This is a quick report from Asia. God is moving here pretty powerfully.
It was 10:15 pm Tuesday night when I left my house. I arrived Asia about 6:00 AM on Thursday morning. Thursday was mostly getting settled and then being taken out to lunch and having some fun fellowship. Thursday night I went to a worship service just to worship. I managed to stay up all day (an attempt to beat jet lag) but about 10:00 PM I was too tired to go on. So I had to leave the service a bit early and go to sleep. Just before I dropped off to sleep, I asked God what He wanted me to talk about at the pastor's luncheon the next day. I was too tired to hear His answer, and I feel asleep. I woke up four hours later, feeling rather refreshed. God began to speak to me and show me what to share at the pastor's luncheon. It all had to do with pastoring the prophetic. It took about three hours to put it all together.
Then I began to pray and worship, and after about ten minutes, the Lord put me back to sleep. I spelt another 2 hours, until 7:00 AM. Normally I sleep about six hours a night, which is how much sleep I got that night. So I woke up feeling like I'd had a full night's sleep. I was refreshed and on Hong Kong time with no Jet Lag. Praise God for that, as a 15 hour time difference is usually very difficult to adjust to!
Friday morning one of the local leaders who has been pretty sick came for healing prayer. Tim and Deborah also came - Tim is the apostle/pastor in Hong Kong who is responsible for organizing this conference and the rest of my schedule in Asia. First we prayed for this other pastor, the sick one. I intended it as a healing prayer session, but God had other ideas and it turned primarily into in-depth prophetic ministry for him. The other pastor left about 45 minutes later, and then we spent an hour praying for the pastor's and leader's luncheon and for each other. God showed up in a very tangible way during the prayer time and we really did not want to stop praying, but we had to go to the meeting.
There were 100 pastors and senior leaders at this meeting. Some of them were Christian leaders in the business community, others leaders and pastors in churches. We sort of mingled for the first half hour and I walked around meeting as many as possible. I only got to meet about 1/3 of the people in the room. Lunch was form 12:30 to about 1:15. We were supposed to start the speaking part about 1:15, but the sound system suddenly went dead. It took them about 1/2 hour to get it fixed.
I asked God what was going on and He said it was spiritual warfare. The devil did not like what God was doing through this conference and also for these leaders. I finally got to start speaking about 1:45.
Early in my message God told me to prophesy over the group--I had not been expecting to release a corporate word until He told me to. I had just explained what corporate words were (and how they differed from personal ones). So I said, "here, let me demonstrate." Then I began to prophesy over Hong Kong and Asia. I don't remember all of the things the Lord said in that message, but one of them was quite powerful. God said that He was going to do the same thing again now that He did when the ark of the covenant was put into Dagon's temple back in the Old Testament. Just like Dagon fell on it's face before the ark of the Lord and crumbled, so idolatry in Asia was going to fall on it's face before God's revival and it's power to deceive men and keep them from receiving the Gospel was going to crumble.
As God had me speak that part, this wave of His power swept through the room. At the end of the word, they broke into applause at God's plan for Asia. I personally was just a tad jealous.. this is going to be a very powerful revival-- but it belongs to the Asians, not to us westerners or to other parts of the world. We can help train and equip the Asian church how to move with God in His power for this revival, but the Asians are the ones who are going to carry it--not us foreigners.
After the teaching, I asked them to pray and ask God to release the prophetic in their churches if they wanted it. The group began to cry out to God, and the Holy Spirit began to show up. I had intended this to be a short prayer time, but since God showed up in a tangible way, I let it go on much longer than I originally anticipated it would go. Finally God told me to move on with personal prophesy for senior pastors.
So we asked the senior pastors to come forward and about 22 people came up. that was almost 1/4 of the group. Because there were so many of them, I tried to keep my words really short...only about 4 minutes each. But that still took over an hour. The things God had to say to them varied, but most of it impacted them deeply. After that, I just sort of laid hands on everyone and prayed impartation and anointing for them. The pastors meeting was supposed to end at 4:00 but we didn't finish until a little after 5:00.
I walked out of the meeting not sure if it had been well received by the pastors and leaders. So I asked Tim about it. He said that he thought it had been a very good meeting and many of the pastors had come up to him to think him for having this meeting.
I did not realize it was a spiritual attack at the time, but I felt sort of discouraged and thought maybe I had not done a good enough job. I was also extremely tired after that meeting. I thought it was because I had worked hard to minister at that meeting, but again that was part of the spiritual attack. We went out to dinner, and then I came home and went to bed early. I expected to sleep soundly all night, but the devil had other plans.
I was attacked in my dreams. I woke up feeling quite slimed and I took authority over the enemy. Normally it is enough to take simple authority once, so I went back to sleep expecting that there would not be any more attack. I was wrong and found myself attacked in my dreams again. This little battle went on three or four times more. I was really shocked that the enemy could attack me again after I took authority over the room from the first attack. I started to wonder if maybe my authority wasn't working. I began to ask God what was going on.
Then God told me that I as being attacked by some relatively high level spirits over area because they were very upset about the word God had me release about the power of idolatry crumbling. That made me feel a lot better and put things into perspective. God was moving and shaking the spirit world in this area, and they were fighting back and throwing as much of a tantrum as God would allow them to. I got a sense that God was guarding me pretty strongly, so the enemy was only allowed to do a light attack instead of a severe one. While the attack was not pleasant, it wasn't scary. But the net effect was that I did not get much sleep that night.
The attack continued in the morning in a different form. From time to time I get nasty emails attacking my character and/or authority. I finally got the internet to work about 9:00 AM and checked my email. There was one of those nasty attacking emails, accusing me of having terrible character. God showed me the spirit they were operating from, but it still bothered me. Of course I invited God to examine my heart and fix anything that was wrong or broken. I was open to any rebuke He wanted to give me, but I wanted to hear it from Him directly, and not from a disgruntled anonymous person writing a nasty email.
The enemy had been whispering in my ear that I was disqualified because of the things the nasty email accused me of, and that God was not going to move through me. The enemy told me that the conference was going to be a total flop, and that there would not be any anointing at all. I knew the enemy was a liar, but I still felt hurt and troubled in my spirit by all of this. I was still concerned that maybe there was something I had done that I did not know about that grieved the Holy Spirit and would impact my ability to flow with Him. God spoke to me that He had worked on my character for a long time and would continue to do so. He would continue to do so. But there was nothing that would prevent me from being a vessel that He would flow through with anointing and power to accomplish His purposes.
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