Month: December 2012

79. Characteristics of the Joshua Generation (#11-15)

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

The Joshua Generation are those who will enter the land of promise, and enable others to do the same. We have looked at 10 characteristics of that generation so far, and there are plenty still to come (so if you are new to this blog, it would probably be best to go back a  few posts if you want to get the most out of what we are in the middle of here).

11. The Joshua Generation will be equipped to enable the next generation to possess the land.

Joshua the son of Nun, who stands before you, he shall enter there; encourage him, for he will cause Israel to inherit it (Deut 1:38).

We have to cause others to inherit. This generation who are going to be saved, who are going to be the labourers for the future: we have to enable them, to disciple them in the supernatural, to encourage them to inherit everything in the Promised Land. We must not sell them short in the fullness of what their inheritance is.

12. The Joshua Generation will witness the awesome overcoming power of God.

We have seen the power of God at work in increasing measure over the past few years, seen quite a lot of signs and wonders, different miracles and so on. Those have just been a taster of the things that are coming.

Do not fear them, for the LORD your God is the one fighting for you…O Lord GOD, You have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and Your strong hand; for what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do such works and mighty acts as Yours? (Deut 3:22, 24).

No counterfeit can begin to match the true power and authority of Almighty God. Just as Elijah did with the prophets of Baal, there will be some among you who will challenge the forces of the enemy and call down fire from heaven, you will challenge some of those who do supernatural signs in the occult realm, and in the New Age realm; you will challenge them to a test of authority and power. And our God wins; therefore you win, you overcome, and you demonstrate true spiritual authority and power. It is going to be awesome!

You are going to win if you will step out in the confidence of the things you have already done, having your faith built up by the things you have already seen. That is what it means not to despise the day of small things but to see it as a time of preparation for the things that are coming.

13. The Joshua Generation will be strong and courageous.

If we are going to need to be strong and courageous, it is because there is something to fear or to overcome. And we will find that we too have giants to overcome, who are exercising authority in heavenly places. There are dragons to slay, who are robbing the people of God. True identity and inheritance are being held back from God’s people and it is for us to see them released.

Then Moses called to Joshua and said to him in the sight of all Israel, “Be strong and courageous, for you shall go with this people into the land which the LORD has sworn to their fathers to give them, and you shall give it to them as an inheritance. The LORD is the one who goes ahead of you; He will be with you. He will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deut 31:7-8).

God is with us. He is going before us. He is preparing the way. He is going to be with each of us and with all of us in this fight and in this battle. But there are going to be things we really do have to face. Some of the spiritual dimensions of things we have to contend with – even in this realm – are going to spook a lot of people.

As I have mentioned before, having been into developing nations where spiritual opposition is much more open, and seen what goes on there when evil is challenged, I expect those things to happen here too. Witch doctors who shape-shift, who change form in front of you? We haven’t seen that here – yet. The big ministry teams in some of those places have what they call the ‘snake-pit’, where they carry out deliverance, because some of the people they are praying for will change into serpents and werewolves and so on.

There is a lot of stuff in the media, films and TV which is beginning to make this seem more acceptable to the Western mind, almost like it is quite good really to have werewolves and vampires; and that is all part of the enemy’s schemes. Some of the spiritual power that the enemy has will operate in that dimension; and we need to know that we have authority over them. We are going to need to be equipped to handle spiritual opposition on a scale we haven’t yet seen.

14. The Joshua Generation will be filled with the spirit of wisdom.

We will definitely need the wisdom of God to know what to do in the face of some of the situations we are going to find ourselves in. Wisdom will be our equipping, connecting us to the God who knows all things. He is before all things. Therefore we can have a heads-up on the future, and on everything the enemy is planning, so that we can take a stand and be ready to overcome it.

Now Joshua the son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him; and the sons of Israel listened to him and did as the LORD had commanded Moses (Deut 34:9).

There will be an authority that comes with that wisdom, which is going to inspire people to press in and receive their inheritance.

15. The Joshua Generation will meditate on God’s word day and night.

This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success (Joshua 1:8).

Meditating on what God has said to us is a key to entering into the spiritual realm; a key to understanding how to access the realms of heaven, seeing the word of God as a doorway into the realms of the spirit. Again, meditation has become a taboo in the church because of Transcendental Meditation and other forms of eastern meditation, which empty people’s minds. Biblical meditation, by contrast, fills people’s minds, fills them with the truth, and teaches them to engage with the eyes of their heart.

As we learn to meditate and to open up our spirit to that realm of God’s purposes, the eyes of our heart will be enlightened. As we engage our spiritual imagination, we can start seeing the Holy Spirit moving on people, start actually seeing angels and other heavenly beings. We can start seeing – and entering into – the realms of heaven.

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Related articles from Freedom ARC

Are you part of the Joshua Generation?

We developed this just for you:

Engaging God on the Heavenly Pathways of Relationship and Responsibility
Equipping a Joshua Generation of supernatural sons of God to live according to the order of Melchizedek.

78. Characteristics of the Joshua Generation (#6-10)

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

In the previous post we began looking at 40 characteristics of the Joshua Generation, and today we are looking at the next 5.

6. The Joshua Generation will be men and women of faith, who speak and live by the word of God.

That was the difference between the generations: being able to speak – and live – the words of faith.  In spite of opposition, Joshua and Caleb spoke out the promises of God.
Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “We should by all means go up and take possession of it, for we will surely overcome it” (Num 13:30).

There is going to be plenty of opposition to come. Most of it will be religious opposition, because the institution of the church is out to rob the true church of authority and power. There is going to be warfare. It has taken place before: whenever God starts to do something new and fresh, whenever He starts to pour out His Spirit in a new way, the previous generation opposes it because they do not want to give up control.

But you cannot control this: you have to go with what God is doing. The Joshua generation will not be into control: as we have seen, they will be gentle and humble of heart. We need to be men and women who are willing to live by faith and are unashamed to speak out the truth, challenge people’s understanding, and challenge the doctrines and mindsets which have robbed people of their true inheritance. Almost inevitably this is going to cause trouble, but we have authority, and we are going to see people rescued from those things.

7. The Joshua Generation will have (and operate in) a militant spirit, and will fully follow the Lord.

But My servant Caleb, because he has had a different spirit and has followed Me fully… (Num 14:24).

If you look at how Caleb entered the Promised Land, he was saying, “Bring it on! Give me the land of the giants, because I’m going to go in and take it”. And even when he was in his eighties, he was still strong to go in and out to battle and to war. He was still overcoming. The Joshua generation may have people in it who are 80, 90, or over 100. It is not about age, it is about attitude. They have a different spirit, a militant spirit – as Jesus said, it is the violent who take the kingdom by force.

It is a breakthrough spirit. These are people who are willing to be breakers, who will break things open so that others can come in and receive. That is what God is calling us to do, and to follow Him fully (not partially). It will take a militant breakthrough spirit to push through into the dimensions to which God is calling us, and we need to be prepared for that.

8. The Joshua Generation will be sensitive to and feel grief over sin.

We do not look back at a previous generation and say, “Well, tough on them, they have missed it”. We look at people and see they are still needing encouragement to come in. Over the church in general we have to have an attitude of intercession, an attitude of standing in the gap. Not an attitude of pride, but of willingness to do what we can to see more and more people drawn in.

And where we see the church as an institution in sin, our spirit needs to be moved to act:

Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, of those who had spied out the land, tore their clothes (Num 14:6).

When the others said, “We are not entering in”, they tore their clothes as an expression of sorrow and of intercession for them. That is how we need to be.

9. The Joshua Generation will be men and women of the Spirit

So the LORD said to Moses, “Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the Spirit” (Num 27:18).

We need to be filled with the Holy Spirit, to be baptised in the Holy Spirit in fullness, and to be so continually. It is not a one-off experience: we need daily to be filled, to be overflowing, and to be operating in the dimensions of the Spirit. In the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and in the fruit of the Holy Spirit. We need to go up to whole new dimensions of the glory that is manifested through the Holy Spirit.

I did a teaching about the five rivers that are present with us. We can enter into those rivers and be rebaptised into our born-again experience, into our baptism in water experience, into our baptism in the Spirit experience, into our baptism of fire experience, and our baptism of glory experience. We need to continually enter into each of these because our ongoing relationship with the Holy Spirit is going to take us to higher realms. He is willing to reveal things to us, because He is the Spirit of Truth who is ready to disclose those things that are to come.

If you want to discover and understand and enter into that whole realm of the Spirit, you can read and meditate on John chapters 12 to 17. Those chapters are all about being connected to and flowing in the Spirit of God, and there is so much more than we know, waiting for us to uncover and experience.

10. The Joshua Generation will be chosen, anointed and commissioned by God for the task.

It was several years ago now that God just gave me a series of four words: investiture, succession, enthronement and coronation. I shared them with some of you at the time, but I didn’t fully understand them or what God intended by them. As I have kept those words in my heart, He has continued to give me revelation of them and I have prayed over people to receive new and fresh mantles of authority.

In fact I have been to the Mantle Room in heaven and seen row upon row of mantles of authority and power, waiting to be conferred on people. Some are the mantles of saints from previous generations, people like Smith Wigglesworth and Maria Woodworth-Etter, who have carried something of that authority in the supernatural realm. Many of those mantles are about to be released.

Some of the wells of past generations are going to be unblocked and are going to flow again; but also there are be new wells to be dug, and new mantles released, new levels of authority to be taken up. People are going to be exercising authority and doing things that today you might find it hard to even imagine or conceive of. They will need to do so if they are to be victorious in the battles which are going to take place. They will include some of us: because those are battles we may have to fight. We are going to need to be anointed, because we are chosen, and we are going to be commissioned.

Investiture is just the first part of that commissioning process. I remember watching Prince Charles’ investiture as Prince of Wales many years ago on TV. But although he has been invested, he is still only the heir to the throne at the moment. He is still the prince: he is not yet King. There is more to come for him. And there is more to come for us: God will give us revelation of what that is.

Lay your hand on Joshua; and have him stand before Eleazar the priest and before all the congregation, and commission him in their sight. You shall put some of your authority on him… (Num 27:18-20).

God is going to release more of His authority to His people. We will be commissioned to enter into a further dimension of our inheritance, our Promised Land.

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Related articles from Freedom ARC

Are you part of the Joshua Generation?

We developed this just for you:

 

Engaging God on the Heavenly Pathways of Relationship and Responsibility – equipping a Joshua Generation of supernatural sons of God to live according to the order of Melchizedek.

77. Characteristics of the Joshua Generation (#1-5)

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

We have seen that in our time God is raising up a Joshua generation, who will enter into their inheritance and enable others to do the same. This is what that generation will be like:

1. The Joshua Generation will be victorious warriors, dependent on God’s Spirit for supernatural victory.

Do you remember the story in Exodus, when Moses was standing and needed support for his hands, because as long as his hands were raised, Israel was winning the battle? Even at that point, Joshua was being prepared to succeed Moses, and there was a supernatural dimension to what was happening:

‘Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this in a book as a memorial and recite it to Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” Moses built an altar and named it The LORD is My Banner; and he said, “The LORD has sworn; the LORD will have war against Amalek from generation to generation”’ (Ex 17:14-16).

We need to know the Name of God, Jehovah-Nissi:  the Lord our banner or victory. ‘The Lord is my banner’. There is something here that we need to get hold of in our spirit. We use banners in this dimension of warfare, and that banner of victory is what will enable us to overcome. This battle will be in every generation. This is something which God wants to equip us for, to see Amalek destroyed.

There is a reason God wants it destroyed. The Amalekites were descended from Esau – they personified evil, and were inheritance robbers. They were those who competed for the Promised Land. For us they represent the tares, the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod, who seek to rob us of our inheritance. We need to destroy them; and there is going to be a battle in our generation. We need to know the Name of God, Jehovah-Nissi, because of the level of warfare which is going to come. When the world is falling apart, we have to be able to be overcomers in the midst of everything that is going on around us.

2. The Joshua Generation will have a servant heart.

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30).

This is a key scripture to understand about being servant-hearted. It is about not doing things in your own strength but in knowing your identity and being of gentle and humble heart. That’s what Jesus said, “if you take My yoke upon you, learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in heart”. A servant generation will know true authority and true identity through submitting it all to God.

We need to understand that Joshua had a call, and yet he was Moses’ servant: ‘So Moses arose with Joshua his servant, and Moses went up to the mountain of God’ (Ex 24:13).

3. The Joshua Generation will know the glory of God as a consuming fire.

We are already beginning to experience this in the heavenly realms, but there is so much more of it still to come.
On Mount Sinai, when God gave the commandments to Moses, Joshua also went up with him to the mountain top. Most people don’t read that or realise it, but that is what it says. And what happened there was that ‘the glory of the LORD rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days. .. And to the eyes of the sons of Israel the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like a consuming fire on the mountain top’ (Ex 24:16-17).

God is inviting everyone to come to the mountain top, to come into the fiery smoke, and to meet Him face to face. It is an awesome thing to look into His eyes. Face-to-face encounters with God will characterise the Joshua generation.

4. The Joshua Generation will be hungry and thirsty for the intimacy of God’s Presence.

We will not be satisfied with anything less. We need the intimacy of God’s presence. We need to press into it. We need to be so hungry and thirsty for righteousness, and for the presence of God, that it is going to transform our lives. And God is going to start stirring that hunger, by giving you experiences that make you crave and hunger for more. Don’t be satisfied with just an experience: it needs to become a lifestyle. We need to live in the presence of God in the dual realms of heaven and earth. We need to press in.

‘Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses returned to the camp, his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent’ (Ex 33:11).

Joshua stayed in God’s presence even after Moses left, and that will be a characteristic of the Joshua generation. When some people give up, when they have had enough, the Joshua generation will press in for more. You are not going to be satisfied until you have received the fullness of your inheritance.

5. The Joshua Generation will be chosen as forerunners to enter the Promised Land.

Some of you are going to have experiences that go beyond, and you are going to help other people to come into it. When I went on the fast two years ago, and began to enter into heavenly encounters, my desire was to facilitate others coming in. Our intention is always to open the door for others. We are not exclusive. The purpose of being  forerunners is not to keep others out, but to encourage everyone to come in.

Joshua and Caleb were sent out as spies: they saw the promises – and they saw the giants – first hand. But they had a different attitude to the others: they were willing to press in.

…and they spoke to all the congregation of the sons of Israel, saying, “The land through which we passed as spies is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord delights in us, then He will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land which flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the Lord; and do not fear the people of the land, for they will be our prey. Their protection has been removed from them, and the Lord is with us. Do not fear them.” But all the congregation said to stone Joshua and Caleb with stones (Numbers 14:7-10a).

These are just the first 5 of 40 characteristics of this generation which I believe God has shown me. Do you recognise these things in you? Is this a generation of which you are called to be a part?

We will look at some more next time.

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