The stages in the development of an army are the following:

PHASE 1: The Call or Mobilization – The call into the Lord’s army begins with our own redemption, salvation, and devotion to live for the Lord and His purposes.

PHASE 2: Training and Maturity – This consists of growing up in the knowledge and wisdom of the Lord, which is the renewing of our minds to think as He thinks and to see as He sees. This is done by the Holy Spirit, who is our Helper and whose anointing “teaches us all things.” This is the place where we learn more about Him and ourselves, discerning and learning about our own specific places in His army.  

PHASE 3: Equipping – In the military, a weapon is given in this phase. In Christ, it is the development of the gifts and ministries of the Spirit, which are the tools we are given for building and the weapons of our warfare that are spiritual.

PHASE 4: Deployment – This occurs when we receive the commission to ministry with a specific mandate. We begin to fulfill our purpose, set the captives free, tear down strongholds of darkness, and prepare the way for the kingdom of God to come. This is where all that we have gone through in our preparation, our trials and training, pay off in measurable fruit.

How does the church presently measure up as an army—mobilizing, training, equipping, and deploying an effective force for the accomplishment of our purpose, summed up as the Great Commission? Most of the church is still caught in Phase 1, with some doing a little of Phase 2. A tiny percentage is accomplishing some level of Phases 3 and 4. Overall, because there are indications that only about 5 percent of Christians even know their gifts, ministries, or function in the body of Christ, we could say we are presently only about 5 percent effective in leading the church to be what it is called to be.

That is actually being generous. Of the 5 percent who know their gifts and callings, only a fraction of those have a place to actually function in them. We are presently failing drastically to fulfill the Ephesians 4 mandate for equipping and building the church. We do need to address this in more depth, but first let’s look at something even more fundamental. Let’s look at the Great Commission, recorded in Matthew 28:18-20:

“All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.
 “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,
“teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

He begins by telling us that all authority has been given to Him in both heaven and earth. This is the key issue of our cause—who has the authority? Our primary goal is to prepare the way for the kingdom of God to come to earth, for the Lord to take the authority over the earth that He has been given. The primary way that we do this is by coming under His authority and compelling others to do the same.

It looks like the devil is still exercising authority over the earth, but authority over heaven and earth has been given to Jesus. He will exercise His right to this authority in due time, but He is first seeking those whom He can exercise it through. Just as Satan does not himself sit on a throne on the earth but uses people to do his will, the Lord likewise exercises His authority through people. The earth was given to man to rule over, and the Lord is going to rule over it through man.

The preaching of the kingdom is the legal declaration that He is coming to take over. We can go forth with total confidence of this inevitability. We serve a cause that is sure to prevail, and we should never have to doubt that. The army that is being sent to declare and prepare for His kingdom can suffer setbacks, but it cannot lose the war. 

As we also see in the Great Commission, to prepare for His kingdom we make disciples, not just converts. Disciples are students who seek to know Him and to do His will. Again, this is all about authority. This has also been one of the main stumbling blocks to those who have sought to fulfill this mandate. The distinction often gets blurred between the Lord’s authority and ours. It is essential that we keep our attention on seeing His authority established, not our own. Once we begin to seek to establish our own, the fall is usually very quick.

Our goal is to make disciples, teaching them everything that He has commanded, not just how to follow our commands. Robin McMillan, the Senior Pastor of our MorningStar Church at our home base in Fort Mill, once stated a profound truth when he said the following: “Many of the teachings on the kingdom have been about how to control people, but that is not how the Lord preached the kingdom. He preached it by demonstrating His authority over the conditions that are on the earth.”

We cannot afford to lose this focus if we are going to successfully preach the gospel of the kingdom and fulfill the Great Commission in our time. It is about His authority, not ours. It is about seeing His authority established over new believers, not just getting them to follow us. We only have true spiritual authority to the degree that we are abiding in the King. It is all about Him. Of course, He delegates His authority to His leaders, but it is always for the purpose of leading people to Him and teaching them to obey everything that He has commanded.

There are exhortations and teachings throughout the Scriptures that verify that as we obey the Lord’s delegated authority, we are obeying Him, and we must also teach this. From the top down, we must keep our focus on obeying Him and establishing His authority. His kingdom and the gospel of the kingdom is about the King coming, not us—not His army, but the One who has prevailed and redeemed us by His cross.

A new breed of ministry is about to arise whose devotion will not be about themselves, but about Him, and they will prepare the way for Him to come. As I was shown in 1988, this new breed will be spiritual eunuchs for the kingdom’s sake. Just as a natural eunuch cannot even have a desire for the bride, but his whole fulfillment is in seeing the king’s fulfillment, that will be the nature of the new breed of ministry that will arise to lead the church. They will not desire the church for themselves, but their whole devotion will be to see the King receive a bride of which He is worthy.