The below is the substance of a prophecy I gave at the “Australia Worships” night on Saturday March 6th held at Victory Life Centre Perth. I understood this meeting to be part of the preparation of God for what he wants to do in our country.
“First comes the natural and then the spiritual” (1 Cor 15:46). The cyclonic and torrential downpours recently experienced across central and northern Australia have lessons the church in our country needs to heed today. Though the coming of rain brings relief to the parched land a flood can be as devastating as a drought. This is as true for a spiritual as well as a natural outpouring. With spiritual blessing will come hardship.
God is seeking to cut a channel through the rocky heart s of his people so that the Spirit might be poured out on dry ground. For this to happen it will require a major transition in the church. There is a call to move from the John the Baptist (Elijah) anointing, which is for preparation (Mark 1:1 -4), to a true apostolic anointing that imparts the gift of the Spirit (Acts 8:18). John the Baptist, though personally filled with the Spirit from his mother’s womb (Luke 1:15), could not impart the Spirit to others because he was in the position of a slave under the law.
“I baptize you with water, but he who is coming is more powerful than I; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” (Luke 3:16) Adjusting the sandal thong was a function of a slave; this was John’s spiritual status in terms of the plan of salvation. As one born under the law John was “enslaved to the elemental spirits of the universe” (Gal 4:3). He could not know the Holy Spirit as “the spirit of adoption” (Rom 8:15). As a part of the generation before the completed work of Christ he had “a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear” (Rom 8:15). This is exactly what happened in John’s life when he doubted that Jesus was the Messiah (Matt 11:1 -6).
Every major visitation of the history in the history of the church has drawn vigorous opposition: “these are the people who have been turning the world upside down.” (Acts 17:6). (There are numerous references to persecution in the New Testament and in much of the church outside the west today.) When the Holy Spirit is poured out on the church in Australia there will be tumult, opposition, derision and hatred (John 15:18 -19).
At the point when I sensed this in prayer on Saturday night I experienced two sensations very clearly and acutely. The first was the pain in the hearts of the people of God when this tribulation came. The second was that this moved the interceding Jesus, as our high priest (Heb 4:14 -16), to sustain his people by a ceaseless outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It is only this three –fold rhythm of suffering for the sake of the kingdom of God, the intercession of Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit that will lead to sustainable spiritual renewal in our land.
The inescapability of this sequence as the only order of spiritual renewal is grounded in the life of Christ. It is only because Jesus is first of all willing to be “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) that the Holy Spirit “descends and remains” (John 1:32) on him as the gift of the Father.
Unless the church is living in the reality of its sonship (Gal 4:6), with a rich spiritual understanding that the sons must suffer freely for the cause of the Father’s kingdom (Luke 24:46; 2 Tim 3:12), natural fear will cause believers to compromise with the world and we will never see a sustained revival in Australia like that which is currently happening in some many places across the globe. We must be grounded in “the Son of his love” (Eph 1:6) or we will surely fail to enter into the fullness of the Father’s promises. This is a time of decision, God is calling us to decide to go forward with Jesus in the cause of his kingdom no matter what the cost. Then and only then will we become a truly apostolic church receiving and imparting the gifts of the Father (Acts 1:4).
Many members of the church have not “made themselves ready” with holy living (Rev 19:7 -8). They are like troops untrained for battle. The call to prepare for the next phase of the plan of God is urgent.