As I have opened up the Scripture during Covid-19, it’s as if God is opening up a whole clear picture, why God created us, what His Purpose was, and how He actually NEEDS US – YOU AND ME – NOW – in order to fulfil His Purpose! We were created by God to fulfil a Purpose! A Purpose which can only be fulfilled in and by the Church! I can suddenly see the whole future! I shall be writing more on this….
But unless I had been slowed down and stopped in my tracks in 2020, and not allowed to continue with my plans for Central Asia and Eastern Europe, if I had simply carried on at the pace I was going, accelerating in evangelism more and more, so absorbed in what I was doing – God could not have got my attention to turn me into this new direction, to see something I would never have seen…
That’s what God had to do with Moses, with the burning bush. God had to attract his attention, draw him aside – to see something! So that God could speak to him! There are times in your life and mine when God has to interrupt what we’re doing… He had to grab my attention – to turn me aside! It was this pandemic that had this effect in my life! I want to challenge you, is God at this time holding up, slowing down, even stopping some of your activity – in order that, like Moses with the burning bush, you will turn aside?!
I like to say that when Moses looked at the burning bush, he only looked and saw – but he didn’t walk into it! And I challenge you – if God shows you a ‘burning bush’, walk into the fire! That’s what I always want to do, I’m impetuous, because if God is in the Fire, I want to be in the Fire too, I want the Fire to consume me… The amazing thing is, the Fire did not change the bush, it didn’t consume or destroy it. And when we experience the Fire of God, it will ‘consume’ us, in the sense that it will fill us and possess us… Because if we walk into that Fire, that Fire becomes part of us! To me, the Fire and the Power of the Holy Spirit is not something ‘out there’, it’s something that becomes part of me, I’m part of the Fire, I’m burning with the Fire, it’s ‘consuming’ me. I admit, it makes me emotional…
But the strange thing is, without the pandemic, I’m convinced, I would not have seen or known what God is showing me now of the future! I can see where my ministry will lie! Just as the film ‘The Rape of Europe’ was so incredibly prophetic, what God is showing me now is even more far-seeing, even more prophetic than that film, because what I am seeing, through Scripture, is from now – until the End!
I’m very excited! My future is assured! When God gives prophecy to me, He’s saying, “Right. This is your job. Now get up and fulfil it. Go and do it!” This is how God has always dealt with me throughout my ministry. I know, what I’m seeing is something I’m going to be part of! I know my whole future is assured, my whole path is marked out. That’s why I have to come to another verse in Isaiah 30, v21 – it has directed the whole of my ministry – because, though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, ‘Your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, “This is the way, walk in it!”’ When you turn to the right and when you turn to the left, you must know, this is the way, walk in it! I can hear that Voice clearly!
The challenge is this: what God is revealing to me is something we have to be active in! I’m not seeing what is happening in the world as a disaster – yes, for the ungodly – but for those who know the Lord, God has a Purpose! With God, nothing happens by accident, by chance – everything happens because God knew in advance. The simplest illustration is that before sin came into the world with Adam and Eve, yet salvation came before sin! Jesus is the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world. 1 Peter 1:19-20, Revelation 13:8. From the very beginning, God had anticipated and known that His Creation would fail Him and need a means of redemption, a way of escape…
In my own life, before I went into that communist prison in 1972, God had already prepared the exact day and the very method of my release. Which God showed me 4 or 5 months in advance! My birthday! Sure enough, 4 months later, I came out, on my birthday! God revealed it to me! He knew what I didn’t! It happened in my life, and it is an illustration which I can pass on to you! If God could tell me, 3 days after I was convicted and sentenced in the court, the exact day of my release, that’s incredible. But God foreknows! I’m not teaching you theory, but what I have experienced in my life!
It was the same with my throat cancer. I fasted and prayed for 3 months, then went back to the doctors – and they laughed at me, “There is no God, your cancer has grown so big, we have to operate immediately!” That was the Friday, the operation was for Monday. But God had planned from the beginning that it would happen that way, so that instead of being healed by the doctors, when they looked on the Monday, I was totally healed! They said, “Somebody has cut it out with a knife and left a scar where they operated. Who did it?!” – “The God you don’t believe in, He did it!” Before I got the cancer, God knew the way I would escape!
And in your life, God sees and God knows the future. I want to encourage you to seek the Lord. Recognise from Isaiah 30, that although the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction in your life, your ‘teachers’ will not be removed from you, but you will continue to see the way through – and your ears will hear a Voice behind you saying, “This is the way, walk in it!” All my life I’ve heard that Voice. And today I’m hearing that Voice again, knowing that it gives me the confidence to live through the adversity and the affliction, because I have heard! Even in this God is saying, “This is the way, walk in it!” I pray God will give you the courage! God bless you!