Prophecy May 21, 2000. Keith Bates. God's grief for His people

This message is about the grief of God for His people, and any harshness that may come across in what I say is my inability to express God's grief.

There are people in the Body of Christ today- and there may be people in this building today- who are respected as pillars of the church and who won't be that way in five years time.

There is a fundamental and deep change coming about in the way God deals with His people; and if there is any pretence, any falseness, anything less than 100% surrender to God, then God is going to expose that and He is going to let those people- even people who have been long-standing leaders in the church in Narrabri- He's going to let them fall aside and even fall out of the Kingdom.

There's a new standard that God is bringing in. God says a lot of His people have been on performance enhancing drugs for too long and there's going to be a testing take place. Those that insist on using the drugs to make themselves look good are going to be disqualified from the race. We are not talking about drugs; we are talking about things like putting on a false front and a pious face and false respectability, and knowledge of the Scriptures without a knowledge of the Author of the Scriptures... the sort of games we play with each other to make ourselves look holy.

I hesitate to put a time frame on this because I know that time frames are usually wrong in prophetic words. I get a feeling that there is a twelve month window of opportunity that we have to change our ways, and then that's it, you're locked in after that without major major major repentance.

So what God is asking for us today is to make sure that we are fair dinkum, that we are real with Him, that there is no holding back of anything. We are not talking major obvious sin, not talking necessarily of adultery or theft or that sort of stuff, but just simply lack of surrender to Him that we want to hold onto a part of our life and claim it for our own. God's going to say "No, that's not good enough. You give it up or get out." God's going to stamp on all forms of self-centredness and rebellion and living for ourselves. His plea for us today- for us, and the entire body of Christ- is to get right, to deal with those things and to be completely sold out for Him.

It's not that He's expecting perfection... he's just expecting a singleness, a unity of heart within us so that we stop being double-minded and wanting to have a bet each way, a bit in the world and a bit in the Kingdom. That's what He's opposed to, that's what He's going to pull down, that's what He's going to judge, that's what He's going to cast people out of the Kingdom for.