PUSH: Persevere Until Success Happens Through Prayer (8 page)

The Church in the earth, birthed forth from the agony and passion of Christ, is His living will and testament; it is His Word alive in the world today. We are a living testimony to the power of God. We are called to overcome the world, to
“overcome evil with good”
(Romans 12:21). Jesus told His disciples that whoever was born of Him—whoever trusted and believed on Him—would do far greater things than even He did.

Believe Me: I am in My Father and My Father is in Me. If you can’t believe that, believe what you see—these works. The person who trusts Me will not only do what I’m doing but even greater things, because I, on My way to the Father, am giving you the same work to do that I’ve been doing. You can count on it. From now on, whatever you request along the lines of who I am and what I am doing, I’ll do it. That’s how the Father will be seen for who He is in the Son. I mean it. Whatever you request in this way, I’ll do
(John 14:11-14 MSG).

The Church is Christ’s legacy, His Body alive in the earth today. If we fail to grow in that role, we have simply
“lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow”
(Colossians 2:19 NIV). Don’t become dismembered from His Body. Stay connected.

But we know that there is only one God, the Father, who created everything, and we live for Him. And there is only one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom God made everything and through whom we have been given life.
—1 C
ORINTHIANS
8:6 NLT

It concerns Him who, being the holiest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the holy, lifted with His pierced hands empires off their hinges, turned the stream of centuries out of its channels, and still governs the ages.
—J
EAN
P
AUL
R
ICHTER

M
any of us have been undermined by a world system that is not constructed for liberty, but in such a way that it brings about victimization and a misuse of our abilities and talents—our anointings and mantels—much like what happened with the prodigal son in Luke 15. The Bible tells us this son went into the world system and wasted his substance—his gifts, his talents, and his time
—“he wasted everything he had”
(Luke 15:13 MSG)—and when the world got through with him, it abandoned him to the realm of the pigs. We read how in desperation the son
“went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine”
(Luke 15:15).
And even then,
“He would have been glad to eat what the pigs were eating, but no one gave him a thing”
(Luke 15:16 CEV).

When he came to himself, he went back to his father’s house where he was received, restored, and reestablished as a son and heir. His father clothed him with new shoes and a robe and placed a ring upon his finger. This is a beautiful illustration of how the Father receives us when we return home to Him.

And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

But the father said to his servants, “Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” And they began to be merry
(Luke 15:20-24).

In the world, the Church is our Father’s house. It is a place where our heavenly Father puts new shoes on our feet and wraps a robe around our shoulders. I believe the shoes speak of affluence, the robe speaks of our mantels of anointing, and the ring represents our authority. When you are walking in your true authority and fully functioning in your area of anointing, it is only then that you become the leader, influencer, and contributing member of society that God has ordained you to be.

God wants to bring you into a place of dominion where you are proactive in your life based on the vision and plans and purposes God has predestined for you. The Church should be a place that matures us. The role of the Church is to grow us up in Christ—to make us emotionally mature, socially congruent, spiritually stable, and economically savvy. Why? It is so
“that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting,”
but instead we would
“grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ—from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love”
(Ephesians 4:14-16).

Some of you may not have come from the best home or have the best family, but in Christ you are made perfect. When you are grafted into the Body of Christ, you are truly born again as an entirely new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). God has a new home and a second chance for you. If your first home did not give you everything you needed to be happy, healthy, and successful in every way, when you come into the house of God you are given a new home, a new family, and a new Father. Jehovah is your adopted Father—and the longer you hang out with Him the more you become like Him. He welcomes you with an embrace and a kiss, and He places His robe around your shoulders and His ring on your hand. You are His child.

Being adopted into the family of God is different from being adopted into a natural family. In a natural family, unless there is a fluke of nature, you will not look like your adoptive parents. You might have some resemblance to them, but you won’t ever look exactly like your adoptive great-grandmother or cousin or aunt. However, when you are adopted into the family of God, you will grow to look exactly like your heavenly Father.
“It has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him”
(1 John 3:2). There is a genetic transformation that takes place—a change of genotype and phenotype.

The genotype determines your phenotype—what you look like on the outside. To be regenerated has the connotation of being “re-gened” right down to your spiritual DNA. By changing us genetically in the realm of the spirit, God was the first to successfully practice bioengineering.

God is in the business of regeneration. He “re-genes” us and causes us to be born again and delivered into a new realm. It doesn’t matter how you started out, what matters is who God has in mind for you to be; what matters is how you finish.

Through His Church, which is His Body in the earth, God is birthing us. We are delivered when we go from one spiritual dimension to another, from the realm of the kingdom of darkness to the realm of the kingdom of light. In the classical Pentecostal church, we call it “being delivered” when someone receives freedom from demonic oppression, possession, or a sinful bondage. But if you look at deliverance from another perspective—such as when a baby is delivered from the dark confines of the womb into the light of the open air, so it is when you receive the light of revelation through the five-fold ministry gifts. You experience a form of deliverance when you are
“being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord”
(2 Corinthians 3:18).

This is our deliverance. Through the spiritual formation and maturing of every member of the Church, which is achieved through the ministries of pastors, teachers, apostles, and prophets, our true identities in Christ are being birthed. We are being called out. Interestingly, the English word
church
is derived from the Greek noun
ecclesia,
which literally means a “calling out” of citizens or a “called-out assembly.” An
ecclesia
is commonly defined as “a gathering of the called-out ones.”
³⁶

The Church is responsible for giving birth to citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Once someone accepts Christ and joins the local church, that church is then responsible for forming that new believer into heaven’s ambassador—taking them beyond church membership to kingdom citizenship to heavenly ambassadorship. In the nineteenth century, Prime Minister of England and literary figure Benjamin Disraeli was quoted to have said, “Man is a being born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.”

The goal of the Church should be to create globally conscious citizens committed to changing the trajectory of their nations and the destiny of their world by the power of the Holy Spirit. Every member of the Body must grow up to take responsibility, ownership, and finally dominion over the ungodly kingdoms and strongholds holding sway around the globe. This is what God purposed to accomplish through Christ—that the Church would
“grow up in all things”
and be empowered to take back dominion and reign in the earth through Him.

To make all see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the ages has been hidden in God who created all things through Jesus Christ; to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places, according to the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.
—E
PHESIANS
3:9-11

Church isn’t where you meet. Church isn’t a building. Church is what you do. Church is who you are. Church is the human outworking of the person of Jesus Christ. Let’s not go to Church, let’s be the Church.
—B
RIDGET
W
ILLARD

To the church of God…to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
—1 C
ORINTHIANS
1:2-3

I
n the beginning, God impregnated the earth when He caused His Spirit to hover over it. We know from Genesis 1:2 that the earth started out
“without form and void”
(ESV). In the same verse we read that the
“Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
The word used here for “hover” is the same word we read in Luke when the Spirit of God “hovered” over Mary, causing her to conceive:
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Highest hover over you; therefore, the child you bring to birth will be called Holy, Son of God”
(Luke 1:35 MSG). Isaiah prophesied of Jesus that
“the life-giving Spirit of God will hover over Him, the Spirit that brings wisdom and understanding, The Spirit that gives direction and builds strength, the Spirit that instills knowledge and Fear-of-God”
(Isaiah 11:1-2 MSG). And in Isaiah 31:5 God declares,
“Yes, I’ll hover and deliver”
(MSG).

From the outset, God, by the power of His Spirit, hovered over creation in order to bring forth life. Nothing was created that was not first imbued with God’s own life sired by His Spirit. The spermatozoa of God’s Word inseminated the earth that was formerly
“without form and void,”
hovering over the womb of creation, or the
“face of the deep”
(Genesis 1:1-2 ESV). God spoke and said
, “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”
(Genesis 1:3 ESV). We know that it was God’s Word—even Christ—that brought everything that is into being. John 1:1-3 tells us that
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made”
(ESV).

Creation has yet to be fully delivered. In Romans Paul wrote,
“All around us we observe a pregnant creation”
(Romans 8:22 MSG). We have yet to see God’s glory carried to full term. Creation, like an expectant mother, is waiting
“in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed”
(Romans 8:19 NIV). Paul went on to add,
“Creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time”
(Romans 8:21 NLT).

All that exists in the earthly realm responds to the voice of God, the Father of all creation. When God releases His Word into the womb of the earth, He germinates His purpose and sets in motion a type of mitosis that cannot be reversed. He said through the prophet Isaiah,
“My word that goes out from My mouth: it will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it”
(Isaiah 55:11 NIV). The voice of God produces its assignment in a set time and season. Even now the earth is forming gold and silver and pearls, oil and metals and minerals, oxygen and water and wind, continually supplying what we need for life. It seems as if no matter how much humanity extracts from the earth, it always brings forth an abundance of resources. I think of Isaiah 66:11:
“For you will nurse and be satisfied at her comforting breasts; you will drink deeply and delight in her overflowing abundance”
(NIV).