Monday, May 12, 2008

Alabama and Tennessee

Our recent trip to the south-east was very successful. Thanks for everyone’s prayers! I intended to write several blog posts while we were on the road, but my laptop was experiencing a lot of problems. So, I only used my laptop for business, but this lead us to the decision, “It’s time for a new laptop!” We have lots of ministry traveling planned this summer, and I don’t want to end up in the same computer deficiency disaster again. Fortunately everywhere we stayed at had computers I could use, but it was still frustrating. Don’t you hate it when something that’s supposed to take two minutes takes twenty?


We started out in Alabama. Our first ministry engagement there was at a small storefront church. It reminded me of another storefront church I had shared at once in TN. Upon arriving we were greatly welcomed and accepted by the pastors, Tim & Angie Mitchell. Before we started we received prayer by two ladies on their intercessor team which was great! After the worship was over Taylor started first, and we played a slideshow of pictures of some of the gemstones we have found. The church was really full for its size, and I believe many people came simply to see the gems. Although I sure many people there had experienced the manifested presence of God’s glory before, it seemed like there were still many who had never seen anything like ‘gemstones from heaven’. We answered questions and just shared how God’s presence had been showing up in our home. The response was great and challenged people to expect new levels of God’s manifested presence.


We prayed for people after the service. Some were touched by the Holy Spirit while we shared, and wanted us to bless what God was doing in them already. Others wanted prayer for prosperity, or physical healing. I prayed for one lady that had severe pain problems in her back and neck. She had been getting injections in her spine for the chronic pain, and could not move her head around because of her neck. One of her kids had invited her to come to the service, and she endured a long (and very painful for her) road trip to attend that night. I prayed for her in the name of Jesus, and for Him to release healing over her body, and her symptoms began to improve! We first prayed for her neck, and ask Jesus to restore mobility, and He did! He didn’t stop there, but all the pain left her body! She had been experiencing this pain in her back for 60 years, and Jesus took it away! Praise the Lord! It doesn’t matter to God how long a physical condition has been going on, if it doesn’t exists in heaven, then God can heal it!

Our next meeting was at a Healing Rooms service. Charlene Hughes invited us to share at one of their weekly meetings on a Wednesday night. Normally the meetings were intercession times, and sometimes a guest speaker would speak. Going into the meeting, I wasn’t really sure what to do, or how it would go. As we worshiped the Lord gave me some things. So when it was over I got the lights on and began to preach what I had felt God had given me to share. There were a couple of points I received that evening, and I shared what I felt the Holy Spirit wanted me to say. The response was a little trying. It seemed that there were some people that were really into it, and I could feel them pulling on me, and drawing the anointing. One man, I saw faith being imparted to him (I’m a seer, it’s hard to explain, but I saw it while I was speaking). However, it seemed there were also people there who respectfully and politely listened, but showed little interest in me preaching. They mainly came to ‘see’ the heavenly gems we had found. I don’t mean to say there is anything wrong with this at all, if anything, I may have misjudged what the majority of the group wanted. Wanting to see, and experience what God is doing is an awesome thing, and this was what most people wanted. If seeing what God has done, brings you into an encounter with His love, then that’s awesome! So, we should the gems afterwards, and many people were touched. I’m not too sure how many people received much from my preaching, but I’m not perfect … and I hope it blessed some people.


Since many of the people at the Healing Rooms Center were visitors that night, I believe Charlene was asked many questions about our ministry and these ‘signs from God’. Because of this, she scheduled us a second time, on the following FR. night. At this meeting, Charlene got up and shared about her relationship with us, and laid a wonderful foundation for the supernatural realm. This intro made a world of difference! I really wish she had shared before our first meeting there! This time, we let people come up and look at our gems collection before we spoke, and then Taylor and I preached. At one point while I was speaking, I felt the spirit of Revelation come into the room. The atmosphere changed, and people began getting touched. Taylor and I began giving prophetic words to people, and the prophetic realm opened up.


We both finished giving a word to one lady, and I had just asked her to sit down when I noticed a small cast on her hand. I told her to wait, and stand back up. I said we need to pray for her to be healed. So I prayed from the front of the room, and Taylor went back and put her hands on her and prayed. As I was praying, I felt like there had been something spoken by a doctor or nurse, that the enemy had used to “jump on” and sustain her injury. (Maybe something like, “You will never be able to use this part of your hand again,” was spoken to her. Something like that, but there are no impossibilities in the kingdom of God right.) I said something like, “Whatever was spoken, is not true, Jesus is breaking what was spoken about your hand right now, and healing you.” I kept praying, and then she said, “I have feeling in my writs now!” (I didn’t know it, but the cast us supporting her thumb. She had severed a tendon in her wrist, and had lost the use of her thumb, and feeling in it and in part of her hand and wrist.) She said her pain had gone down, so I ask her if there was any way she could test out her thumb. She just said, “I’ll take the cast off!” (Which I did not ask her to do, she did it on her own initiative, and her own faith!) Then she just started unwinding it and took it all off. Then she began moving her thumb, and it was completely healed, pain free! The feeling nerves in it were restored, and she could move it again, completely normally! Everyone rejoiced and praised God for this creative miracle and demonstration of His power.


The night before we left Alabama to go to Tennessee a group of about 12 people came over to worship and pray together. Many of them had just heard us speak at the Healing Rooms meeting and were hungry for more of God. Hunger draws the anointing! Jesus always answers prayer, but real, authentic, spiritual hungry seems to draw His presence in greater amounts. I was in the kitchen showing someone some of the gems we had received, when someone yelled in the other room. A gem had just appeared on the floor! Everyone got really excited, and soon everybody was crawling around on the floor! Then more gems started showing up! This was the first time that Taylor and I had seen gems show up in AL, and the first ones for most everyone there. (Taylor’s mom had found one before, a few weeks ago in a church.) It’s hard to describe the atmosphere that night. Every time someone found one, people would yell and scream, and flip out! I wish I had a video camera; it was awesome just to watch people’s reaction to God’s glory. When you get a present from Jesus in heaven, people tend to get excited. Thank Jesus when you receive gifts from Him! For my wife and I, thankfulness has positioned us for more. Gifts are things that are given, not earned. When Jesus gives us a gift, all He wants is for us to enjoy it and use it, and to thank Him. Thank you Jesus for all you extravagant gifts!


The next part of our trip was in Nashville. This was a great time, and we got to witness an amazing demonstration of radical giving at Grace Center Church, my home church in Nashville. The church was having a small week-end conference that had been targeting the poverty mindset in Franklin TN. This poverty spirit is overcome by radical generosity, and faith in God for all our needs. At a Saturday meeting the church decided to do an offering, but only told the church every penny would go to some need in the city of Franklin. A group of about a hundred people just gave in abundance, not even knowing where the money would go. This is a great attitude when it comes to giving. So… that small group of 100 people gave over $115,000. !!! That’s right a hundred fifteen thousand dollars! Wow praise God. Taylor and I were not there, but they shared about what happened the day before at the Sunday service we went to. After sharing what had just happened on Saturday, they churchy just did another offering the same way, still not telling where the money would go. This time about 800ish people gave over $100,000 making the total amount of the two days offerings: $200,000+ !!! I can’t remember the exact amount, but it was huge, maybe around $203,000! (I know for sure it was over $200k, sorry I don’t have the exact amount) Then after the offering, we found out where the money was going to go. Grace Center’s pastor and leadership had decided where they felt like the Lord wanted to give the offering. A small church located near Grace Center was recently completely destroyed by a tornado. The Church of Fernvale, has about 50 members, and had been meeting in a small church building for many years. Their church building had much history, and was greatly loved by its community. Obviously this was a devastating event for them, but Fernvale Church’s pastor remained faithful, and encouraged his church members to trust in God. That Sunday they were temporarily meeting in someone’s barn. Jeff Dollar and the Grace Center staff decided this was where they would sow this huge offering! They gave the whole $200k to this small church! Now, I’ve been a part of Grace Center for a while, and have visited many times since I moved out of Nashville. Grace Center is experiencing healthy church growth, and really, really needs a new building of their own. They meet in an overcrowded gym, and can’t seat everyone who comes on Sunday mornings. Isn’t it just awesome that a church would completely forget about their needs, and bless another church in their community? Grace Center needs to save for their own church building! It was a beautiful thing to witness. The group of church members at Fernvale were overjoyed at this huge blessing, and were so thankful for this timely gift. I believe as Grace Center Church keeps sowing into other people’s needs, God’s grace will fall on them and supply all their needs, even a new building!



That's about it... Gems started showing up at my parents house in Nashville as well. God's glory will cover the face of the Earth right? Yay praise God for releasing His glory!

Monday, February 11, 2008

Colored Gems!

On my last post, I mentioned we had just started finding colored gems. (If you haven’t read my previous post read it now! -or this one will not make any sense) Well, we’ve found some more! Our first one was a beautiful tear drop/pear shaped purple one. I was so excited when I saw it. It looked red-ish on the ground and glistened, and I just knew it was a colored gem! Later that day someone found a mystic topaz. If you don’t know what that is, they are multi-colored gemstones with blues, greens, reds, and purple… it looks almost like oil floating on water, or oil on the ground swirling with many colors. It was so beautiful. After seeing this one, I began praying for God to send more colors.

I know a lot about diamonds and there characteristics, but I will admit I am somewhat limited when it comes to other precious stones. So, I will describe the colored ones we’ve received so far as best as I can. This Wednesday we invited some of our friends over to worship and seek the Lord. Taylor and I wanted them to experience the diamonds, and prayed early that day that they would find some. A few minutes after coming over people started finding them! When Chris arrived, we all stopped looking and worshiped for an hour or so. It was an awesome worship time and a real blessing to have him play. God’s presence just came down... you could feel it and see it!

After about an hour of worship, we all just started looking around the house for diamonds. Alyssa found a huge round diamond, probably about 3 carats! She started crying right after she found it, and was so touched by her new gift from God. It was really humbling seeing how much she appreciated it, and how excited she was to find it. I looked so hard that night for gems. It seemed like everyone else was finding them but me! I finally found one on the floor by our couch. I decided to keep that one with me in my pocket as I looked for more. It seemed like I could really feel God’s presence with it, and the presence just kept getting more intense.

I didn’t find any more for a while, but then the colors started coming! Other people just wanted to find a diamond or anything, but I really really wanted to find some colorful gemstones. While I was looking Taylor found a huge, round cut, green gem! It was probably over 3 carats and very dark green color, but still slightly translucent. I don’t know what it is but its really beautiful. I was so excited when she found it! I was telling somebody about the green one on the phone when the next one was found. I heard people yelling in the other room. (People are loud when they find gems from heaven) I quickly went into the other room and Chris had found a huge purple gem! This one was a square, princess cut. Yay! Praise Jesus! Yay for colored gems! Alyssa was in our room and yelled that she found a red one! It was a princess cut, and a beautiful red-ish orange-ish color! That got me really looking for more! Isn’t that awesome! God’s not limited to just diamonds – He’s not limited to anything actually, He’s God : ).

The next day Taylor and I had two people over for dinner. I think we found three right before they arrived, so Taylor and I had high expectations. I wanted a blue gem. We ate dinner, and afterwards showed our guest the gems we had already found. They were really amazed and soon we all started looking for some more. Almost immediately after we started looking I found a red one! Yay! It was a dark red, and to me looked like fire. We found a few round diamonds, then it seemed like to slow down a little bit. It’s like they show up in waves, we’ll find a bund in a row, then none for awhile. Then I found a blue one! It was about the same size and shape of the red one. It’s very translucent, and a very light shade of blue. It almost looks like water. Later that night the Lord spoke to me and said these two gems represent His fire and the prophetic (or revelation) in our lives. Amen! I got to have the fire of God! And I desperately desire, and need prophetic revelation from God every day.

So, why does this happen? Why would God manifest precious gemstones in His presence? I don’t know. However, I think that we need to be able to accept things we don’t fully understand, and be comfortable with not knowing everything to go deeper with God. God is infinitely glorious and His mysteries go on forever! The more I get to know God, the greater and bigger I find Him to be. As for why He chooses to manifest His glory, (like diamonds and gemstones) praise Him for it! Jesus only rebuked His disciples for unbelief, and hardness or heart. I believe the more we are open to whatever God wants to do, they more we will see Him doing. God wants to break out of our boxes and He will glorify His son Jesus! On earth Jesus required His disciples to discern truth in others’ testimonies (Mark 16:14). Let God challenge you to see Him, and expect Him to show up in new ways. Our testimony of what’s been happening here can happen everywhere. If it happened to us it can happen to you! Check out this verse: (Jesus was speaking to Martha about Lazarus, but it tells us about belief in general) “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” (John 11:40) It’s clear in the Bible that we are not to seek signs and wonders; they are to follow us around. As we seek after God, He will reveal Himself to us, and signs and wonders will follow.

We pray from heaven, to earth, because we are seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus right now (Eph. 2:6)! It’s time that heaven invades earth, and literally changes the physical environment. Let’s ask God for more! As we seek the Lord, and His presence comes down, I expect the appearance of the earth to become like heaven. Jesus taught us to pray ‘On earth as it is in heaven,” meaning, the earth that we live in should be like heaven, where God is enthroned. But let me be clear, we cannot do this – it is not by our power at all, but as God’s glory is released where we are, things change, and it’s His power that makes things change. Praise Jesus, for all power and dominion is His!

Sunday, February 3, 2008

When the diamonds started falling…

We recently have been experiencing God’s presence in our home in very extreme ways. His glory has been showing up and manifesting gold dust, feathers and gems! If you’re wondering why He does this, I’m not fully sure. It’s exciting, amazing, and brings us into new realms of faith and worship of our King! My wife gave me the best explanation I have heard for why these manifestations occur: “Our God is in heaven. He does whatever he wants…” (Psalms 115:3) True signs and wonders should glorify God and give Jesus the praise due to His name. If you want to look at a Biblical foundation on signs and wonders, I have really in depth word study here. I decided not to explain everything here in my blog, but just state what has been happening…

After school Wednesday Taylor told me about a revelation she got from the Lord. God spoke to her about how we must seek Him! He can break through to us, but since He has given us free will, many times He is waiting for us to seek Him. She received a vision of people standing on a mountain top seeking the Lord and sketched it out in her journal. She said the Lord was scanning throughout the whole earth, looking for those that were desperately seeking after him with everything. This was a great word! We have to be content with God’s presence in our lives, but at the same time desperate for more of Him.

Later that night we went to a small home group meeting. It was great gathering where we worshiped and prayed over one another. Taylor shared the word and vision she had received early that day. After about 2 hours of praying the meeting was coming to an end when our friend Britney screams she found a diamond! We all gathered around and in her hand was a very tiny, sparkly, round cut and faceted diamond! I thought to myself, how did she find that, that’s almost to small to see? But in her hand you could make it out, and it really really was a little diamond!

Let me go back a little bit. Taylor and I had received 2 diamonds from the Lord that really blessed and encouraged us. Taylor shared the story about them at school, and many of the students have been asking the Lord for heavenly gems since then. Our friend Brittney was blessed by our testimony and lately had been really pressing in and asking the Lord for her own gem. Taylor and I had been praying for others to find them as well, and that night Britney did!

Right after she found it, we all just started searching for more. Why not? Soon John found one! It was really small, and looked just like the one Britney found. This really raised the faith in the room! We all kept looking, and soon Taylor found one, and David (another person named David, not me) found one! We were all searching and Taylor accidently dropped the one she found on the ground. When she went to pick it up, it was bigger!!! Everyone kept looking, and I think 6 were found before we all went home. Praise Jesus, come on!

They were all almost exactly the same size and shape. Taylor had found 2 and one was slightly larger than the other one, but they were both really small. We drove home at about 12:30 and almost as soon as we got inside Taylor found another diamond! This time it was a bigger one! We started crawling around on the floor looking for more diamonds, and we kept finding them, but now they were different shapes and sizes. They were getting bigger, and we even found a princess cut! When we had found 7, we were so tired, we couldn’t keep looking anymore so we decided to go to bed and look more in the morning. When we went into our room, and pulled the covers back on our bed there was another one under the covers! This one was big, probably a little over a carat and it was a heart shaped diamond!

The next day we found two more in the morning, and Taylor brought them all to school to share what had been happening. I called one of my friends, and he came over, and we each started to find more! We just crawled around and went hunting for diamonds. Later that evening when Taylor got back from school, we invited lots of people over to experience what has been happening. God was releasing diamonds all over! By that night I had lost count of how many Taylor and I had found, probably around 20, and that’s not counting any of the ones other people found! People were just crawling around the floor searching for diamonds. I think God was smiling at us acting like children searching for treasure. God wants us to seek after Him and pursue Him. His presence in our home is worth way more than all the diamonds in the world! We have to have Him! He wants us to seek after Him, just like we are seeking after a priceless treasure.

Yesterday we found our first colored gems! I was beginning to wonder if we would only receive diamonds… We found a pear, or tear, shaped tanzanite! (At least that’s what I think it is. Who knows maybe it’s some purple gem that’s only found in heaven.) Also, someone in Taylor’s small group found a heart shaped Mystic Topaz! That’s right. Heart-shaped gem, that was a Mystic Topaz, and its really really big!!!! Praise God! The gems are getting more unique!

Our faith and expectation as really increased. We are praying that people will be encouraged by our testimony and ask God to release heavenly gems in their homes! If it happened to us, it can happen to you! You can check out the pictures of them here. And read about the Colored Gems in my blog too.