41. The Kingdom of God is Filling the Earth

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

The Kingdom of God is filling the earth.

You continued looking until a stone was cut out without hands, and it struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and crushed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were crushed all at the same time and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them was found. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth Daniel 2:34-35 .

Daniel is interpreting the dream the king has had, in which he has seen a statue representing four empires: Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. In the time of the Roman Empire, a stone was to be cut out. That stone is Jesus and the mountain is His kingdom, which will fill the whole earth:

In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever (Daniel 2:44).

So God is setting up a kingdom which will not fail. It explicitly tells us that it is not going to be left for another people. It is going to overcome all the other kingdoms. These are truths that the enemy has fought hard to keep from us, because if we really get hold of them we will no longer be sitting around saying, ‘Jesus, come and rescue us’. Instead we will be saying, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, empower us to play our part in seeing this victory, the kingdom of God filling the earth’.

Here is another passage about the same kingdom:

I kept looking in the night visions,
And behold, with the clouds of heaven
One like a Son of Man was coming,
And He came up to the Ancient of Days
And was presented before Him.

And to Him was given dominion,
Glory and a kingdom,
That all the peoples, nations and men of every language
Might serve Him.

His dominion is an everlasting dominion
Which will not pass away;
And His kingdom is one
Which will not be destroyed’
(Daniel 7:13-14).

Now, is this all just pie in the sky? Let me give you some facts and figures about how the kingdom is advancing. Let’s look at what God has done since 120 people in an upper room were empowered by the Holy Spirit and fire, spilled out onto the street and eventually into the whole world.

  • In AD100, there were 360 non-Christians for every true believer, a ratio of 360:1. Today, the ratio is less than 7:1. That means that the kingdom of God is filling the earth. It really is.
  • No Christian was officially allowed to live in Nepal until 1960. Now there is a church in every one of the 75 districts of Nepal with estimates of over half a million believers in that nation.
  • Every day, 20,000 Africans come to Christ. Africa was 3% Christian in 1900 but today it is over 50% Christian.That is a whole continent where more than half the people are Christians.
  • In 1900 Korea had no Protestant church and the country was deemed impossible to penetrate. Today Korea is 30% Christian with 7000 churches in Seoul alone (and several of those churches have over 1,000,000 members each).
  • Every day 50,000 people in countries served by Asia Access come to Christ.
  • There are currently 60-80 million Christians in China with up to 25,000 converts a day. That is thought to be a very conservative estimate indeed. The church there is growing fast, under persecution.
  • 35,000 conversions occur in Latin America  daily

If only 1 out of every 6 believers reproduced themselves one time each year, that is if just one in six of us made a single disciple each year (and one in six of those did the same), the entire world would be reached for Christ in 8 years! That is even without a massive outpouring, even without the River of Life being released into the earth as we believe it will be.

Jesus said the kingdom was going to be like leaven spreading through the dough. He also said it would be like a little seed that grows into a massive tree.

Make no mistake about it. We are winning. The kingdom of God is filling the earth. We belong to that kingdom, and that kingdom belongs to us.

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40. Challenging the Sacred Cows

Mike Parsons –

I pointed out last time that there are widespread demonic doctrines entrenched in the church, which attempt to place the kingdom of God and the authority of that kingdom in another time, or give them to another people.

Old Covenant

The enemy will always try to take us back to an Old Covenant system. The Old Covenant system was one country, one city, one temple. That is where God was, He wasn’t manifest anywhere else, whereas in the New Covenant God is everywhere. He is in His people; we are the temple and we don’t need another temple. But to try to rob the church of power and authority, the enemy has tried to make the church equal a building, a temple somewhere. That is not what the church is. It is a people called out by God, in relationship with Him and with one another in the kingdom of God.

Again, the enemy will always try to bring us back to an Old Covenant system where there is a priest, rather than all of us being priests, all of us having access to God. God does not want us to have any mediator other than Jesus; He is the only one we need. Yes, there are people with different gifts and calls within the church, but every one of us has the capacity to hear God for ourselves. Leadership in the church does not need to hear God for you. You need to hear God for yourself, otherwise all you are doing is obeying somebody else.

Destiny

God wants to inspire and touch each of our hearts, and release everyone into their personal destiny. Every person reading this has a destiny in God to fulfil, but the enemy has tried to rob us of that destiny by all sorts of methods and means. So God is saying, ‘Rise up, fulfil your destiny.’

Now there are a whole herd of sacred cows in the church that we are going to have to challenge. I am only doing this because God told me to challenge them. Left to myself, I really didn’t want to do it. But as I have mentioned before, I went to a conference with Bill Johnson and Jill Austin, and I shook for a whole day until I stopped resisting what God was telling me to do. God was wanting to put a sword in my hand, and I knew what that would mean. But if persecution comes because of it then we need to be prepared and we need to have the answers. We need to know what God is saying, we need to know where we fit into that, what God is calling us to. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it.

Kingdom dominion

We have to prepare for kingdom dominion. Kingdom dominion is what God’s intention was from the beginning. ‘Now it will come about in the last days  that the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains and will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it (Is 2:2). This is one of the key scriptures to understand, and this truth runs right throughout the bible, yet the enemy tries to put it off so that we think it is not for us.

We are going to see that it is indeed for us. This scripture is talking about the kingdom of God operating through the church. It will be chief of all the mountains, and mountains speak of authority. Authority will operate through the church; I am not talking about political authority, but about spiritual authority in the earth. We are to have spiritual dominion over all the works of the enemy, which will bring the blessing of God to the earth. That is what Adam and Eve were called to do.

Centre of the world stage

All the systems of the world culture will fail – they are only ‘hills’, you notice – they will come to nothing, and in the shaking of the world’s systems we will need to be ready to be raised up. I am sure that shaking will be beyond anything we can imagine right now, and in the midst of that, the church must be ready to rise up to provide the answers that all those worldly systems were unable to provide.

We need medical answers, financial answers, spiritual answers, governmental answers, societal answers; we need demonstrations of wisdom and knowledge and authority and power. Ryan Wyatt says (quoting Bobby Conner, I think), ‘The church is going to be taken out of the corner of the field and placed right in the center of the world stage’. When the medical systems fail people are going to be desperate for healing. Who is going to be able to heal? We are. We can lay hands on the sick and see them recover. When the financial systems start to fall, folk are going to be drawn to a people who are flourishing and being blessed. Again, that will be us, because we have supernatural provision and supernatural transfer of wealth to us.

We need to be ready to receive all these things and operate in them, because we are blessed to be a blessing and to bring heaven to earth.

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39. Demonic Doctrines in the Church

Mike Parsons –

In looking at the prophetic timetable which God showed me, it is clear that a time of persecution is coming. As with everything else, we need to be prepared for it.

Persecution

Where is it going to come from? Well, there are Nephilim spirits which are controlling world systems at the moment, but they are hiding. When the light starts to shine into the darkness, it begins to expose them. It says in Matthew that when Jesus returns, it will be like in the days of Noah. If you want to look into that in more detail, in a previous post we have already considered some of what that might mean. In short, there was open warfare going on upon the earth. If those days are returning, we need to be prepared for open warfare once again.

There is going to be a massive persecution which comes through the religious church. This is because there are so many demonic doctrines operating in the church at large which hinder us and have robbed us of power and authority. When we start to challenge those doctrines, all sorts of religious spirits start to kick off.

If you look at the internet, you will find far too many people from some sections of the church criticising and complaining against other Christians and other moves of God. Come to that, I have had books and leaflets and emails and CDs and DVDs given to me and even posted through my letterbox telling me that everything we see of God moving in supernatural power is actually demonic.

There is a reason why those things are happening. The enemy gets worried when the church begins to rise up, and starts to operate in the power of God and in the authority that God has given us. He tries to get other people (and especially other Christians) to start criticising what is going on, so that it causes disunity and disharmony which disrupts the move of God and makes the church ineffective again.

Where is the fruit?

If you are truly concerned about whether what is going on here (or anywhere else) is a genuine move of God, the answer is to look at the fruit. If it is not of God, it will just fall away. If it is of God, it will produce fruit. Are lives being transformed? Are people being saved and healed? Certainly they are, and there will be more besides.

But the critics I am speaking about will not be satisfied with that. The challenge to God moving supernaturally comes from entrenched doctrines which place the kingdom of God and the authority of that kingdom in another time, or give them to another people. Even just to point that out has a tendency to cause religious spirits to kick off really heavily. Those entrenched doctrines are false doctrines. Was it only in New Testament times that the power of God worked, or will the kingdom only be manifest a thousand years in the future? The only thing you can be sure of is that as far as these people are concerned, it certainly isn’t for us and it certainly isn’t now.

Defeat and rescue?

This kind of thinking has bred an eschatology (that is, an understanding of the end times) of defeat and rescue, that Jesus is going to come and rescue a weak, pitiful, defeated church. That is just a complete lie. If you read the Bible, how could you possibly believe that is going to happen? But it has been taught, and for years and years the church has fallen for it. This is one of the biggest areas that stirs up controversy. As soon as you begin to question people’s eschatology, it causes stink.

Lots of prophetic people around the world are facing a problem in these days, and some of them are quite well known people. Their problem is that what God is showing them prophetically just doesn’t match up with their own eschatological beliefs. One or two of them have been brave enough to stand up and say so, but have quickly lowered their heads below the parapet again because of the hail of abuse and criticism they received for doing so, especially in the USA and Canada. They end up trying to fit what God is saying into an eschatology that doesn’t work.

Jesus is coming back for a victorious church. This is not triumphalism, it is the plain truth of scripture. The kingdom of God is going to be raised up, and we will look some more at this next time.

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38. Breaking Off the Poverty Mentality

Mike Parsons  –

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich’
(2 Corinthians 8:9).

Rich

Jesus gave it all up, all His heavenly majesty and everything that goes with it, and came as a man. But He came as a man operating in the Kingdom of God, so that we might become rich; and that is not just rich in money, but rich in the things of God’s Kingdom: rich in anointing, power, authority, everything He has. Jesus gave up heaven so that we could have access to heaven – so that we could bring heaven to earth. And we need to be rich in every way if we are going to do that: in the anointing, in wisdom, in knowledge and understanding of the Word of God; in power and authority and in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But there is something that will keep us from all that. It is having a poverty mentality.

A poverty mentality is not about how much money you have. In fact, if you have a poverty mentality, you could have a million pounds and it would make no difference at all. It is about fear and lack. If you have a poverty mentality then you will believe you are not good enough to be blessed so you will cling on to what you have in case you lose it. God wants to deal with that in our lives.

Blessing

The truth is that He desires to bless us. His promise is that we shall not lack (Ps 23). He intends to provide for us in every circumstance: Abraham called the name of that place The LORD Will Provide, as it is said to this day, “In the mount of the LORD it will be provided” (Gen 22:14). God’s provision is always available for us, in order that we can fulfil His will.

And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed (2 Cor 9:8). This is one of my favourite scriptures in the New Testament; I spent about 6 months meditating on just this one verse and God really blessed me through it. How much grace is all grace? And what is grace? It is God’s divine power, and ability, and enabling. ‘Abound to you’ – in other words, it overflows. ‘Always’. Is there any time left out of ‘always’? ‘All sufficiency’… every word and phrase is packed with revelation from God as we meditate on scripture. But whatever God is willing to pour out upon you, you will miss it if you have a poverty mentality.

God wants to break the poverty mentality off us. We are sons of the King, and we know the pomp and lavishness of how royalty does things. God is not a stingy Father, reluctant to bless His children, to see us prosper, to see us succeed in all He has planned for us to do. A poverty mentality tells us not to believe this, tells us we are unworthy, that we are not able.

It is time to allow God to break the poverty mentality off us, to cast it aside. And it is time to remove the poverty spirit from its throne.

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37. Redeemed from the Curse

Mike Parsons  –


credit-card-309613_1280The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
Because the LORD has anointed me
To bring good news to the afflicted;
He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,
To proclaim liberty to captives
And freedom to prisoners;
To proclaim the favourable year
of the LORD (Isa 61:1-2a).

God wants to provide for us financially, because the scale of the task facing the church in these days is so far beyond anything we could provide for naturally out of our own resources.

This scripture in Isaiah is one that you will find we quote a lot at Freedom. It is one of the foundational scriptures for us as a church. It sums up the heart of what we believe God has called us to do in our community. And where it mentions  the ‘favourable year of the Lord’, that was the Year of Jubilee, the year in which all debts were to be cancelled, everyone was to receive back their ancestral inheritance, and all property that had been lost was to be restored.

God is saying that we are living in the Year of Jubilee; we can have restored to us what has been lost or stolen, and all debts are being cancelled (we have to understand that if we are in debt, we are under the curse; and if you read Deuteronomy 28, you will see that any kind of poverty is actually a curse).

Therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the LORD will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in the lack of all things; and He will put an iron yoke on your neck until He has destroyed you (Deut 28:48).

In John 10:10 Jesus describes our enemy the devil as a thief, a killer and a destroyer. But,

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us – for it is written, “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” –  in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. (Gal 3:13-14).

So the good news is this: we have been redeemed from the curse.

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36. Blessing the Whole Earth

olives-1307154_1280

Mike Parsons – 

There is a level of resources that the church currently does not have but is going to need in order to accomplish what God intends in these last days. This is no surprise to Him, and He has planned for it in advance, so that throughout scripture we can find His promises of a wealth transfer – of financial resources coming to His people in these last days, out of the world and into the kingdom.

Promises

We looked at some of those promises last time, and I encourage you to go over them again and again, until you grasp the magnitude of what God is planning. Those promises are there for us to begin to seize upon, and pray into, and to see them manifest. But to help us, one thing we have noticed before is that for every promise yet to be fulfilled in its fullness, God has given us forerunners, examples, little tasters if you will, that have already happened. So before we go any further in this post, let us look at some of those examples in the Bible, of wealth transfers that have already taken place.

The first of those is Israel coming out of Egypt. ‘I will grant this people favour in the sight of the Egyptians; and it shall be that when you go, you will not go empty-handed… Thus you will plunder the Egyptians’ (Ex 3:21-22). You can read about it there (and in Exodus 12): they went out with all the gold and all the treasure of Egypt.

Secondly, Israel inherited the promised land. Maybe you have never seen this as a wealth transfer, but that is what it was. They didn’t go in to a land that was empty: it was full of all sorts of good things. ‘I gave you a land on which you had not laboured, and cities which you had not built, and you have lived in them; you are eating of vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant’ (Josh 24:13). We need to realise that God has a provision for us which has nothing to do with how much we can get for ourselves.

Again, maybe you have read the story where four lepers walked into the camp of the Assyrians – they were outcasts and desperate men – and yet they collected all the wealth of the Assyrian army, because God had come and scared the Assyrians, so that they had all run away (2 Kings 7). God can do that for us.

Joseph, as we have seen before, was promoted from the dungeon to the second highest office in the land and was able to administer all the wealth and produce of Egypt.

Covenant

Now Deuteronomy 8:18 says this; But you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth, that He may confirm His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day.

The reason God wants to bless us, to give us an abundance, is so that we can fulfil His covenant, the covenant in which He promised: ‘And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed’. Notice that the covenant is intended to bring the blessing of God, not to one person or even to one people, but to the whole earth. God’s desire is to see every family of the earth blessed, coming under His kingdom power and authority, and becoming part of His family. We are the people through whom He has chosen to accomplish that, and that is why He desires to bless us.

So if you want lots of money in order to have all kinds of nice creature comforts in your life, then you have really missed the point of these promises. The point of this transfer of wealth is to confirm His covenant and to enable His people to fulfil the dreams and visions that He has given them. God does want to bless us, He does want to transfer wealth to us; but we need to be positioned to receive it. We need to be prepared, so that when it comes we will not squander it, but will be ready to put it to proper use.

Over to you:
What dreams and visions has God given to you?
What financial resources would it take for you to accomplish them?
Are you expecting a wealth transfer?
(Please feel free to post your comments below).

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35. The Wealth of the Nations

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

We have begun to glimpse the scale of the task facing the church if we are to reap a harvest of harvesters and train them up effectively in the supernatural. But God has a plan to ensure we have the resources to achieve all that He is asking of us, and part of that plan is that there is going to be a wealth transfer, out of the world, and into the Kingdom of God, into the church (ekklesia). In order to equip the number of harvesters we are expecting to come in, we are seriously going to need extra resources – and on a grand scale. God wants to position us so that we are ready for that wealth transfer. There are plenty of scriptures that promise this, and we will look at some of them:

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, and the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous’ (Prov 13:22). Is there anyone righteous reading this? If so, then you can know that wealth is being stored up for you.

For to a person who is good in His sight He has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, while to the sinner He has given the task of gathering and collecting so that he may give to one who is good in God’s sight (Ecc 2:26). If you are good in God’s sight, then what should you expect?

He who increases his wealth by interest and usury gathers it for him who is gracious to the poor. (Prov 28:8). If you know what we do here at the Freedom Centre during the week, you will know that we are gracious to the poor. Therefore we can expect to receive the wealth that is being raised by interest and usury (the world’s financial system, which robs people).

We really need to get hold of these scriptures, meditate upon them, and start expecting to see these promises start to manifest.

Then you will see and be radiant and your heart will thrill and rejoice; because the abundance of the sea will be turned to you, the wealth of the nations will come to you (Isa 60:5). The ‘wealth of the nations’: you can spritualise that if you really want to, but actually it means ‘money’.

Your gates will be open continually. They will not be closed day or night, so that men may bring to you the wealth of the nations (Isa 60:11). That tells me that we need to be open, and ready to receive.

But you will be called the priests of the LORD; you will be spoken of as ministers of our God. You will eat the wealth of nations, and in their riches you will boast (Isa 61:6).

This is a powerful one in Haggai: “I will shake all the nations; and they will come with the wealth of all nations, and I will fill this house with glory,” says the LORD of hosts.  “The silver is Mine and the gold is Mine,” declares the LORD of hosts.  “The latter glory of this house will be greater than the former,”says the LORD of hosts, “and in this place I will give peace,” declares the LORD of hosts (Hag 2:7-9).

The Lord of the Angel Armies says that the wealth of the nations is going to come to His house when He starts to shake the nations. Who is His house? We are, the church is. And is He starting to shake the nations? We have seen that He is beginning to do just that. This scripture even talks about silver and gold – how much clearer could it be? God is promising financial blessing. And the glory of the latter house (that is the church) will be greater than even the former glory (of Solomon’s Temple).

‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a future and a hope’ (Jer 29:11). I want you to grasp this for yourself as an individual today. The word ‘prosper’ means to be successful, to increase, and to have more than enough. That is what God’s plan is for you. You do need to position yourself so that you can receive it, and we will look at how we do that.

Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers (3 John 1:2). ‘In all respects’. That doesn’t leave anything out – God wants us to prosper in body, soul and spirit.

Remember, we are not talking about having loads of money just for the fun of it. We are talking about having enough resources to be able to do all that God has called us to do, and even more than enough so that out of our abundance we can bless others. There will be degrees of this. You might only need a million pounds to accomplish what God intends for you – there might be some who need billions. There may be some who need 10p, who knows? But whatever the amount, you need to have enough to fulfil God’s will for your life.

We will pick this up again next time, as we look in the Bible at some examples of wealth transfers that have already happened.

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34. Enlarge The Place Of Your Tent

Mike Parsons  –

In all that we are sharing about the Prophetic Timetable, it is important to remember that God has not revealed this simply so that we can be fascinated as we look into it and see what He is doing: He has revealed it so that we can be prepared to play our part. There is a place of authority that God has always intended us to occupy, in which the authority of God is expressed through our lives as we bring heaven to earth. All the earthly systems are about to be shaken and all the world will turn to the church for the answers: we need to be ready.

I have mentioned before that I believe that the first harvest of labourers, the harvest of harvesters, will amount to 20% of the population. Worldwide, that would be over a billion people. If that scale is too hard to imagine, let’s look closer to home: the population of Barnstaple and the surrounding villages is around 48000 according to the latest figures I could find, probably closer to 50000 by now. 20% of that is 10000 individuals. What would it take for the local church in our relatively small market town to handle an influx of 10000 people right now (I don’t mean just Freedom Church, but all the churches across the area)?

There are 20 churches who are part of the Barnstaple Churches Together network, and only a handful of them have congregations over 100 at the moment. Could each church take 500 people, disciple them and equip them to go out and reach the rest of the population? What if there were only 10 churches who were prepared for that? That would be 1000 each. No wonder we are thinking we need a bigger building! The biggest auditorium in North Devon is probably the Queen’s Theatre, which holds 600. Possibly if you used our local Leisure Centre you could squeeze in a few more. Even in a town like Barnstaple you would have 10 churches needing 10 places that size or bigger.

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And if only 3 churches were ready… in that case, we are going to need the whole site we have been believing for. That is why some of us have been making those declarations and prayer-walking and staking out the boundary God has shown us. If you look on a map, or this aerial view, it is shaped like a footprint, with our present building at the ‘big toe’ (centre right, marked with our butterfly logo). That is very fitting, because God told Joshua that he would possess everywhere he set his foot. And just as God really intended Israel to take the blessing to the whole world, that footprint is not the limit of our inheritance or our influence – it is just the base from which we would look to reach out to transform our whole community (however wide that is).

So what if people came from further afield? In the revival here in 2012 we saw folk coming from the south of the county, from Torquay, from Cornwall and Somerset. If we are to be a regional apostolic centre, how big is the region? How big is our vision? As I update this post in mid-2015, we are connecting with thousands of people around the globe through our ‘Engaging God‘ programme, blog, websites, social media and YouTube channel. Wherever you are reading this, how does all this translate into your situation, your church, your community?

All this may well get you thinking: and it is just one aspect of what it would take to disciple and equip the harvest of labourers. I am really only quickly sketching it out now as an introduction to what I want to get into, which is this: if we are going to do all that God is showing us, we are going to need resources way beyond what we now have at our disposal. It is just one line on that Prophetic Timetable, but it is an important one: there is going to be a wealth transfer, to enable us to do all those things to which God is calling us.

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33. The Day Of His Power

Mike Parsons –

Ever since the Garden of Eden, man has been trying to do things apart from God. All we like sheep have gone astray – we have all done things our own way. The whole world system has been set up to provide an alternative to God, but it is coming down.

The pride of man will be humbled and the loftiness of men will be abased; and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day, but the idols will completely vanish. Men will go into caves of the rocks and into holes of the ground before the terror of the LORD and the splendour of His majesty, when He arises to make the earth tremble’ (Isa 2:17-19).

God is going to arise and make the earth tremble, shaking it to its very core. When it crumbles and falls, what is left? The kingdom which cannot be shaken (Heb 12:28), the kingdom of God which is within us (Luke 17:21).

This is what is going to take place:

Now it will come about that In the last days the mountain of the house of the LORD will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; and all the nations will stream to it. (Isa 2:2)

The house of the Lord is the church, and the mountain is kingdom authority. It will be established over and above all those other hills and mountains, over every authority that exists in the world, and everyone will stream to it because the church will have the answers that the world is looking for. Are we really up for that? We need to be. At the moment, evil spirits are controlling those world systems: those spirits need to be dethroned, and God is going to use His people to dethrone them.

Light and darkness

This is a word that has been given over and over, here in Freedom Church and worldwide:  Arise, shine; for your light has come and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you (Isa 60:1). Jesus is coming for His church, and His church is supposed to be light to the world: we are to be children of light. There is going to be a period of great light where the harvest of harvesters is going to come in. But read verses 2-3:

Behold, darkness will cover the earth and deep darkness the peoples; but the LORD will rise upon you and His glory will appear upon you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.

When there is nowhere else to go, when we are shining in the darkness, when the glory of God is manifested through His church, when the Presence of God is manifest, then people are going to start to come. And then, in a great period of darkness, we are to shine even brighter for that end-time harvest. That is what God is calling us to. That is what He is preparing us for.

We need to start shining. We need to start getting the glory of God in our lives; we need to start letting the glory of God out of our lives. We must manifest the presence of God in our daily lives, not just in meetings, but everywhere. God’s glory must be so evident in us that people will start coming up to us saying ‘what must I do to be saved?’ They will come to us in desperation because everything they have put their trust in has come to nothing.

Choose

What must we do? It is time to choose who we are going to serve. A Joshua generation is being raised up, and we can be part of it. It was Joshua who said to the children of Israel:

Now, therefore, fear the LORD and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served, and serve the LORD. Choose for yourselves today whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD (Joshua 24:14-15).

It is time to get rid of the idols, time to decide to serve the Lord. At Freedom, as a church, we have made that decision. We are going to serve the Lord. No matter what it costs and no matter what it takes; no matter how much we have to do that we might rather not do, we are going to serve the Lord. And we want other people to be part of that, because God is going to raise up churches and ministries around the world to be part of this move, to equip this end-time generation.

It is also time to choose individually: who am I going to serve? Am I going to serve the idols of my past, or am I going to surrender and serve the living God? Have I been serving myself, have I been serving the enemy, or have I been serving God?  Who am I going to serve?

As for me, I am going to serve God.

He is going to pour out His light, pour out His Spirit: He is going to equip us beyond our wildest dreams. Honestly, some of the things I have seen, some of the things the other prophetic people have seen coming – that shaking of the world’s systems – it will be like nothing in history, nothing that has ever taken place before, and we have to be ready for it. But God is asking, are we ready to volunteer in the day of His power (Ps 110:3)?

He is looking for those volunteers, because the day of His power is surely coming.

Related articles from FreedomARC

SoundTrack: All we like sheep (Handel’s Messiah) – via YouTube

Engage with God like never before!

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

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32. Nations Will Stream To It

Mike Parsons –

Now it will come about that in the last days the mountain of the house of the LORD will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; and all the nations will stream to it (Isa 2:2).

There is going to be a shaking.
I would encourage you to read and meditate on these verses:

And His voice shook the earth then, but now He has promised, saying, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven”. This expression, “Yet once more,” denotes the removing of those things which can be shaken, as of created things, so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire (Heb 12:26-29).

Shaking

It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb 10:31). But we have an opportunity to surrender to that fire, to allow Him to consume all the rubbish that is in our lives so that He can prepare us. Everything that has been man-made and created in this world – every system, such as humanism, that has been created to rule over the world and to show forth man’s power and what man can do – all of those things are going to be shaken in these days, and shaken to such a degree that the whole structure is going to collapse.

We have to be ready.

The religious systems are going to be shaken and shown up as false, counterfeit and worthless: they will have no answers for people in these days. The whole worldly system will be shaken to its very core. We have seen what a little ripple in the financial system can do, with people buying up debt which couldn’t be repaid: it shook the world – and that is nothing compared to what it is going to be like when these things are not just shaken a little, but are shaken until they totally collapse.

The same is true of the education system, governmental systems, the media, arts, the entertainment business, the whole medical system. There are going to be diseases which the medical experts have no answers for, and some of them will actually be man-made created diseases which are going to be released in the world. I have seen this, and I know others have too. But when the world has no idea what to do in the face of these diseases, we are going to have the answers. That’s why we need to be equipped with healing power.

Meltdown

Where are people going to go when the world’s system is in total meltdown, in famine and collapse? When every one of those systems is shaken to its core, their root of materialism is going to be exposed. Materialism has been defined as ‘looking for material answers to meet spiritual needs’, and that is how the world’s system operates: it offers things to meet our need, and it will be exposed as a sham. All the counterfeits are going to be exposed for what they are: powerless to bring eternal salvation or lasting change. All man-made humanistic systems will be shaken; all the ‘-ologies’ and the ‘-isms’ and suchlike philosophies are going to fall. They are going to become meaningless when people have nothing and nowhere to go, when everything they have put their trust in is suddenly useless.

So where are they going to go? They are going to be looking for a people who are ready. They are going to turn to a people who have the answers, to a people who are operating in genuine supernatural power, who can offer safety and security and provision, healing and miracles. Every system that man trusts in and relies upon will fail. All the cultural systems, the whole of society as we know it, will crumble.  The Word of God talks about it, and that is why God is calling us worldwide to be prepared for this to take place. That is why He is warning us, that is why He is saying now is the time to deal with the stumbling blocks, to deal with the idols, and to allow Him to start moving in us so that we are ready when it comes.

This is what it will be like:

The proud look of man will be abased and the loftiness of man will be humbled, and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. For the LORD of hosts will have a day of reckoning against everyone who is proud and lofty and against everyone who is lifted up, that he may be abased. Against all the lofty mountains, against all the hills that are lifted up against the knowledge of truth (Isa 2:11-14).

‘Mountains’ are authorities, systems of authority, and they are going to come down because their pride is in man.

It was knowledge, apart from God, that the devil offered Eve in the garden of Eden, and she took up that offer. Ever since, man has been trying to do things apart from God, and set up his own systems to achieve this.

They are all coming down.

Soundtrack: We Shall Not Be Shaken – Matt Redman (via YouTube)

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Engage with God like never before!

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

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