God is on the move…always! If you look to long at what God did yesterday, you will miss what He is doing today. Should we celebrate what we saw Him do, what He let us experience? Absolutely, but stand your stone of remembrance and look for what He is up to today.
Think about the followers of John the Baptist. These were exciting times…God had been quiet for 400 years and now here is this locust eating, camel hair wearing, nut job speaking the truth of God out in the wilderness. He didn’t look like the religious leaders of the day, that’s for sure, but he had the Holy Spirit all over him, since birth in fact. His mission…prepare the way for the One, point to the One, and get out of the way of the One once He came.
John recognized his call, his purpose very clearly, but more importantly he recognized when his mission was complete.
When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, "Look, the Lamb of God!" John 1:36
He encouraged his followers to leave him and follow the current move of God. Okay, this may be an extreme example, after all I am talking about when Jesus came in the flesh.
How about this one? One of my favorite OT stories is the bronze snake on the pole in Moses’ time that brought healing to the Israelites in the desert (Numbers chapter 21 I believe). It was an amazing God event. However, too much attention for too long turned it into an idol.
He (Hezekiah) removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. 2Kings 18:4
I’ve heard people say, “Be careful…you don’t want to get ahead of God”. Yeah, good luck with that! I’d be thrilled to grab a hold of God’s shirt tail and try to hang on for awhile. I don’t think “careful” or “fear” is part of the vocabulary of heaven. As soon as you have more to loose, or maintain, than you have opportunities to gain, you may be working for a Kingdom other than God’s.
These are exciting times my friends…let’s head for the biggest, highest roller coaster there is! When a bigger one is built…let’s head there.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The Purple Flame Vision
I just returned from a long weekend in Atlanta, GA where we (Marg, Josh, Mom, and I) went to a couple of different “Mountain of Worship” (MOW) events. Great experience…fun three nights, but the point of this writing is the vision I received while there.
I am not much of a vision person, not meaning that I don’t believe in them…I do, but rather I have not experienced much in that area personally. Maybe that’s changing...I hope it is. I actually had two separate visions very closely related, as well as close in time. We were about an hour into the current worship time when the first one came…
While worshiping, the bongo drums just seemed to stand out to me very powerfully. As I was listening I could sense Jesus dancing. I didn’t “see” anything, not even in my “minds eye” (whatever that is), but I could sense Him and His movements. I’m not going to try to explain this so that it makes sense, I’m just going to tell the story. I knew the WHOLE point of His dancing was to simply have fun, and He was (I learned Jesus dances a lot like I would if I had enough courage). He invited me to join him, which I did, briefly. I opened my eyes for a moment to reengage this world (not sure why) to discover I was still safe and ready for more. It now seemed the first vision was simply a warm up for what was to come.
This time, when I closed my eyes someone was in my vision PLAYING the bongos. It didn’t take me too long to discover it was Jesus doing the playing. He sat off to the left in front of me. I was then aware that I was in the midst of a very large crowd…all christians. There was a “performance” of sorts going on in front of us that we had gathered to watch. It was the Holy Spirit dancing before us in a beautiful display that only God could put on.
All of the sudden, He grew to a tremendous size and filled the sky. I could sense Him saying, “You like fireworks…watch this!” This was followed by amazing blasts of color and feelings to the awe of the crowd…all of this to the rhythm of Jesus’ Bongos. The color show finalized with a large purple “cloud” above us. The cloud then fell down to us as handful size purple flames! A few of us couldn’t wait to catch them, but most fell to the ground and went out. It was clear that everyone in the crowd who wanted to catch the flames did. While it was exciting to have two handfuls of purple flames personally, it was much sadder to see the vast majority fizzle on the ground.
Those of us with the flames started to rub the hands of those who became willing, who then also had the purple flames. After awhile the entire crowd had two hands full. I noticed the individual flames became one huge purple flame over the whole crowd. Some how, we joined with other groups who were also ablaze and became a mountain of purple flame. From the mountain I was a part of, I could see other mountains also ablaze in the distance.
I was then given a perspective from space, and could see the entire Earth ablaze in purple flame. Finally, one person shot up from the Earth and flew past me. It looked a little like the final scene from the only good Matrix movie. It was Jesus! I had a sense of Him saying, “There you go Papa…what do you think of that!”
I don’t want to try to interpret this vision, but only share what I saw. I will tell you this however…the point in time of the vision when there where only a few holding the purple flames did not feel special, but sad. The only desire at that time was to give it away as quickly as possible and see everyone have the same thing.
I am not much of a vision person, not meaning that I don’t believe in them…I do, but rather I have not experienced much in that area personally. Maybe that’s changing...I hope it is. I actually had two separate visions very closely related, as well as close in time. We were about an hour into the current worship time when the first one came…
While worshiping, the bongo drums just seemed to stand out to me very powerfully. As I was listening I could sense Jesus dancing. I didn’t “see” anything, not even in my “minds eye” (whatever that is), but I could sense Him and His movements. I’m not going to try to explain this so that it makes sense, I’m just going to tell the story. I knew the WHOLE point of His dancing was to simply have fun, and He was (I learned Jesus dances a lot like I would if I had enough courage). He invited me to join him, which I did, briefly. I opened my eyes for a moment to reengage this world (not sure why) to discover I was still safe and ready for more. It now seemed the first vision was simply a warm up for what was to come.
This time, when I closed my eyes someone was in my vision PLAYING the bongos. It didn’t take me too long to discover it was Jesus doing the playing. He sat off to the left in front of me. I was then aware that I was in the midst of a very large crowd…all christians. There was a “performance” of sorts going on in front of us that we had gathered to watch. It was the Holy Spirit dancing before us in a beautiful display that only God could put on.
All of the sudden, He grew to a tremendous size and filled the sky. I could sense Him saying, “You like fireworks…watch this!” This was followed by amazing blasts of color and feelings to the awe of the crowd…all of this to the rhythm of Jesus’ Bongos. The color show finalized with a large purple “cloud” above us. The cloud then fell down to us as handful size purple flames! A few of us couldn’t wait to catch them, but most fell to the ground and went out. It was clear that everyone in the crowd who wanted to catch the flames did. While it was exciting to have two handfuls of purple flames personally, it was much sadder to see the vast majority fizzle on the ground.
Those of us with the flames started to rub the hands of those who became willing, who then also had the purple flames. After awhile the entire crowd had two hands full. I noticed the individual flames became one huge purple flame over the whole crowd. Some how, we joined with other groups who were also ablaze and became a mountain of purple flame. From the mountain I was a part of, I could see other mountains also ablaze in the distance.
I was then given a perspective from space, and could see the entire Earth ablaze in purple flame. Finally, one person shot up from the Earth and flew past me. It looked a little like the final scene from the only good Matrix movie. It was Jesus! I had a sense of Him saying, “There you go Papa…what do you think of that!”
I don’t want to try to interpret this vision, but only share what I saw. I will tell you this however…the point in time of the vision when there where only a few holding the purple flames did not feel special, but sad. The only desire at that time was to give it away as quickly as possible and see everyone have the same thing.
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