Prophetic Stuff
Be encouraged - Be envisioned ! ***********************************************************************************
PROPHECY TO THURROCK CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP
Brought by – ALARIC HUNT – JAN 2010
As I was praying for you this morning I saw a picture of a new housing estate, and on a new housing estate they always have a show house, in other words they have a house where prospective buyers come along and look around and they can see that all the houses are going to look like this – not necessary the same and that house is kept to the very end.
I really sense that the things that the Lord is doing in your midst, the whole transition, such important strategic things that other Churches and Christians around in time would come to you to actually receive stuff, - keys that the Lord has shown you and things that you have seen and proved in your own midst and people will come and ask you if you could teach some of this stuff. I feel that it is so significant what the Lord is doing.
I tell you that you will make mistakes, alright ? – we all make mistakes ! – because you haven’t been this way before. Have any of us been this way before ? But the Lord does not judge us by our mistakes. He judges us by our obedience and our relationships. Those two things are absolutely key. There is non negotiable love and obedience to His word. If you have got those two things working – you can make all the mistakes you like ! The enemy might be able to give you some kind of flesh wound, but he won’t be able to pierce through to any kind of real heart damage at all.
There are two things which I felt I heard Him say:- For a while, for a very brief while, and it would be very brief, - you could get smaller, but out of that, He is drawing you out of “hiddenness”. This is not the time to go and be in a desert. It is not the wilderness time or the wilderness season, it is time to come out of the hiddeness and be visible. Eventually I saw multitudes and multitudes came in all sorts of different ways into your midst and into the works that you are connected with. You will suddenly almost wake up and think “we’ve tripled in number” – in a very short space of time, and because there has been a root of prayer which the heart and the fire undergirding this, there is a shield around what you are doing. I just sense that the Lord just wants to give you a whole lot of peace right now. Okay we don’t understand everything, half the time we do not know what we are doing, but we do know that God is doing something here. Sometime we feel “I just want to go with the flow”, so go with what He is doing and I just believe that God wants you to have peace about that. He will look after the things that you can’t look after.
I also saw, a really strange picture ! – of a Neapolitan ice cream – probably don’t get it now – but it is three flavours and I sensed the Lord saying that the three churches that you have here are all quite unique, although you are the one body, God has shown you things and you have got a DNA in each of your Churches and that you are going to need all three for the future. He has shown you things in each of the churches, it almost like there is a root Spirit, all I can describe it is like a DNA that you are going to need for the whole of what He is doing. It may look on the outside very different, but at a heart level will be the same.
I had two scriptures for you, one was Genesis 32 and Joshua – first 5 chapters. Both are very similar scriptures. Genesis 32 – Jacob wrestles with God and he wrestles with Him right through all of the night and Jacob won’t let him go. Out of that wrestling is a very close encounter, even closer than rugby. You can feel the breath of the other person on you. You can feel their heartbeat. Out of wrestling comes identity and what happened was that Jacob had his name changed to Israel that day. He had his true identity emerge out of that. Out of your wrestling with God, and actually with God and with one another, with Jesus in you and you are in that wrestling match, in that place of close encounter with God and with each other and you are wrestling through issues and doubts and fears, you are wrestling through faith and vision – all that kind of stuff – out of that comes and emerges your true identity and who you are. Out of that comes multiplication. That is when Israel started to multiply.
If you look through the book of Joshua, you will see the foolishness of God again again and again. God doing stuff that our natural minds wouldn’t even dream of doing. There were about 2 ½ million people – a lot of people ! – they crossed Jordan and there is a city of Jericho and there are giants and all sorts of strong people, and the first thing that God does it says that he wants all the guys over 20 years old – I want them to get circumcised ! So there is this army that is just about to take this city – walking around like John Wayne ! Now we wouldn’t do it that way would we ? – and we could go on and on about the unusual strange ways that God had for taking the territory. Until we get use to the fact that God’s ways are not are ways – we are going to struggle, because we want to have it all wrapped up, all thought out, all thought through, everything sorted and then we go. God says “No – just step out and I’ll do this”.
You will find that your greatest breakthroughs will come when you feel insecure, when you feel out of your comfort zone, when you feel that you are stepping into a realm that you feel that your are not ready for. You will find that your greatest breakthroughs will come at those times. Not when feel as if everything is sorted,when you are feeling confident, when you are in a good season. It is in those times of foolishness in a sense. I don’t mean “not wise”, I mean in the terms of the miraculous. Everything that God does, there will always be an element of the impossible in it – otherwise we wouldn’t need Him.
I want to encourage you in these things – to do it together. Graham Cooke used to say that tension isn’t wrong, it means that something is happening. It means that something is going on in the Spirit realm in the terms that God is moving us on. That nation had walked around the desert for 40 years living in tents and suddenly that day arrived when it was time to walk across the Jordan. I bet there were quite a lot of dissenters and people who weren’t sure of what was going on, and thinking “we’re all going to get killed” – and that is normal, that is natural – we are human beings ! We have thoughts we have doubts, and I think what we need to do is kind of listen to each other and understand that these things emerge. It is not that the enemy has got in here, it is because God is here. Tension doesn’t mean that something is wrong, it means that something is happening – we are on the move. It means that things are developing and that the Kingdom is moving.
The kingdom of God is a moving object, - if I can put it that way. It is a moving power. Jesus said “The kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it”
You are to actually embrace one another, to listen to one another, to go forward as much as you can together and to receive the unusual, and when someone says I had this idea of going and doing such and such then it maybe time to say hang on a minute let’s listen to this. Learn to take off the lid of the limit of what He can do and see what happens. ***********************************************************************************
Recently TCF Leaders held prayer sessions every day - sometimes very early in the morning ! Here is some of what has been shared and used as a foundation for prayer:- Here are some of the prophetic words brought :-
" I can see a huge lake, a lake where there is life in it and growing around it, It is a huge reserve of water that is being held back by a large sluice gate. On the other side of the gate is a large area of land that is dry, arid, very dusty, nothing is growing, everything is dead and there are rocks and stones strewn everywhere. God is standing by the sluice gate and he is starting to lift the gate up and the waters are beginning to pour out of the huge lake into the dry and stony area" I sense that what God is saying is that we have seen the lake - full of life and that life needs to flow out and into the dry land round about which is our communities. We know what needs to happen, we have prayed that it will happen, and in the past we may have even tried to lift the gate ourselves through our own good intentioned efforts. But it is only God who can lift the sluice gate and He will do this in His time and in His way. Now is that time ! As seek God, as we prepare to embark on this new journey, and start moving out the the lost of our community, then so will the water start to flow. The water beginning to flow out underneath the gate and is flowing into the dry area. It is taking different directions and is sometimes flowing in directions that we did not expect it to. It is a bit like tipping out a paddling pool or bucket of water into your garden - the water is mainly going in the expected direction but some of the water is flowing in places where you did not expect. Also when the water flows over the dry land, and the rocks and minerals, other things which have seemed to have died a long time ago will come back to life and rise and float on the surface and have new life breathed into them again. What God is saying here is that as you embark on this new journey, do not be surprised when His life flows in directions that you do not expect, do not try and divert its course because God is going to surprise and amaze you in the direction that He wants His life to flow. His life will flow over rocks and obstacles, nothing will be able to stand in it's way. Just be ready and prepared for this, and to see how God sees things and not necessary how we see things." *********************************************************************************** When we were on holiday recently we went on a tour that took us up into the hills and there we stopped off at a pottery where there was an old man all set up at his potters wheel waiting for us all to arrive so he could give us a demonstration. It was one of these remote places where electricity seemed a bit scarce and the potters wheel consisted on a spinning slab which was connected to a heavy concrete fly wheel underneath and this was simply operated by the man kicking and spiining it with his foot. There was no electricity involved.
Sitting on top of the slab was a lump of clay, nothing special about it, it was just sitting there nice and soft and ready to be moulded. I wondered how on earth anything useful could be created out of just a lump of clay, and was intrigued to see how the potter was going to turn that lump into something which resembled many of the beautiful pots and other works of art that were on display around the pottery. However off he started, talking as he went along, spinning the fly wheel with his foot. It wasn't at constant speed. Sometimes the potter caused the wheel to speed up and at other times, he deliberately slowed the wheel down. Slowly but surely his steady hands moulded the clay and eventually the most beautiful pot was created. Thinking of all of this again, I sensed that God was saying to us that we had reached a point on this new journey where we had listened to Him, we had heard from Him and now we are at a point where he just wants us to be like the lump of clay on the slab and allow him to mould us into what he wants us to be - something which is beautiful to Him and something which is useful and which can carry and pour our life into our communities. As we reach out for his kingdom there will be times when everything may seem quite slow and at walking pace and then there will be times when the wheel will need to spin fast and things will happen very quickly. But do not worry about this because it is our Father who is the Master Potter who controls the the speed and we are fully in the care of his crafting hands. We might wonder how on earth Mission Shaped Communities is all going to work out, but our Father does not want us to be worried or to get hung up on the details of Mission Shaped Communties but instead have the confidence that he has everything in his hands and just simply to be obdient, listen to Him as he talks to us, and being willing to be the lump of clay allowing God to mould us into the work and into the beautiful thing he is going to do in us and in our communities. ***********************************************************************************
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