Where do we go from here

For many years church has been going on each and every week, with little changing for many of us.  It seems to continue to remain ‘church as we know it.’  We gather, we perform our traditions and rituals, and we go home.  We feel comfortable with the status quo of church as we know it and aren’t looking to change it.  Or for many others maybe your in the camp who is bored to tears with ‘church as we know it’ and are looking for a change.  If you talk with many Christians they feel like change is necessary, but what needs to change, and where do we go from here.

God is changing how we do church. The prophecies coming from around the world all say similar things.  God is beginning to release a new move and we won’t be able to program it or control it.  In my local church many have felt a large shift in the spiritual atmosphere over the last couple weeks.  God is definitely up to something.  He is moving His people to begin a release of  His Spirit the likes we have never seen.  So what do we do, and how do we accommodate His move?

First we need to recognize that we have no precedents to follow.  Just like the children of Israel as they entered the promised land for the first time “we have not been this way before”.  God is preparing us for a new release and if we try to manage or follow it based on previous patterns and moves we will be unable to follow Him.  Just like Jesus said in Luke 5:37 we cannot pour new wine into old wine skins.   What God is about to do will not fit into the nice little package we currently offer in our churches.  We must be willing to allow some things we value as part of our traditions to begin to fall away and allow God the opportunity to change what He needs to so that we can enter into His plan for this time and season.

Although God is doing something that we cannot use previous moves and patterns to follow He will not contradict scripture.  So many people have allowed themselves to be swayed by hype and what people have called the latest revelation from God that really have nothing to do with God because they have not stayed in God’s word.  God will not go against what He has revealed in scripture.  So if something doesn’t line up with God as revealed by the bible then I would question  whether or not it actually is of God.  So scripture will be a major guideline for what God is doing now.

We also need to keep our relationship with  Jesus fresh.  Without a relationship with God we will not be able to sense the leadings of God’s Spirit and may miss out on the turns and course changes that God is going to make.  Christianity is about having a relationship with God and not a religious experience anyway.  But we need to keep it fresh.  Our relationship needs to be Daily.  Like many this is also an area for growth for me as well.  I often get lost in the business of life and can lose my focus in the difficulties and struggles that happen daily.  Our relationship needs to be as important as the air we breath.  For just as important as oxygen is to physical life, our relationship with God is to our spiritual life.

We need to make and keep our focus on Jesus.  If we allow our focus to move to anything else we will lose our direction.  He is the “author and finisher of our faith” and will complete in us what He started.  But He needs to be our focus.  Often we can move our focus to ourselves, or our difficulties. or the lives of friends or families around us.  And when this happens we begin to drift.  Just like driving a car, you steer towards what you are looking at, our lives will move towards what we focus upon.

Lastly we, like Jesus, need to be “about our Father’s business”.  We allow a lot of things to pull us away from what is really important.  Me included.  The mandate of Jesus was to “seek and save the lost”, and He passed this mandate on to us as well.  Jesus said in John 20 “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you”.  What the Father has sent me to do, I now send you.  Most of us are not comfortable with the concept of evangelism.  It causes us to push past our comfort zones and reach beyond ourselves and see others as important.  Something that Jesus has never changed His mind on.  He was always ‘about His Father’s business’ and passed that call unto us.

So we have some changes to make, both at a personal level and a corporate level.  And if we are willing to make the changes necessary we will enter incredible and exciting times walking with God and moving with Him.  Great times are ahead of us if we are willing.