Background
This is the substance of a prophetic message I shared at the Commonwealth Prayer Initiative (CPI) in Perth on October 29th 2011. It lacks the footnoting, biblical detail and supporting data I would usually include in my articles because it is a recollection of what I spoke directly from the floor of the meeting. The context of the CPI (www.commonwealthprayer.org) was the visit of the leaders from the commonwealth nations to Perth for CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting). Interested parties will be able to see that this message is deeply connected to my last “Word for Australia.”
This particular meeting was arranged to hear Graham Power, Graham is a successful businessman in South Africa, and the founder of the Global Day of Prayer. This movement has achieved the largest assembly of praying people in the earth’s history, over the last few years involving Christians in every nation of the earth. Once I heard that Graham was coming (I had met him once before in Hong Kong), I had a sense that there would be a very distinct “shaking” (Heb 12) at his meeting.
In a time of prayer with a few others immediately before the meeting I felt strongly to express the faith that the extraordinary things we hear about God doing in other nations, South Africa, India and so on, he will do here in Australia. In hindsight, I believe what I was about to receive in the meeting was an answer to this statement of faith.
A Strange Experience
I am very used to attending Christian gatherings and listening attentively for the Word of the Lord. Since I had been intimately involved in planning for the 24/7 week of prayer for CPI, even to the extent of residing in the Perth CBD, I firmly anticipated I would hear God in some significant way, either personally or corporately.
In this case the meeting and the usual rousing worship was led by folk from a very vital Chinese majority church in Perth. Graham’s address went on to focus on how God called him as a Christian, and dramatically shared with him visions concerning three global waves. The first would be a global prayer movement, the second an unashamedly ethical movement and finally a tsunami of worldwide revival. Since the first has rolled out as God commanded and the second is now spread to scores of nations, we may anticipate the third will come. All this, whilst profoundly transformative, I had heard before. What grabbed my attention however was that as I sought discernment from the LORD about anything he had for me or the meeting I drew a most unusual blank. There simply seemed to be no witness at all. I was blank and empty and said to myself puzzlingly “I am out of my zone”; I could not work out what was going on – was the dullness merely because I had heard of these things before, was it because I am not a marketplace minister?? I struggled very much within to get a handle on what was going on, but it just seemed like there “no traction” and” no vision” coming to me. It was a very difficult experience indeed. Then I started to realise that the extremely global focus which Graham personally brings was a key to what the Lord was trying to say.
Get Out of Your Zone
Having been involved in a range of prayer movement over the country for several decades, and visited a number of prayer assemblies across the nations, I happened to be in a position of being informed that few on the day possessed. I started to sense that the active and passive resistance to the adoption of the Global Day of Prayer (GDOP) in Australia from certain sections of the national prayer movement was a key to what God was trying to say. Various attempts to get the GDOP launched on a significant scale in WA, apart from the occasions when it was supported by ethnic churches, had failed to get significant traction. Local and national interests always seemed to prevail and keep people in a very restricted zone.
Sensing that the Lord wanted to speak to the assembly along these lines I approached the leader of the meeting for space to speak. Just after this we were broken into small groups to pray with the person next to us. Amazingly, the man next to me, an immigrant from another continent said with tears that he had just realised in the last few days that God had brought him to Australia for a purpose other than a happy and successful material life. This greatly emboldened and confirmed that I was indeed hearing the Lord.
When I got up to speak I found it extraordinarily difficult to talk, it was like I felt a great weight inside me, and mentioned this several times to the group that I had a very difficult word to bring. I then mentioned the matter of national resistance to the GDOP in Australia and that I sensed that the Lord deeply wanted us to be a part of the third wave of the global movement of the Spirit that Graham Power had prophesied. The paragraph below is my memory of what I said.
“This is a message to the native born Church, not to people from other continents, not to people who have come here from Asia or Africa of the Americas, this is not your problem, it is the problem of the Caucasian Church. God has blessed Australia with extraordinary prosperity, but because of its complicated and difficult history this blessing has become a snare to us. We are happy for people to come into our zone from other places and after a while become like us, but we have no passion to go into other people’s zones. WE DO NOT WANT THE PEACE AND PROSPERITY OF OUR EARTHLY PARADISE TO BE DISTURBED. We need to get out of our zone; we need to go through today a representation confession/repentance on behalf of the Australian Church. I am asking all those who have been born of Australia to stand up with me and we can prayer together and confess the sins of an inward looking Australian Church and ask God to break through so that we can get out of the zone in which we have become trapped.”
There was probably 30-40% percent of those present who wee Australian born, and to my knowledge they all stood up and prayed together with me a prayer of repentance. I am sure that God heard that prayer, and the very extraordinary things that he has been doing in other continents will definitely soon happen here in our land.