Faces
As I was writing some notes on the first four verses of Ezekiel chapter one, I felt like the Holy Spirit was quite talkative and in His particular way He prompted me to read further on, although the rest of the chapter did not seem to apply to the specific theme of my sermon.
Sometimes you can feel the Holy Spirit is there, right by your side, prompting you to go on because He has some revelation, and He seems to be so excited to share it with you.
That’s relationship.
That is His goal.
The whole plan of God, from creation to salvation to heaven follows one primary and overwhelming desire in the heart of our God: Relationship.
With you.
Yes, God wants a relationship with you, and He is more excited and anticipating it than we could ever be.
God the Father sent Jesus not because we needed salvation. God did not send Jesus because we did not have a way to go to heaven without Him. Jesus did not come with the higher purpose of populating heaven, or enabling us to escape damnation. All the above happened, it is a reality stemming from the work of the Cross. However, the motivation all along was to enable God to restore us into a relationship with the Father that we could have not otherwise had.
God wanted a relationship with His creation.
His fallen creation.
So, He needed to “unfall” us. Restoration through recreation: He made as a new creation. In Jesus.
The Holy Spirit has a way to mess with your head when He wants to make a point! The Holy Spirit is not a pusher but when He suggests you look into some particular Bible verse, He surely knows how to entice you to go ahead and read it! He surely does! But out of what sometimes we feel is a messy, hard to grasp concept, come truths so deep that we have to sit down and take time to assimilate.
| Sometimes you can feel the Holy Spirit is there, right by your side, prompting you to go on because He has some revelation, and He seems to be so excited to share it with you. |
As I was writing down those notes I felt compelled by the Spirit to read on and He pointed specifically to the verses that describe the creatures Ezekiel saw in his visions. Those -to say the least- strange creatures which Ezekiel observed are described as:
Eze 1:4 Then I looked, and behold, a whirlwind was coming out of the north, a great cloud with raging fire engulfing itself; and brightness was all around it and radiating out of its midst like the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.
Eze 1:5 Also from within it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man.
Eze 1:6 Each one had four faces, and each one had four wings.
Eze 1:7 Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the soles of calves’ feet. They sparkled like the color of burnished bronze.
Eze 1:8 The hands of a man were under their wings on their four sides; and each of the four had faces and wings.
Ezekiel 1:9 Their wings touched one another. The creatures did not turn when they went, but each one went straight forward.
And again,
Ezekiel 1:9 “Their wings touched one another. The creatures did not turn when they went, but each one went straight forward.”
Forward
I heard the whisper of The Holy Spirit as He asked: “Which way is forward?”
Don’t you just love when God poses a question to you, to which He obviously knows the answer, because He wants to make a point and help you understand what He is about to say? Is this a ‘gotcha’ moment? And He said: the creatures always went straightforward and they had four faces, so which was the way forward for them since they had four faces pointing to four different sides?
| Which way is “forward” when you have four faces pointing to four sides? |
Now He got me thinking. And praying, because He was obviously onto something and I wanted to know! For a week or so I could not get this out of my mind and kept praying for revelation as to the meaning of it all. In fact, He got me there and now He had to give me a way out of this enigma!
I talked about it with a couple friends; one of them, Mark Pelletier in Vancouver, WA said: I believe it relates to what you have been preaching about Kairos, where time is not measured in past, present and future but in an always active “present” presence; it is another dimension of time without time, and so, likewise the creatures move in another dimension of space without space restrictions.
That made a lot of sense. However, that did not explain how they could move in four different directions at once.
I talked to another friend, Charles Cooper in Modesto, CA. He said, “Well, as I read what you wrote and the passage in Ezekiel I keep getting the word “expansion”.
The Holy Spirit sort of gave me a jolt! He said: did you get that? That’s your clue!
Expansion
Back in the mid 70s I was blessed to help plant a church in La Boca, a very unusual neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina, with Missionaries Ralph and Frances Hiatt. It was part of a concerted effort involving several other missionaries. The project was called “Impact ‘74” and it proved to be one of the most God inspired endeavors because those churches became huge foundational stones for the revival that hit the South American nation a few years later.
La Boca is a colorful neighborhood in a city of over 3 million people, not counting the approximately 12 million living in the surrounding Greater Buenos Aires.
That particular church, “Jesus, La Esperanza” (Jesus, The Hope) never grew to more than a few hundred strong, but has been the mother of countless ‘daughter’ churches, many of which have grown to become some of the largest churches in the nation.
| That church never grew to more than a few hundred, but has been the mother to countless daughter churches, many of which are running tens of thousands people. |
That church, which, as I mentioned above did not become a ‘mega” church by any standard, not even in the highest peak of the awesome Argentine revival that started in 1982, which is still ongoing even now, more than 30 years later, gave more than a hundred pastors -and counting- to the revival. Some of them are pastoring churches in the tens of thousands. However, the church grew above the rest in its influence for the extension of the Kingdom of God. Yes, a big church can have more resources, and possibilities when it comes to influence a lost world for Christ, but nothing can compare to the influence exercised by moving daily in the Presence of God.
Almost every one of those churches have given birth to daughter churches which have in turn grown in size and gave birth to daughter churches themselves.
| . . . a big church can have more resources, and possibilities when it comes to influence a lost world for Christ, but nothing can compare to the influence exercised by moving daily in the Presence of God. |
That. Is. Expansion.
But it is not a strategy for growth. It is not a planned, designed strategy, with the goal of creating some kind of network of churches, or such similar endeavor. Rather, it is organic growth, pretty much like a plant, it is the natural expansion of a living organism.
Presence
Then it dawned on me: If you are expanding then you are moving like a balloon in every possible direction. Moreover, because you are moving in a different dimension in God, you do not need space to expand into, but rather the space is created as you expand within His Glory.
Scientists tell us that the universe is constantly expanding. Into what space? The universe itself generates the space as it expands. It is interesting that the word translated firmament or skies into our language, can also be translated as “expansion”. Don’t you love it, when scientists discover something that was already described in the Bible?
| . . . because you are moving in a different dimension in God, you do not need space to expand into, but rather the space is created as you expand within His Glory. |
John’s Gospel tells us the story of the disciples struggling with one of those sudden storms, very common in the Sea of Galilee. They went one for hours, until Jesus showed up, came into the boat and the storm calmed down. But there is more than just calming down a storm, an often-overlooked little piece in the closing statement:
John 6:21 “Then they willingly received Him into the boat, and immediately the boat was at the land where they were going.”
When Jesus came into that boat, it reached the other side at once, from the middle of the sea to the shore, from the uncertainty of fighting with a storm to the certainty of the land they were headed to: that was Kairos and Presence; it was not temporal space. If you allow me to do some guessing, I would think that they probably reached their destination at the exact time as if the storm had never happened and the disciples were never delayed.
When Phillip was translated to Azotus, (Acts 8:40) it happened in the dimension of Kairos and Presence not in temporal space.
In the Presence of God in the Time of God.
I will share in the last chapters, part of my own testimony, but let me say here that although back then, when God invaded my life, I did not know anything about the mechanics of Kairos, I found myself achieving in a few months’ time goals that had been elusive over many years, including some already abandoned dreams! I had been away from the Lord, and obviously from ministry, for some years and when He restored me, He did not bring me back to the beginning, it was not a start over kind of experience: He restored me to the point where I would have been if I had never left!
We serve an amazing God, full of Grace.
Job had 7,000 sheep before he was struck and lost them, along with nearly everything he possessed; but when he was restored he had 14,000; he had 3000 camels, now he had 6000; everything was doubled: God restored to him what he had lost PLUS the increase as if he had never lost it!
Expectations
“This is what I expect of my church: Just like each creature in Ezekiel moved in every direction at the same time, my people should be moving likewise in a way that admits no backwards. There is no backwards in the Kingdom, the only direction is forward. Ever expanding.”
But this can only happen within God’s presence. Just like the creatures were moving within the whirlwind and the fire, and the brilliance of the glory; in the same way, we are to move within the presence of God and expand His glory toward every direction.
Isa 54:2 Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; spare not; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes,
Isa 54:3 For you will spread abroad to the right hand and to the left; and your offspring will possess the nations and make the desolate cities to be inhabited.
| There is no backwards in the Kingdom, the only direction is forward. Ever expanding. Ever increasing. |
Wow! I said, please tell me more Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit went on and said:
“This is the time of redeeming, a time of recovering, all that you thought lost is not lost, it is there for you to call back, to redeem, to possess. It can happen in a moment. In My Presence, years long can be fulfilled in one day, and all that you desired, prayed, hoped, or even what you thought was long gone, can be brought into fruition when you move at my word”
However, your time of fulfillment requires a place of fulfillment as well: The time is Kairos, ever present now, and the place is in God’s Presence, ever expanding. Only within the Presence of God can you find fulfillment in your time because within the Presence of the Most High the Kairos time of God’s opportunities becomes your time: you don’t count your time as days and weeks anymore but in opportunities to grab and promises fulfilled.
“Do not sit down outside to contemplate My Glory: Leave that to those who do not know Me yet. Let them who have not seen me before, see My Glory, but you become a carrier of My Glory and not a spectator. From within God’s Presence you will expand toward all directions, for ‘as I live, saith the Lord, that My Glory shall cover the earth”
| . . . you don’t count your time as days and weeks anymore but in terms of opportunities to grab and promises fulfilled. |
