Let Us Be

God has been speaking to me heavily about the body of Christ and our judgement towards one another. For the past couple of years I've had the privilege of working alongside an amazing church and non-profit in the Midwest. I remember the first time I had conversations about Christianity with some now very close friends of mine. We were connecting yet so disconnected. They brought deep wells of knowledge on theology, social justice, doing life on life, and discipleship while I brought conversations of prophecy, prophetic/spontaneous worship, moves of the Holy Spirit, tangibly feeling God, and talk of revival. Two sides of the spectrum but both so important and necessary.

I've experienced closed hearts to prophecy because of the supernatural outward signs that can be seen as weird, scary or demonic. But I've also experienced beautiful, inspiring, convicting conversations from open hearts and minds. As I've been open to learning more about their expertise in discipleship and community they've been open to learning more about what it looks like to soak in a worship session under prophetic song and movement.

We need both. I see what churches on the west coast, and more specifically Los Angeles, lack. We severely lack solid discipleship and community in our churches. We are so revival focused that we forget revival starts in the mundane, everyday relationships we build with those around us. But I also see that churches in the Midwest and east coast lack tangible experiences of the love of God for them individually. They often host many "I may walk away from God at some point" level of doubters in their community because they have no prophetic words of hope and no solid experience of God's love for them as an individual.

For me, hearing God loved me and reading God loved me in the Bible wasn't enough. We don't all have faith big enough to read words on a piece of paper and believe them with all of who we are. I needed to know God knew me individually and I wasn't just another number. I wasn't just a part of the group of people He loved, but that God knew ME and loved ME.

I went to church for about two years hearing that God loved me, reading scripture, hearing about God's love in worship songs that were sung at me. But until I experienced a prophetic word, a word of knowledge, so specific and secretive that only God would know, I could care less what people said and what I had read. It wasn't until a prophet pulled me up, spoke over my life, and described the exact spot at an overlook by the ocean where I would go in the mornings to watch the sunrise, where he said God would sit with me and was there every time, did I know without a doubt that God knew ME and loved ME and that I was not just a number or a statistic.

People of God, we need both. We need those that believe for the miraculous, new legs to grow, demons to flee, prophetic words, and revival. But we also need those who do life on life, making disciples, building relationship with those around them on a daily basis and whose faith stands firm on the word of God alone and don’t need a prophetic word to keep God first and in focus. Both are necessary and both are needed to have true revival.

I pray the church as a whole no longer judges what the other does or looks like, but that we would join each other hand in hand, and be ONE body. We are the BODY of Christ for a reason. An ear can't do the job of a toe, and an elbow can't be a knee. God made us different with a purpose. May we embrace and learn from one another. For you have something I don't, and I know something you have yet to learn.

xoxo