On Monday, for over an hour, I kept seeing a large hand and arm extending from heaven, taking someone’s pulse. I realized it was God taking the pulse of His church.
During the pandemic, many prophetic voices shared what they believed God wanted to accomplish in the midst of all the chaos. You have to understand it’s not God who sent the pandemic. That was from the enemy. But God classically will use what the enemy sends to expedite and accelerate His purposes.
Although God did not send the pandemic, He doesn’t waste anything. So, during the pandemic, when all the chaos going on with the virus, the chaos politically, and the social chaos was all being played out before us on the news, not just in America but worldwide, the Lord was trying to speak to His church. He wanted to awaken His church to really discover her identity. With everything that seemed to be normal, everything that people depended upon in the natural, shifting and changing, God wanted to expose anything in our hearts that we were finding identity in or security in other than Christ so that we could, in owning our full identity in Jesus, accelerate in Christlikeness during this season of chaos so that when all this came to an end, the church would emerge as a fuller expression of the very life of Christ on earth and therefore, be the body of Christ through which Jesus would touch, heal, and draw to Himself all those around the world who didn’t know Jesus and felt so vulnerable, insecure, fearful, and angry even.
As the pandemic was slowing down, the Lord spoke something else: every Christian is going to come out of the pandemic either desperate or deceived. They are going to come out either desperate for God, desperate to fully know who they are in Christ, to fully experience His life, to fully manifest the glory of the Lord, and to fully reveal the likeness of Christ. Or, they will have become deceived by being distracted, discouraged, walking away from the Lord, or getting so into other issues and becoming issue-oriented, even politically oriented, that they have lost the sense of their first calling. And their first calling, according to Romans 8, is Christ’s likeness.
Now as each person is coming up out of the pandemic, it is being revealed who has been deceived and who has become, in a godly way, desperate to experience more of the all that’s available to us in Jesus. It does not mean God has quit working on the deceived, but that is just where things are and how it has shaken out as we come out of the pandemic.
What I see now is that God is taking our pulse. When you take a pulse, you are giving a test. You want to see if there is a pulse, then how healthy it is, how strong it is, and how rapid it is. I believe that God is doing that in places around this country and worldwide. He’s taking His church’s pulse. Where He finds hearts with a strong pulse, beating hard for Him, beating faster in love-sickness and holy hunger for Him, I believe those are the hearts on whom God is going to breathe even more fresh wind and fresh fire. God is going to connect them to His ravished heart.
So, you have this ravishing going on in a holy way in the people whose heartbeats are already rapidly, passionately beating and longing for the Lord, for more, to experience more of the all. God is taking people’s pulses, and if it’s beating like that, He’s going to breathe on them fresh fire or fresh wind. Then His heart is going to be attached to their heart so there is this consumption taking place, creating an amazing union between the heart of God and the heart of the people who are crying out in childlike faith and anticipation.
That’s what I see: God taking the pulse of the heart that is beating fast enough, then coming down to connect His heart to that heart, and their hearts merging.