(Written originally in July, 2003)
Luke 17:24-27
“For just like the lightning, when it flashes out of one part of the sky, shines to the other part of the sky, so will the Son of Man be in His day. But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.”
Is The World In For A Big Surprise?
Since 2003 began, I have been feeling a sense of dread, a foreboding of massive global upheavals to come. My flesh doesn’t like to dwell on such things. It wants to focus on rosy vistas and positive expectations and ignore any thought of scary, brutal and unpleasant things. But the foreboding won’t go away. It’s like a message in red letters…flashing on my ‘viewing screen’ –
‘Red Alert, Red Alert, Red Alert: serious trouble and turbulence ahead!’
So I sense that it’s time, for those that are called to follow the Lord as His disciples, to receive appropriate training from the Holy Spirit that will be equal to, and even surpass, whatever lies ahead. Our Lord knows everything that will happen. We can take great comfort in knowing that He is Perfect…Perfect in His Ability and in His Loyalty to His own. He will do whatever it takes to prepare us…if we will only trust Him and cooperate and allow His Spirit to do whatever must be done to take us through the necessary ‘boot camp’ preparations. God Himself will do it. We are His Covenant Family and He alone can build, teach and train His Covenant Family. Only Almighty God can fathom the depths of what we need in order to be prepared, and He will do it through and by His living and written Word and Holy Spirit.
If this nagging premonition has merit, then Father has probably already begun to ‘reshuffle’ a seemingly random array of people…taking them out of their former comfort zones, groups and associations – to begin developing them into a sort of ‘first fruits’ group…a ‘first wave’ that will serve as the ‘spearhead’ of a Last Days Invasion by the Kingdom of Heaven. They will be the ones to establish a solid ‘beachhead’ to prepare for the arrival of the final generation of the Last Days Future Body of our Messiah.
So what will that first fruits gathering look like? Well, most likely it will come as a result of an intense culling, pruning, weeding and polarizing process that will take place in the lives of an increasing number of people. They will be like a ‘Gideon-type’ force for which many will feel called, but few will be chosen. The chosen won’t do the work. The Lord has already done it! But He’ll manifest His glorious results through them. Their numbers won’t be anywhere near as important as what the true state of their hearts and the attitude of their souls toward God’s Word, will be. The state of their hearts will determine which ones will be chosen to be formed into authentic members of His Body and which ones will be bypassed. It will also determine which of them will persevere all the way to the end.
As the global turmoil erupts and continues to spread and intensify, God will invade and soften the hearts of more and more unredeemed people. And they will respond to Him, in unprecedented numbers. But before that can happen, He must first invade the hearts of the ones that He will have in position to receive and welcome them. The welcoming party has to be prepared first. That’s where the company of Gideon troops comes in. Boot camps need trainers and drill instructors to demonstrate and model God’s New Covenant ways. The training of the trainers must come first and will include the most thorough cleansing, purification and mind-renewal of all. That is how it was in the beginning, when the Lord was preparing to institute the New Covenant prior to His death, resurrection and ascension. His original disciples had to be trained thoroughly and excruciatingly. Only after they were trained and Spirit-filled, was the Gospel, in all of its New Covenant ramifications, able to spread from Israel, to the rest of the world.
An Authentic Body to Reveal Messiah
But having begun it, the Lord is now preparing to finish it. And that’s where the Last Days disciples, and their training, come into view. Once the Lord is truly free to operate as Master, Owner and indwelling Life of these hand-picked disciples, they will transform into living, fruit-bearing members of His Body. When they really come under His authority, He will be free to execute His Last Days Invasion of the world. These disciples must become a true, authentic Body for Him that will actually reveal Him as He really is. The Holy Spirit must have total freedom to do whatever will be necessary to these disciples. Then He will be able to work in them, at unimaginably deep levels, to cleanse and purify them so thoroughly that the Glory of the risen Lord will actually shine and radiate through them without any blockage, interference or opposition on their part. When they are trained, yielded and willing to that degree, they will be ‘points of entry’ through which the risen Lord can appear and work on Earth and obey His Father and do everything He is sent to do with total effectiveness. Such crucified disciples will serve as bases of operation from which their Master will pierce, penetrate and impregnate more and more unbelievers with His Truth, Authority and eternal Life…all over the world.
So the Last Days Invasion must start with a very deep, ‘Believers FIRST’ penetration of hearts. The flesh residue…the natural soulish minds, wills and affections of those commissioned to be part of this Gideon Force will be like a New Covenant version of the original ‘clay pitchers’ that the 300 in Gideon’s army used in their battle with the Midianites and Amalekites in Judges chapter 7. The 300 were given lit torches that they concealed within the clay pitchers. And at the right time, the trumpets (rams horns) sounded and then the pitchers were broken so that the light of the torches could suddenly appear in the dark night. The sudden explosion of light accompanied by the sudden piercing blast of the ‘trumpets’ coming out of pitch darkness, threw the enemy into total confusion, chaos, self-destruction and total defeat.
The ‘soul pitchers’ of these modern day disciples-in-training are concealing a different kind of ‘torch’. These torches are the regenerated spirits God gave them. And within those spirits, the Life and Light of Christ’s indwelling Presence has been quietly abiding. At the appointed hour, the soul pitchers will finally break completely and suddenly. And the Light of the World Himself will explode into view and go into action. That is what the ‘boot camp’ training is about. The soulish ‘jars of clay’ must be rigorously trained and readied—for TOTAL breaking! And when these disciples are completely broken, they’ll be deployed and will be ready to begin operating from their proper God-assigned positions. When the hour arrives, ‘the trumpets’ will give the signal and what is left of those ‘clay coverings’ will fall away completely. Then the ‘torches’ which consist of the Light of the indwelling Lord, will explode into view all over the earth, simultaneously…revealing the risen Lord of Glory in His true Splendor.
Colossians 3:1-4
“Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our Life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in Glory!” (Emphasis added.)
The Invasion begins when that divinely appointed, strategic ‘kairos’ moment, arrives. But until then…the training provided by living in this broken, fallen world will continue. It will inflict increasing oppression, persecution and chaos on the trainees…to toughen and get them ready to overcome what is yet to come. If this premonition is accurate, only God knows the precise plan and the zero hour of its execution and how much time we have left to prepare. But prepare we must.
The various candidates for the first wave are currently scattered in separate locations, in various stages of training. Many still have not come to grips with the nearness and inevitability of the troublesome days of God’s Last Days Plan. Nevertheless the seed of something huge, supernatural and world-shaking has already been sown into them and it will grow and mature to complete fruition. One day, the fruit of what God is now doing in them will be released into the world—from within their God-filled spirits. It will be a revelation of our risen Messiah Himself, in all of His Glory.
Psalm 2
“Why are the nations in an uproar and the peoples devising a vain thing? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the LORD and against His Anointed (His Messiah and His Last Days disciples), saying, ‘Let us tear their fetters apart and cast away their cords from us!”
“He who sits in the heavens laughs, the LORD scoffs at them. Then He will speak to them in His anger and terrify them in His fury, saying, ‘But as for Me, I have installed My King upon Zion, My holy mountain.”
“I will surely tell of the decree of the LORD. He said to Me: ‘You are MY SON, today I have begotten You. Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations (pagan Jews and Gentiles) as Your inheritance, and the very ends of the Earth as Your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, You shall shatter them like earthenware!
“Therefore, O kings, show discernment; take warning O judges of the earth. Worship the Lord with reverence and rejoice with trembling! Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way, for His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!
When the D-Day turbulence and chaos begin, it will seem—to those that do not have the spiritual ‘eyes’ to see and recognize what God is doing—that all Hell has broken loose. The world will be taken completely by surprise and overcome with confusion and terror. People will view what is happening as being demonically induced. But God’s enemies won’t be initiating anything. They too will be shocked. And they’ll react in terror, to the enormous initiative God has suddenly unleashed! The Lord will move…on His Father’s terms and in His timing…for His purposes. And the stunned enemy will react violently and be forced to back-pedal accordingly.
2 Corinthians 4:6-10
“For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the Glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this Treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the Power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the Life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.”
Many of those destined for these ‘Gideon units’ are still mostly unaware of their calling. They’re scattered across the world, marking time within a great variety of cultures, and unrelated pursuits, religious affiliations and local fellowships. But at staggered intervals, they will begin to hear the ‘Gideon Call’. Suddenly they’ll feel like misfits within their current comfort zones. An inexplicable ‘restlessness’ similar to the urge migratory birds experience prior to takeoff, will arise within them. What felt so comfortable and familiar before, will suddenly begin to feel strange, alien and unappealing. the Holy Spirit will cause so much discomfort that they’ll finally be ready to move out and relocate to wherever their training is to take place. This boot camp will force them to deal with their fallen fleshy, self-pampering ‘civilian’ soulishness, as never before.
The training will increase in toughness, thoroughness and intensity, so that by the time D-Day arrives, they will be broken ‘all the way’. Of course the majority do not currently have any interest or stomach for this. But these called ones will begin to feel an intense Spirit-given attraction for radical change. Most will not know what to expect or be able to understand what has begun to happen to them. Many will interpret and explain their growing inner stress and turmoil in a variety of negative ways. A large number will become frightened and discouraged and will turn back in an attempt to recapture what they had before they felt the call.
But those that stay will eventually take to the changes, like ducks to water. They will go all the way through, wholeheartedly. Just like salmon returning to their original spawning ground, these chosen ones will keep swimming against the current of public opinion and that of their own laziness, selfishness and cowardice—knowing that those once-revered things must die! Inexplicably they will rejoice and press into their indwelling, risen Master, all the more! They will develop supernatural thoroughness, integrity, maturity, courage, toughness, faithfulness, skill, boldness and mastery, in living out the Last Days’ New Covenant ways of Almighty God.
No one will have to coax them; and nothing will be able to deter them. The Holy Spirit will empower them to ‘grab hold’ and learn, grow and begin to help others that start after them. Together they will persevere through all of the painful, humbling difficulties and hurdles that their training will impose on them all. But in the midst of it, they will experience the Life of our Master… His Joy and Peace will continually throb within them and work unceasingly and relentlessly, within them. His Life will change them and do awesome things in and through them, for which they will know that they cannot take any of the credit…
Can You Relate To Any of This?
The results will be totally supernatural! Any past training they may have had will pale in comparison to what they will now be required to undergo. But so will the inner peace and joy they feel, increase. It will surpass anything they’ve ever experienced in the past. The Lord will take them deeper and further… through the Mother of all boot camps, to prepare them for the ultimate climactic combat with the demonic powers of Darkness that awaits. The intensity level of the training will even surpass the enormity of the challenges that await them. Regardless of whether they are trained by Christ-Life (Ultimate Journey) teachings, or by any other venues, the training of the Last Days disciples will exceed anything that believers have ever experienced previously.
When the time arrives for them to enter ‘The Last Days’ Arena of Testimony’, supernatural demands will be made on them all. But by then, an astounding, enormous anointing will begin to flow into them from Christ their Head. And what was previously ‘drill, practice and training’, will suddenly become actual Triumph… amidst the deadly combat with the powers of Darkness. That’s what it will take to transform them into an invincible Invasion Force, capable of penetrating and goring the very bowels of the Darkness that has had such a strangle-hold on this fallen, broken world and its occupants for so long.
Troops being prepared for yet undisclosed missions can’t see why they must endure such apparently meaningless and difficult training. What they endure won’t relate to anything currently going on. It won’t fit the paradigms or comfort zones to which they previously became accustomed. But because God’s plan unfolds on a ‘need to know’ basis, most in the ‘Gideon Force’, still live banal, routine lives. All they can do at this time is occupy themselves with doing the obvious that is right in front of them.
But the Holy Spirit is already preparing their soulish ‘clay pitchers for that total breaking that is coming. He is leading them into excruciating experiences… imposing gut-wrenching challenges and stripping them of many temporal, worldly things they once clung to and held very dear. He is freeing them all from their former worldly entanglements. He’s preparing and freeing them up, to do their appointed jobs by allowing them to be exposed, abased, thwarted, stymied, abused, undermined, betrayed, neglected, deprived, disoriented, frustrated, misplaced, forsaken, scourged, broken and—yes—completely crucified!
John 12:24-26
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal. If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.” (Emphasis added.)
The desolation they will experience will even make them feel ‘unsaved’ at times. That’s because the Holy Spirit is carefully forging them into a living, Psalm 22 image and likeness of our crucified Messiah! The actual experience of seeds falling into the ground and dying will prove to be much different than what their comfortable ‘bless me’ church meetings and Bible study discussions of the past, kept leading them to expect. But these human seeds must and will, fall into the ground and die… for real! They will not be allowed to ‘improve’ or move higher up on the world’s false scale of 1 to 10. Like their Master, they too will go all the way down to zero! They will really die! They will completely ‘lose it’. Their self-adoring radical independence will begin to rot and come apart. It will fail and it will look terrible and smell even worse! People will turn away from it in horror and disgust (Cf. Isa. 52:13-15; 53). There will not be a speck of anything left in them that will be desirable or of any use to this fallen world’s system! They will hit the Zero Point for good!
Thereafter, it will never again be about them. After they’ve been completely stripped of reliance on themselves, they will be forced to focus on and depend upon Another—their Lord—100% of the time, from that point forward. Once they reach that state of helpless dependence upon their glorified Head, once He is truly their one and only Life, they will be ready for the Holy Spirit to take them into ‘The Last Days’ Arena of Testimony.
As their training proceeds, the trainees will not understand what is happening to them. The more they lose their grip on their former ‘self-reliance’, their personal, self-made empires and agendas will fall of their own dead weight and crumble. At first, the more it happens, they will instinctively blame someone else. Some will blame God; others will blame people around them; others will blame Satan… and most of them will whine and wallow in self-pity and assume that they’re losers. But they will not be losing! The old paradigms that they formerly followed will still be in place… ‘hard-wired’ into their brains… and they will naturally continue to mislead and misdirect and continue to make them assume that it’s all about them, and how they feel, and what they do and how they do it!
But the truth will be this: as their self-life and its corresponding paradigms are trashed, along with their comfort zones, THESE DISCIPLES WILL BE WINNING! God must wean them of their original living death radically independent identities, viewpoints and agendas. And He will exchange all of that pathetic temporary stuff, for the Perfection of His Word’s Finished Work and the Glory of Christ’s Perfect Eternal Resurrection Life and the incomprehensible Heavenly Inheritance into which He is here to bring them, and impart to them, for all of Eternity! That is why every speck of their former temporal self-adoring corruption must be stripped off like cocoons, so they can be free to embody the Perfection of God’s Eternal Living Word… and soar with Him into what is Eternal and Perfect and can only come to them from God!
In time they’ll get used to the high altitude spiritual territory as the Lord conditions them to appreciate, desire, and learn to embrace and embody—the perfect Humanity of the Crucified and Exalted Lamb and His Spirit-led way of operating on Earth. After they learn these ABC levels of the Gospel, God will train them for the big league, XYZ levels of resisting Satan, standing on and holding their God-given Blood Covenant Ground, and staring down and overcoming the entire host of the demonic powers of Darkness!
Then those that formerly insisted on being placed first, according to their worldly, self-life mandates, will now gladly choose to be last, so that Christ, Whom they formerly rated and placed last, will from then on, be FIRST! Now they’ll be so weak in themselves, that there won’t be anything else for them to do but embody the risen Lord—Exalted and Triumphant—in God’s awesome supernatural Power. The living Word Himself will emerge gloriously, out from the little that is left of them!
2 Corinthians 12:8-10
“Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, ‘My Grace is sufficient for you, for Power is perfected in weakness.’ Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the Power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong!”
So while most people continue to strive to deodorize, primp, improve, enhance, increase, better manage, and ‘spiritualize’ their self-centered temporal earthly lives, relationships, feelings, positions and circumstances, these Special Forces are even now being trained to do just the opposite! They are being prepared to operate superbly in arduous, humanly impossible circumstances and conditions that aren’t even here yet! That’s why they currently feel like total misfits in the comfortable, materialistic, self-indulgent religiosity of the status quo and the ego-centered, self-adoring trappings of the phony humanistic world that still operates all around them.
The humanistic world is obsessed with its quest for self-gratification and Perfect 10 status. Man and his self-adoring happiness and fulfillment, remain the end-all and be-all of everything the fallen world does. The world’s war cry is, ‘I’ll do it MY way!’ But in this crucified, supernatural Gideon army, everything will be about the Glory of God and the revelation of His Son. Their war cry will be, ‘OUR LORD, THE WORD OF GOD, IS EVERYTHING!’ (See Philippians 2:5-8) So as the teeming billions in the ‘Me first’ parade go in the direction of ‘Perfect Ten’, these misfits are hobbling by twos and threes, into the loneliness of the opposite, crucified, direction…the direction that leads to the ‘ZERONESS’ of Christ-crucified first… and then enables them to abide with Him… in the Eternal Glory of His Resurrection!
By the Holy Spirit’s empowerment, they will begin to joyfully and aggressively allow God to humble, decrease and pour out every speck of their Sin-spawned self-life (Cf. Isa. 53, Mt. 10; Jn. 12; Rev. 12). As our Master taught His disciples in Mt. 10, so will these troops learn to forsake everything they’ve ever been, ever had, or ever desired or did, by nature, in exchange for what God wants to make of them by His supernatural grace. They’ll become the incarnate embodiment of God’s beloved slain but resurrected Lamb (Rev. 12:10-17). And the Lord will weave them together, into an enormous, interconnected, spiritual ‘Fishnet’ that will contain and release His Life and Light’ as He works to save those myriads of former enemies that now are beginning to hear His voice and heed His commands…in and through the Last Days’ example and guidance of His well-prepared disciples.
At this present stage, many of them still have trouble seeing and thinking ‘outside the box’ of the universally accepted, traditional, religious, theological mindsets and lifestyles we have all inherited from previous generations. But the enormity of what is approaching will blow away all current traditions, denominational mental boxes, world religion structures, secular humanistic expectations, priorities and comfort levels. So, predisposed or not, when the shaking of all things temporal begins, every one of us will—see what we’ve never seen—hear what we’ve never heard—feel what we’ve never felt—and go where we never dreamed the Lord would ever take us (Heb. 12:25-29). May we all see the need to get ready. And may we all learn to trust exclusively in the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…and nurse continually at His all-sufficient breasts, like totally trusting, secure babes.
A Tidal Wave of Change
We’ll probably have to explore spiritual vistas that prior generations never imagined and undergo heart-rending separations as the tidal wave of change sweeps away loved ones that insist on remaining unprepared. But the Lord will have His Gideon Force ready to ‘ride The Wave’ of change instinctively, when it finally comes to pick them up. The Wave is the Holy Spirit. And these troops are being trained to interact constantly with Him during these precious, quiet, excruciating, controlled-agony days of ‘boot camp’ training that still remain for us. Those that the Lord has called, culled and is qualifying, must be trained to thrive amid MASSIVE, horrendous reality-shifts without missing a beat.
They must learn to be so at one with the Holy Spirit that they are effectively reduced to toddler-level dependency on God. The Cross that they’ll one day come to love, cherish and rest upon in total peace, will be the instrument upon which they must be trained, even as more and more of this fallen, broken world falls apart and blows away. The trouble is that most of us are conditioned and wired to live in relative stability, ease, strength and comfort in a very materialistic, self-actualizing world. But these troops are not being trained for the current status quo. They’re being trained for the way it’s going to be after the world’s man-made houses of cards have begun to come apart in earnest. Most of that is still in the future and is still mostly unknown to us. That makes it very difficult for those that live around these trainees to know what to do with them in the present. Why don’t they cooperate and help to strengthen, cultivate and maintain the status quo? Why are they so weird, stubborn and contrary? Their families and neighbors can’t understand them because at present it’s very difficult for them to even understand themselves!
It will be difficult for them to know how to be and act in the present, because these troops will be in the process of actually being weaned from the way things are in the present! And the Reality they’re being trained for is still in the future and still, ‘Top Secret’. So how can they navigate in the present, without becoming or appearing to be disoriented and out of touch with current ‘reality’? In fact, to some, they will appear to be insane! To others, they will come across as arrogant, elitist, standoffish and Pharisaical. That’s because a mere foreboding such as the one I’m trying to articulate will only make sense to those that also feel and sense what this ‘Gideon Force’ senses. But to those that do not sense it, it will seem to be totally crazy.
But even the tension this will cause will serve as wonderful training for the groups that will be divided at first, by their vastly different viewpoints. The tension will do wonders for all of their ‘clay pitchers’, since they will all be broken, one way or another, in any event. Iron sharpens iron. Thus many who suspect and resent these ‘misfit nuts’ today, will hear the call to join them tomorrow. In time, they’ll all be true, ‘to the death’ Covenant friends and comrades. And many of those ‘weird ones’ that now irritate and rankle their complacent neighbors, will soon welcome those very same people into their midst, and they will come to love them as the closest, dearest friends they’ve ever had! It has to happen if they’re all going to share the same fate, and transform into our Messiah’s one Body, under His total Headship.
So the Lord lovingly uses healthy tension to strengthen flabby mental, emotional and relational ‘muscles’. All of this is ‘raw material’ to be used for learning to deal with our ‘clay pitchers’ that are all on death row and must all be broken, sooner or later. Even as our imperfections and inadequacies are magnified for the world to see, from within our nothingness, the absolute eternal PERFECTION of our indwelling Lord is ready to begin to shine forth…brighter and brighter…from within each one of us. And the day is coming when He will be clearly seen and experienced by the world as He operates in our midst…AS HE REALLY IS!
An End Times Body
In the midst of Christianity’s current understandable confusion, division, mutual misunderstanding and suspicions, I see God quietly building the ‘end times’ Body for His Son. It will be the enormous New Covenant ‘ARK’ that will, in a very short time, receive droves of panicked, unredeemed, Jews and Gentiles into itself as they begin to fear and heed God’s warning of the flood’ of enormous Judgment that has already begun to emerge. The tranquil window of opportunity we now enjoy is God’s mercy—giving us a quiet, peaceful span of time in which troops can drill, practice and prepare together, before the unspeakable chaos of the coming tsunami of changes breaks out fully all across the horizon.
Our brains and mental ‘on board computers’ only listen to us. So we’re responsible for renewing, rewiring and retraining them. It’s easy to say we should do it. It’s easy to read, study, think, talk and sing about doing it. But it’s another thing to produce effective, competent ‘drill instructors’ that can say, in spirit and in truth, ‘We’ve been there; so watch us interact with God in this…watch Christ in us deal with that…watch the Holy Spirit guide us through this while we remain crucified to self-life and draw exclusively from what our awesome God has already created and supplied and paid for in the past…watch us rewire and program ourselves for transforming change…and…now YOU TRY IT!’
I believe God wants to produce an authentic Biblical, disciple-level corps of ‘Watch us…now you’ trainers for this critical time. That’s why the first wave is being assembled. When they become fully trained, competent veteran instructors, more detachments of future disciples will begin to appear. The Holy Spirit will have built an infrastructure and have it in place by that time…ready to receive newcomers and help them begin their preparations in earnest.The increasing stream of recruits God will place in the care of these original instructors will in turn mature and begin to reproduce what they learned from their teachers. They too will become fruit-bearing instructors, teaching and training others in how to interact with and draw exclusively from the risen Lord that lives within and among us all.
The Gideon Force will learn to thrive amid the pressures created by the massive tsunami of radical change that is going to hit the entire world with unprecedented force. These disciples won’t be victims of their circumstances or feelings. They won’t allow unexpected changes or disappointments to intimidate or deter them. They will be God’s carriers of heavenly changes. They will be innovators and beneficiaries of what God will be free to do through them. But their demonic enemies will be confounded and devastated at every turn because of the relentless unpredictability of these Spirit-led and empowered disciples:
John 3:5-8
“…Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
They will develop such faithful hearts that they will overcome things in their hearts even before they happen in time and space! And regardless of circumstances, natural feelings or past habits, they’ll be able to ‘travel light’, be flexible, highly mobile, faceless, anonymous and totally free of slavery to circumstances. And because they’re all being taken into brand new territory, it will be psychologically impossible for any of them to see themselves as ‘experts’, or ‘big shots’ or ‘big names’. The Cross will reduce them all down to the level of little children. All of their focus will be on their indwelling Lord and His infinite Perfection and All-Sufficiency, at all times; and no longer on themselves. They will embody and reveal Him as one New Man in Messiah (Cf. Ephesians 2-5).
God is the only real Minister and Ministry to all fallen flesh. Only He can deal with it. So these troops will not rely on themselves; nor will they focus on other men or obsess over the desperate needs of all flesh. The poor are always with us (Matthew 13: 10-17). And they are poor only for as long as God is not yet free to be their one and only Source for what is real, true and good. So the focus of these disciples will always be on our indwelling Lord and His continued revelation and the increase of the establishment of His Authority and Glorification.The more the Living Word of God prevails in them and through them, the more He will shine forth and draw men to Himself and meet the needs of the people that will continue to cluster around His disciples. And because of the depths to which these disciple troops have come to know Him, they will appear to be like weak, crucified children. They will always remain insignificantly small and utterly weak before God and men. But as they operate from the power of their indwelling Lord in the spiritual realms, God’s demonic enemies, will recognize and fear them tremendously – for the awesome spiritual, Resurrection-Life titans they really are.
These Last Days troops will be much more focused and determined than even the terrorists we hear so much about in the media today. They will be equipped to confound and put terrorists to rout. They will be weaned of any attachment to material, comfortable, static, sensual, sectarian, racial, religious, ethnic and worldly concerns. They’ll be trained to maintain LASER-LIKE FOCUS on and interaction with—their indwelling Lord. They’ll maintain a constant Colossians 3:1-4 mindset and agenda. They’ll be prepared for the wave of change because they will have already cut off all ties to and dependencies upon the man-made, worldly things that will be crumbling and disappearing. These disciples will lose nothing when temporal worldly things are blown away, because they will have already been deeply grounded and connected into everything that is eternally permanent. They will be transplanted and rooted into the richest Soil imaginable… God’s Heavenly Ground—THE RISEN MESSIAH HIMSELF AND HIS INFINITE, PERFECT FINISHED NEW COVENANT WORK THAT CANNOT FAIL!
By the end of their training, these disciples will terrorize terrorists! Both they and the terrorists will be anonymous and faceless. Both will blend in anywhere. You won’t know who they are until after they pass through. Terrorists are known only by their fruits—death, destruction, terror and desolation. These disciples will operate in a similar way. They’ll be a highly mobile, low profile ‘Church without walls’. Their thrust will go counter to that of their death-dealing terrorist counterparts. They will embody and release supernatural LIFE AND LIGHT—HIMSELF into everything they touch! They’ll scorn death, hardship and discomfort even more than terrorists do, because they will already be dead to this world—living out from and thriving in Christ—on the resurrection side of the Cross!
Christ’s Synchronized, Coordinated Body
They’ll draw no attention to themselves. Christ will be their ALL in all. Their common Christ-mind focus will make them transcend all man-made denominational, organizational, ethnic, religious and cultural walls. They’ll leave all that petty competitiveness behind, and spread out in all directions under the Holy Spirit’s direction. They’ll infiltrate everything and blend into wherever He leads them. They won’t obsess over things ABOUT Christ; they’ll embody Christ Himself! So they won’t be rigid, petty or argumentative. They won’t continually divide and split apart or undermine one another. The Cross will break, soften, melt, mold and unite them all, into Christ’s one synchronized, coordinated Body. Their focus will be on embodying and revealing their Head alone, as living members of His one, fully-integrated Body.
You won’t know they’ve been here until they’ve passed through. You won’t remember their names, or what they looked like. But after they pass through, you will never again be able to forget or ignore the risen Lord that they serve, proclaim and embody. The fruit in their wake will be—Christ, Christ, Christ, The Glory of the risen Messiah, the Fruit of the risen Lord, and the Absolute Takeover of all things, by the living Word of God. You’ll never lose sight of the risen Messiah again, once His New Covenant disciples have touched your life. The Messiah died first so that they might live. But now, they die so that He might live.
I know that in saying this publicly I may prove to be the most deluded fool on earth. I’ve tried to forget this and just ‘be normal’ and mind my own business. But the burn inside won’t stop. It is more real than anything I currently see around me. If I’m wrong, I will be dreadfully embarrassed and in desperate need of intercessory prayer. But if this Last Days D-Day really is bearing down upon us, then there’s not a minute to waste. So I’m going with my intuition. If later on, I am proved to be dead wrong, so be it! In fact I pray that I am wrong, for the sake of everyone’s ease and comfort! But I can’t risk the gamble. I’m much more afraid of what it would mean to miss the window of opportunity—that we have in this time of relative peace and calm—to make the needed preparations, than I fear being considered a fool, in the eyes of the world.
If I’m wrong, and even if I’m right… I remain in myself, a monumental fool. But even so, if I’m wrong, then at least we will be trying to do what the Lord said He wanted us to do – ‘make disciples’. I admit that I tremble – wondering if I misheard God. But I tremble even more at the possibility that maybe—just maybe—I didn’t mishear Him. And if this intuition of mine turns out to be right, then—
Our only safety will lie in being spiritually, mentally and emotionally prepared for what is coming!