A few weeks ago when I was in intercession the Lord spoke to me and asked me a simple question, “Richard, are you willing to ignore all of the laws of science and intellectual theories that have been taught to you, and learn the ways of God concerning innovation?” At the first receipt of this question I was immediately shocked by its contexts and implications. And then my flesh responded, “Who’s going to believe me?”
The intellectual cost of true innovation is priceless. The reason for this is simple because most the masses of population just seem to want better sameness. Haven’t you noticed this whenever you’ve gone to a church where the service was repeated from the last week, and the week before that, and so on? This is nothing but the drone of repertory sameness! But believe me it does have its benefits. If a pastor can get his congregation to faithfully continue to give in the offering without ever being upset or disrupted in their weekly routine, he actually has a pretty good and clear set of finances coming to him most of his life.
What a way to live, right? That’s why literally hundreds of thousands of churches throughout the world operate in this repetitive process. The only thing that messes this moneymaking system up is if the pastor is trying to connect the people with the living Jesus Christ. That’s because the Lord is a person and He does not like having a relationship with a machine, even if the machine is run by religion. Now you can begin to see the struggle I am going through.
I realize the premise that I just described to you about a church, is the predicament I am also am facing in my own personal life. Think of this absurd example. A farmer wants a field to look perfect every day so he plants plastic wheat, which always looks the same. But it can never fulfill the purpose of what real food was designed to do, and that is to feed the hungry. Oh, it’s nice to look at, but it has no reality. Now you see how God might look at dead churches. What is their real purpose?
This is where the true cost of making an intellectual quantum leap comes into play. Its expense is actually felt in your daily dying to intellectual premises that have supported your fleshly reasoning and have been the foundation of your own personal ego. This is why one of the breakthrough moments that I had in 2014, was the day the Lord told me I was narcissistic.
That statement explained to me why I was having such a hard time receiving the new innovations that God was downloading into my mind. It was really a battlefield going on in my thought process because any idea that was truly innovative was intellectualized in my mind by my personal pride, which was based on my previous understanding of scientific law.
But this is the new premise that I now must live by in the year 2015: my entire foundation of intellectual law and knowledge will be based upon the relationship that I have in Christ Jesus ~ through the salvation experience which is described in the Bible as being born again, which includes the infilling of the Holy Spirit by the evidence of speaking in other tongues. Through this experience God lives inside me and talks to me about new innovations.
When God talks to me about these innovations I realize they will not make sense to my intellectual understanding that emanates from my flesh, so I must be willing to move forward on these new premises in spite of my own restrictions and confusion. This is going to cost me, and I must be willing to pay the high price of being rejected, mocked, and even persecuted by the intellectual community around me.
Yet if I can do this and exude the fruit of the Spirit in every communication, then I will receive the greatest prize that a man in my time can receive. And that is innovations, which will increase man’s ability to extend his existence, enjoy the pleasures of life, and live well with his family and loved ones. I believe this will be the same group of people who will spend eternity with Jesus.
A Place To Meet Jesus 