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We live in an exciting time. Renewal and revival whirl around us like a
hurricane. All around us believers are filled with energy and hope.
Healing and signs and wonders are on the increase, and the Lord appears to
be renewing apostolic ministry. The sky is the limit. But have we settled
for “power” and not “presence?” In this season of blessing have we
neglected the foundations of church and kingdom?
The world-wide church is facing an
unprecedented time of shaking and the Lord is birthing a new thing. Only
that which is built on solid foundations will remain. When all that can be
shaken is being shaken, we need wise master builders (1 Cor.3:10). Is
there a biblical picture of the work of rebuilding that might be a
prophetic parable for our time?
The
Renewal of Apostolic Ministry
And you also are being built
up into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer sacrifices
acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:5
On the morning of February 4th I was reading in Nehemiah and Ezra,
thinking about the church in the new millennium. The Lord was helping me
pull some pieces together when I had to leave to meet some friends for
coffee.
I
drove to the home of Nick Fenn, a good friend who was a worship teacher at
University of the Nations in Hawaii. When Nick got into my car he began
telling me about a dream that another friend's nine-year-old son had had
early this same morning. The boy’s name was Joshua.
In his dream Joshua was standing outside a temple and God
was standing beside him. God spoke to Joshua and told him that the temple
had to be destroyed because the people were not worshipping the true God;
they were worshipping other things.
God told Joshua to kick the temple with his heel. Before he did so,
Joshua yelled at the people inside, warning them about what was going to
happen. Some began running out of the temple, but there were some that
stayed in the temple and who wouldn't come out. Joshua then kicked the
wall. The people who remained inside were standing under their idols when
the temple started to collapse. Joshua saw the idols that they had made
fall on the people and crush their heads.
The LORD is shaking all that can be shaken, that which is built on
the Rock alone may remain. Old things must come down before new things can
rise from the dust to replace them. As Graham Cooke put it,
We cannot hold onto our old order and still progress to a new level
of anointing. When a new paradigm unfolds before us, it will always take
us back to ground zero. Paradigms do not build on each other; they replace
each other. God loves this! We start again with a new dependency rising
out of fresh inadequacy.
A Divine Confrontation, Destiny Image, 1999
The renewal of apostolic ministry is about rebuilding foundations
in order to extend the kingdom. Extending the kingdom involves both works
of power and works of weakness. Paul is one of the best human examples we
have of apostleship, and he “gladly boast[ed] in weakness.” The
ultimate model for apostolic ministry is Jesus Himself, who was
“crucified because of weakness, but lives because of the power of God”
(1 Cor.13:4).
In
Power and in Weakness
Most
of us understand works of power. Contemporary renewal movements have been
founded on signs and wonders, healing and prophecy. Fewer among us
understand the way of weakness, because it rarely seems “efficient”
and it demands personal sacrifice. For goal-oriented people it also means
growing out of control into a ministry of true empowerment of others.
This
past summer I was at my daughter’s baseball game and when she wasn’t
at bat or on bases I was reading in Jimmy Long, Generating
Hope: A Strategy for Reaching the Post Modern Generation. He begins
his book by describing how he went to University with the idea of becoming
a Meteorologist, specializing in hurricanes.
Hurricanes
are complex weather systems that are governed by two primary types of
wind: feeder bands, the conflicting and multiple currents that generate
the many funnels that form and cause all the destruction; and currents,
the wind force that actually determines the direction of the entire storm.
The current is like an invisible river channel, a track that steers the
storm.
When
I read this I felt the Lord call to my mind renewal and its context.
Renewal and revival are like the feeder bands of the hurricane. It’s
easy to focus on the powerful things that God is doing and become caught
up in that excitement. When we do this it’s easy to miss the broader
context and direction, the current that acts as a channel for the storm.
If
the whirling storm is renewal and revival in our time, an expression of
great power and rapid change, the context and direction is Apostolic: “I
will build my church.” Renewal and revival are always unto the church
and the kingdom, and the work of apostles is to build the foundation (1
Cor.3:10 ff).
As
these things played through my mind I continued reading in Generating
Hope until I came to this statement two chapters later: “When
the sky is the limit it’s easy to neglect foundations.” The Lord
stopped me short with that one.
Apostolic
Builders
“When
the sky is the limit it’s easy to neglect foundations.”
In
May of 1999 Graham Cooke spoke locally in a series of meetings. He
referred to “wise master builders” as those who build, and don’t
merely bless. Too many leaders prefer to merely “bless” the work of
ministry around them rather than invest their lives in building solid
foundations. We settle for “power” and don’t pursue “presence.”
We want results quickly and don’t want to spend the time investing our
lives in a solid foundation. Nehemiah is a biblical picture of the work of
rebuilding that is a prophetic parable for our time.
Nehemiah
is an apostolic builder. His name means literally, “Yahweh comforts.”
His story begins in the book of Ezra and then continues into the book with
his name.
The
period covered by these two books is roughly 110 years. The period of
rebuilding the temple under Zerubbabel, inspired by the preaching of
Zechariah and Haggai, was twenty-one years. Sixty years later Ezra brought
a revival and proper teaching on worship. After thirteen years Nehemiah
came to work on the walls. Some scholars think that Malachi also lived and
prophesied during these years.
“You see the distress we are in,
how Jerusalem lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire.
Come and let us build the wall of Jerusalem,
that we may no longer be a reproach.”
2:17
“And they shall rebuild
the old ruins,
they shall raise up the former desolations,
and they shall repair the ruined cities,
the desolations of many generations.”
Isa.61:4
These
verses are a prophetic statement of the church in our time, as well as a
prophetic call to the apostolic work of laying new foundations and
rebuilding the wall. The wall, as we know from the New Testament, is
composed of living stones.
Now therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners,
but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,
having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone,
in whom the whole building, being fitted together,
grows into a holy temple in the LORD,
in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling of God in the
Spirit.
Ephesians
2:19-22.
In
our time, in my opinion, the church has largely lost alignment with the
purposes of God, becoming a defensive structure against the world, rather
than an offensive army on the move, taking back ground from the enemy.
Unfortunately, because the church has been mired in ways of doing and
being that are more grounded in culture than in Scripture, leaders have
largely encouraged passivity and “church” has become a spectator
sport. We are in desperate need of a new reformation. Rick Joyner comments:
"Spectator
sport" Christianity is another cause for much of the lukewarmness
that now prevails in the church. It is also a primary reason for many of
the problems that churches experience with people becoming disgruntled, or
even worse, bored. Every Christian has been given a calling, a ministry.
They were known before the creation of the world and called with a
purpose. The frustration of not being equipped or given the place to
fulfill what we were created for is causing many of the church splits and
other problems many experience today.
Megatrends in the New
Millennium
The
LORD desires to rebuild the foundations and build the wall! For this
purpose He is raising up apostles and prophets who will declare the word
of the LORD and restore alignment, releasing His people from captivity.
As
the church in our day is captive to culture, so the Temple in Nehemiah’s
day lay in ruins. The people of God had been in captivity in Babylon for
generations. But God raised up prophets and apostles (though in those days
the term didn’t exist) to build up His people, and eventually to lead
them in restoration of worship. Much more than this, however, as God
regathered His people He was restoring their identity as a people.
Nearly eighty
years before Nehemiah returned to the land, the Lord raised up the first
apostle of restoration in Zerubbabel, who was appointed by King Artaxerxes
of Babylon as the governor of Judah. As governor of Judah, Zerubbabel was
responsible for rebuilding the Temple. Zechariah had a series of visions,
and in the fourth vision the word of LORD to him was not to trust to his
own resources or abilities.
6
The angel answered and said to me,
“This is the word of the LORD
to Zerubbabel;
‘Not by might, nor by power,
but by My Spirit,
says
the LORD of hosts.’
7
Who are you, O great mountain?
with
shouts of “Grace, grace to it!”
8
Moreover the word of the LORD came to me, saying:
“The hands of Zerubbabel
have
laid the foundation of the temple;
that the LORD of hosts has sent
Me to you.
9
For who has despised the day of small things?
the
plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel.
which
scan to and fro throughout the whole earth.”
Zech.4:6-10
The first verse cautions Zerubbabel to depend on the
LORD. The second verse declares that it is only by grace that God’s work
is accomplished, and also that it is God’s intention to be gracious in
this work. He has not forgotten His people (“Zerubbabel” means
literally, “God remembers.”)
Who Has Despised the Day of Small Things?
“Who has despised the day of small things?”
In our time the LORD is shaking all things, and many churches are
experiencing profound discomfort. The
wine of renewal that the LORD has been pouring out is bursting the old
skins, because it is the LORD’s intention that no structure that limits
His purpose shall stand.
To the eyes of man these may seem to be small things. When old
foundations are crumbling and new things are being birthed they can seem
small and insignificant. The old things have great stature in our eyes
because they were structures where the LORD dwelt in power.
The old things were good things for a time, until the cloud began
to move.
But as the old walls crumble, the LORD is releasing new vision and
new leaders – Moses passes the torch to a Joshua generation. It is
striking to me that the name of the boy who had the dream of kicking out
the walls of the temple was Joshua. Joshua represents the new leadership
that will take the land, slaying giants and taking cities and giving the
glory to God.
The Joshua mentioned in Zechariah 3:9 is the high priest, “For
behold, the stone that I have laid before Joshua. Upon the stone are seven
eyes…”
“For these seven rejoice to see the plumb line in the hand of
Zerubbabel.”
The seven eyes of the LORD are on the stone that the LORD has laid
before Joshua. The LORD rejoices to see the work that Zerubbabel is doing
as he stands upon the wall with a plumb-line in his hand. God’s purpose
through his servant is to evaluate the wall and see where it is bowing or
bulging. The plumb-line will reveal exactly how the work is going. Where
the wall is crooked it must be pulled down, and where it is straight it
will stand. "The time has come for judgment to begin, and it begins
with us first" (1 Peter
4:17).
Building Inspector
God
is coming to the Church like a building inspector; to see if the things we
have built will measure up to His code. A house can be built in many ways,
and it’s not uncommon for contractors to cut corners. What can seem
adequate can completely fail inspection. When a building inspector
determines that a house isn’t up to code, the work stops. Nothing else
is done until the work conforms to code.
Much
of what we know as God’s building has been built upon weak foundations,
foundations that in fact are not up to code because they were not built as
the LORD prescribed. The easy answer is some simple adjustments. But just
as “no one puts a new patch on an old garment,” so small adjustments
are not the answer. “Band aid” solutions don’t help the victim of a
cataclysmic event. In the same way, shoring up the old building will only
make the whole structure unsound. Rather, we need to start anew.
In
volume 7, No.4 of Living Water magazine Randall Kittle recalls an old Cary
Grant movie called Mr. Blandings
Builds His Dream House. He
relates the story like this:
“In
this movie he buys an old house that is in need of some major repairs. He
has a building contractor come out to give him an estimate for remodeling.
To his surprise, the contractor hangs a rock from a string and looks at
the house (makes a plumb-line) then matter-of-factly says "Tear it down." The shocked look on the owner's face
causes the builder to explain. "We
can't repair it' the foundation is crooked. It's leaning. You’'ve got to
tear it down and start over."
“Everyone
knows that if you put up a building on a crooked foundation, your building
is in imminent danger of falling. The higher you build the more certain
will be the collapse. Is the Holy Spirit trying to tell us that our
spiritual house is faulty? It will not last if the foundation is out of
plumb - not in alignment with God's true and undeniable measure!”
A
few days before I began writing this article the front page of our local
paper shocked me with a word from the LORD. There on the cover was a
church steeple, with a huge backhoe in the foreground, and the crumpled
remains of a wooden building spread out before it. The caption read,
"Out with the old."
The picture showed a mess of tangled and broken
wood. Graham Cooke, in A Divine Confrontation, comments
that:
Order is always birthed out of chaos. When chaos surrounds
us, the Holy Spirit broods over us...and God is creating a new
masterpiece. We cannot hold onto our old order and still progress to a new
level of anointing. When a new paradigm unfolds before us, it will always
take us back to ground zero. Paradigms do not build on each other; they
replace each other. God loves this! We start again with a new dependency
rising out of fresh inadequacy.
Passing
Inspection
“Unless the LORD builds the house, they
labor in vain who build it.”
In
his article, Kittle continues:
“Building
things up to code can be a little more costly, but there is almost always
a good reason behind the building code - even if we don't know what it is.
Doing it the right way may seem more difficult or expensive until you have
to tear things down and redo them. Only after the building inspectors have
approved each department-structural, plumbing, electrical, masonry,
heating and air-conditioning can you get a certificate of occupancy.
“Similarly,
God has been giving the Church great seasons of visitation, but He is not
going to dwell with us until we are "up to code." Each and every
area of church-life must be in alignment with God's design. Once we have
removed everything that is not of God from His house, He will be able to
take up occupancy and dwell with us there. And that is His desire far more
than it is ours-to dwell with us in His House!”
During times of renewal many ministries grow very prominent
because they were part of the old order establishing the new. Was there a
time like this in the Bible?
John the Baptist represented a transition time in God’s
purposes. He was sent to prepare the way for the Messiah.
But when the Messiah arrived, John said, “He must increase, and I
must decrease.” John understood that when a new paradigm is being born,
there is no place for the old ways.
In the same way many ministries which have been prominent
in renewal will begin to decrease as God reestablishes His church in new
ways of being. The church in the new millennium won’t look like the old
church. Some of the old
leaders will transition to the new thing, but many will not.
God is raising up Nehemiahs who will build a new foundation,
calling His people out of captivity and building on new foundations as He
reveals the plan. Rick Joyner comments:
However,
there is about to be a clear distinction between those who have received
their authority from above, and those who have promoted themselves, or
been promoted by institutions. The latter authorities will be increasingly
revealed as operating in the control, political and religious spirits.
This is Satan's
"cord of three strands" that he has used to bind the church.
That cord will soon be broken, and the true liberty of the Spirit released
in the world, and the church
which will fall into increasing tyranny and bondage to
evil. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty" (II
Corinthians 3:17).
Freedom is coming. A new breed of leader is going to arise
who will fulfill the mandate of true New Testament ministry to equip the
people, and allow them to do the ministry. This will probably come in many
forms, but it will come. It must. A true New Testament church leader is
only successful if he or she is raising up others who can do what they do.
Is that not the model that the Lord gave us for leadership? Then we will
also have true church growth, which is not just growing fat, but growing
strong as well.
Rick Joyner,
Megatrends in the New Millennium
A
New Way of Building: Team Ministry
Those who built on the wall, and those who carried burdens,
loaded
themselves so that with one hand they worked at construction,
and
with the other hand carried a weapon.
Every one of the builders had his sword girded at his side as he
built.
And the one who sounded the trumpet was beside me.
Then I said to the nobles and
rulers, and the rest of the people,
“The work is great and extensive,
and we are separated far from
one another on the wall.
Wherever you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there.
Our God will fight for us.”
Nehemiah 4:17-19
One of the
astonishing things about chapters 3 and 5 is that virtually EVERYONE is
involved in the work of rebuilding. There is no apparent distinction
between leaders and people.
In fact, even Nehemiah and his servant worked together on the wall.
Nehemiah himself did not take the portion that was rightly his (5:15) and
personally fed 150 at his table daily (5:17). In the process of working
together the people of God rediscovered community.
Team ministry will be increasingly important in the new
work that God is doing. No longer will authority be restricted to a few
specially anointed leaders, creating huge bottlenecks in the work of
building the kingdom. Rather, authority will flow down like anointing oil
from the beard of Aaron, a fathering and releasing work that is a hallmark
of the true apostolic.
One day last fall I was out walking with my wife in the hills near
by our home. As is typical for a late fall day in lake country, some
Canadian geese were forming a huge V above the hillside, heading south.
From our vantage point we were almost at eye level with the
formation. I watched with fascination as I saw something take place that I
had only previously heard about. The lead goose dropped from the front of
the V to the rear, and another goose took his place.
I felt the LORD speak to me that so it should be in His body.
Leadership must be flexible, and should be shared. Breaking the trail for
the entire V formation is tiring. The lead goose bears the brunt of the
forces in the air. Each goose along the V does less work than the goose in
front.
Eventually the goose in the lead gets tired. Trading off this
position with another goose allows each goose to rest, and it also allows
each strong goose to experience the exhilaration of being out in front.
Geese seem to have no need for control, and no lack of humility!
There are a number of challenges we face to true team ministry.
First, we as leaders are accustomed to control. If God is in control, what
are WE to do? We thought that was OUR job. If anyone can bring a word in
our services, where does that leave our sermon? We are accustomed to being
valued for our highly visible giftings. Will the church still need us? Our
insecurities become not only our problem but a bottleneck to ministry. We
need to remind ourselves that our task is not to DO the work, but to equip
others to serve. We need to recover Ephesians 4:16, where the body is
built "as each part does its work."
Second, professionalism has crept into our churches. "Let the
professional do it." Both people and pastors are affected by this
thinking. It’s helpful to get outside our own culture for perspective.
W.C. Lees, in "Second Thoughts on Missions,” writes,
Let me
picture for you a jungle friend of mine. He is five feet, two inches in
height and pug nosed. Two enormous wild bear tusks stand out like hat pegs
from his punctured ear lobes. His heavy earrings are of brass. Since
childhood, they have stretched the lower part of his lobes, until now they
are two inches longer than mine. His only covering, apart from a loin
cloth, are festoons of beads around his neck, and black grass bands around
his legs just below the knees. He is just literate, which is a notable
achievement, for literacy comes with the gospel.
It is
easy to think of him as a quaint hangover from the past, - a "wild
man" from Borneo. Yet he is a pastor, and one well able to use the
Scriptures - his only book. He is emphatically a better pastor than I am.
He has not been to a bible college, nor attended school. There were none
to which he could go. He is, however, a man who is relentlessly obedient
to every scrap of light which the Scriptures bring him. To such God keeps
his promise and gives further understanding... (John 7:17)
Our culture demands serious training in order to be a
“professional” leader. Once we have the training, we feel that we are
not honoring God or our people unless we exercise our gifting to bless the
body. Where fishermen were preachers and teachers and apostles in the
first century, now we must have degrees.
There are two problems here. First, as David Watson put it,
"No man has a spiritual ministry by virtue of his education."
Worse, the willingness of the unschooled to teach decreases the more the
professionals exercise their gifts. What farmer or mechanic wants to be
compared to the professional speaker? The equipping environment, where the
message of a fisherman could carry as much weight as the seminary
graduate, has been destroyed.
It is the task of leaders to release and empower the word to come
through every member of the body. Think what an impact we will make on the
world when we can recognize the preaching anointing on Marge the secretary
and George the printer! You have to KNOW they will impact their world.
Professionalism also means that we insist on looking and sounding
respectable. We want the sermon neatly laid out, with logical flow and
three points that rhyme. If we insist on this being the highest goal, we
will achieve it. We may have wonderful sounding sermons, but will they
touch the heart? What will we lose in the process?
For one, we lose the ability of the blue collar worker to speak
with understanding to those like him.
Third, we suffer under the cultural impact of individualism. We
have lost the biblical perspective on the life of the Spirit in the
community. Living in our western atomistic and cause/effect world, we have
limited the life of the Spirit too much to the individual. Paul would have
placed far more emphasis on the Spirit in the Body (cf. I Cor.10:17,
11:29). We need to discern the body. Jesus is no longer an individual; He
is the gathered power of the community. We need a new understanding of the
corporate presence of Christ. "Where two or three are gathered in My
name, there am I among them."
Conclusion
Change is often messy, and few of us like change. It is a challenge
to all of us to release control and allow new ways of doing and being to
arise. Leaders are needed to correct, protect, and direct as the entire
people of God are equipped and released. In the first two centuries AD the
church grew and spread like wild fire apart from buildings and programs
because all God’s people carried the good news. The modern house church
movement is attempting to recover the dynamic of that day.
New wine requires new wineskins, otherwise the skins will burst and
the wine is lost. The Lord Himself is bringing change to structures. His
heart is to see all His people released to serve Him. Old structures are
falling down and God is raising up a new generation of apostolic leaders
and fathers who are not afraid to try new ways and walk without maps in
dependence on the LORD.
Nehemiah is a type of the apostolic builder. He walked with
integrity, courage, and wisdom, and in dependence on the LORD. He walked
as an equal among brothers, although he had the right to ask for honor and
privilege. He was instrumental in rebuilding the temple as a place where
God could dwell.
We need to prepare our hearts and get ready for the coming
Reformation: the liberation of body life in the power of the Spirit!
“The
God of heaven Himself will prosper us;
Therefore we His servants will arise and build….” Ezra 2:20
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