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The Kingdom of God
The Power to Fulfill Your Destiny
Studio Session 46
Sam Soleyn
8/2004
It was always God’s plan to live in you and to live through you. Our destiny is not at all what “we could do for God.” There is nothing we could do for God because God knows exactly what He wants to do and He knows exactly how to do it and He intends to do that unique thing through you. You were created because God wanted to touch humanity in a particular way so that when He made you, you were His plan to touch a circle, a sphere of humanity in a particular fashion. I’ll give you an example. I have a very close friend who has worked in auto racing at the level of Indianapolis racing and he loves automobiles; he loves engines and racing and the techniques of racing. Now when he ministers in that context, the people to whom he ministers respect him because of his competence in automotive racing, but they also see the goodness of God in him and through him.
He tells the story of one occasion when they were doing some time trials and it had started to rain and they were thinking that they would have to postpone their trials until it had quit raining. Well, he had heard a message that I had spoken about how we have been restored to the Spirit of lordship so we could command the weather and it will respond to us when we are pursuing the purposes of God. So he went out on the track at one of these speedways, spoke to the weather and told the rain to wait. Well the rain waited; they got the time trials finished and did very well.
A few of the men in the pit heard him do that, and that—taken together with his extreme competence—gained him a level not only of respect but later on they were in another location and this time they were going to run a race. Everything was ready. It started to threaten and one of the pit crew chiefs came to him and said to him, “You ought to talk to the Man upstairs (that’s how he referred to God) about this weather. It doesn’t need to rain, we don’t need to have the race delayed.” My friend talked to God and spoke to the weather. Not only did it not rain, but they won the race. Later on—and these are hard-partying fellows (I don’t mean my friend is, but the people all around him)—later on, the chief of the pit crew came to him and said to him, “Don’t you think we ought to stop and give thanks?”
This was an authentic case of a man whose destiny was to talk to people, to bring Christ to people who were “off the beaten path,” away from the mainstream… tough, hard-partying guys and gals. But God intended to speak to that crowd, just as He intended to speak to a church crowd. He chose this man and equipped him early in his life with the skill and the competence in automotive racing and a passion for it, so that in the fullness of time when God was ready, He could deploy him into the midst of that crowd so that—just like Jesus came and stood among the Pharisees, just like Jesus came and stood among the beggars and the prostitutes and the down-and-outers—so God prepares His people to present the face of Jesus Christ to whatever crowd of humanity there may be.
Your destiny is something for which you will have a passion. It is something that God will put in you—a love for, an enthusiasm for and an authentic competence in that area. Why would this be so? Well because humanity is not comprised of churchgoers primarily. Humanity is comprised of all walks of people, all walks of life, all types of people—people who love to spend their time collecting art or people who like to spend their time working on old cars, people who love to spend their time fishing and flying and sailing and climbing in dark holes and caves and… all of that. And God’s love is such that He intends to find a people wherever they are and send among them His people—whether you are a research scientist working on quarks or you work in a bottling plant or a slaughterhouse. Wherever it is, God intends to find you and He intends to do that through people who are “authentic,” people who are right there working next to you but who also love the Lord. God means to live through you—God means to live in you and He means to live through you—and to do that, God intends to empower you so that you become the active presence of Jesus Christ where you stand.
In the church context we have been made to think that only passing out “four spiritual laws booklets,” or passing out tracts written by one group or another or in some way pushing the message of a particular crowd of people—only in that way can God actually reach someone and talk to them. But the truth of the matter is that the Living God intends to live through every person—authentically—because there is a group of people somewhere in the world around you, in your circle, whom God loves and whom He intends to show something of His presence, something of His goodness to… through you. Now how exactly does He intend to do that? The answer is: by empowering you with gifts of the Spirit, so that what you do is extraordinary, what you do is miraculous, what you do has a divine stamp to it that is undeniably the result of the presence of God.
God is not interested in what you could do “for” Him but He is interested in what He can do “through you,” for others, to touch them. My friend in the racing situation did not appeal to the men around him because he was a competent mechanic. He appealed to the men around him because, at the word of the Lord, he stopped the weather. The reason that they came to him though, was that he was a man with whom they could identify. He was like them: a mechanic. But he was a mechanic who could walk in heavenly things in their presence. That’s who Jesus was on the earth. He was a carpenter who could walk on water, who could multiply loaves and fish, who could raise the dead and heal the sick. He was an ordinary fellow in terms of his vocation, but authentically so. But he could do the things; he could work the works of God. He could introduce the divine things to change people’s view.
That’s what is missing in the church today and that’s what people are looking for. They are looking for: how the Living God will operate through them to do what He wants to do, while they are being who they are. If you are a farmer, if you are a businessman in town, if you are a scientist, if you are a housewife, if you are a telephone operator—whatever it is that you are—that’s not your calling, that’s just the context in which God makes you like other people. Your calling is how He introduces himself to others through you, whether it is in the working of miracles, the bringing forth of revelation, the favor of the Lord to heal marriages or relationships, the counsel of the Holy Spirit when people are needing to make decisions or whether you need to look into the eternal, behold the future and declare it to be so.
So what are these gifts of the Spirit then? What are these manifestations of the power of Jesus Christ orchestrated by the Holy Spirit to present the life of Christ to another so that you might fulfill the destiny for which you are here? These are what you call “gifts of the Spirit,” and they may be, if for example someone is needing to make a great decision about, say, changing a job, marrying someone, moving from a certain location, buying a house… all the hundred and one things people have to decide on routinely. What is their big concern? Their big concern is, “Have I overlooked something? What is the best decision that I can make here?” Is God able to give someone, absolutely, the answer that they need from heaven in the moment that they need it? Yes.
How would He give a decision, what gift of the Spirit would operate to bring understanding to someone within that context, to show them what they ought to do? Simple—a word of knowledge and prophecy. You would bring a word of knowledge so that they would know that God knew them and prophecy would be to speak the future to them in the present. We who are believers, and understand these works, somewhat tend to take them for granted but I have been in situations… Recently I was on an airplane and there was this woman who sat down next to me and it happened that she knew me from the city where I live because she also was from that city. So we had some conversation about where I was going and what I was doing and so on, and similarly what she was doing, etc.
As she spoke, the Spirit of God showed me that she was a very aggressive person because she was prophetic; she had a prophetic nature to her. So I began to prophesy to her, I began to speak first a word of knowledge to her. I said to her that she is probably going through a hard time right now with some of her co-workers because she seemed to set such a pace that it’s hard for others to keep up. She looked at me and she said, “Well how do you know that?” I didn’t answer her right away, I began to speak more to her and I said to her, “Over the course of your life you have found it very difficult to get along with people because you always want to see the heart of the matter of every relationship and you don’t have the time to do all the social minuets, the little dances that people do socially, to dance around the issues, finally to get to the point.”
And I said, “All of your life, you have gotten right to the point and as a result sometimes you do that when people haven’t given you permission to do that and they turn on you. And over your life it’s been very hard for you to keep friends; you’ve not had many close friends in the course of your life.” Well by then she was asking me—her eyes were asking me—questions like, “How could you possibly know me this personally when you and I have never talked before or sat down and had a conversation?” So I began to explain to her that God shows me, and others—by a gift called “a word of knowledge and a word of prophecy”—God shows you who other people are. And I reminded her—she was a Baptist so she knew the Bible—but I reminded her of the Scriptures that said that Jesus knew what was in their hearts. (Inserted – actual verse—“Then there arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be greatest. And Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a child, and set him by him.” – Luke 9: 46,47 KJV)
And I said, “Just as He did, so do I. Because He knew what was in their hearts by the Holy Spirit, I know what is in your heart by the same Spirit.” Needless to say, my wife and I were invited to have dinner with her and whenever she has problems she comes by and just wants to talk, just wants to check in. Well you see, the gifts of the Spirit are the operations of the power of Jesus Christ in you and through you because He lives in you to show His kindness to others. He lives in you to show His goodness to others. Let’s say that it is not those kinds of issues that I have described but that somebody wants to know what to do in a certain situation. You can employ the gift of wisdom—listen to all the facts, listen to all the things they have to say to you and let the Spirit of God speak wisdom to them. If you need knowledge, let the Spirit of God speak knowledge to you.
Sometimes it is not those things, sometimes people just need a healing. They have problems; they need to be healed and so you demonstrate the power of God by healing. Sometime ago there was a young girl who was in a car accident, in a pickup truck rollover outside of the city of Roswell. A woman in Roswell who knew me from television, when I spoke in Roswell on television, called me up to tell me that there was this family in Albuquerque in the hospital and the young girl had brain damage and was not expected to live. She asked if I would go by and meet the family and so on, and I did.
I walked into the intensive care unit; the father was standing in the hallway when I walked in. He recognized me from television; I don’t think he knew I was coming. So I explained how I came to be there and that I had heard of the accident and he gave me the update. He said, “They are saying that she has swelling in the brain, she is in a coma, she is not expected to live.” So I walked in with him, stood over her, and the Lord spoke to me and told me that she would not die. So I called her spirit forth and I said to her spirit, “You are not supposed to leave this body because her work is not finished; it’s not time for her to go.” I commended her spirit to her body and I claimed that she had life to be lived and a work to be finished and I walked out. I spent another ten minutes maybe, with the family and I left. Later I heard from a number of people what had happened and then the father called and told me something of what happened. When I left they went back in to visit with their daughter in the thirty-minute cycles that they could, and her brain wave monitor indicated brain activity. She began to recover then. In two days they wheeled her out of the hospital and took her home and as far as I know—I haven’t followed up—as far as I know, she is fully alive and fully functional today.
Well what do we do? We show the goodness of God in that moment in time. We show what God wants to do and we show the mercy and compassion of God in that situation. Everyone who was ever born into the world has a destiny. That destiny is the way that the Living God wants to live in you and wants to live through you. He wants people—when they look into your eyes, when they look into your face—to see the goodness of God in your face. So the book of Colossians says this—this is from Colossians, chapter 3, verse 1—“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” (Inserted – Colossians 3: 1-4)
Christ, when he appears, will appear through you. You see before you were in your mother’s womb, God knew you. (Inserted – actual verse—“The word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.’” – Jeremiah 1: 4,5) Before you were born, there was a destiny in God that He intended to fulfill through you. The Holy Spirit lives in you to empower you to fulfill that destiny. That destiny is the way that God, himself, wants to live in time and space through you. God wants to touch the people; God wants to show the goodness of God and the kindness and mercy of God to the people whom He brings into your life. But He knows that there is a certain way that that must be done, so the things He puts in your heart to desire… in the case of my friend, he desired—from the time he was small—to be involved in automotive racing. Before he could race automobiles, he raced bicycles and then motorcycles… it was “in him.” He practically has gasoline in his veins. So when it comes to that crowd of people, this brother is the absolute perfect mission for that.
What we see is that we see a lot of people who will see a potential mission field, a field in which people need the Lord. But they have no training in that field, they have no expertise, they have no contact, so what they do is that they go around, they carry a Bible and they try to “buddy up” to the people in that field and get in good with them, hoping that maybe an opportunity will arise by that process to talk to the people. That is “you doing it your way.” If you were called to those people, God would have equipped you with a passion for the same things for which they have a passion because that is the way God makes you “authentic” when you walk up to them… regardless of what the field is.
If you are an art collector, God will make you knowledgeable about art, competent in establishing art values… all those things: the understanding of themes, the understanding of genres and the like. Because when you are talking to people if you are not “authentic” in their field—in what they know or what they want to know about—if you are not “authentic,” then you are just trying to get them over into the subject of Bible so you could talk to them about it. God doesn’t do it that way. What God does is that He equips you and sends you, so you can actually be “authentic.” But the way He does it is by gifts of the Spirit, and by the gifts of the Spirit He accomplishes the work of showing His goodness to other people. So He sent the Holy Spirit to give you the empowerment to make you an instrument by whom, and by which, He will speak to others.
Now the Holy Spirit equips you in a number of ways. One is by this form of empowerment, but there are other ways that the Spirit equips you as well and we want to talk about those ways in the next broadcast. So I hope you will join me as we continue to study the Holy Spirit’s empowerment and the purpose of God in giving you gifts of the Spirit to equip you for the life that He has put you here to live. It is His life in you; “Your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” (Inserted – Colossians 3:3) “He lives in you to will and to do what pleases Him.” (Inserted – actual verse—“For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” – Philippians 2: 13) I’m Sam Soleyn, God bless you. We’ll talk more about this in the future.
Scripture References:
Luke 9:46,47
Colossians 3:1-4
Jeremiah 1:4,5
Philippians 2:13
