Without vision people perish, which means they expire living hopeless lives and many times they end up waiting around dead things expecting it to give them life. Religion is man made and as we go through the motions we might become dry in our faith but as a river of living water Jesus will bring life wherever He shows up.  Let’s not be like the people surrounded at the pool waiting for an angel to save them when the one who carries healing we desire,, is in the room waiting to encounter us. We can be people that hear about Jesus but because our eyes are so focused on breakthrough we miss who is right in front of us. When Jesus enters the room: 1) He immediately sees what we need 2) He frees us so that we can free others 3) He sees past our brokenness, Jesus sees revival in us Jesus healing one man in locked revival in everyone else around him. God chooses us because He wants to “empty the pool through our testimony.”  As salt and light of this world we are meant to enhance the lives of those around us. If we lose our saltiness we will not be able to produce fruit! The value of salt is that it carries itself as a pure element. We don’t want to tarnish the purity of our Spirits by allowing our Spirits to mix itself with other things. As we have our hearts open we will release control and trust that whatever God wants is where we will go. 

All throughout the Bible God would constantly ask the Israelites to remember. Because sometimes looking back at the things that God got you through can give you the courage and confidence to believe that He’s going to get you through the now. But there are times that the Lord says, “I need you to forget the former things and perceive the new.” If we are looking back we will never be able to move forward into what He’s wanting to do through us. When we start living in a way that fills our house with light, we can be entrusted to change the neighborhood and then the world! The church has buildings but little boldness The church haha numbers but little nerve  The church has comfort but little courage  The church has status but little spirit  The church has prestige but little power  The church has knowledge but little wisdom The church has influence but little integrity  The church has resources but little resolve  The church has activity but little anointing  The church has sermons  but little sincerity  The church has knowledge but little kindness  The church has rituals but little relationship The church has tradition but little transformation  The church has programs but little purpose God wants a new church come that will not just light a lamp during the day but will burn brightly at night. The talents that God gives us are merely lampstands to show off and reflect His glory so let’s wake up oh sleeper and allow Him to use us as vessels to promote His glory!

God is everywhere and is not confined to a building because of that we see Jesus at a wedding, where He ends up performing one of His very first miracles. The miracle that turned water into wine wasn’t as simple as Jesus snapping His fingers but instead He gave the servants a process, a series of steps to follow that brings this miracle to pass. Oftentimes this ends up being the case with our own lives; we might be broke and He gives us a process to heal our finances, we might need community and He gives us a process to getting plugged into the family. Here are some things to remember about the process:  1. The process makes no sense as we are supposed to lean not on our own understanding. 2. The process checks our hearts and He will ask us to do things that are questionable in the moment, but will always lead to the miracle 3. The process takes endurance and faithfulness until we see the full picture. Like the ceremonial washing bins, God chooses us as vessels for a miracle not for our cleanliness but for our capacity. And we are asked to keep speaking, keep doing and keep trusting until we see it.  We don’t know what we have been given to steward and carry however God chooses us to make wine fine with and all it takes is trusting in the process. God put time into something that in the natural would have taken years but because there was obedience involved it took a matter of hours. We can get discouraged along the journey because it’s taken longer than we thought but let’s take our water to the master so that He can declare over us that the work that Jesus started in us has been complete!

The 7th hour represents the God hour over our life as 7 is the number of completion. Sometimes in life we find ourselves stuck on a road without end but with, there is always something to expect at the finish line. It's at the 7th hour that miracles take place, it’s where the sun stands still and we see God move. The Roman Official that came to Jesus for a miracle  heard the stories but he wasn’t a follower of Jesus yet he came humbly to God as the answer for his heart's cry. What Jesus ended up giving this man was a word, a precious word that was planted on rich soil that then yielded a harvest of a miracle. That one word of God is more than a 1000 words from man. God is trying to deposit life in us but we often fail to listen to what He’s saying to us. He is giving us a word that is active and living and He is marking us with His word. When He speaks,  things move and form planets and that same God is speaking to us daily because He wants to produce a harvest in us.

Here are some things to consider when God deposits a word in our lives:

1. Is God’s word enough or are  we looking for signs? If we’re looking for signs we often times get side tracked by the enemy.  2. His word won’t allow us to camp in the middle of our journey because He is good to his word.  3. The devil plants seeds of death or a weed that produces fruit that he hopes will KILL the promise God spoke over. God speaks in pictures and works in processes. Once you understand the process, the blessings and miracles are infinite. Every single person that held fruit has gone through the whole process of stewarding and cultivating seeds and the process pulls out those weeds that could destroy that good work in our hearts. God will plant His word in the dead parts of our live because it’s those dead things (the manure) that will ultimately give birth to life! Here are some things to know about seeds: • A seed (our dreams) can remain dormant for years  • Some seeds (dreams) need winter before the sprout  • Soil (our heart) health is more important than you think  • Seeds (dreams) need darkness (to be buried) to germinate  • Farmers rotate crops (God rotates our dreams) to maintain soil health • Plants (our spirits will protect those dreams)  use chemical warfare to survive • Seeds (our dreams) contain all they need to grow • Seed (dreams) spacing is crucial  • Not all seeds (dreams) sprout even in perfect condition  • Seeds (dreams) respond to gravity, they know which way the roots and shoots need to grow.

The Lord longs to give us His Holy Spirit power, not just power for selfish gain but power so that we can be a witness in testifying about the truth of God. It’s okay if we don’t have the personality of the prerequisite in our biblical education to do so but all we need is the power to go out and preach this word with our lives. Along with the power we also need to be able to discern where the Holy Spirit is leading us because some things can simply be a good idea instead of a God idea. Sometimes the call of God might lead us to encounter closed doors which is why it is important to start any journey with a revelation from God. Our road might lead us to opposition which does not always mean that God is not in it but a reminder to stand firm on the word He first gave us. The enemy will make us put our faith in fear instead of the plan that God has for us, especially if it is one that requires faith. We might not have the provision or the right relationships but when God says now He means it and He plans to provide for everything! When we are chosen to change the world we have to: 

 1 Fear God, not Man 2 Shake the dust off my feet and get back up 3 Never let my praise be silenced Fears are proportional to the God we serve, if we serve a little God we will be scared of everything but if we serve a big God we will be scared of nothing. People are yearning for a demonstration of the power of God and we need some believers who will not just know the word but will operate in Dunamis power so that when people hear the teaching and see the move of God they will have no choice but to believe. God's ways are greater than ours and He will allow us to walk through storms, closed doors, miracles, signs and wonders but all these things are only a result of obedience. We might be attacked at our place of greatest value and have to overcome fear to get to the other side but it will all be worth it because God’s word will and always will be true! Application: Has the Fear of Man, fear of failure or the fear of losing what you know to be your life kept you from stepping out into the call that He has for you? Prayer: Father I pray that I will be able to subject myself to your good and perfect will always. I want to get rid of the fear of man and the fear of failure because I know that faith requires obedience and above all, I long to be obedient to your will. Mold me as clay and allow me to become a vessel for your Glory!

Revelation 3:14-17

Those who God loves, he disciplines through truth in love by giving us an honest picture of our lives. As we continue this series on the churches we see that in everything God says He is longing for intimacy with us. With the church of Laodicea He does commend them for their works but because they were a church that worked hard yet has chosen to be lukewarm, He ultimately rebukes them the most. God addresses the attitude in which they had succumbed to living their lives and implores them to become either hot or cold. Christianity is an all in the way of being, you cannot be halfway in and halfway out and please God. Those that please God through lip service have to have a change in their heart service eventually. The problem with being lukewarm is that God is not lukewarm, He is either healing like the fire or refreshing like a cool spring and that He how He longs for us to be. Here are some ways we can slip into lukewarmness: 1) By becoming disconnected from community we become apathetic and indifferent to people around us 2) By getting overwhelmed or burned we’re either too far ahead or too far behind God. 3) By becoming complacent, we’ve allowed ourselves to become comfortable in life and nothing affects us Becoming lukewarm takes time, it happens over years if we keep going through the motions we end up neglected and dying. All we have been called to do is to tell the world of Jesus and if we can’t do that, there really is no point in us playing the motions of church. We can have joy in the middle of difficult situations if we tune our minds to the words Heaven is speaking over us. Let the Lord redefine us and prune us so that we can become a church that is more zealous about protecting the gospel than protecting culture!

There is a spirit at work in our modern day culture that has led us into a false theology. We in the western world are not the persecuted church, however we can be a group of people that call Him Lord without submitting to Him in our hearts. There is no qualification in Christ Jesus besides Christ Jesus and we have been asked to practice the word of God that we hear. In order to become a true disciple of Christ there is a level of practice of this relationship that can only come when we are possessed by the will of God. Like the church of Thyatira we can so easily become a church that is great at love without truth and call it tolerance. This allows those inside attacks that destroy us from within to take root! The enemy doesn't mind us building, he just doesn’t want us building on the truth which is the only way to change our lives for His glory. People allow the Jezebel spirit to rule because of Moral Relativism, which states that truth is subjective. We so easily let people believe a truth that they might perceive as absolute because they declare that it is their truth. But God says that He is the absolute truth and in order for us to become the Church of Christ we must display trust in the truth of His word. Here are some indications that we might not be okay with absolute truth: 1) We start looking to other being to justify how we feel listening to false prophets 2) We are unwilling to take the difficult questions up to God because we don’t want to let go of our desires 3) We only give glory to God in moments of victory but we curse him in moments of defeat God is God of love but He is also a good Father and because of that there are some things He asks us to hate. It is for our protection that He asks us to be in the world but not of the world. The lust of the flesh and the pride of life come from the enemy and in order to win at life we need to walk away from things that we desire that are not beneficial to us. We are going to be a church that does the Will of the Father. God has called us to call out those things that are unbiblical and that is what we are going to go!

Our relationship with God is never about what He can do for us, it should always be about falling more in love with Him. Our earthly actions in attending church, doing ministry or giving to the poor will never get us into heaven, but true intimacy with Him will decide our trajectory. In the book of revelation, Jesus reminds us that it is so easy to become a group of people that are professional Christian’s who maybe look the part, but nothing will matter if we don’t allow ourselves to go back to the basics and to His first love.  One of the churches that did do well in His eyes, was the church of Sardis and like that church, if we seek him first and pursue him with a pure heart we can come to a place we will be rich in our spirits. Our prayer needs to be to get back to a raw hunger we used to have for God so that we can give him back something of value at the end. Here are the crowns we can cast at his feet: The crown of life - perseverance  The crown of righteousness - those who long for his return  The crown of glory - ministering to his sheep  Incorruptible crown - running the race with self control  Crown of exaltation - winning souls We have to remember that it’s the enemy that is constantly after our faith and our relationship with Christ. As we wrestle with these principalities we have to remain faithful even to the point of death.The Bible says that the righteous receive those crowns as a reward and as those who truly hunger for Him, this is all we should see. None of us want to go to him empty handed so let’s keep that at the forefront of your mind as we continue to persevere in our faith.