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Jan. 22, 2019 - Jim Bakker Show
08:04
Three Mandates For The Church - Loren Sandford
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Three Mandates for the Church 00:07:00
Lauren, you talk about three mandates in the book.
Yes.
Would you share that?
Yeah, three mandates for the church.
They come out of three dreams that the Lord gave me.
And I'm not one that I, Bob Jones once called me a Nathan prophet.
He said, I have my little dreams and visions.
You just know things.
So when I have a prophetic dream, I pay attention.
There were a series of three that started in 2015.
In the first one, it was after John Paul Jackson had passed.
He was a family friend.
He used to call me a spiritual sibling because my father was his spiritual father.
But I had this dream, and John Paul came to me in the dream.
And he was brokenhearted.
He was just, I mean, there were tears.
And it was almost as if he had come to me with a feeling was almost like coming for counsel or help.
And what he poured out to me in the dream was that there were things that were off in the prophetic world that he could no longer fix.
And he was brokenhearted about it, and it was like he was laying a mantle to, I can't do this now, and so I'm passing something to you.
And what I took from that is the first mandate on the church is that we need, I'm going to say this to the church, we need to hold prophetic people accountable.
We need to hold them accountable for their character.
We need to hold them accountable for wrong words.
We need to hold them accountable for biblical accuracy.
And we've not been good at that.
And what we have right now, to be perfectly honest, as we extol the value of prophecy here, is we have a crisis of credibility in this country right now, in the body of Christ, where prophetic ministry is concerned.
We've had things that didn't come to pass.
Too many things, big things.
The second dream was, it took me days to get over it.
It was almost more upsetting.
The second dream, I was in a kind of a shopping mall someplace, and President Obama was there.
And he was standing before the nation.
He was getting ready to do a broadcast and talk about his broken heart for the shootings that had happened.
And let me preface this next part by saying that I was not a fan of Obama.
I struggled for eight years with my attitude.
Lord, please sanctify me.
And so I see him, they're setting up for him to make this address to the nation, and the Lord flooded my heart with this overpowering love for him.
I mean, just overpowering.
And I found myself walking right past the Secret Service guy, right up to the President.
I took his hand, and I said, Mr. President, would it be all right if I stood before you with the nation, before the, stood with you before the nation?
And he began to weep, grasped my hand like a drowning man, like, oh, thank you so much.
In the last part of the dream, I was telling the stage hands to remove the podium so that we could, because I wanted us to be seen standing together.
Mandate for the church is, church, we're coming into a season where we've got to stop, stop, stop with the harsh criticism and the harsh language.
If we're going to make an impact in this world and bring revival to this country, we're going to have to love those with whom we most strenuously disagree.
We're going to have to love them radically, and we're going to have to be seen to do it.
Because right now the world knows what we hate.
They don't know what we love.
The church has a horrible reputation, and we've earned every word of it.
And so the mandate for the church is we're going to have to become known radically for our love, especially for those that we would hate the most or disagree the most with.
Wow.
The powerful word.
And the third dream.
The third dream impacted me almost as hard.
The background for the dream was in real life when I moved to Denver.
It was a miserable time.
I was there to be the executive pastor of a very, very large church.
And it was the 14 most miserable months of my life.
When I came there, the pastor was turning away from all of the charismatic things that I had been raised with and given my life to, rejecting the prophetic, rejecting manifestations, rejecting all kinds of things.
And I left after 14 months under a hail of gunfire, accused of all kinds of things that I had not done, not said.
That pastor even went on national radio and slimed me publicly, telling lies about my ministry there.
And it cost me.
It cost me a lot.
It cost me my translocal ministry for years after that.
And I carried a lot of sickness in my heart for a long time.
So in this dream, I'm speaking in a setting like this, not a whole lot of people, doing some teaching.
And he walks in the room.
He and I had been friends.
He walks in the room, and it was like two old buddies meeting each other.
It was beautiful.
It was just embracing each other.
And he began to tease me about how crazy my church was during the Toronto thing.
And I said, yeah, yeah, we've been crazy.
And we laughed about it.
No criticism.
And then he took me to a room.
He took me to an apartment where his nephew was staying.
And I remember the apartment clearly.
It had all kinds of screens in it and windows down two sides.
And as I asked the Lord what the dream was about, the first mandate for the church is there's, I know in my city there are tens of thousands of people who've been driven out of church, wounded and hurt.
And I understand that.
I understand the sickness that leaves in your heart.
And so you want to reject the church.
A few minutes ago, Charlie said, God is still, he's not through with the church.
The church is still the center of God's redemptive plan.
And the mandate for the church is that it's time to come home.
Come home.
God is making a change in the hearts of so many pastors.
He's putting his heart in them.
Come home.
Come home and forgive.
Make friends.
Come home and let us broken pastors be the broken men that we are.
Let's be the body of Christ again.
If you've heard a word that God is calling you, that God is through with the organized church and he's calling people out, that's a lie from the pit of hell.
That comes from, that's demonic.
And you need not to be listening to it.
And then the second part of that particular dream, which I believe is part of the mandate, is it was his nephew, a younger man.
The Last Days Generation 00:01:19
When you get windows in a dream, that's revelation or screens, television screens.
This is revelation.
And what we're dealing with right now is this up-and-coming generation, which I believe is the last days generation, are intensely prophetic.
I have seen young guys, 17 years old, 16 years old, who are at a place at that age that it took me 20 years to get to.
They're on a fast track because we don't have the time.
We don't.
And so God is calling for a great Malachi 4, 5, and 6 restoration of the generations.
They're the last days generation.
They're intensely gifted.
They're intensely prophetic.
And if we don't intentionally reach out to them, our hearts, our older generation hearts, restored to them, we're going to miss it.
And so I'm telling this older generation, if your kids are alienated from you, you go after them.
And don't make it about you.
If they're rejecting you, don't listen.
Don't listen.
Don't take no for an answer.
Go back again and again and again with your love.
Don't preach.
Just go with your love and with your blessing.
And see what happens.
That's so good.
Jesus can't come back till that happens.
That has to happen.
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