A Leap of Faith
Every morning during the Warfare of Rest consecration, our Awaken Team has met together via conference call for prayer. It’s something we felt the Lord asked us to do, as part of our own consecration and preparing the ground spiritually for the gathering. Most of the times we start by praying in the Spirit and as we do, the Lord begins open doors of revelation. Later, when I’m writing the daily exhortations, often I have the sense they are simply the English interpretations of what has already been prayed out by the Spirit each morning!
This morning, as we prayed, I saw a clear picture of a fence with many Gen Xers sitting on it. Below the fence, I saw the Father standing, arms outstretched, saying “Just jump, I will catch you.” But the Xers seem paralyzed and unable to move. Even though I could see many really wanted to jump, something was holding them back. Then I heard the Lord say, “It’s a leap of faith.”
As I shared with the team, we all agreed that we sense a rising level of contending in our spirits for all those whom the Lord has appointed to come to The Door is Open gathering, from every generation. But in particular, we feel the Lord is zeroing in on the Gen Xers, even as He has focused the call for this gathering on our generation. Many Gen Xers have already taken a step of faith and have registered, even if all the circumstances have not yet aligned for them. Still others have told us that since they committed to come, they have been experiencing increasing warfare, over themselves, their families, and their finances.
So why is there such warfare over gathering a group of people from a generation that, until now, has been mostly unheard of in the Church? Simply put, it’s because now we have entered into a kairos or appointed time of God for the restoration and release of Gen X.
Over the last few weeks, many of the Awaken team have been seeing the numbers 11:11 everywhere. When we say the “eleventh hour” it means the time has run out, we’re at the last possible moment. We believe that we are standing at critical transition point right now in the body of Christ in our nation. It seems like every day we hear another word from a respected prophetic voice saying a great awakening or revival is coming to Canada. But just because God is declaring it, doesn’t mean we can sit back and wait for it to happen. He is still looking for a response, for surrendered vessels through which He can move to release what He wants in our nation at this time.
Throughout history, awakening has come through younger people. So it’s interesting that at this time, most of the voices that are trumpeting the call for awakening are coming from the older generations. However, we believe that God wants to do a new thing in this hour and bring awakening into this nation not just through one generation, but through all the generations moving together as one family. That’s not to say that we will all have the same role, but each generation must respond in equal obedience to whatever part the Lord has destined them to play.
And this is why it’s key for the Gen Xers to rise up at this time. As a translation generation, able to understand the language of the older and the younger, we are called to be a bridge and play a vital role in bringing the generations together into one family. We are also wired by divine design with a desperate, almost-to-the-point-of-being-unbearable, need for the presence of God and as such are born “temple builders”. Gen Xers birthed the new worship movement in mid-1990s that shifted the Body from singing songs about God to singing to God – creating a channel of intimate communion with God through worship. But our mandate is not complete. We are meant to lead the whole family, through worship, in the pursuit of the sound of heaven that God is longing to see released on the earth. We believe when this sound on earth resonates in perfect harmony with the sound of heaven, it will create a channel through which we will experience the release of the “greater glory” that God promised through Haggai, that will not just impact the Church but the whole earth.
So why then do we not see the Gen Xers pursuing these mandates in the Church today? Because in our youth, many Gen Xers could not find open doors to radically pursue God’s presence of build a family within existing church structures. But rather than stand our ground in intercession, most of us simply slid to the sidelines - disconnecting, physically and/or emotionally from the Church.
But our departure affected far more than just our generation. Because of our call as a bridge, not only did our absence accentuate the gap between the older and younger generations, it also created a breach that the enemy is now exploiting with the millennials. While most Gen Xers left the Church as “conscientious objectors”, eschewing the man-made system but maintaining an intimate relationship with God, we didn’t realize that the kids in the youth group watching us leave didn’t understand that we were “standing on our principles not to perpetuate an unhealthy church system”. The only message they got was “when things don’t go your way, when things get hard, you leave.” And so they are leaving, in droves, not just the Church, but their faith as well.
Although Gen Xers cannot bear the full responsibility for all that is happening with millennials in the Church, we believe we do have a part that we must own and a wrong door. that we have opened in the Spirit, which we must close. Not just for the sake of the millennials, but for the sake of our generation as well.
Although Gen Xers say we long to see the King take His rightful place in His Body, the truth is most of us were not led out of our place (physically or spiritually) in the Church by God, but by our own pain, frustration, discouragement and hopelessness. In doing so, we elevated our feelings to the position of idols in our lives – giving them the right to direct us, when that right belongs to God and God alone. In doing so, we became AWOL - absent from the Church without leave from our King and Commander and Chief, Jesus.
As Xers, we have reaped the penalty for our faithlessness, as today, in our 30s and 40s, many in our generation are still wandering around in confusion, purposeless, disconnected, seeking to find fulfillment in jobs or families, all the while knowing deep down that we were meant to live for so much more.
But in our weakness, feeling trapped in hopelessness, believe it’s too late for us, God in His unfailing mercy and graciousness is calling out to Gen X, even as He did to Israel through Hosea thousands of years ago.
14 Therefore I am now going to allure [you, Gen Xers];
I will lead [you] into the wilderness
and speak tenderly to [you].
15 There I will give [you] back [your] vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There [you] will respond as in the days of [your] youth,
as in the day [you] came up out of Egypt.
“In that day,” declares the Lord,
“you will call me ‘my husband’;
you will no longer call me ‘my master
17 I will remove the names of the Baals from [your] lips;
no longer will their names be invoked.
18 In that day I will make a covenant for [you]
with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky
and the creatures that move along the ground.
Bow and sword and battle
I will abolish from the land,
so that all may lie down in safety.
19 I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion.
20 I will betroth you in faithfulness,
and you will acknowledge the Lord.
21 “In that day I will respond,”
declares the Lord—
“I will respond to the skies,
and they will respond to the earth;
22 and the earth will respond to the grain,
the new wine and the olive oil,
and they will respond to Jezreel
23 I will plant [you] for myself in the land;
I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one
I will say to those called ‘Not my people, ‘You are my people’;
and they will say, ‘You are my God.’”
The door is open, Gen Xers, and it’s a door of hope. Even as we just read on Day 8, when the situation looked hopeless for the Israelites trapped between the raging Red Sea and the marauding Egyptians, God had one simple word for them: “Tell the Israelites to move on.” Gen X, it’s time to move on. It’s time to forget the past, to stop looking at the circumstances of the present and to venture with God by faith as He makes a way where there is no way and destroys our enemies behind us. It’s time to take a leap of faith, jump off the fence and get in the gap, for the sake of all God wants to do among all the generations in our nation to reveal His glory in this hour.
Gen Xers, if you feel the Spirit calling you to be at The Door is Open gathering, don’t let any circumstance or obstacles, real or imagined, hinder your obedience. If God is calling you to Edmonton, it is part of your personal journey to enter into rest and He already has a plan to provide all that you need. Don’t listen to the lies of the enemy telling you that your voice doesn’t matter, that you don’t have a place here, that you don’t belong. Push past the voices of fear and pain from the past. Resist the devil, stand firm and set your face like flint to obey God at any cost. He is not a man that He should lie or the son of man that He should change His mind. If He promises, He will fulfill.
To the older and younger generations, if God is calling you to come to the gathering and stand with the Gen Xers at this time, your obedience is equally critical to God fulfilling His purposes. We are one family and we need to stand together, knowing that the restoration and release of one part of the Body is for the blessing and benefit of the whole.
To those who are walking in the consecration but don’t feel the Lord is asking you to attend the gathering, we want to encourage you that you can still stand in agreement with His purposes, through prayer and sowing. Both are God-ordained ways by which we link in the Spirit to the Lord’s purposes. There is a tremendous power that is released when we agree on earth with what God is declaring in heaven and in this, there is no distance in the Spirit. For more information on what to pray or how to sow, please visit the Agreement page in The Door is Open section of the website.
We are so grateful that God has linked us together in this journey and we thank you for your heart to contend with us to see the purposes of God served in our generation (Acts 13:36).
Love,
Stephanie
On behalf of the Awaken Team
