones off to get the new ones on. If I was to give you a brand new suit, or a beautiful brand new dress, you would have to go somewhere private to change. The reason we go someplace private is because we understand that there is a nakedness that is about to be revealed, in order to get the new clothes on.
This is the essence of Isaiah 40:31,
But those who wait on the Lord Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40:31
And then the part that Isaiah may have forgotten, but they put it into a song is, “Teach me Lord, teach me Lord to wait.”
The eagle molting goes up to a rock and takes its beak, a perfectly fit beak that has worked well but it’s worn out. He begins to knock it off onto a rock until it becomes disfigured and falls off. He takes his feathers and he begins to pull them out. We call that molting. He finds first a very secret place where he can be alone and safe while he becomes super vulnerable. So to all of his enemies that he once was the king over, he is now vulnerable. He goes into quietness, a settling in. He goes into a quietness because he has to get the old feathers off for the new feathers to come in. He has to get the old beak off for the new beak. He’s got to renew or change. In Isaiah 40:31, the word renew is the same word as to change.
Pharaoh called Joseph out of prison and he changed his garments.
When taking off the old to put on the new, there is vulnerability, there is nakedness, there is “woe is me.”
All of a sudden Isaiah saw himself in light of the glory. He, who once was a prophet who could point out the error of Israel, now saw himself as a participant of the error of Israel. He said, “I am a man of unclean lips. I dwell among a people of unclean lips.” This man was not falling into a false sense of humility, or lack of faith. He was coming into a recognition of, “Wow, I’m here, and what I just saw is there. Now this contrasts with that. I now I have a whole new grid on honesty.” This is repentance. He was seeing himself in an entirely different light than he saw myself the day before. He was now undone.
Undone is a beautiful word. It is just naked, with a sense of not knowing what to do.
This is a part of prayer that in the next few weeks, I want to give you permission to feel and not try to fix it. I know when the Lord is doing something in me.
- First He begins to tell me about the new.
- He will give me time to see it.
- He will give me encounters in it.
- He will give me experiences with the Spirit with His voice.
- He will go to the scripture to substantiate.
- He will grow it.
- He will let it happen.
- Then I will try to find what we might do to get there.
- Then I will recognize, no that’s not working; it’s not doing; it’s not getting.
- Then I will rest.
- Then when it comes time to recognize that something is supposed to happen, there comes the exchange of grace. Grace for grace. The grace that I’ve had has been a good grace, but I need a new grace for the new season.
Then when I’m there at that posture, I am getting quiet inside and vulnerable.
I get very honest
I make it a point to be very honest with God.
I’m not in any effort to force Him into something that He ought to do or
I’m not trying to blame Him.
I’m just recognizing me in the presence of Him.
And… I’m not afraid.
You see, this is what the Lord said to us all last year. “I want in. You want out, I want in. You’re My inheritance. You don’t like where you are. I want where you are. I want what you have. I want access to where you are.”
In our religious minds we said, “Well You wouldn’t want to be where I am because where I am is here.”
He answered, “Exactly. This is where I want to be – I want to be where you are.”
We then must say, “Okay, well this is Yours. No apologies. I screwed the whole thing up. I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know where my faith went. I don’t know what happened with my intention.”
The older we are, the more stories we have. The younger we are, we have more time to build stories. But the exchange is the same. From the day we were a sinner and gave our life to Christ, to the last day we breathe on the planet and yield to glory, it is a continual breathing and releasing. Take it off, put on the new. There is a recognition. Nobody takes it off for us. Nobody forces us. The last thing any of us need is somebody to come and say, “I see what you are doing wrong.” We’ve all been there and that does not bring any life to any of us, because it’s just condemnation and pointing the finger and speaking of wickedness. It’s not lifting off a yoke of bondage. It is putting it on someone. But when the Lord does it, it is received. We say, “Yes! You’re so right!” And we work our process.
We are like the woman at the well. We are crying out to our friends, “Come see the Man who told me everything I ever did.” And between the encounter and the new commission, there is an experience where we need to have liberty to dialogue our belief system against His.
We believe that Jesus’ belief system is superior to ours. It is above what we believe. We are way below where He is.
Saul’s conversion is the pattern of the conversion of the New Testament. Isaiah says, “Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips dwelling among unclean people.” And then, the seraph that he saw brings the coal. He then puts his lips to the coal and says, “I cleanse your iniquity.”
Iniquity always has to do with the will and intent and energy of man and self. Whatever we try to do, whatever we did, is the iniquity part that God will deal with. It looks righteous, religious, wonderful, and moral. But it could still just be self in its expression—self-resourced.
This is the place of a cleansing and the freedom and the liberty. The responsibility comes off, along with “I’ve got to do this, or I’ve got to do that. I’ve got to fix this or I’ve got to fix that. I’ve got to make this happen and I can’t have that happen.”
All of a sudden, God says, “Who will We send?” We can now say, “Send me! Send me! I can go! I’m ready! I want to go!” This is all an encounter. This is the winds of salvation, repentance, and conversion – the thinking anew, considering a thought we hadn’t, seeing something and then turning to what we see.
Turning from where we were to where we are is conversion. Forgiveness, freedom, blotting out the sin, touching the coal to the lip, the purging of the iniquity and the sin removed is an experience that once happened, we can’t have
it taken from us.
If someone the next day says, “Shame on you,” you are able to respond, “I really don’t care what you think now. I’m free!” We don’t hide. We don’t keep things back. We go tell people, “Hey, you want to hear about how cool Jesus is? Let me tell you how bad I am and what He did for me He can do for you.”
People suddenly say, “Hey, I’d like to meet this Guy because I know how bad I am but I have to spend all my day from thinking that way because I’ll have an emotional breakdown. I’m a fragile person. But now you’re telling me there is Somebody who will talk to me in the core of my being and liberate me from it? And I’ll live free from all the shame? Tell me about this Man!”
The woman brings a whole city out to the well and they want Him to stay. For three days He stays until the whole city is converted, right in Samaria. Shechem—the same city is as it is today – a few different religions going on, but basically the same. Conflict, contrast and rejection… and the whole thing comes alive – all from one woman! One encounter! One deep calling to deep. Dismantling so she can be re-mantled. Disrobing so she can be re-robed. Then all of a sudden she the evangelist. She’s the witness and there’s a multiplication!
Upcoming Events
Sunday, March 1, 2015, 9am: Gino will be sharing, “Now”.
Sunday, 10:20am: Join us for the Nations Prayer—“Ask of Me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance”. Join us for 30 minutes of reigning prayer over His earth.
Sunday, 11am: I will be sharing “Many are Called Few are Chosen” What did Jesus mean when he made this statement? How do we entering into being chosen? What have we all been called to?
All of our services are leading us to the CHOSEN Gathering, March 6th and 7th. Pray with us and register today! Remember, lunch on Saturday is free to those who register now. Our intercessors are praying for those who register, by name. Click Here.
Meditation and scriptures during our forty days of prayer to prepare us for what God is bringing at the CHOSEN Gathering are available by clicking here.
