With each new year, we have new hope for better things to come. I pray this year will be your best yet. So, what would make this the best year of your life? This would be a good time to define the best thing that could happen in your life. Would it be the salvation or reconciliation of a loved one...

In 1987 I was shown that the United States would experience another civil war. I wrote about this in my book, The Harvest , published in 1989. There is much biblical teaching and precedence for taking advantage of warnings like this to pray that they do not come to pass. Prayer, humility, and...

The title for this week’s word is also the title of our upcoming New Year’s conference. In this gathering, we seek to hear a prophetic word for the coming year, thus we call it the Vision Conference. The Lord has honored this, and our words have been getting increasingly specific and exciting. At...

As we continue our study of life in the kingdom, beginning with the critical factor of new covenant church life, one of the most common questions I am asked is, “What do I do if there’s no church body near me to fit into?” My answer is always the same—“Move!” Years ago, I was shown by the Lord that...

The two main Greek words translated “church” or “fellowship” in the New Testament: ecclesia which speaks of the government and structure of the church, and koinonia which is the deep bonding of believers into the family of God. This biblical model for the church is to first become a family, then...

I have been blessed to experience some of the greatest worship there has been in our lifetime, but we have lost that by letting our devotion to worship eclipse our devotion to the Lord. Several times I have been distracted from the River of Life by the great tributaries that feed it. Consequently,...

The Scriptures make it clear that walking in new covenant church life is required to walk in the new covenant, as we see in texts like I John 1:7: “If we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship [ koinonia ] with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us...

We can be assured when we seek God, He is not boring and where we find Him will not be boring. If our church life is boring, we can be sure we got off track somewhere, and our focus is not on the right place. The encounters God had with His people in Scripture are the most exciting and interesting...

What I proposed in last week’s Word for the Week is contrary to the way most churches are being built today, but are any of those ways working? Granted, there are some outstanding churches in our day, but are any of them even remotely like the one we read about in the New Testament? Are any so full...

As we continue considering what the perfect church might look like, we should expect a vision for the perfect church to be as varied as the people who are in it—that’s how it should be. We may wonder how anything could be built with everyone having different ideas about what it should be, yet this...