Tag: Explore Dream Discover

The Prophetic Process: Tuning In

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When did you last hear God speak to you? What did his voice sound like?

Was it like the sound of mighty waters? Or as quiet as the gentle whisper?

Whatever it sounds like, hearing God speak to us is a joy. And as disciples of Jesus and children of our perfect heavenly Father, the door is always open to his revelation. The eternal promise of Jesus is that we’ll hear and recognise his voice. In fact he wants you to hear his voice.

In my previous blog I introduced the idea of the ‘Prophetic Process’: hearing God is not an event, it’s a process – a process in which we fully engage with the intentionality of God’s words to us.

The first part of this process is Tuning In: recognising and receiving revelation from God. And in this blog I want to share some thoughts about this first step and consider how we can all find a way to do this well. I’d love everyone reading this to catch a vision for what it would look like for you to have an unhindered flow of revelation straight from the Father’s heart; because that is what is promised to us as Pentecost people who live out the reality of John 7:38. There is an invitation to live so close to God’s heart that tuning in to his frequency is a natural and everyday expression of relationship with him.

I’m going to start with these four simple steps – you’ll hear us reference them a lot at Accessible Prophecy:

  1. Know who you are: really get to grips with your covenant identity as a beloved child of God, learning to listen to him from a place of security, love and rest.
  1. Recognise all the ‘normal’ everyday ways God does speak to us and be thankful: because most of the time he speaks in normal, everyday ways to normal and everyday people – so pay attention to all the ways God is already speaking to you.
  1. Understand that we are all different and we all hear God in different ways: it’s important to identify the way you primarily hear God speak, your unique language of revelation.
  1. Be expectant: cultivate your faith that God will speak to you!

Practising these steps daily is a great way to develop a ‘tuned-in’ lifestyle. But to take things a little deeper, I want to consider the posture of such a lifestyle.

SITTING: Being a good listener is a skill. When someone really needs us to hear them we are wise to stop whatever else we’re doing and give them our full attention. Ideally we sit down with them over a nice cup of tea (if you’re English!) and look directly at them.

We choose to be fully present in the moment.

It’s exactly the same when we’re listening to God. Tuning in well requires the right posture: one of receptivity. We can’t make God speak, but we can ensure that when he does we are giving him our full attention and properly listening.

Tuning in well isn’t a technical exercise – it’s always about relationship – and we do it best when our faces are turned fully towards God, fully present, fully expectant, basking in his peace and love. This is why worship is often the best context to tune in to God’s revelation: it gives us an environment where we’ve got time, space and focus.

Tuning in well means that we are comfortable with silence – it’s enough to simply be in his presence. And wait.

And as our hearts start to leap for joy at his voice – that’s the moment when we dive in deep. We should never rush this moment; instead we need to embrace it and let it resound deeply in our spirits. We allow the door to fully open to the encounter with God, engaging all our prophetic senses. We allow the Holy Spirit to take our hand and lead us deeper into the full measure of communication from the Father’s heart.

Now I realise of course that there are situations where we don’t have all day to simply dwell in the revelation. If we’re doing prophetic ministry there are often time constraints. But even in these situations my encouragement to you is to spend a little bit longer in the tuning in.

Because at the end of the day we are talking about engaging with God’s heart – which is a vast spacious place that needs time and focus to explore.

Let us be a prophetic people consumed with the very heart of God, being prepared to take our time to explore his heart for everyone we meet. Get the kettle on and go and sit down with him. He’s waiting for you.

Prophecy and Mission

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This blog is written by John White, exploring his thoughts and revelation on prophecy and mission.

“He is the missionary Spirit of the missionary Father and the missionary Son, breathing life and power into God’s missionary church.” (The Cape Town Commitment)

As the missionary Spirit breathes life and power into God’s missionary church, so God’s people are released into prophetic missional activity. Prophecy is to mission as a heart is to life. Prophecy lies at the heart of the mission of God’s people. This has been the case throughout Scripture, whether under the Old or New Covenant.

The history of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles clearly shows the connection between the gift of the Spirit and the missional activity of the early disciples. The Acts of the Apostles is not just about God’s guidance; it is about specific directions from the Spirit for mission.

Mark Twain: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Explore, dream and discover.

There is an extraordinary connection between three chapters in the Bible; Joel 2, Acts 2, and Numbers 11, and all three present an opportunity to ‘explore, dream and discover’.

In Numbers 1 – 10, God was preparing his people for the journey from Sinai through the wilderness to the land that God had promised them. How were the people to relate to a holy God? How were they to be a people on mission? The story of the Bible is how God called a people to himself through Abraham, beginning with liberating the people of Israel from slavery and bondage in Egypt.

So if Numbers 1-10 is an exploration of how to relate to a holy God, Numbers 11 is a ‘bridge’ chapter, that reveals the pressure the people of God faced when starting to walk out God’s mission. It is a chapter of ‘responses’ – the people’s, Moses’ and God’s. Response after response. It is hard being a people on mission for God. So the people complained. Why couldn’t they have stayed in Egypt? What on earth are they doing here in a wilderness? And as for the food; all they got was manna, conveniently forgetting that the manna was God’s gracious provision to keep them alive in the desert.

They craved meat. They looked back to Egypt, hardly halcyon days. They grumbled and complained. Not one for missing an opportunity to get involved, Moses added his complaint. He was fed up with the burden of leading God’s people.

What happens? Seventy people, who were already exercising some form of leadership, were chosen to be elders. God took some of the Spirit that was on Moses and placed it on the seventy elders. The result was that the seventy began to prophesy. Two others, who were not part of the original seventy, also began to prophesy. Joshua thought that they should be stopped, but Moses replied, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29). Moses’ pipe dream? Yes, but one that would be linked through a promise in Joel 2 (2:28 – “And it shall come to pass afterwards, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy …”) to the fulfilment in Acts 2. What was a pipe dream in Numbers 11, and a prophecy in Joel 2, eventually become a reality in Acts 2.

If Numbers 11 is about empowering God’s people to fulfil God’s mission to the world under the Old Covenant, so Acts 2 is the same, but this time under the New Covenant.

Joel’s promise of the gift of prophecy is fulfilled at Pentecost, enabling God’s people to take up Abraham’s call to be a blessing to the nations, a prophetic blessing to the nations. In Genesis 12:1-3, Abram is called by God, who blesses him so that he will be a blessing to the nations. Later, in Genesis 20:7, Abraham is described as a prophet. His ministry was to the nations. His was a missionary call to the nations that had at its heart the prophetic equipping and empowering of God’s people.

Prophecy and mission are intertwined together. As Robert P Menzies has written in ‘Empowered for Witness – The Spirit in Luke-Acts’, “According to Luke, the Spirit of Pentecost is the source of prophetic inspiration and, as such, the Spirit of mission.” The Acts of the Apostles shows us the first disciples seeking to live out their mission as the Spirit-filled prophets, thus demonstrating the outworking of the link between Numbers 11, Joel 2 and Acts 2.

In G Vandervelde & W R Barr’s book, ‘The Spirit in the Proclamation of the Church’, we read: “All God’s people are “to prophesy” … are called to proclaim the story of God’s love.” Frank DeCenso Jr. writes in his book, ‘Amazed by the Power of God’, “… God wants His children to catch the vision of moving in His power to change other’s lives and to tell all people that He is in love with them.”

As then, so now. That’s our mission, that’s our calling; to be a prophetic people living in truth and love, and speaking out God’s prophetic word.

Application: how we go about responding to this
Erwin Raphael McManus: “when we become visible, the invisible presence of God becomes visible.” Am I seeking to be intentionally visible in bringing a prophetic word from God to those I meet? Is God calling me to leave the familiar (like Moses leaving the privileged life of a prince, to be drawn into the wilderness) and to speak God’s prophetic word to those outside my immediate context?