Just sharing – A Memory.

It was good Friday, and I felt a great need to find fellowship, but churches were not as such open on Good Friday. I was living in Brussels at the time and the only church I knew to go to, was the Anglican church at the centre of town. I found my way there and sat down on one of the empty pews. The church was empty but open for people to come and pray as they wished. Just as I sat down, I felt the Lord prompt me to open Jeremiah chapter 2. I dutifully did and my eyes fell upon a disturbing verse. It was verse 13. “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken ME, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

I rested in the Lord as He began to impress upon me the state of the church and I understood then two very important things.

1. God was saying that we forsook Him, the living God, the real God.
2. But worse still, we built up our own institutions with our own agendas which do not allow the Spirit to move in them because there is no room for His spirit within our own limiting structures. And because of fear, leaders often restrain the move of the Spirit.

I was a young believer at the time, barely a 10 month old believer but God instantaneously was able to show me the main issues on His heart. This was as far back as 1986 when I was living in Brussels with my husband on his secondment from the Ministry of Agriculture to the Foreign Office. And to date the issues mentioned in Jeremiah 2:13, remain the same. Established churches do not allow His spirit to operate in full and even we as individuals are afraid of moving more freely and, at least in part, we are stuck in religion. We resist the training for freedom, total submission, and intimacy with God because it is hard.

The one specific thing I remember God spoke to me individually was as follows. He said to me, ‘You see, you seek to go to church because you need fellowship, but as from today, you will only set a foot in church when I lead you there.’ He imprinted on my spirit the importance of fearing Him first and following His lead and not necessarily what is customarily done in church in general. The emphasis in this was to fear Him first and indeed He did lead me to church, and I was trained and disciplined by leadership and learnt the principles and ways of church and the faith, through trials and rejections. But God used all for my benefit, honing me in opposition, teaching me warfare, and teaching me how to submit both to leadership and my husband as a way for promoting His purposes.

Later in 1989 when we returned home to the UK with our first child, God began to teach me about what He was going to do with the church in order to bring us into our true purpose in Him. He taught me weekly from Isaiah 50,51,52. He literally sat me down just once a week to study these books two verses at a time as He revealed to me His plan to humble the church down to the dust through many trials. He showed me that believers will experience all the ailing issues that non-believers experience and this way He will move believers from religion to a living faith and God fearing action while being rooted in faith and the principles taught by Him. And at the end of this process, He will shift our perspective from a rigid dogma based faith, to being Spirit led, so that He can use us to better minister Himself to an ailing world.

I think this training is not over and He is still leading us first to choosing Him above all things and responding to His unique calling over and above religion and fear. So that we can feel at home with Him and offer the same to the world.

He is still inviting us to be intimate with Him as a number one priority and in so doing to return to the specific destiny He prepared for each one of us and the overall church.