The Movement of the Spirit

But I have learned about and want to share with you three movements of the Holy Spirit that can help you deepen your prayer, become more.
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Jesus says in Matthew Where do we find the courage to answer this call, especially in light of our fears and weaknesses?

Discerning the Movements of the Spirit

He says in 1 John 4: Maybe you have experienced the love of God in the past, but loss or struggle has shaken your belief and trust in Him. Either way, God wants to love you more than you want His love. Ask the Holy Spirit to pour the love of God into your heart today, tomorrow, and every day. It is a gift freely given through the Holy Spirit. Ask, receive, and become convinced. Sometimes I wish my faith life could be programmed into my soul like a computer.

Computers execute the commands given to them without needing to grapple with tough choices. But real life is messy. Many of us deal with constant temptations and distractions that lead us away from God. But in the midst of chaos, we are called to order all our desires and love towards Him. How can we overcome the world and live for Jesus? We need to ask for and respond to the conviction that comes from the Holy Spirit. Conviction is a strongly held belief or living in the state of being convinced. From there we need to seek the conviction that will allow us to love God in return and pursue holiness.

Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 1: Conviction activates our beliefs. It turns a hunger for God into spending time with God in prayer. It turns a desire to know God into the habit of reading the Bible or another spiritual book for a few minutes every day. Conviction from the Holy Spirit takes even our desire for God to the next level because our human desires are weak. Every corpse on the side of Mt.

August 2018

Everest was once a very focused and highly motivated person. If we attempt to climb the mountain of God without conviction — a movement of the Spirit beyond ourselves — we will not make it.

I needed to find freedom from selfishness and pride so I prayed the Litany of Humility and asked the Holy Spirit to convict me of the truth that my life was not my own. I needed to do my part but I knew my effort was never going to be enough. Through the conviction of the Holy Spirit, I began making progress.

I have a long way to go but I now have the discipline of prayer to keep me going forward. These sound nice, yes, but what we are often really praying is, "Lord, send revival Every time God moved in Scripture or recent history, His movement—by and large—was accompanied by weird phenomena. What do I mean by "weird?

It pushed people out of stale, dead and dry religion. It called for pastors and leaders to be more elastic with their "orders of service" to accommodate God's agenda. When God comes down and we experience a taste of the power of the age to come in the here and now, things are going to get a little weird. This is to be celebrated, not tolerated at best or rejected at worst.

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Jesus' birth was weird. I love Christmas, but I am concerned that we have overly glamorized what transpired at the birth of Jesus. The holy King of creation was delivered by a frightened teenager in a smelly stable while the sinister Herod enjoyed the splendor of opulent quarters. Jesus' life and ministry were weird. God incarnate actually limited Himself while He walked on planet Earth.

Although He was God and never ceased being God , He did not pull the "God-card" and display power out of His divinity. He lived as the Son of Man, anointed by the Holy Spirit, thus providing all born-again humanity a model to follow once they received the same empowering of the Spirit. It's weird, really, that Jesus didn't just hover around the planet and immediately take over everything.

After all, He was God Almighty—King of kings! He didn't come as the liberator everyone thought He would be. Many were expecting the Messiah to physically overthrow the Roman oppression over the people of Israel and usher in an eschatological Golden Age as the heir to David's throne. Scripture does point to such an age of glory, yes, but that day is still yet to come. The Messiah had to first come as lowly Savior before He would come as conquering King.

If He came as King without first dealing with the sin issue, humanity could not stand under His holy reign. Weird, but that's how it had to happen. Jesus' death was weird. It's hard to comprehend what the onlookers must have thought as they watched Messiah Jesus carry the cross up the hill of Golgotha. Even Jesus' disciples and those closest to Him were surely perplexed by the weirdness. God was being slaughtered. The Creator was being torn, beaten, mocked and spit upon by those He created.

Furthermore, the most perfect Being in all of creation was being treated like the most hardened of criminals and being sentenced to die the most horrific of deaths—Roman crucifixion. Who are we to think that in our sophisticated modern culture, we have somehow "graduated" past the need for what the early church depended upon for dear life—Pentecostal power?

When the Holy Spirit came in Acts 2, a lot of weird stuff happened. Never mind the whole speaking in tongues thing. There was a host of unusual manifestations in operation: It's interesting to also note that lots of people were present during these phenomena.

Scripture records that during this outpouring, " Now dwelling in Jerusalem were Jews, devout men, from every nation under heaven" Acts 2: Such a setting is every preacher or pastor's dream. An audience full of potential!

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND US

I think it's important that we examine how the story did not play out. The Book of Acts does not record it this way:. And at the sound of the relevant and eloquent preaching, the Broadway-style production, and the professional praise and worship the multitude came together. Multitudes, both then and now, are not drawn by the world repackaged in a Christian presentation. I prophesy that the Lord is awakening the church to the deep longing of those who are disconnected from God.

The Holy Spirit | Focolare Movement

Such a longing can be expressed in the following question—a question that, I am convinced, the people who cross the threshold from the world into a church building are burning to know the answer to. Wouldn't it be like the devil to try to distract the postmodern church from answering this question. There is only one thing that sufficiently answers this question, and it's not the size of a church sanctuary or the relevance of the preaching, or the hip-ness of a preacher or the professionalism of the music teams.

These things are fine, to a degree. We need to be relevant, not irrelevant. We should pursue excellence and not settle for mediocrity. We do this, however, to honor God—not build an "experience" to attempt to please people.


  • Epitome: The Movement of the Holy Spirit.
  • Pensions, Labor, and Individual Choice (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report).
  • Why We Must Embrace the Weird Movement of the Holy Spirit — Charisma Magazine.
  • Twitter Updates.

And yet, we often aim at this target because we are terrified of being "weird. The one answer to this question is the very thing we are terrified of—the movement and outpouring of the Holy Spirit. God made every provision available so that we could have an answer to a world that is desperate to know if God exists. He gave us His Spirit, and how do we often respond? We're afraid that He might do the very thing that will answer the cry of a hungry, thirsty world—we're afraid He might move.

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I prophesy that it's time for charismatics and Pentecostals to boldly return to their roots of the supernatural. I prophesy that it's time for different denominations to re-dig the wells that were paid for often through blood and martyrdom and sacrifice by their founders, as many historic, orthodox denominations were birthed through a move of the Spirit. What drew the multitudes then, and will draw the multitudes today?

I have to warn you, it's weird. But are we going to veer away from the opportunity to reach and impact the masses because we're afraid of what a few people will think of us? The sound of the manifestation of Holy Spirit outpouring. The unusual signs and wonders that accompanied God's entrance into the Earth realm was a sound from Heaven that drew the multitudes.