rekindle the flame, embrace the first fruits of what you had, the zeal that you had in the beginning,
ask Him to explode that in you again so that you can become an effectual part of the Kingdom of God as it advances.
Amen.
And then pray for your own family, your own city, your own nation.
But don't just pray what you want God to do.
Ask Jesus what He's praying for them and pray in agreement with Him.
God promises in Joel 2, 28 to pour out His Spirit on all humanity.
Welcome to Global Outpouring.
Are we content for that promised outpouring?
Are we equipped for that outpouring so that we may engage in that very outpouring?
I'm Philip Buss.
And I'm Sharon Buss.
Welcome to the podcast today.
We have with us again a man that we just really love and admire in the Spirit.
His name is Timothy Bentz, and he will be sharing with us some more of his experience and just going deeper into what he shared with us in the last episode about what happened when he was studying the Word in the Spirit.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
We really want to bless you with this recording.
We know that it's going to be life changing for you as you go deeper into the Word with our guests.
But before we get started, we want to encourage you, if you haven't already done so, that you get on our mailing list.
You can get there by going to our website, globaloutpouring.net.
It's going to be an opportunity for you to stay in touch with us, for us to stay in touch with you so that when we've got something going on, you can be informed about it.
And you can also see on our website the event page that we have there that will show about our convention 2025, May 21st through 24th at the St. Louis Airport Marriott Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri.
It's going to be a real time of going deep into the things of God.
And we have our speakers all lined up.
Siggy O'Blander will be opening for us.
She's a mighty woman of God with a depth of revelation in the Word and a prophetic gift.
Tony Kemp will be speaking.
He's got such a depth in God and follows the leading of the Holy Spirit, bringing all kinds of wonders out of the Word and out of the gifts of God that operate in his life.
Dean Braxton will be speaking and also having question and answer times so you can find out more about what happened to him when he was outside of his body for an hour and 45 minutes.
Jean Little will be ministering in our special Israel evening.
And Jeff Simons is going to be bringing a message that is on his heart that the Lord has given to him.
He's been used of God in so many ways in the prophetic gift and in teaching and in bringing miracles, signs and wonders, ministering in the streets, all those kinds of things.
And I will be bringing the message for the session one.
We're going to be bringing new members into this ministry.
So plan to be there.
It's going to be a life changing event.
And we are looking forward to seeing what God will do as we gather together.
It's family camp.
Bring your family, bring your loved ones, bring people that are hungry for the things of God.
It's going to be a glorious, glorious time where we worship together in such a presence of God that is it's more so.
I'm just going to say it's more so.
It's probably what you've experienced in other places, only more so, where God comes down and ministers to people individually.
And we bring our own personal anointing there and it feeds that corporate anointing, that amazing synergy that comes when the people of God get together.
And the people of God that come together for this, many of them have fasted 21 days, 40 days, different amounts of time.
But when you have denied yourself and taken up your cross and followed him, it increases your anointing.
So the anointing when you get these people together is greater than lots of places.
So we just encourage you to come and get immersed in the things of God that he's doing in this time.
It's the Wednesday through Saturday of Memorial Day weekend.
And we just know that it's going to be life changing for you if you get there.
So come and bring friends.
So, Timothy, thank you so much for being with us last episode and opening up the heart of our Father out of the Word and out of the experiences that you had with him in the Word.
And I just encourage you, listener, if you didn't hear that episode, please go back and listen to it,
because I think we're going to go deeper in these things that have to do with the heart of our Father and how he wants us to mature,
to grow up as sons and daughters and to walk with him and operate with him.
So, Timothy, just take us wherever the Holy Spirit is leading.
I wanted to pick up on this.
In the last session, we were talking a little bit about the combination lock, I would say, where a move of God is unlocking it.
It required Peter's heart to repent for not loving the Gentiles the way God did.
And as soon as he got over that, he repents.
This is in the story in Scripture where he's in Joppa.
He sees the sheet come down with things that are unclean on it.
As soon as he can say yes to calling clean what God calls clean and calling unclean what God calls unclean, which is just coming into agreement with God.
At that moment, a massive door opens, an effectual door of righteousness for the gospel of the kingdom of God to go to the Gentile world.
At the same time, God is dealing with Simon Peter in Joppa.
He's dealing with Cornelius, who's not very far away, but Cornelius is a Roman centurion, and he's Italian in his background.
So Cornelius' house becomes the first fruit among the Gentiles in Scripture to bow their knee, get saved after the resurrection, and receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
And now the move of God is on.
Yeah.
But when God gets ready to move in new ways, he doesn't just use the people that he's already called.
He puts them in high gear, and they're already sent, but he shifts them into high gear.
So I can say Peter's life got really fun and crazy and amazing after this experience.
But at the same time, there's a move of God on, so God starts calling new people also.
This is always part of his ways.
So something old comes into full maturity and gets released.
Something new gets commissioned at the same time.
So at the same time, Peter repents for the hatred he had toward the Gentiles.
Jesus goes and saves Saul on his way to Damascus, and he's a Roman citizen.
He likes being called Paul, and he's on his way to kill people.
And then he gets encountered by Jesus, saying, why do you kick him against the bricks for?
I want you to save people.
And Saul becomes a transformed believer because of the face-to-face encounter with Jesus.
I'd submit to you to remember, I said it earlier, but please remember this if you didn't listen
to the earlier tape.
I want everybody to know that it takes a change of heart in order to be what God requires us
to be.
Yeah.
It's not easy to just naturally step into it, even though it's what you're created for.
We have to sometimes repent for something, and then we can step into what we were really
created for.
And repentance isn't always because you sinned.
Saul at that time would not have thought he was sinning.
He thought he was being zealous for the living God.
He viewed what he was doing as doing God a favor.
That's pretty wicked, but he had to have a face-to-face encounter to get delivered from
his own darkened understanding.
When he does, though, he becomes this profound preacher of righteousness.
And I think he learned how to walk in God's ways probably better than most of the early
mentioned people in the New Testament.
He so zealously stepped into following after God and being an apostolic leader that he
took the gospel further than almost anyone in his day.
Now what I want you to see, we think it's just because he's extraordinary, but it's
also because God has a way of doing things.
And if you understand his ways, it's a lot easier to be extraordinary.
If you don't understand his ways, somewhere along the way, you'll spend some time doing
your best efforts.
And it may not always be extraordinary, but eventually you'll figure it out.
God doesn't want you to not figure it out, so he's wanting to help us with this.
But Saul is, first of all, one clue we have in Scripture, he's Saul of Tarsus.
He's not from Jerusalem.
He's from Tarsus area, which is not very far from Tyre in Sidon.
He's up there in Syrian territory.
Probably grew up in a Jewish colony, but he would have been surrounded by a lot of the
Gentiles in that area.
And Tarsus is a really odd little city.
It's sort of by the seashore of the Mediterranean as you're going up around the eastern side.
So if you think about from Israel, you're going up through Syria area, and then you're
going up.
And if you follow around the north part of the Mediterranean in Europe somewhere.
But when you look at why is he called from Tarsus, and Jesus immediately commissions
him to be an apostle and sends him to the Gentiles.
Yeah.
Well, it's a combination lock.
God gave the keys to Peter for the kingdom of God.
So Peter has to put his key in the lock and turn it by his own repentance towards the
Gentiles.
And then God has to pick somebody that has been closely associated and probably understands
the character of nature of the Gentiles better, and he sends him to save them.
Wow.
So those two keys now go into the heavenly doors and a broad, effectual door to speak
the good news opens up.
So the Gentile world to be saved, somebody still has to go and do the work.
Right.
So Saul continues on his journey, gets some prophetic deliverance, gets his blindness
healed.
I think it was more than just physical blindness.
I think when Jesus opened his physical eyes from his supernatural encounter, because it
says he was blind, he needed somebody else to lead him after he had this face to face.
I think he got healed of his spiritual blindness also.
Yeah.
And the reason I say that, because he suddenly has this massive understanding of scripture
and he gets this profound level of revelation for the rest of his life that he walks out.
One of the things that I think he gained a revelation of was how God does relationships.
And this is not talked about enough.
We often talk about his journeys and what he preached and we read the letters that he
wrote, but he didn't write a letter to a stranger.
He wrote all of his letters to someone God connected him with.
So if you study that out carefully in the New Testament, especially, and then go over
into his letters, the book of Acts starts showing us this.
And then it carries over into his letters.
Every single person that he mentions by name in any of his letters or is mentioned in Acts
that ends up associated with him, takes him to another country.
He needs Barnabas to get to Antioch.
He needs Timothy to get to Greece.
Okay.
If you look at the names mentioned, he gives him a son or a daughter, and then God gives
him a nation.
Beautiful.
And now that is something we need to understand better because the evangelism has a spiritual
pattern to it.
It's not just a message of preaching the good news and then asking somebody to make a decision.
It's also understanding how God divinely connects people.
And if God wants to send you to a new place, he's probably for all of us, he's probably
going to bring somebody from there to you before he's going to send you to them.
That's good.
Yeah.
Good point.
This is one of the reasons why America is so on God's heart because he's brought the
nations from afar to this country.
True.
It's hard to go anywhere in America and not meet somebody that has a history in another
part of the world.
True.
Yeah.
And our immigration problem currently right now is a big political issue, but we have
to understand how God views this.
It's not just kindness towards the strangers.
Why does God say, take care of the widows, take care of the orphans, take care of the
strangers that come through, visit those that are in prison?
Well, one of the things that God said that he wants, that he needs us to help him obtain,
Jesus as the King is going to inherit nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues.
Right.
Can you consider that a widow probably has an anointing to give him one of those things?
An orphan has an anointing to give him one of those things.
Wow.
And those that are in prison have the ability to give him something.
Now, because we don't understand that very well, if we don't take care of the things
that he said are concerning to him, we don't get those things unlocked as part of the inheritance.
So what does the widow carry?
Well, Jesus was pretty nice to widows.
In fact, he said to me one time when I was complaining a little bit about taking care
of my own mother, not because I didn't know him, but because I was a little bit of a
widow, not because I didn't want to.
I loved my mother immensely, but she forced me to move with what I call Nana pace.
I'm rolling through life like a freight train and suddenly I got to take care of this 92
year old lady that is much slower.
Walking with a walker.
Yeah.
I had to learn to pace myself to her pace.
I complained about it a little bit, not because I was complaining about her, because it was
such a radical shift for me.
Jesus didn't like my complaint very much.
I never have one in argument with him, but he says to me, you know, son, I waited until
my father died and I had the full care of my mother as a widow before I started my ministry.
And I took Mary with me everywhere.
And I'd realized in scripture that Mary was along for the ride, somebody had never dawned
on me that Jesus was bringing her as a widow.
Wow.
So I said, well, I'd like to understand what she did.
Now, if you've ever been around a Jewish mom, it's fun.
And they're going to insert themselves in the dynamics of whatever's going on quite
extraordinarily.
And they're going to make their opinions known for sure.
So you've got to grapple with that a little bit, especially if you're the son of man and
you're going to change the world.
Mom's going to be helping along.
So the first miracle we see in scripture is instigated by Mary.
True.
And it has to do with a wedding.
Yes.
So she tells Jesus, oh my gosh, we're at this wedding and they're running out of wine.
You got to do something about that.
And he says, my time is not yet.
That's a nice way of saying, daddy's not ready to send me to do that stuff yet.
I can only do what I see my father do and only say what I hear my father say.
You're getting ahead of the curve, mom.
And she didn't care.
She's a Jewish mom.
So she appeals to father.
Now it doesn't say this exactly in scripture.
I'm telling you, I know this though.
Just trust me.
She didn't argue with him.
She went to father.
And when Lord revealed this to me, he said, I want you to know what my mother did, how
she overrode my timetable.
He said, did you realize that my mother was the most despised woman in Israel?
I said, I didn't realize that.
Why was she despised?
He said, well, when she was a virgin and she found out she's pregnant by the power of the
Holy Spirit, everyone didn't believe her.
Most of her family rejects her.
All of her friends reject her.
When she and Joseph go to Bethlehem for the census, everyone there is a relative or a
part of the same tribe.
And there's no room in the end.
That means none of your relatives, none of your friends will take you in.
That's despise, but that's saying you've done something wrong and I don't care how much
you say it's right.
I don't think it is.
So I'm not going to give you a room in my house.
So I'd never thought about this much till Jesus said this to me because you get a little
bit of that story in the beginning with Joseph and Mary, but then by the time Jesus is coming
on the scene, we sort of forget what Joseph and Mary went through to Stuart.
Stuart over this extraordinary baby.
That would have affected Joseph's business.
That affected their connection with social life.
They were shunned by their own friends and relatives.
And so Jesus said to me, my mother was very upset by what she found out at the wedding
because it was the first time since her own marriage to Joseph.
It was the first time she was invited to a wedding.
For 30 years, she had not been allowed to go to a wedding with friends or families.
And there's no way she's going to let the first time she gets to do that turn out bad.
So she doesn't want this young bride.
We don't even know who it is, whoever that young bride was.
She doesn't want her to have any kind of shame or adversity on her wedding day because she
had lived with despisement for 30 years and she doesn't want anybody to walk away from
a wedding and say, boy, that family doesn't know how to throw a party.
So she appeals to father and she says to father, I didn't get a wedding, but I got your son.
I didn't get to go to funerals.
I don't get to go to family gatherings.
I don't get invited to reunions.
Don't deprive this little widow of what I've had to lay down.
My son is here.
Fix it.
And father changed the times and seasons to appeal to it.
Why?
Because he knows somewhere down the road, he's going to prepare a wedding feast for
everyone that gets saved.
And he's going to give Mary the right to help that one.
She's not going to miss that one.
Beautiful.
So the release of the presence of God to say, I'm going to fix a problem with a wedding
was a prophetic act on the earth that is telling us father's heart for the wedding feast of
the lamb that's going to happen somewhere way down the road.
Beautiful.
And yet it's also a first fruit offering.
You need wine.
Bring me the wine, the grapes, the fruits, the first fruits, your crops.
So this is a first fruit offering.
Why is that important?
Because if we give him the first fruits, then we get to reap the whole harvest.
Beautiful.
So Jesus is getting ready to go reap the earth.
Mary makes sure that the first fruits are given.
Beautiful.
And not only that, but then she is actually transforming a nation.
So she's saying this nation denied him the fig tree and has denied him the first fruits
and has kept back from the festivals.
We've not been doing these things in the prescribed way for a long time.
Now the Messiah is on the ground getting ready to be introduced to the world.
Let's fix this.
And so she's fixing a nation with her request to father.
I'd submit to you that the reason we're supposed to take care of the widows is because their
prayers have power to transform nations.
Beautiful.
Wow.
As soon as she sets up the miracle, Jesus is now sent to save the nation.
So the first fruit unlocks his voice in the earth to begin to save the nation.
Wow.
What does an orphan do?
An orphan doesn't know where they fit.
They've been cut off from their inheritance, cut off from their household.
They don't know what tribe they are.
They probably don't know who their mother and father are.
So God adopts the orphan and gives them power to save the tribes of the earth.
If we understood that if he gives us an orphan to care for, he's also giving us a tribe.
Evangelism would just transform phenomenally.
Then why do we need the foreigners?
We've got to treat them nice because God is going to inherit the tongues of the earth,
all the nations, all the languages of the earth are fractured off pieces of the original
language that he spoke when he said, thus saith the Lord, let there be light.
So whatever he uses for creation, every language that exists in the earth is a fragment of
it.
If he wants to bring the nations back to him, he's going to speak their language on some
level, but he wants to bring them back in an understanding fully of what he says so
they can comprehend the full measure of everything that proceeds out of his mouth, everything
he writes with his finger.
So he needs someone from a foreign land to call out to him and then he saves the tongues
of the earth.
So a people group that speak a different tongue than you, you can gain permission to go reap
them if you'll be kind to the stranger when they come near your house.
And then those in prison, every nation, tribe, people, tongue, those that are in prison,
in some way, everybody that's in sin is in prison and we have to have the blood of Jesus
to let us out.
So if I'm willing to go visit someone in prison, then God will give me an anointing to set
free those that don't know him.
So we need all four of those, obeying all four of those things in order to allow Jesus
to have his inheritance.
Now, Saul, I think, had some understanding of what I just described.
He knew the ways of God enough that I think by the revelation that he had when he had
this encounter with God, that he then begins to really pay attention to who God brings
to him.
So Agabus takes him into healing and releases an ability for him to understand supernatural
healing.
And again, this is one of those things that sometimes we have had someone pray for us
and gotten healed, but we didn't ask for an impartation to go be the healer.
And if you encounter somebody that can pray for you and you get healed, wouldn't it be
obvious to say, can I have some of that?
Come on, that's right.
Because you're not the only one sick in your city.
Quit being selfish.
Ask God for power to clean out the hospital.
If someone's anointed with God and their prayer for you is effectual, you can ask for an impartation
as well as healing.
It's good to get healed, but we ought to go for the whole thing.
I think a lot of our sicknesses even are actually related to an intercession.
Instead of just praying for my own body to get healed, I should ask Jesus, am I interceding
for another part of the body?
Am I experiencing a little bit of pain or an adversity in my body because you're trying
to get my attention for something that's broken in the body of Christ?
Oh, come on, explain that.
Well, if I got a knee problem, for instance, my knee is hurting.
I don't know why my knee is hurting, but every time I try to walk, my right knee is hurting.
If I just pray for my knee and it doesn't get healed, it's a pretty good evidence that
you're actually carrying an intercession.
Because we get healed when we pray.
And if you don't get healed, it means God's trying to tell you something first.
Wow.
Stop thinking that he doesn't want to heal you.
You're not good enough or he doesn't love you enough or he likes his sister so and so
and not you.
Come on.
And if he doesn't heal you immediately when you pray the first time or especially if somebody
else prays for you, then ask him, why am I not being healed?
What am I not seeing?
What am I not hearing?
That's good.
There's something related to my sickness that you're trying to show me.
So show me what it is and then my healing will come.
But when it comes, you're also going to probably get an assignment because he's trying to show
you something, not just heal you.
So very likely you're interceding for the part of his body that is lift up your hands,
strengthen the feeble knees.
Is there a part of the body of Christ that you're related to in your city that has feeble
knees?
Pray for that to get healed and your healing will accelerate.
This is so good.
Yes.
I can't see well and I'm losing my vision.
I don't like wearing glasses, but I pray all the time for the body of Christ to get better
vision.
This is good.
And what I find is over and over and over, sometimes people ask God multiple times to
get healed and they don't.
And then they just get frustrated, give up.
God doesn't want to do it.
Instead of, no, you're praying for the wrong thing.
You're putting yourself first and God wants you to pray for his body first.
Beautiful.
You eat the kingdom of God first, then all these things are added to you.
So when I pray for another person to have the very thing that I want, now I have the
right to ask for it too.
That's good.
Abraham was told in blessing, I will bless you and multiplying, I will multiply you.
So give it away and then you have a right to ask for it.
That's good.
Pull down the power of God for somebody else and you'll never be deprived of it.
Now, when I began understanding that sometimes God subjects us to a little bit of adversity,
it's not because he's being mean to us or because he doesn't like us.
It's probably not because you did something wrong.
It's just the way God wants to help us connect with other parts of the body.
And we're so out of touch with his ways that we don't understand this very well.
So we're very selfish, motivated most of the time.
It's me, me, me, me, every minister I know, you better know who I am because I need something.
Instead of what can I do for you?
That's right.
And how can I serve my King best?
So if he needs something, I want him to know he can call on me.
If somebody near me needs something, I'm available, Lord, send me.
If I make his priorities my priority, your life gets really, really fun.
Yes.
Beautiful.
But what I discovered in my own life is that he wasn't subjecting me to adversity because
he was punishing me in some way.
He was trying to get my attention.
Yes.
And once he had my attention and said, this is that, this little discomfort in you right
now is actually related to a part of my body that I need to fix.
Now as soon as you begin addressing that, your pain goes away.
Glory to God.
And it's not that you get healed.
It's actually that you weren't sick.
You were just feeling something that was making you sensitive to part of the body that is
hurting you.
Yes.
The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you.
The head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you.
So sometimes God makes the head uncomfortable when his feet are hurting.
So this is happening all over the body of Christ and we're processing this as God doesn't
want to fix me.
Instead of, no, God is aggressively fixing his body and he needs your help.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
Now that said, I think Saul figured this out.
So we have this extraordinary thing where Saul is going like a freight train right after
he gets saved.
And remember he's from Tarsus and he understands a little bit of the ways of God.
So he's the protocol in the ancient text for a traveler is, and not just apostolic, but
anybody that's traveling is to go sit in the gate of a place that you're going or a stop
you're going to make along the way and wait for someone that lives there to offer you
hospitality.
Now why would that be a protocol that is ancient?
Goes back thousands of years for cultures to do this.
This be back before hotels were out there.
There wasn't an abundance of ends and places to stop.
So you were kind of subject to the weather if you didn't follow this protocol, but it
made them sensitive, especially if they were entering into another community along the
way.
They were sensitive to the gates of another city because they would usually sit in the
gate and wait for somebody local to offer them hospitality.
So the instructions to the early church was every city you enter into, pray for your peace
to impart to it.
Well, how's it going to impart to it?
You don't know anyone there.
You've just gotten there.
What's this mystery?
How do I just release my peace to an intangible place?
Well he answers that question.
He says, when you speak your peace, when you pray for your peace to impart to that city,
if there be a man of peace there, it'll land on him.
And when you find him, go into his house.
But if not, if they don't receive it, then ask for your peace to return to you and shake
the dust off your feet and go on.
It's not a mean thing to shake the dust, but it's going to bring down a correction on that
city because God knows, I'll say it very boldly, God wouldn't have sent you if there wasn't
a man of peace there.
So if they don't respond, they're disobeying him and they're locking up their city to a
move of God.
So they're going to need some correction for that and he'll correct them nicely.
They'll get a little spanking.
He'll give them another chance.
They'll do it again.
Eventually the glory of God's going to fill the place because it's going to fill the whole
earth.
That's right.
Yes.
Well, Saul figured this out and so he discovered along the way that when I have a mysterious
encounter with a person, it is Father God unlocking a nation.
Beautiful.
So he paid attention to this and he didn't plan his way like a revival train, an 18-wheeler
that's going to roll into town and advertise to everybody that the revival wagon's here
and we've got a certain tent set up on Main Street.
Come and join us and bring your tithes and offerings.
He went looking for a man of peace.
Come on.
And when he found it, he reaped cities, whole cities and nations.
Beautiful.
Because he figured out the ways of God, not just the responsibility of preaching the gospel.
That's good.
But remember, he saw of Tarsus.
Why Tarsus?
Why did God choose a man from Tarsus to be the first fruit among the Gentiles?
Because Tarsus was the city where idolatry that was proliferated all over the earth was
born.
Wow.
The main piece of idolatry in that day was the bull.
Okay.
It's just Baal.
Yeah.
It's the same bull that we see Egypt serving.
We see Israel transgressing with that when they were out in the desert.
They created a golden bull and worshiped it.
We see this happening in many parts of the world.
That manufacturing of idols from a little place in Tarsus also imparted to whole nations
along the Silk Road, along the trade routes.
So idolatry was proliferating throughout the world along the trade routes.
Now Saul journeys and he finds a person.
He gets to their city.
The gospel opens up.
He does it again and again and then he gets to this spot and acts where it says he wanted
to go to Asia and for the first time the Holy Spirit says no.
Why would God tell him no when he's already been told to go to the ends of the earth?
Yeah.
Well, he at least understood that that meant no and ask again.
Yes, that's it.
That is a good word.
It's not no, you're never going to go.
It's no, you can't go because something's not lined up with my protocol.
So ask again.
Yeah, that's good.
What's the right question to ask again?
Why can't I go?
Yeah.
Well, I'm missing a relationship.
I don't have a son or daughter from Asia yet.
Wow.
So I can't inherit Asia.
Wow.
I've got Greece in my pocket because I found Timothy.
Yeah.
I've got Antioch because I found Barnabas.
Yes.
I've got to find something that God has not connected yet.
So he prays and he has a dream.
Yes.
And in the dream he sees a Macedonian man saying, come over here and help us.
Yes.
What did Macedonia do?
As a nation, they did two things really extraordinary.
One, they conquered most of the known world.
Yeah.
Through Alexander the Great.
They took an army to the ends of the earth, secular power, military power.
They conquered nations because God was doing something.
It looks weird because I'm not condoning Alexander trying to say that was all a good thing.
If he was a nation he conquered, it might not have been a good thing.
But sometimes God uses something like that in history to pave the way for his gospel.
Beautiful.
In the same way Rome had done the same thing, Rome sort of followed in Alexander the Great's
footsteps and they conquered much of the same areas of the world.
So the gospel with the apostles spread on the Roman roads.
It spread on the pass of the Macedonian army.
Wow.
Why?
Because they were going out to transform countries to their understanding of thinking.
If they had had the gospel, that's what they would have taken.
Sure.
Rome didn't have the gospel, but it knew how to build cities, it knew how to build
citizenships.
It had a level of government that was quite extraordinary compared to what most people
were used to.
In its founding principles, it had some really good things.
It deviates and gets a little crazy because of the military and the Caesars.
But the Roman design was a better design than what most cities had in that era of the world.
So when you became a Roman citizen, it carried a lot of weight.
It was like having a passport to America or to the European Union or something.
However, they didn't do everything perfectly, but God used them.
He raises them up, He allows them to have that kind of power, and then He uses whatever
they did do that was worthwhile as a foundation for the gospel.
This is a mystery because you can't condone everything about them and you could certainly
say, I wish they weren't there, but something emerges out of it later where as God brings
their kingdom to an end and His rises above it, He uses their roads for the apostles.
It's a case of all things working together for good.
Exactly.
Saul understood that in part, but he's stuck.
He can't go into Asia.
He just simply asked God why.
Has this dream?
Sees a Macedonian and said, come over and help us.
Well that is Macedonia is sort of in our day, we see it as a little circle in the middle
of Greece, but in his day, Macedonia was bigger than Greece.
So for Macedonian man in a dream, say, come over and help us.
It's including Asia minor because that's what they controlled.
And today we can't see this as clearly on a map, but if you go back and look at an ancient
map prior to this period of history, you've got to go back far enough about 200 AD or
earlier, you'll see the current country of Turkey is named Lydia.
That's right.
Why is it named Lydia?
Well, because there's this extraordinary lady that lives there named Lydia that's part of
the royal families.
And he dreams a dream and sees a Macedonian man saying, come over and help us.
The thing that's interesting about Macedon or the Macedonians is they train their women
to fight just like the men.
So very often if you saw somebody in Macedonian army, you wouldn't have been able to tell
if it was a man or a woman and they would have fought just as skillfully.
So they were very, very difficult people to beat or conquer.
You couldn't conquer their cities because the women would fight to the death.
The men would fight first.
You'd have to get through them.
If you got through them, you're not going to get through the women because they're not
going to let you get their babies.
And even the children were trained to fight before they were trained to walk.
They could ride a horse before they could walk.
They were fierce warriors.
So he sees a Macedonian man.
It might've actually been a man, but I'd submit to you, he probably saw somebody in Macedonian
armor and he assumes it's a man.
And then out of frustration, he doesn't know where to go.
So the right thing to do when God says no is go back to the last place.
You got a yes.
That's a good, good, good key there.
That's a good word.
So he goes to Phurgia in Greece, already has relationships there.
Everything works right there.
When he goes there, it's friends, it's fellowship, it's peace.
The gospel's advancing and spreading among the Greeks.
And he's got lots of friends there.
So he goes there to try to figure out why can't I go into Asia?
And he's doing what he always does.
Now he's preaching where he has permission and freedom again, within the context of the
ways of God.
And then this lady named Lydia shows up.
She was a seller of purple.
She's not from Phurgia.
She's from Thyatira.
And she gets converted.
And then she makes this nice little statement to Saul.
She says, Saul, if you consider me a believer, come to my house.
Or her house was in Asia Minor.
Oh, wow.
We don't see Saul having to ask again to go to Asia immediately.
Lift up your heads, oh, you gates that the king of glory come in.
The gate just opened.
The keys just turned in the lock.
The gospel can now spread to Asia.
Wow.
But he had to find the gatekeeper's house.
And I call her a gatekeeper because I think he understood that when she invited him to
her house, she was unlocking her nation to the gospel.
Beautiful.
It's the same way as Peter.
When Peter repents for the Gentiles, God opens up the factual door to the Gentiles, saves
Cornelius' house.
What we've not understood about the way evangelism works is that if one person says yes to Jesus,
so God is going to go after much, much more.
Amen.
You don't know who you're connected to in the spirit.
You don't know how God views your DNA, but he aggressively is going to use your obedience
as an open door for the gospel to now to spread much further than you.
Amen.
If you cooperate with that design and you share your testimony with your friends and
families, all the more it will accelerate.
Amen.
All right.
So when the apostles figured out these kinds of ways, they weren't just preaching like
we understand.
They were preaching by design within the ways of God, looking for that missing piece that
had to get saved before the whole city would.
Wow.
And he gains Lydia and then he goes into Asia Minor and he begins to speak the good news
there.
Again, now he's got a green light, permission from God to do anything in Asia.
Wow.
That's interesting.
Why?
Because she opened the door.
From Thyatira, we end up with stories in the gospels where he ends up birthing the church
in seven cities of her domain.
Oh yeah.
So we get the seven churches of Asia.
Right.
Mentioned in the book of Revelation.
Wow.
Ephesus, Philadelphia, Sardis, Thyatira, you can look them all up.
All of them were in Lydia's domain.
Wow.
But another strange thing happens.
If you look at this ancient map, it's not too hard to find.
You can go dig for it and find one.
The whole country that was named Lydia on an ancient map looks like a bull with its
head down charging towards Israel.
And it's the seed of idolatry for the trade routes all over the world.
Wow.
So it's not just worshiping the queen of heaven and Baal and Marduk and some of these ancient
gods.
It's merchandising them all over the world with trade routes.
Wow.
So God saves someone that understood the royal dye.
The other anointing that she carried is she controlled the market for the royal dye that
made robes for kings and queens.
Wow.
Which means she's got connection with kingdoms all over the world.
Wow.
She's cornered the market on the commodity that they want.
And now she's going to befriend an apostle who's going to take the gospel the same way
she took purple dye.
Glory to God.
This is powerful.
Now, when you look at this ancient map and you see the bull with its head down charging
towards Israel, this is idolatry that had been set up in the earth probably by the fallen
angels originally.
And they have created a seat of power to stop the gospel and to punish any way possible
anyone that comes into covenant with God.
They're warring with God's people.
Yeah.
So God picks a man from Tarsus to fix it.
Glory to God.
He finds somebody from the very birthplace of that idolatry, says, there's one I can
use.
He's zealous for the wicked.
Now he's zealous for me.
We're going to fix this.
Wow.
Now, this is what we've not understood about churches.
Saul didn't go birth churches anywhere he wanted.
He didn't pick out good place for real estate.
He birthed churches where he had a convert.
So first he finds the son.
Then he gains the house.
And then if you pray in the house, you very likely are going to get endued with power.
And when you're endued with power, Jesus says the king might call you his Ecclesia, but
you're not allowed to be called an Ecclesia just because you wanted to put a piece of
real estate there.
You don't start the church and then invite the people.
You go find the people that God is saving.
And it becomes a prayer room and out of that prayer room, the Ecclesia emerges.
This is the apostolic pattern that we've missed.
We're trying to take over churches with apostles now instead of birth them with the same way
that the first ones did.
If we go back to the first fruit, the way they did it in the first hundred years, we
would reap the earth, I think, in a rapid way.
Right now we're trying to take over things that probably have been birthed illegitimately,
but they have Jesus' name on them.
And I'm not saying that's all bad.
I'm just saying that we need to go back to the pattern of how God wants to save the world.
Why is this so important?
When he was told, no, you can't go to Asia, God knew this is the seed of idolatry.
He's not telling Saul, you can't go there.
He's saying you got to go there the right way.
You can't bring something down until you get it out of you.
And I can't send you until you go in the way that I want, walk in my ways, not just with
my message.
When he finds Lydia and he has this green light, he goes to her house, he engages with
her family, he ends up with freedom to preach in all seven of these cities.
And a church emerges or an ecclesiast emerges in all seven of these cities.
Now if you look at them on this ancient map, four of them line up exactly horizontally
right here and three of them line up just a few kilometers away.
And they are a collar on the neck of the bull.
The strategic place that the churches are birthed becomes a place for the foot of the
king to put his foot on the neck of his enemies and break the idolatry in the earth.
Glory to God.
So when they dealt with this correctly, first they save some, they get them praying, and
then they've got to deal with this marketing of the idolatry and that becomes a riot.
But God doesn't answer the riot with another riot, he answers the riot with power.
They actually probably murdered Saul and the disciples gathered around him and he jumps
back up and goes back in there and starts preaching again.
He's preaching until the idolatry comes down.
But he's not preaching against the idolatry, he's preaching the kingdom of heaven.
If Jesus is lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.
So when a guy gets resurrected, what's the message?
He's not going to go back in there and say, y'all are idolaters and you need to repent.
He's going to go back there and say, I told you, I served the king that's resurrected.
Yes.
Look, you killed me and now here I am preaching again.
Try it again if you want to, but you're going to do this until you see him because I'm here
to show you the face of the one that made you.
Beautiful.
If I be lifted up, I would draw men unto me.
They don't do that easily, they don't change easily.
He deals with another thing that's a part of this.
He gets the little servant girl that follows him around.
That story sort of relates to the same thing.
These are some of the types of opposition we get and we think it's spiritual warfare
and it's actually, let me say it a different way.
It's not the enemy's spiritual warfare to resist us.
It's strategic warfare that if we understand the ways of God, we plow through it, break
it easily and then we gain a massive move of God.
Amen.
So when he gains this foothold in seven locations and you could literally say, now the King
of Kings has put his foot on the neck of idolatry that's messing up the world.
Wow.
At that point, John finds out about it and Mary the mother of Jesus finds out about what's
going on over there and they come to visit.
They went into the temple of Diana and they prayed for the idolatry to come down.
Wow.
And when they prayed, a massive earthquake happened and the temple fell.
Wow.
When that temple fell, whole cities were buried.
It set off earthquakes.
It set off volcanoes.
It was massive and it was so massive that God shook the nation and he broke the head
of the bull off.
Glory to God.
So today, if you look at a map, you don't see the whole country of Lydia.
You see a bunch of fragments that have become the Greek Isles between Turkey and Greece.
And they weren't Greek Isles in the biblical era.
They were the head of the bull.
Wow.
So the strategy of this is if you put the body of Christ into full functionality in
the spot that God wants, then he inhabits that with his presence and that can transform
the whole city.
Amen.
We need to understand this again.
Now, I go one step further.
Saul writes a letter that he couldn't go to Asia and then within days or weeks, he meets
Lydia and something just dramatically opens up.
He then writes a letter a few years later and he says, all of Asia has heard the gospel.
Hallelujah.
Do you realize what a miracle that was?
Wow.
Wow, wow.
In about a two-year period of Lydia saying yes to Jesus, all of Asia heard the gospel.
Glory to God.
That's about how long it took Alexander the Great to conquer it.
Wow.
You see the pattern.
God took something negative that had happened in history and he fixed the history of the
Macedonians with their ruling over other nations to make them more like themselves instead
of bringing them something good.
He follows the path of war and conquer with the good news.
Beautiful.
To say, let me bring my kingdom to you.
It's going to be good for you.
I'm not here to conquer you.
I'm here to transform you into a nation of light and peace and prosperity.
The walls that had kept him out, they fall by the little acts of obedience like people
like Lydia and Timothy and Titus and Barnabas and these people that are mentioned throughout
scripture.
They're catalyst for the power of God to move because they said yes to Jesus.
Now God will move through whatever stewardship they have in the earth.
We ought to be looking at ourselves this way saying, I don't know who I am fully because
I know a little bit about my genealogy.
In the heavenly map, when God looks at me, he has an understanding of a nation, a tribe,
a people and a tongue that relates to me also.
So if I say yes to him, he's not just going after me.
He's going to go after everything that I'm connected to with my spirit.
And if I give him freedom to save me, it's just like a trade route, it just opens up
a trade route for the gospel to have success with the hearers to the extent of my boundaries.
My whole point in this is that the modern country of Turkey or ancient Lydia, I think
is one of the most profound examples of how God wants to move in the earth.
I'm praying for that area of the world to have another move of God the way they did
in the ancient days, but also that we would understand God's protocol and his ways on
how we want to do this.
The apostolic grace is very important to understand when it's sent, it must go in the right way.
It's not just sent because it's an apostle or it's not an apostle just because it's
sent.
They must learn to walk in God's ways.
So their primary job is to lay their life down in order for others to be lifted up.
So they have to walk correctly, not necessarily without making mistakes.
We all make some, but when they walk in God's ways, profound things open up.
And the other thing is the link between the apostolic grace and evangelism should be reinstituted
in a profound way with wisdom.
We understand how these two graces work together.
I think we've seen the first tier of evangelism in our lifetime because we've seen people
get saved either from a message or at a meeting.
A gifted five-fold evangelist comes to town and has a grace to get a lot of people saved.
But the second tier of evangelism is when the person that gets saved, like Lydia, as
I was just describing, when she brings her testimony to her own family and friends, now
it has power with God to do it again.
She doesn't need Saul to show up at her house so he can preach to all of her friends and
family.
She needs him to bring his grace into the room, which helps bring the presence and brings
some bit of a support for her.
But it's the person that just got saved or just got a miracle.
Their testimony that's important to save their friends and family or their city.
When they give their testimony and we're there in the room to help them, we're not doing
it for them, but we're encouraging them to do it.
When they do it, we'll pray with them.
The word testimony in the ancient text means to do it again.
Now whatever God did to save them or to heal them or to deliver them, saved, healed, set,
re-delivered, whatever happened that was glorious in their life when they testify about it,
then we can pray with them and God will do it again.
His intention is to save their family and their friends.
Then it begins a prayer room.
Now that's sort of a repeat of the upper room.
Now this new convert and her family and her friends begin to pray for Asia.
But they're praying for the part of Asia that they understand.
They want the other cities where they got relatives and friends that live.
They want those cities to be touched by the gospel.
But they're not just paying for Saul to go to the next place.
They're praying and their prayers are what's getting answered.
He's basing his activity on what God is doing in a divine relationship.
So when she gets saved, she brings her friends and family into it, he prays for them along
with her.
God saves a household, saves a family, saves a city, and then it begins to spread throughout
the trade routes.
As we see it goes to those seven churches of Asia, then God moves in a massive way to
accelerate it.
He breaks off the idolatry and the earth.
He deals decisively with the demonic powers that are resisting the gospel.
And now it's like an open heaven.
It just spreads like a wildfire throughout Asia.
As that goes to the next place, again, we need to pay attention to the divine connections
because I'm looking for the widow, the orphan, the poor, the alien among us, those that are
in prison.
I'm looking for the man of peace when God sends me somewhere.
And I find these clues that connects up something that God is concerned about and they receive
the gospel.
Now we can move to the second tier, which is to begin to save who they're connected
to.
If we reach that spot where now Lydia's house gets saved, Cornelius' house gets saved, now
we've got friends and family that are coming into the gospel and it bursts a prayer meeting
that's effectual for the kingdom.
Yes.
It also lifts the king up over whatever they're stewarding over.
So they begin to declare his name over their trade, their business, their ministries, whatever
they're doing as a part of their life.
The third tier of evangelism is after their friends and family and something in their
house begins to stir with God.
And now they're requesting of God to enlarge and expand his kingdom in their domain.
When God may answer in mysterious ways, he may choose somebody to be sent, he may just
sovereignly begin to show himself to many, he might start performing massive signs and
wonders, whatever it is that he responds to their prayers, it's the apostles of the five
folds row to follow the clues.
So when God moves, we respond and we ask him to do it again.
If he heals somebody, he's probably not just healing a person along the way, but he's healing
someone strategic that it's their testimony that is probably the key to save the city.
And we need to let them give their testimony.
Very often ministries in our day are trying to testify about what God's doing, but we
don't give the microphone to the person he did it for.
So we get on the stage and we tell somebody, well, God, you know, save this lady from cancer
when I prayed for her.
Well, great, but where is she?
Come on, give her the microphone.
It's her testimony.
If you let her have the testimony, God will do it again.
And it doesn't mean you don't get any credit for it, but it's a combination of law.
If I take the credit as my ministry, I deserve some because I was there because I was a part
of it, but if I take her testimony from her, then I diminished its power and glory.
And that probably is not going to see the same results as if I let the person that got
that miracle testify about even if they don't feel comfortable doing that, or they don't
feel like they're any good, or they don't feel like they're called of God.
Still, they're the ones that God did the miracle for.
They are the ones that need to go and declare what great things God has done for them.
And then he'll do it again.
If we follow that pattern out correctly, we should see a person saved that God strategically
chosen and then we see their family transformed along with their friends.
And then we see him release strategy to save their city, and then we'll see their nation.
And the pattern that I want us to understand that if I adopt a son or a daughter, if I
take heed to what God's doing and just one person that's important to him, then we may
be able to see the King inherit a whole nation.
Amen.
And I believe that's the pattern that God is going to unveil again in our day on a massive
scale.
We're going to reap the earth and the harvesting angels are coming to help us.
And the glory of God is going to fill the whole earth with his glory.
But we need to wrap ourselves around his ways again and relook at scripture and say, this
is what happened in the days of old.
Let's ask God how to do it again in our day.
Amen.
So thank you for listening.
I'm just praying that you'll step into this fully.
All of you that are listening to this, I would ask that you would pray for an ability to
hear and to see and to obey.
And also that you would rethink about when you got saved, what did God do for you that
caused you to receive the gospel?
Ask him to do it again for your friends and family.
Even if years have gone by and you've sort of lost that first fire, rekindle the flame.
Amen.
Embrace the first fruits of what you had, the zeal that you had in the beginning.
Ask him to explode that in you again so that you can become an effectual part of the kingdom
of God as it advances.
Amen.
And then pray for your own family, your own city, your own nation.
But don't just pray what you want God to do.
Ask Jesus what he's praying for them and pray in agreement with him.
Beautiful.
I look forward to seeing you again.
Thank you for having me and I just pray that global outpouring will continue to prosper
and do what God has created them to do.
And I look forward to seeing them in the days ahead and hopefully we can come back and chat
some more.
So thank you guys.
Appreciate you.
God bless.
Amen.
God bless you.
Thank you.
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Until next time, this is Sharon Buss and I'm Philip Buss.
God bless you with this overwhelming loving presence.