Revelation and Expansion

Pastor Ian Wright

In this information age of email, cyber-speak and text messaging it seems that all that we need we can get in a moment of time. It seems that even

teen-agers can text each other in order to organize a strike in sympathy with their teachers.., our email lists grow longer and Web sites demand we log on and down load.

I often say I’d be lost without my email connection. In our Christian witness and experience these are useful tools to touch the world, and listen to its’ heartbeat, and ability to connect with world missions, and building address lists of contactable people who will help our cause.

However it seems that while more and more are hearing from one another.. There are less and less spending time hearing what the Holy Spirit is saying to the church.

In all of our getting, are we getting information.., or Revelation?

If there is ever a time to hear from the Throne Line rather than through the phone line it is now.

New Zealander’s we are told, are the most “connected” electronically in the world. We are the early adopters of the many information gadgets that the marketing guru’s want to throw at us.. and yet it seems that local churches are seeing less and less people being arrested by the power of the gospel and then “connected” into that church family with purpose and vision.

As a boy Romans 1:16 became my information revelation. The spark of the “Power of the Gospel..” to change lives, fired an enthusiasm in me that motivates me to this day. And I am finding that another generation.., a generation that is plugged in, cyber-savvy, and hungry for more, is now finding the soul satisfaction of that God given revelation.

There is a generation of Samuel’s in New Zealand who have asked of broken relationships, fragmented families, drugs, teachers, peers and sometimes churches, “Did you call me?.”. And are discovering that the Spirit of God has never stopped speaking, whispering and calling.

Our churches, and indeed ourselves will never grow on information and programmes alone, but if we are people of Revelation we can look to the word of God to reflect the effects of our new found “ear”, Expansion!

“Sing, O childless woman! Break forth into loud and joyful song, O Jerusalem, even though you never gave birth to a child. For the woman who could bear no children now has more than all the other women,” says the Lord. ²“Enlarge your house; build an addition; spread out your home! ³ For you will soon be bursting at the seams. Your descendants will take over other nations and live in their cities. Isaiah 54:1-3 – New Living Translation

If we are to “burst at the seams” we have to go to The Source instead of the cell phone, the place of intimacy rather than the internet. It is there that we will meet again the God who is not willing that any should perish, and who has His strategy for your situation.