Category: Fivefold Ministry
Coming Soon To A Church Near You!
In preparation for a great visitation, God may raise up many messengers, each preparing the way of the Lord in his own appointed sphere. This is surely a day when God is looking for forerunners to blaze the trail of revival; not smooth preachers, but rugged prophets: men of the stamp of Elijah, who, with the hand of the Lord upon him, girded up his loins and ran before the king to the entrance of the royal city (1 Kgs. 18:46). Thus, he demonstrated the spiritual work he was doing as a forerunner. On Carmel Elijah had prepared the way of the Lord, and now the Lord was coming “as the latter rain that waters the earth” (Hos. 6:3).
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Distinguishing Flakey from False Prophets
The prophetic movement and or prophetic leaders have perhaps been the most controversial in the Body of Christ the past several decades. Some of it has to do with the fact that many people are afraid of any move of the Spirit and or criticize that which they do not understand. However, as someone who has functioned in prophetic ministry since the early 1990’s, I would say that a fair share of criticism against the prophetic is warranted because of either “flakey or “false” prophetic ministries. It is the objective of this article to attempt to bring a distinction between a flakey and false prophet.
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Overcoming the Famine of the Hearing of the Word of the Lord in the Church Jesus is Building
In Amos 8:11, the Lord speaks about a famine of hearing the Word of the Lord. This was referring to a time in the life of the nation of Israel when there was rarely a true prophetic word spoken. I believe that we are now living in similar times. There are many dubious so-called prophetic voices, but of greater concern is the existing trend to dumb down and cut back on the preaching of the Word of God to make church attendance attractive to all.
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The Role of Fivefold Ministry (Part 3)
Now as pointed out before (in the book, Charismatic Captivation), the Church is the quintessential Theocracy. Its government is not a political government wherein the governed themselves constitute, devise, and effect their own government, such as that of this nation, the United States, which is a form of democracy (republic), supposedly “of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Rather, the Church is literally governed by a singular Supreme Potentate—the Lord Jesus Christ—who God has appointed as its Sole and Sovereign Head. The absolute necessity of understanding this one concept is emphasized and re‑emphasized repeatedly in this volume, and indeed is the ultimate and salient point of this book.
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The Manifestation (Charismata) Gift of Prophecy
THE PROPHETIC GIFTS ARE THE GREATER GIFTS
1 Cor. 12:31 “But earnestly desire the greater gifts.”
Among the manifestation gifts of the Spirit, there are “GREATER” gifts, that is to say, some gifts have a greater spiritual impact and require a greater anointing to operate than others. The term “greater gifts” also indicates there is an order of ascendency among the three categories of manifestation gifts as well as within each category. In other words, of the three categories of manifestation gifts, some are greater than the others, and each category has an order of importance as well. For example—
1 Cor. 14:5 “and GREATER is one who PROPHESIES than one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets….”
This verse presents an example of “greater gifts” within a category of manifestation gifts. According to this verse, among the Vocal Gifts, prophecy is the greatest, interpretation of tongues is next, then tongues. Not only is the gift greater, but the “one who prophesies”, according to this verse, is operating in a greater level of the anointing than the “one who speaks in tongues.” The exception to this is—”unless he interprets,” meaning that if the person who speaks the message in tongues also interprets, then he is operating equally in anointing, gifting, and equipping as the “one who prophesies.”
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Apostolic Conversion (PART 1)
The apostolic realities that pertain to God’s glory can only find fulfillment in a people who are utterly abandoned to God. If we embrace only the vocabulary of apostolicity, we engage the cruelest of all deceptions. It is possible to be saved, and yet not be converted in the sense of an utterness toward God that apostolic reality requires. Something foundational to our relationship with God must first be brought into being, a radical crossing from the one reality to the other.
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A NOW Prophetic Word to Local Church Leaders
The greatest church-growth program ever devised in the history of mankind and the church Jesus is building is the Fivefold Ministry Model outlined in Ephesians 4:4-16. Every senior church leader in America and some other nations around the world has at their ready disposal some of the most battle-tested, God-anointed, God-appointed, life-experienced Fivefold Ministers on the planet living right in their “backyard,” so to speak, in the form of highly-experienced preachers/teachers/ministers who reside in their geographical sphere of operation — in their immediate locality, their region, or state. God has distributed these mighty warriors of God all around you like salt on a plate of food. These are Kingdom-assets God has blessed you with who are eager to do what they can within their range of ministerial expertise to HELP you in the task of building your local church.
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Divinely Determined Ministry Scope
In vocational ministry, however, there are divine limitations to our fruitfulness. Those limitations are often intuitively understood, but not as often well defined. We may subconsciously realize that the large majority of God-called ministers will never have the impact of the Apostle Paul, yet we sometimes talk as if all ministers could attain to Paul’s level of spiritual success, if only “we were as dedicated as the apostle Paul.”
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ALL Scripture is God-Breathed and MUST be Believed!
I consistently meet Christians who challenge parts of the Bible solely because they do not fit their denominational standard. Pastors are especially guilty. Calvinists reject “Arminian” teachings and Arminian believers reject Paul’s writings about election, predestination, and the sovereignty of God. What is our obligation? We are to believe all of the Bible regardless of our being able to reconcile it. It is in the theological challenge that we learn. Our first responsibility is to God–not our local church. Mental stretching does for our spirit what physical exercise does for the body. Such work-outs may be painful and tiring–but, they produce strength.
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PRESSING ON TO MATURITY
It is now time that individual believers and the collective Church that Jesus is building MUST begin to advance toward the accomplishment of the end-times purposes and plans of God!
God is doing a NEW THING as He promised in His word He is constantly doing, and it is up to every genuine believer in Christ and the collective church to know, understand, comprehend what those new things are and begin to walk in and according to them!
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Prostituting Supernatural Gifts
We were sitting around the conference table, when suddenly our Senior Pastor, David Wilkerson burst into the room, obviously quite upset. He walked to the conference table and leaned on his fists and bowed his head in intense silence. He didn’t want to explode in anger, and yet his volcano of frustration was obvious. He said, “I just got off the phone with the wife of a well-known minister. If I said his name, you’d all know him. He’s hooked on pornography and his poor wife doesn’t know what to do. She’s looking to me for advice. Last week the son of a mega church pastor told me his dad is hooked on drugs and has a mistress on the side. I get one or two calls like this every single month from relatives of these so-called mighty men of God. Do they not have any fear of the Lord in their hearts?”
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