Please read Isaiah 35, which is the theme for our upcoming Highway 35 conference. There is a pivotal moment in this chapter where victory is secured and defeat is defeated. It is a place of an appointed manifestation and also spoken of in Hebrews 10:32-39, where the same true pivotal moment of changes is recorded.
John was on the Island of Patmos, in prison. He was in the spirit on the Lord’s day. The next thing you know, he heard the voice of our Lord Jesus, the glorified Christ, the resurrected Lord, the sound behind him. He turned to see the voice. And when he saw the voice, he describes what he saw—which is the glorified Christ. This was an amazing manifestation of His robe, the golden breastplate, the linen, His face was white like wool or snow, His hair was the same, His feet like bronze that had been purified in the fire, and his voice was the sound like many waters. And, out of his mouth came a two edged sword. Immediately, he fell down—he was as a dead man. It says that Jesus touched him with his right hand and said, “Do not fear. Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am alive, I was dead and behold I am alive forevermore and I have the keys of Hades and death” .
At that service I said, “You could begin to learn to see in the spirit by practicing, just take some time to meditate on those scriptures in Chapter 1 of Revelation. I want to encourage you to do things like that because, most of the time, I say those things, I’m not smart enough to come up with a plan to get somewhere. I just say what I’m hearing and seeing. And I was on a walk about three days later, talking to the Lord, and He started to, I wouldn’t say accost me, but it was very strong…He began to give me a vision of the glorified Christ. And when I see a vision—when the Lord begins to imprint or impress Himself into where I am—I always look for scripture to substantiate, to collaborate, and to enlarge. So, I go into the Bible, as well as what I am seeing, and they just begin to become layers of sight. And that’s what I want to teach on: How we can cooperate and learn the skills or the art of this.
I was thinking to myself “Wow, I didn’t know You were going to just manifest Yourself, so strongly as the glorified Christ. Do you know that right in that first chapter it says that (imagine this) He is the ruler of all the kings.
There is coming a glorified image of Christ inside of His church so that the church can come into agreement with the glorified Christ. We have to begin to perceive Him past the resurrection and into the place where He now. Where He functions from High Priest and a joyfully celebratory Brother Who sings in our services.
All of this is in Hebrews. It’s all in the Bible. But, because we have to proclaim his death until He comes, because the door into salvation is His death, we tend to often times not follow Him into all of that He accomplished—death, burial and resurrection, ascension and even to His intercession.
Read Isaiah 35; and then I’ll share what I saw there because it’s same kind of thing:
The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, And the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose; 2 It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, Even with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, The excellence of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the LORD, The excellency of our God. 3 Strengthen the weak hands, And make firm the feeble knees. 4 Say to those who are fearful-hearted, “Be strong, do not fear! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, With the recompense of God; He will come and save you.” 5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, And the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. 6 Then the lame shall leap like a deer, And the tongue of the dumb sing. For waters shall burst forth in the wilderness, And streams in the desert. 7 The parched ground shall become a pool, And the thirsty land springs of water; In the habitation of jackals, where each lay, There shall be grass with reeds and rushes. 8 A highway shall be there, and a road, And it shall be called the Highway of Holiness. The unclean shall not pass over it, But it shall be for others. Whoever walks the road, although a fool, Shall not go astray. 9 No lion shall be there, Nor shall any ravenous beast go up on it; It shall not be found there. But the redeemed shall walk there, 10 And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, And come to Zion with singing, With everlasting joy on their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
I don’t think there’s anyone who’s read Isaiah, and does not come to this chapter and think, “Ah! It’s so explicit; it’s so full of sound and promise, and hope and faith.”
Twenty years ago is when the Lord began to minister this as a personal promise, and a promise that He was going to manifest in our midst.
Now the problem about Isaiah 35 is that chapter 36 follows. And if you know anything about the book of Isaiah, that’s when Sennacharib and Rabshakeh come from Assyria. They had overthrown all of Israel, the northern ten tribes—and now they were coming for Judah. They come all the way and besiege Jerusalem after they’ve taken all the other cities of the lowland. They’re just the last ones. And Hezekiah had, prior to that, initiated a renewal: the Temple has been cleansed, worship has been restored, the tithes are coming back, and people are fully engaged. And now they find themselves totally surrounded by the enemy. And yet, through a series of events (if you read through chapters 36 and 37 in Isaiah) you will get a recognition how prophetic that one verse was, and how powerful a deliverance God is able to make when He chooses to finally demonstrate Himself. It’s almost as if God loves to declare what He’s about to do. The devil gets wind of it and rushes in to try to consume it in its infancy, to intimidate and press us out of our place. And God delights in allowing that to happen because it just makes a bigger backdrop for Him to show off! This is what He is doing in your life right now.
God’s making a bigger backdrop to show off in my life. He IS going to show off in my life! He’s going to be Himself! So I’m not going to share these things, from a place of someone who’s just walking this out. I’ve walked through 36 and 37.
I think of repeated them a number of times. I’m like Peter. I see far beyond where I have the capacity to live. I started like Peter, without any God or my inheritance. I had God but I didn’t have it in my upbringing, so when I became saved I tried to truly live what I saw… since I was seeing so much, I was trying to live so much.
Like Peter, I could see who Christ was and then I wanted to be equal to the task of where Christ was going.
I made those blunderous statements like, “Everyone else may deny you but I won’t.”
I sang those songs, like “I have decided to follow Jesus” I would just pull it from the depths of my being. I love that part that says, “Though none go with You, still I will follow”.
This is all supposed to happen. It’s all supposed to happen because you are really decreeing from your eternity. But you are still processing it through your soul and your ability.
But the depth of the cry is from God. Do you understand that? The depth of the cry is from God.
One of my favorite songs was, “I want to be a channel for the River of God. I want to be channel for the River of God, so dig me deep, Lord, and dig me wide I want be a channel for the River of God.”
Then, I would just make it my own song: “I am a channel for the river of God so dig me deep Lord and dig me wide I am a channel for the River of God.” If I knew what “digging deep and wide” felt like, looked like or sounded like, I would is sang, “I want to be shallow in the River of God…so make me smooth Lord and make me rich…” But, thanks be to God, eternity wouldn’t let me. Eternity was singing but my soul was trying to process. My soul was trying to “be”.
So, I got myself in all these places, and thanks be to Jesus that He prayed for Peter; and so I know He will pray for all of us in that way. He said, “Peter, This night Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat but I prayed for you that your faith would not fail. But when you return, strengthen your brethren.”
That in itself has to be comforting to every one of us. He said, “I’m going to pray that your faith doesn’t fail.” But that night, Peter made a mockery of himself. He humiliated himself. He failed in every way. He went to the using the strongest Hebrew he knew, up to cursing, to deny that he ever knew or saw or had anything to do with this man, Jesus. And yet in the midst of what would be the most horrific time, his faith was still intact. It brought him back to the Lord.
If you read Peter, in the Gospels, and then you go to his epistles, he’s the man who teaches us to lay down our life, to be a servant, to not fight our bosses, to do whatever they ask even if they’re not good bosses. He teaches us how to hold a witness and to not be freaked-out when we go through fiery trials because that’s what’s supposed to happen to all of us.
In our journey toward heaven, we are being resisted by hell. He’s the one who tells us to walk with faith, even when our adversary, like a lion, is trying to devour us.
If we would just hold our places, after a little while, He will strengthen us and establish us and raise us up.
He knew what He was talking about. He couldn’t hold his place but he was always the first one God would use to find a new place.
And so we all have our journey and none of us will ever hold what we see within our own ability. We will only become what we see by turning to Jesus and being healed. We will discover the healing part after we fail in the application part.
In 1999, it became so important to me, that by 2001, I had committed this entire chapter to memory. I did that with chapters 60, 61 and 62 of Isaiah and I went into different portions of the New Testament. This was because I knew that the only hope of completion, for me, was that God would keep his word and I was going to make sure he kept it. I was going to watch over His word… if He wasn’t.
You know how you feel? We are like a kid who comes to his dad saying, “You promised!” Finally the Lord told me one day, “You know, except the seed fall into the ground and die, it remains alone”. But if it dies…
The point was, that if it falls in the ground and doesn’t die, it’s going to be alone. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit. And that was in 2004. So for three years, I was holding everything with all of my resources. It was the greatest relief just to let go and say, “Okay everything you’ve ever said, without me calling You a liar, not faithful or unable, I just let it go and I release it to fall into ground and die.
All of a sudden, all these Scriptures that were memorized went out of my mind, the way I had memorized them. I began a journey of a yieldedness to discovering the Lord in a whole new way.
I had the encounter to come and learn to abide and not try to abide. Then, once God began to flourish, I didn’t just go to harvest the flourishing or the fruit that was coming out of the abiding. But instead to stay from a posture of abiding and learning that there was a vast world of the spirit and the kingdom from which we can live from.
Going through the very things you’re going through, the very job you have to go to, the very neighbor you don’t like, the troubles you’re in, a home or whatever it is, there’s a place that we are to abide in God to which the very journey we’re in begins to become like Eden and begins a change from the pool of weeping into the pool of blessing.
I went to Isaiah one day in gratitude, in the spirit with the Father, in His presence, just worshiping Him. I went to Isaiah 35 and the essence, the substance, the spirit of it, just started to reverberate in my being. It was as though I saw. And in fact, it’s now become so much more vivid because of this Kairos moment we’re in.
Just in the last two weeks, this is what’s been occurring. I see myself standing on a torched earth. It would be like the Mojave Desert, wilderness, wasteland, desert that those words referred to uninhabited, parched and s sterilized land. Assaulted earth just standing there. Then all of a sudden in the midst of this vision, in the midst of Isaiah 35, I saw that it suddenly started to rejoice, a sound—a violent sound of life.
All of a sudden the desert begins to rejoice and blossom. To blossom like a rose. We think of a rose like what we might have in our garden, but it’s really more of a Desert Rose. It’s funny that the flowers of the desert are often the most delicate and perfect because they have come out of such a harsh journey. It starts bursting with color bursting with sound. The word “The desert shall blossom” is the very word, meaning to all of a sudden burst forth. The sound of “joy” is the word for twirling around violently because of an emotion.
So the entire place I am standing in is just a barren and torched life which I could understand to be my life, my inheritance, my future—our life, the land we’re in, the circumstances. It’s just what has become of what was given. It’s all of a sudden bursting. It is like sound, like the idea of the Sound of Music; but really happening. That the hills are alive with the sound of music. The rejoicing, the gladness, and then the glory of Lebanon. Which is a description because Lebanon, in those days, was one of the most beautiful areas. It was full of ancient trees and beauty. And the glory and the excellence of Sharron and Carmel—all are coming and they will see it. You’ll see the Glory of God, the Excellency!
So, it is talking about an inheritance. The wilderness, the wasteland, all of this will begin to burst forth. The word “Glory” is this copious wealth of God. It is this display of Himself, like over-doing it, like the Golden streets that heaven houses.
“Excellence” is the word where we get Majesty and splendor, ornate, beauty. It says that all of this now is beholding and I’m in the midst of this and I’m hearing the sound of rejoicing the sound of praise sound thanksgiving the voice of laughter—the sound of coming up from the grave. All of a sudden, I hear this sound. It’s not the sound of the earth responding but it’s now the sound of the father, the sound of Jesus.
You hear Him say, “Strengthen the weak hands”. I’m listening… again I walk and listen. I look and I observe and explore. I also look into my Concordance and learn definitions and discover what words mean. It’s is like looking into a word that is one-dimensional that can be two or three or four or even five dimensions—just because it begins to enlarge and come alive. That’s how the planet was put into orbit. That’s how creation is held in place that’s how times and seasons are framed. It is by the word of God.
The sound of the voice of the word becomes very expansive, if you are being beckoned in there and you walk through the door of the idea of “Strengthening the week hands”, to hear that sound. You’re watching this miracle take place and then you hear the commission, “Strengthen the weak hands”. The word “Strengthen” is where we get the word “fasten”. It’s not the vigor that you brought into the earth. It’s the fastening component It’s like two arms fastening together. It’s being held while you’re holding. “Strengthened the weak.” The weak has just lost some of its focus. It’s become sluggish, it’s so despondent. It is not engaged. “Hands” is the word for “open”. An opened hand, which represents what you are about or what you do. It could be said, “Strengthen where you have become slack in your work what you have been given to do what it is in your hands and you have whatever your hand finds that you do so hardly as under the Lord”. Yet because of the baroness, because of the season of desert, we lose clarity and focus and strength. We just grow complacent. We lose our place. We go to build our own homes instead of the house of the Lord. We then wonder why we have holes in our pocket. We just get out of our way, and out of sorts.
Then we read, “Make firm the feeble knees”. This is the command which is what has been said from Joshua on. “Be strong and courageous”. It is where something has been tottering, or wavering, or vacillating, double minded, and not sure. “Make firm” is to get “alert” again. “Strengthen” is to “fasten” and “firm” is to “get alert”.
What has become vacillating, losing its focus, you’re just kind of weak kneed. “Knees” is the word Barack. Which is the word “to kneel in adoration, to bless, to worship”. It is the most powerful imagery. So what He is saying in effect is, “Strengthen the work you have been given. Strengthened the work that you doing and become alert again in your worship”. Come alert again in your place that you hold before God, that He asked you to hold for Him
When He asked you to be with Him and you say, “I want to be with you”, He actually shows up that day looking for you. He comes to your house looking for you. Through your day, He bumps into you trying to wake you up. You might not believe this…but, of course He does.
He went into the Garden of Eden after His man, Adam, who had just handed over the entire planet and our future to His archrival, Satan, in the cool of the day to be with His man.
He comes looking for us. And we, like Adam go hide. We get this fearful condemnation imagery. “I might get in trouble or He might ask more than I can do. It’s too hard I can’t trust. I don’t want to deal with it…I just want to be someone else”.
But Holy Spirit comes like the wind, again. He calls us to be re-alerted again in our worship, becomes focused, strengthen ourselves again in our work. Just those two things, heard from heaven and responded to is the pivotal transitional point between victory and defeat or defeat victory in every situation business family emotional physical financial is to have the of the sound that creates strength and courage.
This happens in our work and worship because this is the essence of our life—our work and our worship.
Our work is all that we do, from mowing the lawn, to paying bills, to the thing you go to the people pay you for. It’s all that.
Yesterday I was mowing the lawn. My little for year old grandson usually helps me. At first, he just wanted to do whatever papa was doing. He just wanted to be out there for all the two hours it would take to do the work. It then got to the point where he kind of dropped out. He got to the front yard, and he was gone. I couldn’t find him anymore. Yesterday, he just didn’t want to have anything to do with it I then asked him what he was doing and he replied, “I don’t want to get sweaty”.
I was drenched, as it was a hot day. I said, “Okay, but it’s okay if I get sweaty right? Ok, you go for it and do whatever you need to do”. That’s what happens in work. Work is not that easy to do. If it was easy, everybody would do it, and we would all be rich.
But the reason we don’t want to engage is that we engaged and we got awful results. So once we do come to internalization and we hear: “Reengage in your worship. Find your place. Rediscover where I opened the door for you. Go back into that door and be with Me. Let Me be with you. I want to experience you. I need to know you and you need to know Me”. This is all that it was about. It has never changed. Come let us have fellowship, let’s have some time together. This is all that this was done for—so He could be with us, know us and we could be with Him and know Him.
Upcoming Events
Wednesday, September 3, 6PM: Practicing the Presence of God, Today – This series begins today and will continue for 5 Wednesdays. It is designed to equip each of us to live in the Spirit. How to hear the voice of God, how to entertain the presence of God, how to develop a rewarding quiet time with God, how to grow is scripture, both the largeness of the word (growing in foundational truth) and the intimacy of the word (experiencing revelation and encounters behind the veil, how to develop the multiple dimensions of intimacy, learning His delights, and the special place Jesus has prepared for you. There will be skills taught, that should be practiced during the week for optimum benefit from this series. This series will be on line so, if you can’t make it, you can watch, during or after, at jubileechurch.org. If you plan to come but haven’t registered, you can do so at the door or register here.
Wednesday, 7PM: “The First Three Element of Entertaining God” Hosting God is a pilgrimage with great reward and joy. Tonight we establish the first three elements of God’s presence.
Sunday, September 7, 9AM: Larry Bingman will be sharing “Come Follow Me” Jesus’ call to follow and exciting developments in evangelism.
Sunday, 10:20AM: Prayer for the nations – our time to partner with Jesus as kings and priest and call the future into now. We are praying over all the areas of the world and need your faith and love.
Sunday, 11AM: I will be sharing “The Voice of Joy and Her Voice of Gladness” It is the sound of the redeemed, the sound of our Lord rising in the midst of us. It is the sound of victory and triumphant. Come join the sound.
Monday, September 8, 7PM: Champions, we will start meeting again to pray for the upcoming Fall conference. God is doing radical shifts right now. Let’s partner with Him right now and cry out in joy, faith and agreement with our King. All are invited to pray with us from 7-8:30PM
