Welcome to the Kingdom Reformation Podcast with Glenn Bleakney—equipping believers for revival, reformation, and Kingdom impact. Subscribe to Glenn’s teaching newsletter, join our live Zoom meetings, explore Sent College Bible School, and access more resources at AwakeNations.org. If you're on Australia's Sunshine Coast, we'd love to welcome you to our church family.

When Jesus spoke of power, He did not speak of comfort, He did not speak of influence, and He did not speak of worldly success. He spoke of a singular purpose: that we would become His witnesses to the ends of the earth. In this message we will see how the fire of the Holy Spirit transforms the human heart, empowers the believer for the work of the Kingdom, and reveals the living Christ before a watching world. The Church does not lack programs; the Church lacks the power of God.

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When Holy Spirit fell on the 120 in the upper room, it was not a random spectacle. It was the fulfilment of a promise spoken at Sinai, foretold by Joel, preserved in rabbinic tradition, and proclaimed by John the Baptist as the explicit mission of Jesus Himself.

In this message, Glenn Bleakney opens Acts 1 and 2 and walks through the often-overlooked connection between the giving of the Torah at Sinai and the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. Why was Pentecost being celebrated as the inauguration of God's covenant by the time Jesus walked the earth?

What did the rabbis mean when they taught that God's voice at Sinai split into seventy tongues of fire, one for every nation listed in Genesis 10? And why does it matter that the tongues of fire fell again on the 120 in Jerusalem?

This is a teaching for every believer who senses there is more, who refuses to settle for Father, Son, and Holy Bible, and who wants to step into the koinonia, the shared life, of the Holy Spirit.

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The Mission We Buried

Every Gospel Introduces Jesus With Fire. We Replaced It With Programmes.

There is a question that ought to unsettle every honest reader of the New Testament, and it is this: if you were to ask a thousand Christians to summarise, in a single sentence, the mission of Jesus, how many would answer with the words the Gospels themselves use to introduce Him? The answer would be very few; perhaps almost none. We have been catechised to speak of the cross, the empty tomb, the forgiveness of sins, the gift of eternal life; and each of these glories is real, biblical, and beyond price. Yet none of them is the answer the four evangelists give when they first place Jesus in front of us. The first thing each Gospel says about His mission is something else entirely, and it is something the contemporary church has quietly, almost unconsciously, allowed to slip out of its central proclamation.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all introduce Jesus through the witness of one man, John the Baptist; and that witness, in every account, converges on a single, identifying phrase. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matt. 3:11). Mark records the same testimony (Mark 1:8); Luke records it almost word for word (Luke 3:16); and John, who arranges his Gospel around theological signs rather than chronological order, still preserves the Baptist’s confession as a foundational identifier: “He who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit’” (John 1:33). Four accounts, four authors, four different audiences, one unbroken introduction. The Spirit-and-fire baptism is not a peripheral feature of Christ’s ministry; it is the headline, the banner, the inaugural definition. To miss it is to misread the opening page.

A Mission We Have Tamed

Why, then, does this proclamation occupy so small a place in modern preaching? Part of the answer is cultural; part is theological; and part, we must confess, is institutional. The modern Western church, formed in the wake of the Enlightenment and the long shadow of revivalist excess, has grown comfortable with a Christianity it can manage. Doctrines that can be systematised, sermons that can be outlined, programmes that can be scheduled; these we know how to handle. But a Christ who baptises in fire is a Christ who refuses domestication. The Greek verb baptizō means to immerse, to plunge, to submerge entirely; it is not the language of a polite religious ceremony. To be baptised in the Holy Spirit and fire is to be submerged in a presence that reorders the personality, reorganises the will, and refuses to leave the believer’s interior architecture in the shape it found it.

Furthermore, secular scepticism has not retreated; it has hardened. The cultural moment in which we now minister is one of intense spiritual exhaustion. Traditional religious routines carry very little weight; passive church attendance has become unintelligible to those outside its walls; and the gospel, when reduced to theory, is dismissed as one ideology among many. Modern audiences are not impressed by religious vocabulary, however well rehearsed. They are looking, however unconsciously, for something tangible, something demonstrable, something that the natural eye cannot easily explain away. Paul understood this when he wrote, “My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4–5). The mission Jesus declared is precisely the mission the present hour requires; and yet it is the mission we have most thoroughly muted.

Fire Unharnessed and Fire Channelled

Fire, when left to itself, is a chaotic force. We see this every Australian summer when wildfires devour grasslands, homes and bushland with terrifying indifference. Yet the same element, channelled and contained, becomes the engine of civilisation. Once harnessed, fire performs four distinct functions; it generates power, it produces light, it provides heat, and it purifies precious metals. Each of these natural outputs answers to a spiritual reality that the baptism of the Holy Spirit produces in the believer. The Spirit and fire that Christ promises are not metaphors for vague religious enthusiasm; they describe a specific transformation that releases four identifiable dimensions in the life of His witness. The remainder of this article will trace each one in turn.

The First Dimension: Power

The Greek word the New Testament uses for spiritual power is dunamis, from which we derive the English words “dynamic” and “dynamite”. In an internal combustion engine, raw combustion is converted into explosive energy, and that explosion is then harnessed into downward force and forward momentum. The parallel is exact. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Jesus did not commission His disciples to attempt witness in their own strength; He explicitly forbade it. “Behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). The verb endusēsthe, “clothed”, carries the sense of being arrayed in something that envelops the whole person; it is the same word used elsewhere for putting on a garment. Until the disciples were so clothed, they were not yet ready to be sent.

When the early church proclaimed the gospel, this dunamis followed; the lame walked, the demonised were delivered, the dead were raised. These signs were not optional accessories to apostolic preaching; they were the physical validation that the kingdom announced was real, present and operative. Philip went down to Samaria and proclaimed the Christ to them; “and the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip, when they heard him and saw the signs that he did” (Acts 8:6). The hearing and the seeing belonged together; the proclamation and the demonstration moved as one. In a culture exhausted by religious theory, the recovery of this dimension is not a luxury. It is the spiritual combustion that gives witness its forward momentum.

The Second Dimension: Perception

Raw power, however, is catastrophic without direction. An engine without headlights at midnight is not an asset but a liability. The second dimension that the Spirit produces is perception, the spiritual capacity to see what cannot be seen by the natural eye. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). Discernment is not cleverness; it is illumination. The Spirit acts as light, exposing what is hidden, identifying what is counterfeit, distinguishing between voices that sound similar but originate in different realms.

This dimension has never been more urgently needed than now. We live in an hour saturated with counterfeit spirituality; deceiving spirits, Paul warned Timothy, will increase in the latter times, accompanied by teachings that bear an outward form of godliness but deny its power (1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 3:5). A deceiving spirit can masquerade as a righteous leader; it can quote Scripture, deploy theological vocabulary, and present a public face that is, to the natural assessment, entirely respectable. Without divine illumination, the believer is left to navigate this landscape by sentiment, intuition or institutional reputation, none of which is reliable. The Holy Spirit, by contrast, provides what Paul called “the eyes of your hearts enlightened” (Eph. 1:18). Such eyes pierce through facades; they see motives the natural mind cannot detect; they recognise the kingdom in unlikely vessels and detect compromise in venerated platforms. Momentum is useless if you are driving toward a cliff; the witness who carries power without perception will, in the end, expend that power on the wrong targets.

The Third Dimension: Passion

The third dimension is passion, and its natural correlate is heat. A machine may possess every mechanical component in perfect order, yet if the fire goes out the entire system grows cold and stationary. The early church understood this; the Romans were exhorted to be “fervent in spirit” (Rom. 12:11), where the Greek zeontes means literally “boiling”, a temperature image drawn from a pot at full heat. Spiritual fervour is not emotional theatre; it is sustained interior combustion that drives the believer’s service even when circumstances would extinguish lesser fires.

The historical church in Ephesus stands as the primary warning here. They had flawless doctrine; they had tested those who claimed to be apostles and found them false; they had laboured tirelessly without growing weary. Yet the risen Christ, who walked among the lampstands, delivered to them one of the most searching indictments in the New Testament: “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (Rev. 2:4). Mechanics without heat eventually degrade into dead religion; orthodoxy without zeal becomes a museum of correct ideas. The Lord’s prescription to Ephesus was not a refinement of their doctrine but the rekindling of their first love; “remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first” (Rev. 2:5). The witness who would penetrate this generation must remain consumed by an internal fire that is contagious; for what is not burning cannot ignite anything else.

The Fourth Dimension: Purity

The fourth dimension is purity, and the metaphor moves from the engine and the furnace to the refiner’s crucible. Ancient metallurgists understood that gold and silver, in their raw state, are bound up with impurities; only intense heat will separate the precious from the worthless. As the metal liquefies, the dross rises to the surface and is skimmed away; and a long-standing teaching tradition holds that the refiner continued this process until he could see his own reflection in the molten surface. Malachi described the coming of the Lord in precisely these terms: “He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD” (Mal. 3:2–3).

The fire of the Holy Spirit performs this same refining work in the believer. It burns away the dross of selfish ambition, private compromise and concealed motives, until the believer’s character increasingly reflects the image of Christ Himself. This is no peripheral matter; it is the seal of credibility. In any court of law, the testimony of a witness whose character has been compromised is dismissed regardless of whether the facts of his account are true; credibility, once forfeited, cannot be reclaimed by argument. So also in the spiritual realm: a witness whose public proclamation is not backed by a private reality has nothing to offer that the world will receive. “Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14). Purity is not optional decoration on the apostolic life; it is the substrate on which everything else stands or falls.

The Reversal of Sinai

These four dimensions, when held together, are not innovations introduced by the New Testament; they are the restoration of a connection that was severed at the foot of Mount Sinai. When God descended upon that mountain in fire, smoke and trumpet blast, His original intention was the establishment of a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, a people who would hear His voice directly, without mediator, without filter (Exod. 19:5–6). Yet when the people heard the thunder and saw the lightning, they drew back in terror; “you speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die” (Exod. 20:19). They chose mediated religion over immediate relationship; they preferred a man to stand between them and the voice of God; and that single choice shaped the next fifteen hundred years of Israel’s covenantal history.

The day of Pentecost was the divine reversal of that ancient refusal. When the fire came again, it did not descend upon a mountain that the people were forbidden to touch; it descended upon the people themselves, resting in cloven tongues upon each one of them (Acts 2:3). What Sinai had withheld at the people’s own request, Pentecost restored at the Father’s own initiative. The Holy Spirit, given without measure, was the mechanism God used to fulfil at last the original plan: direct, personal, unmediated access to His presence for every son and every daughter who would receive Him. “And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (Acts 2:17).

This is why the New Testament refers to the Spirit using the Greek word koinōnia, “fellowship”, “communion”, “shared life”. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor. 13:14). The Spirit is not an impersonal energy source to be tapped, nor a functional tool to be deployed; He is a Person, an intimate friend and partner, with whom the believer shares a continuous, conscious life. To know Him as koinōnia is to be released from the weight of religious obligation; what was once duty becomes shared activity, what was once striving becomes participation, what was once performance becomes presence.

The Mark of the Witness Sent to the Ends of the Earth

We return, then, to the place we began. The Gospels introduce Jesus as the One who baptises in the Holy Spirit and fire; and we have seen that this baptism produces four identifiable dimensions in the believer: power that demonstrates the kingdom, perception that pierces deception, passion that refuses to grow cold, and purity that establishes credibility. These four together constitute the witness that Christ promised would carry His name to the ends of the earth.

The modern world will not be won by religious theory, however accurate; it will not be drawn back to Christ by institutional refinement, however polished; and it will not be persuaded by argument alone, however eloquent. It will be confronted, and ultimately convinced, by ordinary people walking in the unordinary reality of Spirit and fire. When such believers appear in a generation, the kingdom is no longer a doctrine to be debated; it becomes a presence to be reckoned with. This is the mission Jesus explicitly declared; this is the inheritance the Gospels explicitly announce; and this is the church the Spirit is even now raising up in our time.

Let the prayer of every reader, then, be the prayer that the early disciples were commanded to wait for and refused to move without: that the fire would fall again, that the Spirit would come in fullness, and that the explicit mission of Jesus would become the unmistakable identity of His people in this hour.

Glenn Bleakney is the Founder of Awake Nations on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, and Dallas Texa, USA. He is also the President of Sent College. Together with his wife Lynn, he leads Awake Nations Global Network and has ministered across more than forty nations. His writing centres on Kingdom theology, apostolic reformation, and the recovery of a Spirit-empowered church for this generation.

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Has God ever blatantly interrupted your life plans for you to follow His? There invariably will come a time in our spiritual journey when the Lord will solicit our cooperation in permitting Him to guide us in a new way.

His preference is that we would sense His leading, fully cooperate and move in the new direction. However, as is all too often the case, He must intervene in the affairs of our lives due to the fact that we are comfortable and entrenched in our present course of action. In this teaching, Glenn Bleakney shares the 3 Biblical ways God often uses to move us in a new direction.

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In this thought-provoking episode, Glenn Bleakney confronts the widening gap between the Church’s message and its lived reality.

Using the iconic “Mind the Gap” warning from the London Underground as a prophetic metaphor, Glenn explores the inconsistencies between kingdom values and institutional practices.

From platform-driven ministry culture to authentic community, from digital influence to genuine discipleship, this episode challenges leaders and believers alike to confront the spaces where vision and reality no longer align.

With practical insights and a call to reform, “Mind the Gap” invites listeners into a deeper conversation about restoring integrity, authenticity, and kingdom-centered community in the Church.

God has a plan for your life—but He also has a pathway. In this powerful message, Glenn Bleakney unpacks the journey of discipleship through Mark 3:13-15, revealing how Jesus calls us first to be with Him before sending us out in power and purpose.

This sermon explores the three essential stages of the Christian journey: encounter, formation, and mission. Discover what it means to walk the pathway of holiness, remain planted in God’s house, overcome offense and consumer Christianity, and pursue a deeper life in the presence of God.

Jesus is still calling people closer. Will you go on the journey?

Host Glenn Bleakney welcomes listeners to Kingdom Reformation and invites them to join the free community at kingdomreformation.org, then uses “Mind the gap” to frame a crisis of credibility caused by misalignment between what churches preach and what they practice. He warns that these disconnects create “casualties” as people seeking authenticity leave, and outlines five gaps: platform versus practice (a “hospital for the broken” but driven by growth metrics), community versus reality (an invisible VIP hierarchy), digital presence versus personal connection (broadcasting over relationship), service versus showmanship (budgeting for Sunday experience over community needs), and gift-based ministry versus position politics (credentials over calling). He calls for deliberate action by reassessing resources, leader development, community engagement, and success metrics, noting the rise of “nones” and “dones,” and challenges listeners to bridge one gap with one concrete step this week.

00:00 Welcome and Invite

00:40 Mind the Gap Theme

01:18 Why Misalignment Hurts

02:23 Five Church Disconnects

02:33 Hospital or Metrics

03:19 Everyone Belongs Really

04:02 Online vs Real Life

04:46 Serving or Performing

05:27 Gifts vs Credentials

06:14 Four Steps Forward

06:51 Nones and Dones

07:40 One Gap This Week

08:07 Closing and Community

You may be forgiven. You may be filled with the Spirit. You may know, with settled assurance, that you are going to heaven when this life is over. And yet, if you are honest with yourself this morning, there is still something in you that remains unhealed. There is an ache you cannot quite name in the middle of the worship service, a loneliness that the sermon never seems to address, a hunger that no amount of theological certainty has managed to satisfy. You have been told the gospel a thousand times, but the gospel you have been told is smaller than the one Jesus came to preach.

What have you missed?

You have missed the announcement that lies underneath forgiveness, beneath the gift of the Spirit, and beyond the promise of heaven. You have missed the truth that ought to have arrested you at the door the first time you walked into a church and never let you go: that you have been invited, that morning and every morning since, into the household of God.

The Apostle Paul puts the matter in language we have grown too accustomed to hearing:

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19, ESV).

Members of the household of God. Not religious visitors. Not occasional attendees of a weekly assembly. Actual members of an actual household, with one Father, one inheritance, one name, and one table. The longer I meditate upon this passage, the more persuaded I become that family is not merely one ministry function among many in the life of the Church, but is in fact the very nature of the Church herself. Family is the Father’s chosen vehicle, the Father’s chosen culture, and the Father’s chosen strategy for the redemption of a fractured world. This is the heart of what the Lord has commissioned us to recover at Awake Nations.

I want to walk you through four convictions that anchor our house, drawn from Scripture and from the apostolic pattern of the New Testament:

* Family is resourced from the Father.

* Family is restored by Jesus.

* Family is realised in the Church.

* Family is what it will take to reach the nations.

1. FAMILY IS RESOURCED FROM THE FATHER

Before there was a man or a woman, before there was a marriage or a child, before there was so much as a creature on the wing or a fish in the sea, there was already a family.

This is not a sentimental flourish; it is the bedrock of Christian theology. In the eternal life of God, before the first syllable of Genesis 1:1 had been uttered, the Father was pouring Himself into the Son, the Son was returning Himself to the Father, and the Spirit was the love moving between them. Relationship is not something God does in His dealings with us; relationship is who God eternally is.

Classical theology has given us two precise terms for this mystery, and both repay careful attention. The first is aseity, from the Latin a se, meaning “from Himself,” and it refers to the utter self-existence of God. He is dependent upon nothing outside of Himself, He lacks nothing, He is not lonely, and He is complete within the eternal communion of His own triune being. The second term is perichoresis, a Greek word employed by the early Church Fathers to describe the way in which the three Persons of the Godhead mutually indwell one another, giving themselves to one another and making room for one another in an eternal exchange of love. Some have called this the divine dance — an unbroken communion of self-giving love within the Godhead itself.

When God spoke the universe into being, therefore, He was not creating family out of any deficiency in Himself; He was extending family out of the overflow of who He had always been. Human relationship and human family did not originate in Eden — they originated in the eternal life of the Father, and they were patterned after a communion older than time. This is precisely what Paul wishes us to grasp:

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14–15).

There is a striking wordplay in the Greek that the English translation cannot quite carry across. The word for father is patēr, and the word translated family is patria, which denotes a paternal lineage, a clan descended from a common father. Hear the connection: patēr yields patria. Every family, whether in heaven or upon the earth, takes its name and its essential identity from the Father.

What does this mean for you, reading this article today? It means that the deepest longing you have ever felt for belonging — for a table to sit at and a name to bear and people to call your own — is not a sentimental weakness or an immature attachment. It is a homing instinct. It is the patria recognising the patēr. You were not designed to be self-contained, and no amount of personal accomplishment or theological certainty will silence the ache, because the ache itself was placed within you by the One in whose image you were made.

Furthermore, it is no incidental detail that the very first command God issued to humanity was a family command:

“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it’” (Genesis 1:28).

From the very first chapter of the canonical Scriptures, God’s chosen instrument for the governance of His creation is family. His chosen vehicle for the multiplication of His image upon the earth is family. His chosen culture for the dominion mandate is family. Whatever else the Church may be tempted to become in a given generation — a movement, an organisation, a platform, a brand — if she is not first and fundamentally a family, she has departed from the original blueprint.

2. FAMILY IS RESTORED BY JESUS

There is a moment in Genesis 3 that we ought never to read too quickly.

The fruit has been eaten. The atmosphere of Eden has shifted. The Lord God is walking in the cool of the day, and for the first time in human history, the sound of His footsteps is not the sound of joy but the sound of dread. Adam hides himself among the trees with his wife beside him, because shame has entered the human story, and shame is doing what shame has done in every generation since: it is separating the child from the Father.

This is the wound from which the entire human race begins to wander. We are clothed, fed, frequently religious, sometimes brilliant, often noble in our intentions, and yet profoundly disconnected from the household of the One who made us. We carry the orphan ache into our marriages and into our ministries, into our private prayers and into our public performances, and we cannot quite name what we are looking for.

Yet hear the response of the Father even in the immediate aftermath of the fall. He does not abandon. He pursues. The very next thing He does in the narrative is to come looking for Adam in the garden, and from Genesis 3 onward the entire arc of redemptive history bears witness to a single divine determination: I will bring My children home.

This is precisely what Jesus came to accomplish, and the Apostle John captures the whole gospel in a single, weight-bearing sentence:

“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).

Read that verse slowly and let its full implication settle upon you. The entire point of receiving Jesus, according to the inspired text, is to be made a child of God. He grants you the right of a son, the standing of a daughter, the seat of an heir, and every privilege that pertains to belonging within the Father’s house. Salvation, properly understood, is not merely a legal pardon granted from a distant courtroom; it is an adoption decree issued from the throne room of heaven, securing for you a permanent place at the family table.

Consider the Lord’s own words to those who had paid a high personal price to follow Him:

“Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions…” (Mark 10:29–30).

Observe carefully that Jesus does not merely promise houses and lands as compensation for what has been forfeited; He promises brothers and sisters and mothers and children. The implication is unmistakable: He has come to restore family. Whatever has happened to your biological family — however broken, however absent, however painful the rupture may have been — the family of God is being given to you in Christ, and that spiritual family takes precedence even over our natural ties.

This is what Jesus came to build. Not a religious institution. Not a moral improvement programme. A family, with Himself at the centre, the Father in heaven, and brothers and sisters gathered around a common table, in this present age and not merely in the age to come.

3. FAMILY IS REALISED IN THE CHURCH

Three thousand people came to faith in Jerusalem in a single afternoon, and what the apostles did next ought to astonish us more than it does.

They did not announce a follow-up conference. They did not launch a brand. They did not roll out a curriculum, rent a venue, design a logo, or schedule a leadership summit. With no building, no denomination, no infrastructure, and no precedent, they did something far more radical and far more durable than any of these.

They started a family.

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

The Greek word translated fellowship in this passage is koinōnia, a rich and weighty term that denotes shared life, common participation, and things genuinely held in common. Koinōnia is not the casual acquaintance of those who happen to attend the same weekly meeting; it is the deep and abiding mutuality of those who share a common life and a common Father. The Spirit on the Day of Pentecost did not gather an audience out of the crowd. He gathered a household, and that household devoted itself to one another, sharing meals, sharing resources, and moving from house to house in the most intimate proximity.

When the Apostle Paul later instructed his son in the faith Timothy concerning how the people of God ought to relate to one another within the assembly, the image he reached for was unmistakably the language of family:

“Do not rebuke an older man, but encourage him as you would a father. Treat younger men like brothers, older women like mothers, younger women like sisters, in all purity” (1 Timothy 5:1–2).

This is the operating system of the New Testament Church, and we ought not to soften it for modern sensibilities. Older men are to be honoured as fathers, younger men received as brothers, older women treated as mothers, and younger women regarded as sisters. This is not a poetic metaphor offered for the sake of warmth; it is the apostolic identity of the household of God, and it is to govern the way we behave toward one another within these walls.

We are called to be a family, not a franchise. We are called to honour one another, to protect one another, to confront one another in love when necessary, and to carry one another through the messy and unglamorous moments that constitute the substance of any real relationship. This is what we are believing for and contending for at Awake Nations: a house in which spiritual fathers and mothers truly parent, in which sons and daughters truly receive, and in which brothers and sisters genuinely walk together over the long obedience of a lifetime. Family is realised here. It is not merely something we preach from the platform on a Sunday; it is something we are summoned to live from Monday onward.

4. FAMILY REACHES THE NATIONS

I have stood in church gatherings in more than forty nations of the earth, and I will tell you what I have observed.

In the places where the Church has functioned as a building with a programme, the surrounding city has remained largely untouched. People have come and gone, sermons have been preached and forgotten, conferences have filled auditoriums and emptied them again, and the spiritual atmosphere over the region has stayed essentially what it was. But in the places where the Church has functioned as a family — with real fathers and real mothers, real sons and real daughters, walking through real life together — something quite different has happened. Marriages have been mended. Prodigals have come home. The fear of the Lord has begun to settle over neighbourhoods, and then over suburbs, and eventually over entire regions. Cities have begun to feel different in the spirit, and outsiders who could not articulate what they were sensing have nonetheless come walking through the doors looking for it.

This is not coincidence. This is covenant pattern. When the Church functions as the household God designed her to be, healing flows outward from her in ever-widening concentric circles, and that healing begins very close to home.

Family heals the orphan heart. Psalm 68:6 declares that “God settles the solitary in a home,” bringing those who are lonely and isolated into the warmth of a family. Then, having placed us within that family, the Father sends His Spirit into our hearts to teach us the very language of belonging:

“And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Galatians 4:6).

When you walk into a family that genuinely understands itself to be a family, something within the orphan heart begins to come undone. You cease performing for approval; you begin belonging by inheritance. You stop hiding behind religious masks; you begin to grow into the full stature of sonship that has always been your birthright in Christ. This is something that religion, with all its programmes and protocols and platforms, has never been able to accomplish. Family heals what religion never could.

And from this inner healing the work goes wider still: family heals cities, and family heals nations. The Old Testament closes upon a remarkable promise, immediately followed by four hundred years of prophetic silence:

“And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Malachi 4:6).

The principle articulated in this final word of the Old Testament is profound, and it ought not to be passed over lightly. When the generations are torn apart, the land itself comes under a curse; when the generations are reconciled to one another and bound together in covenant love, that curse is broken and the favour of God begins to rest upon a region. The transformation of a city, of a state, of a nation does not begin with a political programme or a media strategy; it begins with the restoration of family within the people of God in that region.

That is precisely what we are believing for on the Sunshine Coast. Marriages restored. Children walking with God. Prodigal sons and daughters coming home from the far country. The atmosphere of heaven settling over this coast in such a manifest way that the wider community begins to take notice. And from this coast, family reaching across this nation, and out to the nations of the earth, until the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.

COME HOME

So hear the call of the Father today.

The cross was never merely a transaction designed to secure your attendance at a weekly religious service. The cross was an adoption decree, signed in the blood of the Son, designed to bring you all the way home into the household of God. Right now, in the heart of every believer who has received Christ, the Spirit of His Son is crying out Abba, Father, summoning you into the full inheritance that belongs to you as a son or daughter of the King of Glory.

If you have been carrying the wearying weight of an orphan heart, today is the day to come home. The Father is not ashamed to call you His own, and there is a seat at the table that has been reserved for you from before the foundation of the world.

If you are a younger believer, I would urge you to find spiritual fathers and mothers within the house and to open your life to them. Receive the inheritance that the Lord has prepared for you in the older generation, for there is a generational deposit that cannot be downloaded from a podcast or absorbed from a book.

If you are a more mature believer in Christ, ask the Lord this very morning: Who am I parenting? Who am I pouring my life into? Who am I raising up to take what I have received and to carry it further than I ever could?

The Church is a family — resourced from the Father, restored by Jesus, realised in the Church, and reaching the nations in Jesus’ name.

Welcome home.

Glenn Bleakney is the Founder of Awake Nations, a church and ministry network based on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Living in the Kingdom: Experience Supernatural Power and Provision and has ministered across more than forty nations. He and his wife Lynn lead Awake Nations Church and serve the nations through Sent College and the Awake Nations global network.

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What does it look like to build the church God’s way in this generation? In this passionate and prophetic message, Glenn Bleakney unpacks the call to become a habitation for the presence of God—a people fully surrendered to the Lordship of Jesus, formed in His image, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and united in authentic spiritual family.

Sharing the journey behind Awake Nations and drawing from Zechariah 4, Glenn reveals the importance of strong spiritual foundations, consecration, and kingdom vision in a time when many are hungry for more than powerless religion. This message will stir your heart for revival, discipleship, mission, and the manifest presence of God in the church today.