GOD IS MOVING IN YOUR LIFE TODAY Prophetic Insight for the Year 2000

As I was sending an email this morning to encourage a Pastor, the Lord began to speak to me. He said, "What every believer needs more than anything is a radical, living, dependent relationship with the Holy Spirit. One in which He speaks them every day."

I said, "Yes Lord, that’s right."

The Lord said, "Some believers hear from me once a week but they wouldn’t think of eating once a week." The Lord reminded me about when Jesus said "Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God".

THE STAPLE OF LIFE

In a moment I realized what God was getting at. Bread was the staple of life when Jesus said that. The first church ate bread every day-- not once a week. Why would a believer settle for a word from God once a week? Jesus said "give us our daily bread" lets ask for our "daily word". Every believer needs to fight for what God wants to give us. Some of us are in a desert place and we are dry. Don’t give up. Press in. Seek Him. Ask Him for His Word-- i.e. your daily word-- even several times a day.

CONSIDER THE BENEFITS OF HEARING GOD SPEAK HIS WORD.

Hearing God is life. (Isaiah 55:3).

God sends His word to heal and deliver (Psalm 107:19-20).

God’s word brings understanding and direction (Psalm 119:104-105).

God’s word is Life and health to our flesh (Proverbs 4:20).

God doesn’t slumber or sleep (Psalm 121:4). God is working in your life regardless of what you see, hear, feel - or don’t feel. Faith is the substance of thing hoped for - the evidence of things not seen (Heb. 11:1).

IF IT FEELS LIKE GOD ISN'T DOING ANYTHING

I felt the Lord say that far too often if or when there are not radical fireworks and earth-shaking dynamics in the local church that many believers don’t think that God is doing anything in that church or in their personal life. Therefore a lot of believers are focusing on what God is obviously doing in other places with other people and they miss what God is doing in their life and in their church.

The result is a lack of expectation and a lack of faith in the local church. God’s first work in a believers life is PREPARATION. Long before God does something obviously great and glorious, He does the work of preparation. In Exodus 3, Moses was on the back side of the desert tending the herd. Paul spent 12-plus years mending tents. Joseph was promised greatness and he spends 13 years in prison and it was all preparation.

WHEN DESPERATE

When people get desperate they end up going to the currently anointed place to see what God is doing.

God is really for unity and I am not at all against visiting other places where God is moving, but the reality is that prior to the current move of God in that "other place" where people are being healed and saved etc.---they were experiencing what "seemed to be a spiritual lull" but they had the eyes of faith to see past what they were not seeing to what COULD BE.

They realized that God was indeed working in their church and in their lives. As they embraced the seemingly ordinary daily grind in spite of a lack of tangible dynamics, God was truly doing a good work-- individually and corporately.

The sobering thing is that they could have ignored the small, not-so-obvious thing God was doing and there most likely would not have been a more obvious visit-- because they didn’t embrace THE PREPARATION.

Any church that experiences the visit of God where He is obviously at work in an overt tangible way first recognized God working in what seems to be the mundane.

If you miss God in the secular--- you will not likely see Him in the Sacred.

BOB CRAINE, PASTOR, VINEYARD CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP