Gifts of the Spirit / Hearing From God (1 of 5)

Mike Connell

If it disagrees with the Bible it didn't come from God. You've got to have the Bible as your standard for testing all revelation, so you know, if you find that you've got something, and you think God's told you to do this and you find it's completely the opposite to what the word of God says, you got it wrong. If you keep getting it wrong, you should go and get some counsel to sort out if something's going on inside you. Getting the idea? So if people come to you and say: God told me to do this and it's very clear, you know, God told me it was okay, we're in love, we can sleep together, you know, hello, give me a break! [Laughter] You're not married, you know? The Bible says those that commit fornication shan't inherit the kingdom of God, so He's not going to tell you that it's going to go good for you, personally, if He's told you in the written word something different. Use the Bible. You've got to become familiar with the Bible, load yourself up, read the Bible, get familiar with the Bible and automatically you'll be filled with thoughts of God that are useful in ministering to people - very helpful.

Okay, the second thing is does it line up with the character of God? Is that something that God would be likely to do, you know, like the devil took Jesus up into a high mountain and said come on, the word of God says cast yourself down, there's angels will take care of you, you want to jump. In other words, I'll put it another way - he was standing on a high place and said go on, jump, it'll be okay, you'll just float to the ground. You see this is contrary - it may have been what the words said, but actually it was a misrepresentation of the nature of God. Interesting thing, God seldom takes someone and suddenly moves them from here up to some big thing. God grows you step by step, so it's not the nature of God to want you to suddenly show yourself off in some big way or public exhibition, or to make a big scene of any kind, or to do something spectacular. He just grows you little by little by little, so if it doesn't seem like it's the nature of God, it probably isn't.

Then finally - or two other things - does it produce good fruit? So one way of testing a revelation is if the fruit of it is good. That's why we'll teach you to ask after you've prayed or ministered to someone hey, how did that go? What did you sense as a result of me sharing with you these things? In other words just get a bit of feedback. The person says well that was great man, it really helped me, touched me - you get feedback. If there's fruit from God it's always good. Fruit from heaven is gentle and reasonable, open to reason. If for example you get someone who says well just God told me, and you can't reason with them, that is definitely not God, because the Bible says in James, the wisdom that comes from heaven is quite easily entreated. You can appeal and talk and interact, so we'll teach you when it comes to ministering a word from God that, just do it gently, don't say well God told me like you're the authority in the earth. Just hey listen, I just sense this or I just felt this or I had an impression, maybe God, about this. In other words just do it much more low key. It's easier for you to interact with the person, easier for them to receive as well, not so dogmatic, okay?

The final one is, if it comes from God it will bear witness with your spirit. When something is right your own spirit bears witness to it. How many have had someone tell you something - I taught Michelle what to do but Michelle had some guy come up to her, said oh God's told me that I'm going to marry you. Now what does she feel straight away? Now this is the dilemma when some guy carries on like that. A good Christian girl wants to please the Lord, now he's saying God's told me this thing and she doesn't feel it in her heart, but she wants to please God. You throw people into turmoil with that kind of stuff. It's very manipulative. I said to her tell him just straight, God didn't tell me that, so goodbye. [Laughter] In other words own your own life. I said he can think what he thinks, and he can say what he says, but actually if it doesn't witness with your spirit, don't go with it.

I've seen many people trapped into relationships, into business deals, if they'd listened to their spirit, they'd have never been happy about it, but they kind of got impressed that someone was very prophetic or very spiritual. How did they get impressed? Because they projected it out that they were, but the wisdom from God is easily entreated. It's gentle and pure, and it produces good fruit. One of the things it'll witness with your spirit, so if something doesn't register as being right, then just say well thank you very much, but no thanks, I'm not going to go with that. You can thank the person, be polite, you don't have to be rude, but we don't need to receive things that aren't right, so let your own spirit bear witness with that, whether this bears witness of good fruit or not. Okay now, why don't we just stop now and I'll get you to stand up and turn around and sit down and we're going to give you an activation.

Okay then, now what I want to do in this session, first of all I want to get you all to do an activation. I'll just show you what it is in just a moment, and then I'll introduce you to activations and how they work. After that we're going to talk about how to activate the gifts of the spirit in your life, so I'll do the teaching session how to activate the gifts, after we've actually got you to step out and have a try, so we'll get started first of all and then we'll talk about the specific things. Then we'll have a chance for some questions and hopefully just finish around about 9.30. So I want to just do a simple activation. Now this is a very, very simple one, and in this one here what we're going to do is we want to just pray an inspired prayer so I could just - Henrietta, just come on up here please. Can I just practice on you? There we go, so Henrietta comes up, there we go and so this is the kind of process.