"VISITATION TO HABITATION" by Todd Bentley Fresh Fire Ministries www.freshfire.ca In this teaching titled Visitation to Habitation, we'll examine what it means to have a visitation from the Lord and we'll take a look at some of the ways the Lord visits us. As well, we'll discover that it's the Lord's desire not only to visit us with His presence, but better still, His desire is to have a resting place among us, like a place of habitation. Before we begin this week's teaching titled Visitation to Habitation, I want to invite you to join with me in prayer. Father, I'm asking You to come to us today with such a wave of Your presence and Your fire that a new spirit of prayer and a new spirit of hunger are created inside of us. Spirit of God, I know that the ingredient for revival in our lives individually, before we can ever see revival in our church and revival in a nation, is hunger and prayer. I pray that You would create such a hunger and holy desperation in the hearts of Your people that they would pursue You with a fire and a zeal like never before. Thank you, Father. In Jesus' name. Amen. GOD IS LOOKING FOR A RESTING PLACE God is watching the nations of the earth in this hour; He's looking for a resting place (Isaiah 66:1). He is searching for individuals and a community of believers who will welcome Him to come and stay, who will make Him a place where He can rest. He wants to find a habitation, not just a place to visit, where He can manifest His presence and His glory. As well, God wants to find a habitation and a resting place for His presence in the corporate church setting. And so I want to talk about us being a habitation for God and a resting place for the Spirit of God. As I describe several encounters and visitations of God, I'm going to talk about the price and cost of the anointing and the price and cost of revival. VISITATIONS COME FIRST When God's presence comes, at times it feels uncomfortable and inconvenient to us. God takes us out of our comfort zone! But having said that, it's always a privilege any time God allows us to be a part of an outpouring of His presence. He has an outpouring and a visitation and fresh encounter for us today, in this hour. However, God wants us to encounter His presence beyond a momentary touch. He wants to come and stay, to have a resting place with us. When we understand what pleases the Lord and what it takes so that we become a habitation for His presence, then our whole lifestyle will be affected. Where God finds a resting place for His presence, I believe there will be a continual outpouring of His presence. But before God has a place of habitation with us, we need to appreciate that He usually begins by visiting us at special times, first. For instance, a few years ago in meetings in northern British Columbia we had 21 consecutive services and we couldn't even count the number of people that would walk into the building and get blasted by God's presence. We had a visitation of God! We heard testimonies of people stepping into the church and the glory of the Lord was already there on a corporate level, waiting for them. Everyone would leave at 1 a.m. and when they came back the next night, the glory was still there. That same presence stayed with us until the last night. Another time when we held a 16-night revival in the Fraser Valley, BC, God began to come and manifest the cloud of His glory to the point that people would see a mist in the building. There was such a heavy weight of His presence that people wouldn't be able to move or speak. They just wanted to soak and bask in His presence for hours! People would drive into the city and come over the bridge toward where the conference was being held and they would get filled with the Spirit of God in the car driving over the bridge! When God came like this, His presence didn't wane, it stayed consistently strong for the 16 days and nights. I've been blessed with visitations like this for three days, a week, and just about a month. At times I couldn't move. It was inconvenient and at times uncomfortable. It stretched me! DESPERATE TO PURSUE GOD But it all began just after God got a hold of me and set me free from drugs, prison, violence, and rage. Right away I had a fire inside of me to win souls and plunder hell! From the moment I met Christ -- I'd only been saved three or four months -- I had such a hunger inside of me to know God and to witness the resurrection power of Jesus. I wanted to see the things that I meditated on in the Bible become a reality, so I would spend sometimes between four to eight hours a day, as a brand new Christian, waiting on the presence of the Lord, meditating on His word day and night. I am sharing this just to give you an understanding of how hungry and passionate I was, and continue to be, about God's presence. I became a God chaser! Instantly, through a work of His Spirit, there was a fire, a hunger, and a spirit of prayer that was released in me. I'd seek God's face (even to this day), in extended times up to 12 hours lying on the carpet. It was then that God called me and said: This is what I want you to do in the church. I want you to make My church desperate. I want you to make them hungry. I want you to make them jealous for the glory. I want you to cause a hunger, a spirit of prayer and a fire to seek My face, to be released into My church. So, basically, that's what I do -- as a revivalist does. I stir up the church to be desperate and to step up into another level in the way that they pursue God. (I've spoken about Jesus and shared the gospel in little fast food places, parks, the streets, churches, conferences, and crusades. Sometimes I've held up to 40 meetings in a month. It costs to be away from my family. At times I've ministered in a community for three weeks, night after night, with two or three services a day, seeing people come into revival, receiving Jesus, and getting healed and delivered.) There have been times when God has visited me and I've had to ask Him to lift His hand off of me because I wasn't able to function. I've had days where the glory of the Lord would come and it would stay for several days. One time His glory stayed for a week; from the moment I woke up, to the moment I went to bed, I encountered the manifest presence of God. I could hardly function. My wife barely even saw me. I was on my carpet. It was a visitation from God. WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO BRING THE CHURCH BEYOND A VISITATION TO A HABITATION? Also, there was a season a few years ago, before I was released into international ministry, when I had waited on God four to twelve hours a day for three months. In that three-month encounter, I experienced the glory from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed. I was in prayer. I was hungry to touch heaven to change earth. Are we willing to take any opportunity that we can to wait on the Lord until He visits us with His presence? You know, God is looking for those who are going to be radical in their devotion -- who will abandon themselves to Jesus and the call that has come out of heaven on their lives. They will truly touch heaven and change earth. God is raising up in this hour a whole generation of what we call radicals or revivalists. I am an evangelist, but really evangelists are revivalists that stir up the church. That's what we do. God is raising up a whole new breed of evangelists today who will submit to pastors and work together with churches and apostolic teams to serve and see the kingdom of God expand. And so I want to ask us a question: What will it take to bring the church beyond a visitation to a habitation? Before we answer this question, let's take a look at some of the different ways that God will manifest His presence during a visitation. A VISITATION IS A VISIT! When we visit a friend, we're coming and then we're going. We're not living with them day after day. In like manner, God will come and visit us, His friends, but when He comes His visitation is a visit, not a permanent residency! One of the ways God visits us is when we have a conference. A special guest speaker comes and there's an excitement and enthusiasm in the air that doesn't seem to be there when we have a regular church service. People who wouldn't normally come to a church meeting fill the building. Whether the conference is for a weekend or for a week, God comes in a special way to meet the corporate hunger for His presence. There is an encounter, a visitation of God's presence at the conference that isn't normally there. Often, when an evangelist comes, it's like God's presence intensifies, just for that weekend or for that conference, to the point that miracles happen that maybe weren't happening before. It's not hard to know when a visitation of God's presence happens, because when He comes down, He interrupts our church service! There's such a weight of His glory and a sense of His presence that worship will continue for hours before the pastor has preached the message. Or there's such a great level of glory that the pastor doesn't even preach because God has come. God will interrupt the way that we thought the service was going to be on a Sunday morning. The usual agenda gets blown out the window! I've had God come like that. I've been asked to speak in conferences, but never did speak because God came in such a great wave of His presence that I was taken out of the way. That's great though. I was interrupted by the glory of the Lord! So, when God's visitation comes, it disrupts the way that church usually is. People might be lying prostrate on their face and there might be weeping and repenting . . . or there's dancing. Sometimes there's complete chaos and there doesn't seem to be the kind of order that we're used to. We're like, "Man, wow! That was a 'suddenly.' That was awesome! That was God!" But if we want a habitation for God, we need to be ready to have a visitation from God, first. That's going to mess up our programs and agendas. And some of the people might be offended! SOMETIMES GOD IS THERE WAITING Here's a familiar scenario: We wake up at our usual time to be with the Lord and we go about seeking God and His glory for our one hour. We're pretty set in our ways about that hour. Not one minute after and not one minute before, and we can't be in His presence without at least having our daily devotion and reading our chapter from the Bible. BUT, then all of a sudden when we get into our prayer closet, and before we even open the door, HE IS THERE! Listen - There are times when I'll say, "Shonna, I am going to pray," and when I open up the bedroom door, I'm under the glory. There's no need to pray or worship. There is no need to bring God down, speaking in tongues and doing all the things I usually do to get God's attention. I just walk in the room and I'm in the glory. It's like words aren't necessary. Many of us have been in that place in God's presence when there's not a word that we can speak to convey what's in our heart and what we sense by the Spirit of God. I've experienced this again and again -- God waiting for me before I can even get to Him. What do we do when we open up that closet to get into prayer and the glory is already there waiting? What I've noticed is we usually quench a visitation like this because we're so used to the structure or the way that we would normally seek God -- our 15 minutes in tongues, our 15 minutes of intercession and worship, and then our 15 minutes of talking to God about the things that we have need of. For most of the church, things have become duty and mundane when it comes to having time with God outside of Sunday services. Some Christians are fortunate if they've had 15 minutes with God in the last week. God wants to put a fire and a hunger inside of His church again to the point that we have to be pried out of our prayer closet so that we can get to our jobs! Probably most of us have had moments when God has visited us -- we saw His face and thought: Man, that was a special time. That was a special touch. There was a special edge about the way that God came. Those are visitations. When God is there waiting for us, that's an incredible visitation! KEYS TO WELCOMING A VISITATION We're prepared for a visitation from God when we allow God to come the way He wants to. It's quite possible that He wants to break the lines of protocol and tradition. Maybe He wants to overthrow our "program" mentality. If we're stubborn and we're not willing to let go of the comfort of something familiar, then I believe that we'll grieve the Holy Spirit and quench a visitation from God. I know that we need to have structure, but there has to be a way to experience church so that when God wants to come and He says, "Let Me just remove those rigid structures," that we give Him freedom to do so. Can we allow God to interrupt us with His glory? Also, God's glory has great potential to come upon us when we fast and pray. When we're fasting we usually pray and read our Bibles a whole lot more. There's a heightened awareness of God's presence and a greater ability to see and hear God and to receive revelation. When we die to our flesh and move distractions out of our way, devoting ourselves to spend extra time in the glory, God releases direction to us. We'll have a heightened awareness of the spiritual realm. We'll have a visitation. But having said that, God wants to bring His church beyond an encounter and a visitation to habitation. As well, if we'll make up our minds not to get hung up on having everything always neat and tidy, we'll be in a good position to sustain a visitation from God. The Bible declares that where there is no oxen the trough is clean (Proverbs 14:4). I find that believers today are very concerned about a clean trough and organized Christianity because when our trough begins to get messy, there will be accusations, there will be offense, and people will leave our church. Where there is no oxen, where there is no strength, where there is no harvest, where there is no producing, you'll find that the trough is clean. But if we're going to have a visitation first, and then a habitation and a move of God, we better be ready to have a messy trough. If we want to have wheat, we better be ready to have some tares as well, because we'll never have wheat without the tares (Matthew 13:25-40). We better be careful that when God comes with the wheat and a move of God begins to happen and we try to pull out all those things that we think are tares, that we don't pull out some of the wheat. We're going to have to just let the wheat and the tares grow together and let the Spirit of God bring a separation. Listen! If we're going to have a move of God and we want a habitation of God and we want it in our lives, our churches, and in our ministries, then we better be ready to acknowledge that with much increase there will be a mess that comes with it. Let's be ready to have a mess! CONSTRAINING THE LORD TO STAY Do you know that every time God visits us, it's not His desire to pass on? Every time we have an encounter with God and He comes and touches us in a special way, He is hoping we will constrain Him to stay. [Constrain means: to restrain, to compel (Webster's New World Dictionary)] As He indicates to us that He is moving on and the visitation is over, He is hoping that we will constrain Him to stay longer. Every time that the Holy Spirit comes -- every touch, visitation, encounter, an interruption that comes to us with God's glory -- is an opportunity for us to have an outpouring. But it's sad when God comes and He blows out the agenda for a service, that when we come to church the following week, we so easily go back to the way we were doing things before He interrupted us. We don't seem to realize that He wants us to wait on Him, minister to Him, and out of that, the flow of His Spirit will continue. We're so used to the way that we do church -- to the set format -- that often we totally miss God's plan to visit us in an outpouring of His Spirit. He's hoping we'll constrain Him to stay so that He can bring a revival, but, when He comes, do we know how to minister to Him, first? Do we understand the sacrifice and the cost that comes with the visitation of His glory? The patriarch Abraham understood the sacrifice and the cost that comes with a visitation of the Lord. (Patriarch means: the father and head of a family or tribe; a man of great age and dignity.) He wasn't afraid to constrain the Lord to stay awhile with him. So let's take a look at this biblical account in Genesis 18:1-10. What's described in this passage is Abraham's visitation. He had an encounter with the Lord and two angels. In verse 1 it declares, "Then the Lord appeared to him by the terebinth trees of Mamre, as he was sitting in the tent door in the heat of the day . . . " "Then the Lord appeared unto him . . . " Most of us have had a visitation. We've had the Lord come to us in those extra special ways, what we would call "mountain top" times. But when the Lord appeared to Abraham, there was a hunger in his heart. He had a desire for more than just a visitation or a mountain top experience, because he said to the Lord, "My Lord, if I have now found favor in Your sight, do not pass on by Your servant" (v.3). He was constraining the Lord and the two others to stay a while. It's like he was saying: I want the Lord to stay. I want the manifestation of God to linger. You know why I want You to stay? I want You to stay so that I can be a servant. I want You to stay so I can make You bread, bring You some water and wash Your feet. I want You to stay so I can minister to You. I'll tell you -- when God appeared to Abraham, he didn't want God to stay because of anything that he could get out of Him by staying. He wanted the Lord to stay because he wanted to serve Him. He wanted to minister to Him and to wash His feet. "STAY BECAUSE I NEED YOUR PRESENCE" Many ministries, churches, and individuals are only having a momentary encounter because the first thing that happens when we get into God's presence is that we talk to God about the things we have need of. When God comes with His face we don't appreciate it. Instead we ask, "Where is His hand?" God comes to show us the beauty and glory of His presence and we're just trying to get a hold of what is in His pocket book because of what we have need of! In fact, someone had a vision of a dove that came out of heaven. It began to rest on the church and as soon as the dove landed, many hands went up trying to grab the dove. The church today is only having a visitation and not a habitation because we haven't really learned what it means to seek His face and not His hand; what it really means to minister to Him, to worship Him, to entertain Him. Another reason why God isn't staying and He's passing on is because the minute that God comes, we want to get a hold of that presence for what it can do for our ministry, for the speaking engagements that it can open up, and for the church exposure it can give us. In light of all this, it's very kind of the Lord to even come and visit us! It's like the Lord is asking us: Does anybody want Me to stay because they want to make bread for Me and wash My feet? Does anybody want to minister to Me and wait on Me? Abraham's heart welcomed the Lord to stay. He wanted to minister to the Lord. His heart expressed this: Don't stay because I need a blessing. Stay because I need Your presence. Oh! We need to have the same heart as Abraham: I want You to stay so I can make you bread. "WHERE IS THE PLACE OF MY REST?" Now, if you go on a little further in this passage of scripture, we find that one of the first things that happened to Abraham (Genesis 18:7) after the Lord consented to stay was that he had several revelations. He realized that it wasn't enough just to have a desire for God to stay, nor was it enough just to have a passion for Him. Abraham did something! "And Abraham ran to the herd, took a tender and good calf, gave it to a young man, and he hastened to prepare (sacrifice) it" (v. 7). Just when Abraham realized that with habitation there comes a price, simultaneously the Lord saw into his heart -- that he was willing not only to sacrifice his choicest calf, but in the future he would be willing to sacrifice his one and only son, Isaac. And so Abraham received the undivided attention of the Lord. You know, there's something that the Lord is looking for -- something that must satisfy His heart before He is compelled or constrained to linger and rest among us. If we, like Abraham, ask the Lord not to pass us by, will the Lord see that we have a heart like Abraham, or not? It isn't enough for us just to be hungry for God and to say, "I need you" over and over again. It isn't enough to sing 45 minutes of worship songs over and over again. We must be willing to sacrifice something that we love, even the most precious thing that the Lord has given us. In the process of surrender and sacrifice, our hearts are purified and cleansed and we put God first, above anything else. Let's close this week's teaching with the words of the prophet Isaiah ringing in our ears: "Thus says the Lord: 'Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build Me? And where is the place of My rest?'" Isaiah 66:1 Let's quiet ourselves before the Lord and prepare ourselves for the desire of His heart -- a place where He can rest, a place of habitation. by Todd Bentley Fresh Fire Ministries www.freshfire.ca Permission is granted (and you are also encouraged) to reprint these articles in hard copy form, as well as sending them to your own email lists and posting them on your own websites. We ask only that you keep Elijah List website, email contact info, and author contact information intact. Thank you and blessings, Steve Shultz, Publisher, The Elijah List http://www.elijahlist.com -- To unsubscribe, send ANY message to: bbinspire-unsubscribe@...