Sons of God should be led by the Spirit of God. You need to spend time in the Word and time praying in the Spirit, praying in tongues, so you can learn how to follow the Spirit of God, not something else.
I have lost count of how many times people have come to me and said “We need to do this, Pastor, in my last church we did this”, or “Mega Church A is doing this and that, we should do this and that”, or “can we sing these songs from Mega Church B”, or “I went to this conference and this happened, you must do this”. I get bought the shirts of the pastors they want me to look like, and the teaching sets of the pastors they want me to sound like! It’s absolutely true.
But I am not a clone, I am me. I have my own spiritual DNA and God has called me to do what I am called to do. Tree of Life Churches should look like Tree of Life and not some other church down the road. I am not going to start this or that because God told someone else to do it that way. I have to hear from God, and if God tells me to do something I will do it.
You cannot just go and start a church, you certainly cannot just go and start a Bible College, you cannot just go and start a ministry. You need something from God that is supernatural. If He does not tell you to do it, you cannot expect Him to help or pay for it. So many pastors are struggling financially because they are not asking God how to do things! There is no excuse for pastoring on a natural level, just doing marketing courses, begging for money, not listening to God, not studying the Scriptures. This is why so much is not working in our country. People actually think doing three years of Bible College is sufficient to run one! It’s ludicrous! You need experience of fivefold ministry to raise up fivefold ministers!
What we do has to be supernatural – and the most important level of spirituality is being shown things to come. You have to have a vision from God and you have to learn how to communicate that vision to people. There are different ways to communicate and different ways to fund raise and different ways to deal with problems – so you have to seek the Lord for your situations and your church and your ministry. You cannot just do what someone else has done and expect results.
We need to be led by the Spirit and we need to operate in the power of the Spirit. I’ll talk more about that next post!
Inspiring and Challenging Dreamers 