Dear People who Keep Company with God,
A few weeks ago I had the same dream on two consecutive nights. Based on my understanding of the scripture when a dream is repeated we must pay careful attention as it is something God has established and it will come to pass quickly.
“Now as for the repeating of the dream to Pharaoh twice, it means that the matter is determined by God, and God will quickly bring it about. Genesis 41:32.
The dream was simple; there was a group of people who were waiting to receive the gospel from another group of people. The people who were to present the gospel were distracted with doctrinal issues and the dream ended with those waiting never hearing the gospel. I believe those who were to present the gospel were our church. I believe the Lord is telling us that we need to be careful to not be side tracked in the coming days as we have an assignment to specific people. God has entrusted their salvation into our hands. That is big.
I share this because I believe the Holy Spirit has had our church in a season of preparation to fulfill His destiny over us. Six years ago I looked around our church one Sunday morning and realized we had gotten old as a church. It was not the chronological age of those who made up the church, in fact at that time the median age of the church was younger than it is now (not counting the babies we are now blessed with). The church had become so predictable and had a feeling of what God did, not what He was doing.
I began to seek the Lord concerning this and after some time I sensed the Lord tell me, “the first step is to find out what is in your heart as that is who you really are as a church and change your name to reflect that.”In the Bible, names are very significant as they describe the character and nature of a person or place. Oftentimes, names change when a significant spiritual event occurs or will soon occur. For instance, `Canaan’ became `Israel’ when the Hebrews entered the Promised Land. Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter. Saul became Paul after his Damascus Road experience.
The Lord gave Becky and me a scripture which revealed God’s heart for our church. It also had part of the new name in it, “River”. “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, The holy dwelling places of the Most High. 5 God is in the midst of her, she will not be moved; God will help her when morning dawns.” Psalm 46:4-5. One Sunday morning during worship I saw in a vision the water and blood that flowed from Jesus’ side when, on the cross, he was pierced by a Roman guard’s spear. I heard, “the headwaters of the River of Life were released that day into the earth.” That is where the “Life” part of the name came from. What we were seeing for the church was that we would be a people who live in this river and draw life from this river. We did not understand what that meant on a practical level as we do today, but looking back it is obvious that Riverlife is the Father’s name for our church.
This past April, Larry Randolph ministered in our church and gave us a challenge as he felt the Lord had revealed to him we are to become a renaissance church. In his explanation of a renaissance church Larry mentioned three attributes of a renaissance church; creativity, diplomacy and abundant resources. A diplomat is a person who represents his/her country’s government in a foreign country and is responsible for developing relationships between the two. So diplomacy has to do with both relationships in the church and kingdom evangelism. Back in 2003 I told our leadership this concerning our church’s future direction, “I want to move away from traditional charismatic-type services and programs and become more relationship-based, more evangelistic and more creative in worship. I want to discover `the heart of the Father” and do what we believe He wants us to do.” The vision the Lord has since given us for The Father’s House will take abundant resources of creativity, time, talent and finances to see it fulfilled.
We are on a journey as a church discovering the Father’s heart and all that He has for us. We have not fully come into our destiny, but as an old saying goes, “we have not arrived, but we are on the way.” Joseph told Pharaoh after he had repeated dreams, “Let Pharaoh take action…” Genesis 41:34. I believe the Lord is calling us to be intentional and take action toward relationships, creativity and evangelism.
Many Blessings, BW