The New Year is always a time for hope, and hope is one of the most powerful forces. It is often a time when we resolve to fulfill certain vows like getting in shape, spending more time with family, or being faithful to certain spiritual disciplines like more prayer or Bible study. These often help people focus enough to actually accomplish them, certainly a good thing.
This is the year the Mayan calendar, which indicated it would be the end of the world. As the Apostle Paul wrote about the Cretan prophets, that they were right about what they were saying about the Cretans, even false prophets can be right about some things. In a way, I think the Mayan calendar is right—this year will mark the end of this world as we know it.
I am not prophesying that this year will be the end of the world, or the end of the age, or the second coming of Christ. I am saying radical changes are coming to the whole world this year. Whether they turn out for good or bad will depend more on the body of Christ than any other factor. This year will be the greatest opportunity we’ve had, not just in our generation, but maybe ever. Times of change are usually steered by a small number of people, and if just a small part of the body of Christ wakes up and gets engaged, the impact this year can be greater than ever.
I do not know exactly how this will play out, but I know that it will. We all “see in part” and “prophesy in part.” After personally going through several years with very little prophetic revelation, I have been getting a download recently and almost all of it has to do with the body of Christ waking up and getting engaged.
The reason I have not received much revelation in the last five years is because I was given an assignment and a promise that if I was faithful, I would get the greatest revelation I have ever had at the end of this assignment. Even so, I have been given a download recently because the times are so critical. The most critical issue coming upon us right now is that the greatest revival and ingathering in history is nearly upon us, and we are not ready for it.
Several prophetic friends have been hearing from the Lord, “Small is the next big.” I was told that this is true and was shown one way it applied. As I shared in last week’s WFTW, when I was given the vision of the harvest in 1987, I saw two waves of revival coming. One began a couple of years later and lasted about sixteen years. Though it swept through South and Central America, Africa, and Asia with the greatest ingathering of new believers in history, it just about missed North America and Europe. I then saw a period of relative quiet before another, much larger wave swept across the whole earth that would be the greatest move of God in history. We are at the end of this period of relative spiritual quiet that I saw, and the next wave is nearly upon us.
In this second wave that I saw, there were congregations of one hundred people that were adding a thousand new believers a week. This sounds wonderful, and it was, but it also brought enormous stress upon the churches. These new believers will need healing, deliverance, and teaching in sound biblical truth. Christians who had taught or spoken in a church service were suddenly leading large congregations of new believers.
We might think that mega churches would be adding tens of thousands of new believers a week in such a harvest, but that was not the case. All churches will be adding people, but the mega churches were not adding thousands like the small churches—only a relative few. This was because they were less prepared for the harvest than the smaller churches. The reason they were not as prepared was they had been devoted to building programs rather than people, and the smaller churches had done a better job building their people.
This is not true of all mega churches, and it is not true of all smaller churches, but it is generally true. We must get ready for the ingathering. Every farmer knows that when it is harvest time, you cannot waste time—it is all hands on deck. There are many things we need to do to be ready, but the main thing is to help every present member of our congregations be true disciples of Christ, knowing their gifts, ministries, and being released to use them—the Ephesians 4 mandate.
We have a short period of time to prepare for the work of a lifetime. This is the time that the prophets and righteous of old desired to see, and we have been called to live in them. This is the year to get engaged in the work of the kingdom like we never have before. Those who are will begin to see it like never before. The kingdom of God is at hand.
