I think I have shared before on this blog that my normal sermon preparation is to ask God, “Father, what do You want to say to Your people this time?”, and then simply listen to what He says. At home I usually ask that question immediately after I have preached, in preparation for the next time. Sometimes He answers straight away, giving me a theme or a verse, or occasionally dropping a full message into my spirit. At other times I get to Saturday night and I still don’t have the message for Sunday morning, and I’m saying, “God! You’re driving me to chocolate! What do You want to say to Your people?”
Increasingly since I have been in Africa, I have nothing till the last moment, and then just a theme or dot points. Sometimes the Lord will lead me to use a message I have preached somewhere else, but even then because I don’t have notes it never comes out the same way twice. (Some people at home think I just have an amazing memory, that I have notes but memorize them so I can preach without notes. But, no, I just don’t have notes … not any. Teaching is different – when I am teaching my seminars or courses, because these are designed to be repeated and I want to have at least some measure of consistency across repeats, for these I use notes. But when I am preaching all I have is what the Holy Spirit gives me.)
Because of all this, I was a little surprised yesterday. Knowing that I was going to be preaching this morning, I asked the Lord my usual question and immediately He gave me not one but two themes, similar but not the same. I was sitting here praying about how the two might flow together, when Adams came in (around 4pm) and told me that I would be taking two sessions this morning, not just the one. I had to laugh. I wasn’t ready for that one, but God was.
So this morning I was preaching at Connect Chapel, one of the outreach churches from East Gate Chapel, where Adams is the pastor. My first message was on loving the Lord with all our heart, soul and strength. It was anointed, and I could tell it was getting through to people, but there was no spectacular outcome. I gave an altar call for salvation, but there was no response, which didn’t surprise me as I assumed that everyone there was born again.
That was followed by a time of worship during which I personally felt a heavy anointing of the Spirit. I knew He was about to do something good.
My second message was about idols: how anything we put ahead of God is an idol, anything we look to in place of God is an idol, anything that gets in the way of our relationship with God is an idol. The Lord had already told me ahead of time that at the end of the message I was to lead the people in a prayer asking the Holy Spirit to reveal any idols in our lives, and then to give an altar call for repentance – and that I was to be the first person on that altar call.
So I delivered the message, led the prayer, announced the altar call and told the people what I was doing, then went and knelt in front of the congregation.
I expected to hear others coming out to join me. Nothing. I waited some minutes. Nothing. Not a sound. I thought, “This was a total failure.” But when I stood up, I realized that every person in the room was bowed forward in their seat, obviously in prayer, and there was a tangible spirit of repentance across the room. There was a holy silence, and the manifest presence of God was so heavy that I hardly dared to breathe, lest I disturb it. I moved quickly and quietly to my seat and continued to pray.
I don’t know why people didn’t come to the front. Maybe they didn’t understand what I was asking. Or maybe that presence of God that made me not want to breathe made them not want to move, or not able to. Regardless, the Holy Spirit was doing His thing, and I believe that lives were being changed.
One of the great cries of my heart to the Lord since the start of this trip, and even before, has been that His tangible presence would be manifest in my meetings. This morning I saw the beginning of the answer to that prayer.
All I can say is, Wow!