Truth Streams – GrahamCooke.Com
This guest post comes to us from Graham Cooke at Graham Cooke Ministries.
The Timing Of God
Graham Cooke
Whenever we celebrate the beginning of a new year, we are given a natural opportunity to ponder the timing of God.
While much study and meditation has been done in recent years on interpreting prophecy, it is important to remember that God sometimes uses words to carry a different meaning in the spiritual than they normally do in the natural. For example, in Acts 2:1-4, we see how God defines the word “suddenly” differently than we do.
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.
When we hear the word “suddenly,” we naturally think, “now.” On the surface, Acts 2 seems to back that up—it seems like the Holy Spirit has been poured out in a completely spontaneous event. But behind the scenes, as anyone who studies Scripture will know, there was a significant time of preparation beforehand. The Spirit was not a surprise, as Jesus had promised several days earlier in Acts 1:5 that, “you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” Just before His ascension, Jesus told His followers to wait for the promise of the Father, and some of them had done just that.
Of the five hundred people who witnessed the resurrection, one hundred and twenty were in the Upper Room persevering until the Holy Spirit was poured out. God clearly doesn’t need everyone to be on the same page to do something wonderful. He just needs a company of people persevering. Like Gideon’s army being cut back to three hundred, God will use the people who are fully and truly committed to Him.
Prophecy is fulfilled according to God’s timetable and man’s preparation and placement. If we are not prepared by God’s hidden process, or in the right place, we will miss the timing of God. These early Christians were right before God, and their relationships were in order. When God’s timing came, and He found them ready and in one accord, He empowered them from on high. The world changed because of that prayer meeting. The word “suddenly” actually carried a significant, and successful, season of preparation with it.
We see a similar principle in Mark 4:26-29 And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil; and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows–how, he himself does not know. The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head. But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”
Jesus spoke of an immediate harvest, but clearly there were a number of things that had to happen before it could occur. When we receive a prophetic word about harvest in a church, we must be prepared to walk through the process of growing that seed. The word very well could mean that we need to break up the hard ground in our own lives first—cracking the hardness of our hearts and learning to rely on both God and one another.
For a time, we may have to throw seeds out. Planting takes work and strategy. We can’t just sit around and expect something to grow if we haven’t planted it. We have to sow the seeds. Churches with prophecies of harvest ought to consider ways of investing themselves into the community. We have to get outside our doors, sharing the promise God has put upon us.
When a church asks me what they should do with a prophecy about harvest, I always suggest planting as many seeds over as wide a region as possible. We need a great planting to have a great harvest. We also have to find fertile ground and develop and train enough workers to do both the sowing and the reaping. Jesus’ “immediate” harvest actually took months of preparation behind the scene.
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