The Kingdom of God!

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Chapter 27

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Earth is hurtling toward a climax that both confirms and completely upends much of what we were taught about the Last Days. The battle is played out every day in the headlines but few Christians see what is really unfolding behind the manipulation of the media. God's endgame is bigger and bolder than anything we have been taught. It is not just a harvest of souls - it is a harvest of nations.

 

Great power is about to be released to those who understand the times and are willing to advance with heaven's angelic armies. Jesus was promised nations for His inheritance. (Psalm 2:8). Powerful forces are coming to maturity in a global realignment of nations and kingdoms. The forces of light and darkness are on a collision course but you do not need to fear.

 

Ours is a contest with global forces of mind control. God's antidote is an outpouring of the Spirit releasing the mind of Christ Jesus is preparing a warrior bride whose heart is set on Him receiving His inheritance - souls and nations! Rejoice and set your mind of heavenly things and be ready to get involved in what the Lord is doing! You will never regret it!

I want to share with you an event that happened when the presence of the Holy Spirit filled the room where this young man was.

Chris Burns, with tears in his eyes, recounts the miraculous salvation of a man who most of us would ask God to strike dead.

The weighty glory of God filled the room as we sang and prayed in the Spirit. Tears streamed down his face as he fell to his knees and began to cry out in the presence of God. "I've done horrible things. I've kidnapped children. I've been involved in sex trafficking. I can hear their voices, I can see their faces, I can hear their cries. How could God ever forgive me for what I've done?" I watched as Jesus saved an evil mans soul. Forgiveness was being given to this man for things I didn't know if I could even forgive. I have little girls, and you have little girls.

"To be clear, this man was not actively trafficking anyone to our knowledge; he was speaking of things he had done in the past," Chris clarifies. 

A man by the name of Saul had a similar encounter with Jesus. He was in route to murder, arrest, and destroy believers in Christ. He was responsible for the brutal persecution of many Christians' men, women, and children. His encounter with Jesus's presence physically blinded him yet caused his eyes to be spiritually opened. He was suddenly profoundly aware of his wretchedness. This man surrendered the rest of his life to preach the gospel. He endured persecution and beatings and eventually died as a martyr. We know this man as the great apostle Paul. 

Can it be that Saul-to-Paul conversions are beginning to spread like wildfire all over the earth? Jesus has been appearing to ISIS fighters, Kurds, and Muslims in the Middle East for many years now, and we are learning of their stories through worship leaders like Sean Feucht who risk their lives to enter refugee camps with guitars, the power of God, and the gospel. 

Maybe the sound of intense worship, prayer, and releasing the glory of God in the darkest places of the earth is the key to ending sex trafficking. Could it be those wretched individuals encountering the beauty of the Lord are the first fruits of the next awakening? Would the church embrace these conversions, or will we condemn the sinner even as the love of God falls?  

As Chris shared, I was reminded of the story told by Jesus in Luke 18:13-14: 

"But the tax collector stood at a distance, unwilling even to lift up his eyes to heaven. Instead, he beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man, rather than the Pharisee, went home justified. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted."

How often have we cried out to the Lord to break into pedophile rings, end abortion, feed the hungry, and stop child abuse? Could it be that the fire and glory of God are about to sweep the nations of the earth and shake every religious and political system and everything we thought we knew about the state of our own souls? 

Will we find ourselves in the position of the Pharisee saying, "Thank you, God, that I am not like that man?" or, even worse, persecuting the messengers the Lord has sent into the dark places?

Excitement overwhelms our hearts as we pray for a much-anticipated revival, but are we really prepared in our hearts for sex traffickers to receive mercy instead of justice? If this doesn't challenge us, our hearts have surely grown cold.

Some 600 million people have been swept into the kingdom of God since 1906, when the Holy Spirit was poured afresh on the world through the Azusa Street Awakening. Historically, Azusa is considered one of the greatest movements of the Spirit of God since Pentecost. The weighty glory of the Lord would sweep into a room of nameless and faceless people on their knees in prayer. Drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes, and everyday people walking down the street would fall on their faces, repent of their sins, and be swept into heavenly encounters. As it was in biblical times when the Spirit swept into the land (1 Chronicles 7:2; 5:14; Acts 2; 1 Kings 8:11, etc.), no one was safe from the presence of God! The Lord revealed Himself with tangible fire, glory, and conviction. 

For the past year, the glory of God has fallen in the Saints and Sinners bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The weight of the glory and the fruit could be compared to Azusa. Countless people have wandered into the bar looking for a drink but found Holy Ghost fire, tangible glory, and salvation in Jesus Christ. 

As Chris and the band sing and prayer warriors intercede, the Spirit of the Lord does the work. "Yes, there is alcohol. It's still a functioning bar," Chris says. "We are not doing some hipster Jesus thing where we have a beer and sing songs. We are hosting the presence of God. Sometimes we forget we are in a bar because of the intensity of intercession through worship that is being released." Chris and the team are living love-filled, set-apart lifestyles. 

The next great move of God will exceed all others. Within the Lord's messengers, the DNA of the Nazirite and the Shulamite must come together, meaning a humble, lovesick intimacy with Jesus that leads to a set-apart lifestyle, forming vessels fit for the Lord to pour Himself through. 

My assistant pastor came to me one day and said he know a friend of his that could really play a B3 organ! We had a B3 organ but didn't have anyone that really knew how to play it. My assistant told me that I might want to think about it because his friend had long hair and wore ear rings in both ears. I told him that I did't care about that and he said that his friend also played in night clubs! I told him I would like to meet him. I met him and invited him to play the B3 for us.

A couple of weeks later he came to me and said, "Last night I was playing in a nightclub with two friends of mine and at break time we were sitting around downing a fifth of Jack Daniels and I told my friend that I found a pastor unlike any I have ever known and I am playing the organ for him. He accepted me as I am!" His two friends said that their girls had been bugging them about going to church. I told him to invite them to come and play music for me and they did. As a result, my friend who played the B3 for me is now in heaven and his friends' wife is also in heaven. His friend's girls are serving the Lord today. They all had their lives changed by the loving power of God because someone accepted them as they were and allowed the Lord to make the difference.

I got a lot of static from the Christian community for what I was doing, however, I am reminded that Jesus said that He came to seek and save the lost!

While our nation is the most divided that I have seen in my lifetime, the Lord is moving and the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit is beginning to happen all over the world. You will soon hear of nations coming to the Lord.

 

I want to share with you excerpts from a Times Magazine article written by Molly Ball and is available on the internet under the title, The Secret History of The Shadow Campaign.

 

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For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America's institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump's conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. "The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation," says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster and determined to protect it.

 

This was not his usual purview. For nearly a quarter-century, Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest union federation, has marshaled the latest tactics and data to help its favored candidates win elections. Unassuming and professorial, he isn't the sort of hair-gelled 'political strategist" who shows up on cable news. Among Democratic insiders, he's known as the wizard behind some of the biggest advances in political technology in recent decades. A group of liberal strategists he brought together in the early 2000s led to the creation of the Analyst Institute, a secretive firm that applies scientific methods to political campaigns. He was also involved in the founding of Catalist, the flagship progressive data company.

 

In April, Podhorzer began hosting a weekly 2-hour Zoom. It was structured around a series of rapid-fire five-minute presentations on everything from which ads were working to messaging to legal strategy. The invitation-only gatherings soon attracted hundreds, creating a rare shared base of knowledge for the fractious progressive movement. "At the risk of talking trash about the left, there's not a lot of good information sharing," says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a close Podhorzer friend whose poll-tested messaging guidance shaped the group's approach. "There's a lot of not-invented-here syndrome, where people won't consider a good idea if they didn't come up with it."

 

The summer uprising had shown that people power could have a massive impact. Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. "Americans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with election," Reuters reported in October, one of many such stories. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Wome's March to the Sierra Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of America, joined the "Protect the Results" coalition. The group's now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets.

Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling. He had been warning for weeks that Trump voters' turnout was surging. As the numbers dribbled out, he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.

The liberal alliance gathered for an 11 p.m. Zoom call. Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. "It was really important for me and the team in that moment to help ground people in what we had already known was true," says Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defense Coalition. Podhorzer presented data to show the group that victory was in hand.

While he was talking, Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately. The question then became what to do next.

The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. "We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street," Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk. Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump'a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer. And rather than elevate Trump's complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.

So, the word went out: stand down. Protect the Results announced that it would not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary. On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn't anyone trying to stop Trump's coup? Where were all the protests?

Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. "They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it," he says. Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didn't materialize, I don't think the Trump campaign had a backup plan."

A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump's ouster.

Un Quote:

 

Today, the Senate had voted to have witnesses but something happened when the Trump team indicated that they also would subpoena at least 100, including Kamala Harris. When the senators came back together after the break, amazingly, they had reached a compromise to not have witnesses and to present their final arguments! Very interesting!

 

The result was that Donald Trump was acquitted. Even so, there were seven Republican senators that came out of the swamp and showed their true dislike for Trump. Including the WV Democrat Joe Manchin who voted along his parties' lines.

 

I have chosen to present this news of what is happening to our nation because it has an effect on our liberty to worship the Lord our God in freedom. We must be involved in what is happening in our great nation because the forces of evil are waging a spiritual war against the Kingdom of God in order to keep it from manifesting through out the world. The Christians in the United States are what is holding back the forces of evil to accomplish this.

 

We are not alone in this battle because Greater is He that is Within us, than he that is within the world!