Lampstand Review, July 2017~Julie

Worship:

What a beautiful time of fueling as we gathered on July 29!  Ginny Wall graciously led us in a time of worship together.  Ginny, if you don’t know her, is a soft-spoken person who loves Jesus deeply and has a beautiful folksy style voice.  She knows many Scripture songs and whenever she sings, it brings a peaceful atmosphere of God’s presence.  She was singing at this particular meeting about the Lord being a consuming fire and asking Him to ignite our hearts.  Through the songs she had chosen as well as her spontaneous singing to the Lord, we were singing about surrendering to the Lord and inviting Him to have His way in our lives.

I love these worship times and the opportunity to lift Jesus up together with others as well as the opportunity to be still and listen for what the Lord is speaking.  It’s awesome the way He will highlight something to different individuals during worship that He will weave together throughout our time together that confirms what He is speaking to each of us.

I had this experience as I knew the Lord was speaking to me personally about learning to really listen for His voice.  After worship, Matthew shared a passage from Kings about Elijah hearing the voice of the Lord not in an earthquake or a fire or a great wind, but in a still small voice.  This confirmed what I was sensing from the Lord that I need to learn to be STILL and just BE with Jesus and learn to discern His whisper. 
 
The Teaching:
Matthew reviewed what we talked about in June: Beholding the Lord!  There is a door standing open in heaven (Revelation 4) and that indicates an invitation to COME UP and see the One seated on the Throne.  He said that all we talked about last week was worth repeating because God has continued highlighting this message even since our gathering in June. 
Since that Lampstand gathering, Matthew shared the same message again at a church in Mooresville.  He and I also both had dreams in the same week about beholding the Lord.  In his dream, he was speaking at a conference and knew he needed to talk about Psalm 27:4 and beholding the Lord.  In my dream, I was also speaking to a gathering of people on a VERY high platform (about 50 feet or more up in the air) about seeking the Lord (the high platform would indicate that He is elevating this message in a pronounced way!).  Then more recently, he had another dream about a blue sheet we use at prayer containing “Hymns of Revelation” which are songs and pictures in the book of Revelation about Jesus, broken down into phrases so they can be prayed.  In the dream, he was praying from these prayer sheets and the words were being projected onto a dry erase board l and the letters were becoming BOLD and then the words were growing in size! 

Through these various encounters, the Lord is highlighting to us that it is truly critical to “behold Jesus.”  To fix our gazes on Him and be transformed because gazing on Him in love changes us. 
He felt like all of this, particularly the latter dream, was a challenge to go deeper in the word of God and to enter into a prayer journey with the Lord.  He quoted Skip Cone’s prayer from TRIHOP the previous night, “Open the natural mind of man and interpret the Scripture for us!”

We listened to a brief exhortation from Julie Meyer who has been with the International House of Prayer in Kansas City for many years and is a lovely worship leader, mother in the Lord, and prophetic singer.  In her message she was exhorting people to sing the word!  Singing the Scriptures over our own hearts transforms us and gets the word written deep within us as it becomes a tool to encourage others!

Response:
Our response time was worship, and in this time Ginny shared a song she had written from an experience she had when she lived through a hurricane in Florida.   She also led us in a Scripture song from Revelation, “The Spirit and the Bride say come!” This was a powerful time of agreement with the Lord and asking Him to encounter us in His word.  Also, asking Him to prepare and fuel our hearts for the “storms” we may be facing either on a large scale as a nation or in our individual lives.

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