His premise and conclustion was that “Reformation requires the assent and the buy-in of the unchurched as well as the churched.”
We have been the masters of “whooping the devil” – inside our church building. But we must understand this premise. It means our language must change. We must learn to speak “fish” [if we are to be fishermen.] We must learn to speak the world’s language. [Or, as Lance Wallnau puts it, we must go to Pharaoh thinking Hebrew (with our Biblical worldview) but speaking Egyptian (his language).]
We must even begin now to take care of what we say in our churches. If we really become relevant, the media will begin to dig in the archives of what we have said. He noted that there were some powerful voices present. He asked them to “please consider that whatever you are going to be saying from now on, know that the world is going to be listening.” He warned that “if you are unwilling to go down that road because you believe it to be compromise, realize that your part in reformation will be on a very private level.” Because, Reformation requires – in a pluralistic society, in the context of democracy – it requires the buy-in of the unchurched.
We are NOT going to take over. That is what the world is most afraid of. He stated that he is afraid of a church taking over that is a king, but is not a priest. He noted that his statement may shock people, but that he is grateful that we have not had more church leaders in politics, because he knows what they would have said. He has worked in nations at senior levels, with presidents, where presidents have set back the clock of the kingdom for a decade or more.
We are entering another ballgame. We can have revival doing what we are doing. We cannot have reformation doing what we have been doing.
Newspapers are the bait sheet of the fish. He exhorted us that if we can’t preach from newspapers, we will not be a voice in the reformation. (We need to be relevant to our generation, our culture.)
I Tim 3:16 – “We are the pillar and ground of truth.” The pillar and ground of spiritual truth? Yes. The pillar and ground of economic truth? Yes. The pillar and ground of epistemology (the science of how you learn)? Yes. The pillar and ground of environmental truth? Yes. There is nothing to imply that his verse applies only to the religious and spiritual activity of people. But, we have not been raised to believe beyond that.
The crisis we are in within the Church is that we have limited our understanding of truth to truth relative to religious activities. If we don’t get delivered from that and get a holistic, Christian worldview – which is comprehensive and includes all that man is and all that man does – we are not ready or prepared for reformation. Reformation is built on the assumption that God’s Church really is the pillar and ground of truth for nations, for all that man is and all that man does.
Rev 22: 1-2 – After the great white throne judgment, after all of sin has been judged and dealt with, we have an anomaly here.
“Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”Why would we engage in reformation if it is only a temporal thing, if heaven is going to be some ethereal thing where all we do is worship and float around on clouds, and none of the things that bring us life here will transfer there? The word of God says nations are an eternal, geo-political phenomenon. The nations exist eternally. Psalms 2:8 – “Ask of Me for nations as thy inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Nations are going to exist in heaven. Nations are going to exist on the new earth. We are going to remain an ethnic, geo-political people.
What was interesting to him in this passage is that after sin is dealt with, the nations still require healing. Why, when sin is gone, will the nations still require healing? In God, the process we engage changes us. Even if we don’t achieve everything we want to, the process will transform a church. [Here, he paused to let these statements penetrate those with ears to hear.]
The Great Commission: “Because the Father gave Me the nations, all authority in the heavenly realm and on the earth is given to me. Go, therefore...”
If the Master fought the enemy in the Word, we have no other choice. It was the Word and only the Word that was He used. We need to do the same. We have had too low of view of the enemy. Dennis gave him no praise, but noted that he is a master (he is very, very good) at what he does. The higher the level at which you play (engage the enemy) the deeper your visal roots must be in the Word of God.
We have “tip-toed through the daisies” in the Church. We have “cast out devils that are bothering us” in the Church. The seven mountains will not be taken by the seven dwarves! What part of that don’t we understand?! We will run into powers, principalities and forces that don’t even know our name. (As in, “Jesus I know. Paul is becoming known. But who the heck are you?”) [We need to gain the strength for our assignment – and not try to take on an assignment that is not ours.]
If we get into reformation, we are moving from sand lot, maybe high school, football into the NFL. Dennis was an all-star, high school football player. A funny thing happened when he got to college. Then he played against a couple of NFL players. They brought him to a new level of reality!
If we are going to engage in reformation, we are going against demonic principalities that play at a different level. We need to understand that. We are going to have to be r-o-o-t-e-d in the Scripture at a different level.
He has taught martial arts for almost 40 years, so he is a trained warrior. One of the things you have to know is where you can be hit and where you can’t be hit. If you get hit certain places, it’s game over – and you have to know that. We are going to have to become morally, sexually bullet-proof. If you think you can have a secret life and engage in reformation, do us all a favor and don’t go out to battle. [We do not need an Ai experience!] If you’ve got a problem with alcohol, you can’t play. If you’ve got a problem with pornography, you can’t play. If you’ve got something going on the side, you can’t play. If you’re cheating on your taxes, you can’t play. If you want to get into the reformation game where everybody’s “big” and everybody’s “tough,” then don’t even think about it. They will roll you up and take a bunch of us with you.
We have to get clear on who owns the earth. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” The Dominion Mandate – the world did it! We preached it (or at least we have lately); they did it. We are running into 400 years of secular momentum. It’s been that long since we had a kingdom-based church. The enemy forces are not going to simply give it back to us because we are coming in the name of Jesus. It is going to be disputed territory. We actually turned the world over to the devil and the antichrist (spirit) thinking we were doing God a favor. It would be different if we have fought inch by inch and were eventually pushed back. But, we gave it away because it was too much responsibility.
We need to assess reality before we start down this trail.
Who is lawfully given the stewardship of the earth? The Church.
We could go through Matthew 13 and talk about the wheat and the tares. Jesus says that the root structures of the wicked and the righteous are so intertwined that if He pulls out one it will kill the other. They have to be allowed to grow together until the time of harvest – until the kingdom of God has obtained full maturity and the kingdom of darkness has gained full maturity. They are co-existing for a witness.
Real players don’t ask the coach to take them out of the game. Real players would rather die than leave the field. The only reason you come out of the game is that your play is hurting your team.
Does the Word of God apply to all men or only the believers? Jesus said that “man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Paul addressed it in 1 Timothy. God has one standard for the world – His Word. Every human being and every nation is judged and blessed according to the degree that they align themselves and their policies with the Word of God.
We are not very good at translating the Word of God into “fish” language, let alone applying it to any of the seven mountains. We are going to have to learn a whole level of communication that we haven’t learned. We are going to have to learn things like epistemology (how you learn). We’re going to have to learn how to say things without quoting Bible verses. The bird is not taken if the snare is seen (Proverbs).
We are going to have to become masters of jujitsu. Jujitsu takes the force that someone gives you and bends it where you want it to go. Jesus took the woman at the well for a ride. She wanted to talk religion; He wanted to talk reality. We are going to have to come to the place in our conversation skills that when we hear key words that unsaved people say to us, our internal conversation is, “Thank you, very much, I was hoping for that word, let me lead you …” [and lead the conversation to kingdom principles but in “fish” language]. Then, when they ask “How do you know all this stuff?” we can tell them. We need to be “ready to give an answer” when the question is asked.
Ecclesia was a political organization. An ecclesia was the town-governing body in the Greek city-states, starting about 600 BC. It eventually spread to the entire Mediterranean basin. In Acts 19, the riot at Ephesus was declared an illegal ecclesia. An ecclesia makes decrees in the spirit out of its lawful authority. The reformation is going to be fueled by another level of prophetic prayer than the one we are on right now. Dennis is working at his church to gather every “citizen” (every committed believer, everyone there by 1 Cor 12:8, placed there by the Holy Spirit, who know that is where they have been called to worship and be a part of government of God) and make decrees for where they have authority, which begins in our cities. If you want to change a nation, you do it one community at a time.
The church has to learn to speak the language of the fish. (Matt 4:19) We are going to have to go to the root issues. (Matt 3:10) When Jesus comes, He will not deal with symptoms. What we get on the news is just another report on the leaves and the twigs. We need to deal with the root structures.
You want to take seven mountains? You better get a deep shovel and a hard pick ax to start digging down in each one of those jurisdictions. What are the root issues that are driving that thing where it is? And what are we going to do to combat it? You can’t beat something with nothing.
“Until you can preach with as much authority out of the LA Times as you can out of the Bible, you should shut up.” We have to understand the Biblical roots of the fishing report. Our forefathers preached out of the newspapers. In the 1600-1700s the sermons were extrapolating Biblical principles into daily situations and issues of the nation -- and they were printed in the Monday paper, especially in New England. If you will go back and read some of these, you will realize how “dumbed-down” we are in the Church today [with respect to issues affecting our society].
The Kingdom of God has to have a three-pronged unity.
(1) The realm of spiritual authority in the supernatural. We are not going to have a reformation without signs, wonders and miracles. (The problem is that we [“us” and the signs and wonders camp] aren’t working together.)
(2) Methodology of God-centered discipleship. The biggest problem in the Church is that we are not making disciples. We are making believers. A believer is not a disciple. A disciple is a disciplined learner. We thought we got baptized in the Holy Ghost to have fun and speak in tongues. The Charismatic Renewal does not even qualify as a revival, historically. It did not even affect the whole Church, much less the culture. There has never been so much spiritual activity on the one hand and the surrounding culture moving in the opposite direction at the same time. We will not have a reformation without a small army of disciples. It is going to take disciplined learners.
If you think praying into those seven mountains by itself is going to “take” anything but energy, you are sadly mistaken. You will be dealing of the crème de la crème – the smartest people in the world at the top of those mountains. God is going to have to give us supernatural power and wisdom to seize what they have. Is it available? Yes. But, first the natural, then the spiritual. Until you have done your homework in the natural, do not expect God to give you supernatural wisdom.
Now that’s a hard word for God’s people to hear; but you said you wanted reformation. It is going to require hard work. The Holy Spirit anoints us to do hard work.
(3) Discipling nations. You have the realm of the supernatural. You have the methodology of producing disciples. And you have discipling nations. Go and do what? Make disciples of nations. That’s what reformation is …
Reformation is turning a nation into a discipling project. Do it in a way that first deals with their fears and objections about what we want. We not only don’t want to take over, we clearly understand we can’t take over. And even if we wanted to take over, God would not allow it. His preeminent principle in the New Testament is choice. Anybody (Church or not Church) who employs coercion fights against God. God always allows choice. “Whosoever will.”
Capitalism works because it is aligned with choice. Anything aligned with choice will work. Anything not aligned with choice, God, Himself, will resist, even if it is in His people. Jesus doesn’t take prisoners. We become prisoners of our own revelation. He will not break a bruised reed or quench smoldering wick.
If we are going to have reformation, we have to bring these three spheres of the kingdom together. The “supernatural folks” are going off in one direction. They will never see the kingdom in its fullness until we go in together with a full orb unity. We messed up discipleship when we tried it. We have to learn to do it right. We must join with the nation-changers. There’s not many of them yet, but the number is growing. We have to work together. If we are going to have the blessing of God, we need the supernatural dimension, we need the methodology of training disciples for the reformation, and we need the nation-changers – men and women called to change nations. Men and women that are called to write letters to the editors that are so powerful they begin to sway everyone that is reading them. They begin to ask, “Who are these people? Where are they getting this?”
Economics:
Economics is the engine of dominion. With the exception of living things, everything that exists is the product of economics. The world understands that; the Church doesn’t. (We call economics carnal!)
As an economist, he projected that we may have 3 to 4 years and limp our way out to some degree from where we are. The real slam will happen in 4 to 6 years when the demographics of the baby boomers hits retirement age. Then God is going to say to this nation, “you didn’t want to deal with abortion as a spiritual issue, now I’m going to serve it up to you economically, and I’ll get your attention. You took somewhere between 45 and 60 million wage earners out of the demographics and leverage of the retirement that you now want. You took hundreds of billions of dollars of tax revenue and you said, ‘hey, it’s a woman’s right to treat the baby just like the white slave owners treated the Negroes.’” He pointed out that we still have slavery “alive and well” in this nation. With noted sarcasm, he went on to say “This fetus is my property.” He concluded, “I thought we resolved that in Civil War that one human being couldn’t own another human being, but apparently this nation did not resolve that.”
Now we begin to understand that you can’t separate spirit from matter and you can’t separate morality and ethics from the ability to prosper. They are inextricably tied together. When you put all the debt and currency that is being monetized right now together … The biggest issue we have right now is for God to prepare us an ark for that day. He projected that when that day comes, we will not line up in bread lines like we did in the 30s, because we don’t have the same moral infrastructure that we did then. We need to get some very specific strategies on a local community level as to how we can become an ark for this world. We will have an opportunity to demonstrate how we really feel about the poor.
How far will we get into reformation before that time? He indicated that he didn’t know. The problem with the truth is that once you see it, you have nowhere else to go.
He then began to speak to Dutch Sheets. He indicated that he had been “scoping him out” to see if he was serious about this. Dennis is 66 and indicated that he didn’t have time “to waste bullets.” He then addressed the congregation and said, “this guy [Dutch] has got it. It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t work; he’s stuck. I heard his spirit.”
Then he asked how many of us were “stuck?” How many understood that God loves unsaved people? How many understood that God loves nations? That God wants the sun and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike? That God wants to raise up a witness of the kingdom of God in power and life – and then the end shall come? And if we don’t push the ball where it needs to go, we are trying to build our children and grandchildren to push it. And we are not demanding from Jesus the outcome, but rather asking for the privilege of putting our hands to the task.
It’s a great day to do business with God. It’s a great day to get rid of besetting sins. It’s a great day to get into a training routine with God.
What is your part of the fight? You need to know that so that you can bring your contribution to the war.
In closing, Dennis introduced Strategic Christian Services at http://discerningthetimes.com/. This is a site to analyze public policy from Biblical principles using secular language.
Dutch Sheets added that we cannot just waltz out there and take over. We have work to do. There’s a reason that the slogan says “Reformation in our lifetime.” We have a lot of work to do.
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