The Coming Storm

I believe that the Lord is orchestrating a massive movement in the earth right now with the purpose of bringing all peoples of every nation and tribe to a choice, to repent and agree with Him, or to claim loyalty to another. I believe that all the unrest and division that we are seeing in the church and in the world is actually part of this movement, this shaking. Right now, God is giving each of us a chance to respond to Him. What we are experiencing is the beginning of a storm, and this storm is about to break out like a flood.

All throughout the earth, there is massive fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Over and over, the Scriptures bear witness to a time of trouble, such as the world has never seen before. Jesus Himself bears witness over and and over of this same reality, and in this, He reveals that this time of trouble is the very way that He will return to the earth. All the writers of the New Testament bore witness to this reality as well.

As followers of Christ, we are expected to bear our crosses and follow Him. He said "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." His word is truth, and if we are not abiding in Him, we are not abiding in truth. We ought to know His word, but how can we know if we do not first submit ourselves to Him, softening our hearts to receive His word and allowing the Holy Spirit to reveal His truth to us? Instead, we have become a peoples exactly as the many peoples that we read about in His Word that have hardened their hearts toward Him, so that "seeing they would not see, and hearing they would not hear."

When I say we, I mean I am included. The more that I soften my heart toward Him, the more that I see how much I have strayed from His Word, how much I have assumed about Him, about His character, and about my relationship with Him. This is what produces repentance in my heart, and in turn, my actions begin to produce the fruit of repentance, which is the fruit of the Spirit working within me in agreement with the Father.

However, I have the choice to soften my heart towards Him, or harden it. I cannot soften my heart on my own, only God can, but I do have the choice to ask Him. This expression of desire towards Him, for Him, is always answered by Him, but it is a process. This process is not easy or painless, for it is actually the process of dying to ourselves. It is the circumcising of our hearts, the pruning of that which bears good fruit and that which produces bad fruit, the act of willingly dying to our flesh, and if we stay in with Him, we find that what He was working in us is so much more than what we saw in the moment. This always brings life, for this is what Jesus paid for us to begin to enter into.

When we do this, we are actually seeking first the Kingdom of God, and because of this, He begins to add all the rest unto us - wisdom, understanding, abundance of life, an overflow of His love, grace that is sufficient, and on and on, for His mercies are endless. However, when we harden our hearts to Him and His Word, we actually dull ourselves from hearing Him and responding. This comes from never actually seeking Him out for ourselves, from listening to others whose occupations it is to speak and teach us about Him, from assuming that we know Him and His Word, and what this mainly produces in our lives, specifically in my own life, is offense towards God and others, an abundance of pride and the desire to be right, an argumentative spirit, a fear of being exposed, hatred of others and of self, worrying and anxiety, and the list goes on and on.

This whole process of sanctification, or working out of our salvation, is the very thing that we got saved into when we received Christ into our hearts. We are set apart unto Him, sanctified by His blood, and we are supposed to be in the world, but not of the world. When we begin going through this process with Him, we begin to separate ourselves from the world as a result. We see things differently, because we see and know the truth. We desire different things, because we see past appearances into the heart. Most of all, we desire Him more and more, because as we taste and see that He is good, we realize that He is a good Father, and we trust Him more and more with our lives, with our time, with our resources, with our hearts.

This is what it means to make new our wine skins, to willingly die to our own way of thinking and to trust that He knows better than we do, that what He says is right is actually right and what He says is wrong is actually wrong. This is the act of becoming like a child, allowing Him to be the Father and us to be His Children. This is the first fruits of the restoration of the relationship between man and God that was broken in the Garden when Adam and Eve took and ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was not that God did not want Adam and Eve to know good from evil, but that He wanted to teach them, as a Father teaches His children, and when they ate of that fruit, they chose to decide good from evil apart from Him.

This is the basis of all sin, and just as those who abide in the true Vine, who eat of the Tree of Life, produce His fruit, those who abide in the false vine, who eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, produce the fruit of sin, of rebellion against God. Jesus called Himself the true Vine. He said that if we do not eat His flesh and drink His blood, we have no life in us, and that we do not abide in Him. He did not say this to those in the world, but He spoke these words to His disciples, the very ones who were following Him, and because of the hardness of their hearts, many were offended and stopped following Him. (John 6:25-66)

Right now, what I see in the world is a massive hardening of hearts. All the turmoil in the nations is being caused by the very same spiritual act of choosing what Adam and Eve chose in the Garden, to eat of the same tree as they did, to choose for themselves right from wrong. Just as this produces the fruit of sin in an individual's life, I am seeing a massive production of this same fruit in an unprecedented way, globally. Right now, the earth's population is estimated at about 7.5 billion people. If you type in World Population History into google and then look at images, what you will see is an exponential growth in the past 100 years that is staggering.

I believe that we live in the time of the Harvest, that we are seeing the fully mature vine of sin producing fruit in the earth right now. With this also comes the maturing of His Vine in the earth. Jesus spoke a parable of a man sowing wheat in the earth, and while he was asleep, an enemy came and sowed tares, or false wheat, in his field, side by side with the good wheat. When a servant asked if he ought to go out and dig up the tares, the master said ,"No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, 'First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.'"

This speaks of seed sown in the same field. Jesus was talking about His Church in this parable, not about those outside of His Church, still living in the world. There is a plant called Darnel, which is often called 'false wheat' because it is almost impossible to tell the difference between it and true Wheat. It is not until the time just before the harvest, when the plant produces fruit, that it becomes obvious as to which plants are Darnel and which are Wheat, as they grow as weeds in the same production regions as Wheat. Darnel is often infected with a fungus that is poisonous if ingested, producing a drunken nausea that can be fatal. The Latin name for Darnel is translated as 'drunk', and the French name is translated as 'intoxicated'.

What I believe that we are seeing right now in the earth is the first stages of the Harvest, of the separating and gathering together of the tares in the Church, those who are producing the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, binding them together to be burned in the fire. What this manifests as in the earth is those who clamor and come together in unity around anything other than the absolute truth of God's Word, of coming into agreement with Jesus and the plan that He has revealed to us about the unfolding of His return, to which all of Scripture bears witness to.

However, side by side with this is the gathering together of the true Wheat into His Barn, His Storehouse. In order for the Wheat to be gathered into the barn, it first must undergo a series of processes that sift the Wheat from the chaff, or the undesirable parts of the Wheat that are also separated from the grain and burned. In order to understand the truth of the Harvest time, spiritually, we must understand these processes in their fundamental form.

The first process is called threshing. All threshing required a threshing floor, which is a flat, hard surface on which the Wheat is threshed. If there was only a small amount of Wheat to be threshed, a common method would be to beat the stalk with a stick, which would knock the kernels off to the ground. If there was an abundance of wheat to be threshed, a farmer would either use oxen to tread out the grain, or they would use a threshing sled, which had pieces of metal or stones on the bottom that would cut the stalks and make the separation of the grains easier. Either way, threshing was a violent process, but it was necessary to isolate the good fruit of the Wheat.

The second process is called winnowing. This is the act of using a winnowing fork, which is very similar to a pitchfork, to take the threshed grain, which still had fragments of the stalk and the husks of the grain, and toss them into the air. This would separate the pile into three distinct piles over time, as the wind would catch what was tossed into the air and that which was less dense, the chaff and the stalks, would be carried by the wind away from the kernels. This process required wind, and as it was often fairly calm during the day in the season of harvest, the farmer would often have to wait to the evening in order to utilize the wind. After the kernels were separated, they would be gathered into a barn or a storehouse and kept.

The third process is called sieving, which was done right before the Wheat would be ground into flour. This process involved putting the grain into a sieve and shaking the sieve at an angle while blowing over the top of it. This separated the finer particulates that were stuck to the grain, such as chaff, from the grain itself. It also separated the Wheat from other foreign material, such as small pebbles and stones, which were then picked through by the one doing the sieving. The end result of this process was the pure Wheat, the good and valuable fruit of the crop that could be ground and eaten.

All of these processes worked together to separate the good from the bad, specifically among the crops that produced good fruit. This is how harvesting has always worked, and it is the same reality with the Harvest that we are in right now. I believe that the earth is experiencing all these realities in some way or another, and that this is the cause of all the division that we see not only in the world, but in the Church as well.

I want to be clear that I believe that this is a reality that has always existed. This is nothing new. From the very beginning, God has been sifting His people for a remnant who would voluntarily choose Him, who would circumcise their hearts and repent of their ways, who would die to themselves and follow Him, not out of duty or tradition, but out of love for Him. Every person ever created was created to seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He has never been far from any of them (Acts 17:26-27).

With Christ revealing the heart of the Father to the gentiles, His Gospel has spread out unto the ends of the earth, and this Gospel is unto the Day of Judgement. Each one of us, when we receive Christ, we begin going through the process of growing up in Him, being pruned and cultivated, maturing and bearing fruit. When stay with Him through this process, we also submit ourselves to being Harvested by Him, of going through even more intense times of trouble and tribulation in our lives that act as the hard and spiritually violent processes of harvesting, that refine and test our hearts in Him. This is the much less intense time of Harvest in our lives, just as when there is only a small amount of Wheat to be threshed and a stick is used instead of oxen.

I believe that each generation since Jesus walked on the earth has experienced a time of mass Harvest, that the Lord has been orchestrating events in each and every generation to get people to choose Him, to choose repentance. Before this, I believe that every generation of Israel has also experienced the same reality, and that they bore witness to every surrounding nation, to those who were seeking the Truth. Those who saw and believed, who came into agreement with God and obeyed Him, their faith was accredited to them as righteousness.

All of this notwithstanding, I believe that we are in the time of the Harvest for this generation, and more than that, I believe that this is the fully mature expression of the Harvest, the final Harvest of Christ's return and the renewal of the earth. But this I also believe, that every person that has responded rightly throughout all the generations since Jesus walked upon this earth has wholeheartedly come into agreement with Him, believing that it was in fact the hour of His Coming. Every writer of the New Testament lived in this reality, and bore witness to it.

So what does this practically look like on the earth, to respond rightly? It is to come out of the world, to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, gathering together with those who are also His Body, trusting in His leadership, asking and receiving more and more of Him, crying out to Him for repentance, coming into agreement with Him and His plan, learning to love Him wholeheartedly, to forsake all else and follow Him. It looks like the book of Acts playing out before our eyes, of being of one accord and tarrying for power from on high, of coming before the throne of God and expressing our desire for Him, of praying with all prayer and supplication always, of choosing the place of weakness so that He can manifest His power, of submitting ourselves faithfully and joyfully to Him as a wife to her husband, of actually choosing to go through the process of sanctifying ourselves, of dying to the world and living unto Him, of taking the time to get to know Him and His Word.

He is the one doing the shaking here on earth, of shaking all that can be shaken to see who will respond to Him. He is the place of peace in the shaking, and those that already stand with Him cannot be shaken. He is handing people over to their sinful desires, those that have hardened their hearts toward Him, in order to sift those who will come into agreement with Him and those who will turn from Him. He is getting a Bride through division, separating the Wheat from the Tares, and it is out of the abundance of His mercy that He does this, that He gives each and every person a chance to choose eternal life in Him, but how we respond is up to us.

What I see in the Church right now is a massive hardening of hearts, specifically in our nation. I see a lot of people ramping up to win arguments, claiming loyalty to an arrogant and godless man to lead them, asserting themselves and their assumptions about God and His Word, and on the other side, I see the same exact thing. In the midst of this, we are in a nation that has turned her back on Israel, massively betraying her into the hands of her enemies, and instead of repenting and standing in the gaps of the wall for her for the coming storm, we have mostly put our faith in a man to restore her. This will be answered from heaven. What this will lead to is a massive falling away of those in the Church right now because they, because I, would not repent and separate myself from the world. This is the narrow path that leads to life. The Gate is narrow and the path is hard, but it is the only way through the coming trouble.

The Bible is very clear on a falling away that must happen before the return of Christ. This falling away is result of those who are following Him to harden their hearts and become offended because of Him and His ways because they never took the time to get to know Him themselves. They will betray those who have actually come into agreement with Him, calling them evil and claiming that their god would never orchestrate events in the earth that caused massive death and destruction. Read Deuteronomy 32 in its entirety and then decide for yourself.

In order to see this rightly, we must first see Him rightly, then see ourselves in His light and come into agreement with Him about ourselves, and then see the world through His eyes. He is love, and everything that He does is loving. His judgements are pure and to be desired. His mercies are unending. His Word is true.

For all of this, I believe that He is shaking the earth right now, much like contractions a woman experiences before giving birth. Jesus Himself likened His coming to a woman giving birth, as well as a time of harvest. The closer a woman comes to giving birth, the more intense the contractions are and the closer they are together. I believe the earth is preparing to give birth to His Bride, and the shaking produced because of this is the very thing that will push Her into being born out of the Church. The shaking is also part of the Harvest process, for they are one and the same. Jesus told us these parables so that we might understand these things in earthly terms, ways that we could understand and grasp onto, for they bear witness of heavenly things that must take place.

This shaking is manifold in its purpose, but one of the main reasons is to wake up the sleeping Church, to shake us from our slumber. Christ warned over and over that we ought to watch, pray, and be ready, but most of us, me included, have followed in the way of Peter in the Garden of Gathsemane, saying that we are ready to die for Him, but choosing to slumber instead. He is not looking for those willing to die for Him, He is looking for those who are willing to die to themselves in order to live for Him. What this produced in Peter, and what it will produce in us, is great misunderstanding when the hour of our Lord is at hand, leading to offense and betrayal, even denying Him before man. Jesus said that he who denies Him before man, so also would He deny before the Father, and He really meant it. If this is offensive, it is because He wants you to understand the truth of His Words, to search it out for yourself, to ask Him to reveal the truth to you and to receive it.

What is coming is a storm unlike the earth has ever seen before. It is the coming of the great and terrible Day of the Lord. It is great for those who are in agreement with Him, but terrible for those who go against Him. I have been watching for the past year or so, surrounding myself with others who are committed to watching, praying, and getting ready, and I can say with certainty that this storm is coming, and those who have built their house on the sand will not stand when it hits. This being said, there is time to respond, to build your house on the Rock, but there will come a time when everything will break, like a flood, and then it will be too late to respond before it hits. This is not about becoming perfect in the execution of His Word, its about being perfected in His Word. This is about desiring Him.

I believe that specifically there will be a massive contraction on March 13th, 2017, that will shake the nations. This is in response to a word that my friend Tom released back in December about March 13th, as well as a word that my friend Jessica released recently about the same date, and as I have brought this to God, talking to Him about it, He has also given me a word to release. What I saw was two tectonic plates, two planes converging, one being violently shoved upward into a mountain, and the other being pushed down into the depths of the earth. The earth shook because of this, and I felt like the Lord was saying that because of this shaking, gas prices will have effectively doubled within a month's time, and that that which is high will be brought low, and that which is low will be brought high, though that which is brought low will exalt itself and that which is brought high will humble itself. I believe that this will specifically manifest itself in the marking of His true Bride, the true Wheat that are coming into agreement with Him and submitting themselves to Him.

It is worth it to get understanding and wisdom in this hour. My testimony is, that without vision or revelation, I cast off restraint. It is worth it to voluntarily submit yourself to His fire and allow Him to refine you, rather than to put it off until the moment where He is testing the whole world. He is looking for those who will burn on fire for Him, who are willing to be married to Him, not those who take His name but in their hearts marry the world and the things in it. This is harlotry, and He will not stand for it. He is coming and He will not occupy second place, but He will not violate our free will. All of scripture bears witness to this, but will you take the time to search it out for yourself?

Holy Spirit, will You open my eyes today? Will You mark my heart and ignite in me a fire for the Coming One? Father, will You reveal the truth of Your Word to me? Will You give me boldness to stand for You, to let my light shine in the darkness, and will You keep me from delusion? Yeshua, my spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak. Will You show me the way? I want to follow You, to be as one equally yoked unto You, for Your yoke is easy and Your burden is light. Lord, show me the joy of suffering as You suffered, of partnering with You in all things, of touching the love that You first showed me by laying Your life down for me. I want to lay my life down for You, to share in this love that dies unto self and lives unto the Beloved. Father, keep me in meekness and humility, that I may not become proud and puffed up. Above all, do not take Your correcting and chastening Hand from me. I trust in You, that You will be my guide, and I commit myself to You, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad, no matter what comes, that I will pursue You relentlessly and run into Your arms instead of away from You. Lord, be my Beloved, for now and forevermore. In Jesus name, Amen.