A BRIDGE TO THE THINGS TO COME One of the most powerful perks of being created in the image of God is the ability to dream, day and night. I use the word perk, here as it is derived from the word percolate. Dreams and images from God comes when we are taking the time to steam with God. Very much like when you take coffee powder and you add boiling water. After a period of fusion you have a drinkable product. It is part of our divine DNA. God has placed within us the desire to dream. Father God wants us to dream our desires for Him. He wants us to dream about ministry, saving souls, doing great exploits, doing miracles, setting up businesses, conquering for Christ and making the kingdoms of this world the kingdoms of our God. God wants us to dream large so that He can fulfill the desires of our hearts. He wants us to dream ourselves out of our present situations and bondages. He wants us to dream ourselves out of the parameter of the present day church. God is waiting for a prophetic people that will use their God given perception and imagination to explore and pioneer their dreams. When we offer our imagination (inner eye, thoughts), and intuition (instinct, perception, insight) to Father God, it will be like a clean canvas to an artist. God will paint his lavish and grand schemes for the churchs' future in our hearts. God chose us, invested the ability to dream so that He can accomplish the desires of our hearts Yet in our attempt to please God, we kill the very capacity He gave us to transform the church from the good and acceptable, to the perfect will of God. Our motto has been “to really please God, we must get rid of everything to do with self”. My prayer has been, “none of me, all of you” for years. God had none of us before we were born and He did not like it. He created us in His image for his pleasure. A scriptural prayer would be, “all of me saturated with all of you”. The church has certainly been perishing because of a lack of knowledge. The false spirituality of the church that is founded on the foundation of the fear of the divine nature of God, has allowed the unbelieving world to lead the way in inventions, architecture, and artistic expression. The unbelieving world should stand in awe of the divine expression of the church. We as the church should lead in every area of new invention. We as the church should set the trend in construction, business and commerce. Being created in the image of God means that we have within ‘self’ (complete personality) the ability to dream and imagine new things, different ways of doing. We have the divine ability to create new inventions, spiritual and in the market place. It is not scriptural to crucify the resurrected man and to call that discipleship. Rom 6: 5- 9(nkjv) 5 for if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. 7 for He who has died has been freed from sin. 8 now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, 9 knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. Even the statement of John the baptist; “He must increase but I must decrease” is often misapplied in order to endorse this self depreciating form of christianity. We need to look at the context. He was passing the baton to Jesus. His job; to prepare the way for the messiah was complete. It was important for him to get out of the way, as he closed the old testament prophetic ministry. Jesus would usher in an entire new dispensation. Jesus has since passed the baton to us so that we might increase. We have inherited a form of church that strips people of their God given gifts, talents, desires and unique divine personality, under the guise of devotion to Christ. This stripped down version of christianity removes the believer from being a trend setting, life rousing miracle worker. The regular believers role is reduced to financial and emotional support of those that are in public ministry. At some point in time we need to grow beyond ‘sinners saved by grace’. We are so busy seeking the favor of God that we do not realize that we are suppose to operate from his favor. We are no more servants, but we are his friends. As we learn to live life from our intimate position in christ we will bring forth the greatest exploits of all time. After all it was Jesus that said: John 14:12-14 (nkjv) 12 “most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to my Father.13 and whatever you ask in my name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.14 if you ask anything in my name, I will do it. We must reveal who our Father is through creative expression. We do not become culturally relevant when we become like the culture, but rather when we model what the culture hungers to become. The hungry for God, world is waiting for a culture of divinely inspired dreamers who’s lifestyle of pioneering the bridge to the things to come will liberate and active a new breed of believers that will do all to the glory of God with our complete competent divinely endowed gifted and brilliant artistic capacity.
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