With all my heart and soul I believe this: We are currently living through a most critical and significant hour in earth's history, and that the Holy Spirit of God is leading those "who have an ear" into a new dimension of revelation and glory that will catapult the Church of Jesus Christ into her true, God-ordained destiny in the earth. Any return to the status quo, and desire to hold onto the vestiges of that which God has passed by; any business-as-usual church experience will sound the death-knell to the full desire of the Spirit of God.

As surely as I know Him I am convinced that God is raising up a NEW VOICE, a NEW FACE and a NEW HEART in the earth. In 2008, Great Britain reports less than 2% church attendance. Having spent a good deal of time in Britain, I can attest to the veracity of that figure. Something is gravely wrong when the land that felt the footsteps of Spurgeon, Whitefield, Wesley, Wigglesworth and other powerfully anointed men and women of God has deteriorated into the state it currently languishes.

In America, the echoes of Azusa Street have faded into oblivion. The times of Jonathon Edwards and the Great Awakening have become merely historic and not dynamic. Dwight L. Moody, Aimee Semple McPherson, John G. Lake, Billy Sunday, Oral Roberts, all shook the land, but as someone has aptly commented, “America is overwhelmed today with dime-a-dozen preachers.”  Those who seek to plumb the depths of God's Spirit and to tap heaven’s well of wisdom must look beyond former personalities and movements for direction and understanding. What God is doing is BEYOND. What God is doing is BEYOND denominations and conventional fellowships. Where heaven is leading is BEYOND corporations, programs, preaching services, man-made agendas, strategies and designs. God told Daniel to "seal up the prophecy" because it would require a future generation to understand. That future generation has been birthed, but where are the fathers, where are the leaders, where are those with “understanding?”

Ezra chronicled the personality of “the sons of Issachar who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.” These sons understood the times, and knew what to do! That same “Issachar spirit” is being placed within a generation which has awakened to a new day of God’s anointing for the earth, and that “spirit” must be recognized and given freedom to speak.

A nucleus of fore-runners is rising in this hour. These “sons of Issachar” have understanding, and those who will hear "what the Spirit says to the churches" and who will make a difference for heaven in this time must listen intently.

I sat recently in a staff meeting in a world-renowned church. As I watched the faces of the young leaders who had gathered there and I listened to the “orders of the day” being given; the drone of the minutiae of running a huge enterprise we call “mega-church,” my heart ached and I wanted to just get up and shout to them,

"This is NOT “that!” This activity does not bear the imprint of the Holy Ghost of Acts 2. This programmed “service” does not have the unction of a church that “turned the world upside down!” Get Up! Get Moving! You can change your nation! Get up! Get full of God! Get His Power and His Resource and His Word and His Wisdom and His Enablement and abandon these man-engendered, man-enabled systems and storm the nations with His love and grace and mercy!!!!!!!!!!"

I love the men and women God has raised up in past generations. God uniquely placed and used them for their hour. I love and respect the men and women God raised up in the most recent past generation. But I wonder, “Could it be that God intends to use the former generation to provide strength and stability to the church, while an entirely new generation rises up with a completely different and new concept of changing the earth? The church of Jesus will never vanish away so long as the Holy Spirit remains in the earth; but the expression of His church is surely in the midst of tremendous transition. Old systems are indisputably falling away, cleaving away like a disused shell to reveal an inner vitality of the Body of life in God. An old wineskin, unable to contain New Wine is rotting before us, and a New Wineskin, capable of containing New Wine is about to appear.

I believe something significant is contained in Darlene Zscech’s song, "Touching Heaven, Changing Earth." We must place greater concern on "touching heaven" if we are to “change earth.” Where we have spent inordinate sums of money and time and energy with our buildings and carpets and music and preaching programs, we must place our resources on “touching heaven” because if we can touch heaven, if we can see heaven, if we can hear heaven, if we can understand what the Spirit is saying to us, to our generation, to our hearts, we will witness a changed earth. The focus has been on doing "things." Our energies have been consumed with developing programs, producing strategies, and doing things the way they always have been done because, our logic tells us, “if they worked for the church of the 1960’s and 1990’s, these things should work for us.” But to follow a former generation’s example without hearing the current whisper of the Spirit will cause us to miss what God is doing in our midst.