What a Wild Time!!

I just got back from St. Paul today. It was a really incredible time. God showed up. And we all know that when God shows up that the impossible and the supernatural MUST occur. Not as a matter of God being obligated, but simply because this is the nature of the God we serve.

The trip was rather funny because Carolyn and I had no idea what we were doing. Daniel Baker invited us to join him on this conference and we thought we'd just be along for the ride and be there to pray for people. You can imagine our surprise when we pulled up to the church and saw our names all over the posters! We were featured guests!! As you can well imagine, we had a good laugh about that. The featured guests had no idea that they were even speaking!

Anyway, the first night was awesome. We found out that this church had been seriously praying for three weeks previous to this weekend, and we walked right into the middle of one serious prayer time. The atmosphere was primed and everyone was hungry for God. Which was wonderful, because I was one of them. I was (am still) hungry for more of God. As far as I have figured out, I have not experienced all that there is to God quite yet, so I want more!

Daniel spoke the first night on something. I can't really remember what, but I'm sure it was good. I think it had something to do with destiny. I was a little blasted in the Lord. Worship was so incredible and I saw heaven open up above us. Lots of angels entered the room and when that happens, I generally just..... go.

The next morning Carolyn spoke her trademark message on "Desperation vs. Passion" which in my opinion is one of the most important messages that the North American church needs to hear. The definition of desperation is to be without hope, to be in a state of despair. That is impossible if you have Jesus in your life because he is the living hope. The definition of passion is that which Christ felt on the cross. Check your dictionary - it's in there. Imagine if we get filled with real passion and run with the passion on our lives what would happen?

We always pray to bless people's passions and to set them free in them each time this message is preached, and it's always fun. Amazing amounts of freedom comes to people when they finally get permission to be who they were always created to be and to run with wild abandon towards that.

Saturday night I preached and my goodness.... God came. And not because I preached. He came before and we essentially had the ministry time before I was even able to speak! Worship lasted two full hours and it was intense, powerful and intimate the entire time. Different people each lead out in prophetic songs and my entire message was literally preached by the crowd of people before I got a chance to! To be honest, it really tested my desire and prayer that the Holy Spirit would come and lead the meetings. We all religiously pray that because we think we are supposed to, but when the Holy Spirit actually shows up and takes over, when you're thinking you've got something nice to say to the people it tests you to see how alive you really are to your own flesh and gives you a great opprotunity to hop up on that altar and die to yourself and your selfish motives.

But, after two hours, they jammed a microphone in my face and I had to figure out what the heck to do. They already preached the message and had a wonderful ministry time on their own. Why would they need me now? I did talk and exorted them that even though they are experiencing the power of God that there is still a distance between what is happening in a church and what is happening on the streets and that distance was each one of us. We had prayed and declared and interceeded over St. Paul for two hours, the windows were now open and the question I felt that the Lord was posing to us was, "Now what are you going to do about it?"

I talked about a bunch of other stuff, but kept hammering on "what are you going to do about it?" and kept asking how St. Paul was going to be changed because of this stuff. Also I reminded them of their rightful inheritance, which is heaven itself and called them to a life of supernatural power and to release heaven all over St. Paul. The basic call of "if it breathes, pray for it" not out of a place of bringing them to heaven, but out of a place of bringing heaven down on them like Jesus taught us to pray. On earth as it is in heaven....

We proceeded to do some whole sale healing and seven people got healed. One lady had a severe neck injury for the past seven years and was in constant pain. Her neck was out so badly that you could easily feel what was wrong, just by touching her neck. She was totally healed as God came and quickly and easily touched her. Nobody laid hands on her, God just came and healed her as we prayed!

And then we moved into asking God to blast us all with an even greater measure of power, so that we could have even more to give to the streets. Blasted is what we got. Carolyn, who I have never seen fall over was literally flopping all over the place. We couldn't touch her because she'd go flying or just collapse in a heap, which was really bad because the three of us were laying hands on everyone and we just got knocked around by the power of God. Daniel is a big man, and he was our stabilizing force and Carolyn and I bobbled all over the farm.

It was quite run, really!

The senior pastor said it was the best service in the history of that church. Hmmm... I wonder if God is up to something there? My faith exploded again to see entire cities saved by the power of God. St. Paul is right ready for it. Pray for them if you think of it.

Anyway, it's midnight and I should be in bed. It's always nice to crawl back into a bed that is your own.