Redemptive gift chat

Redemptive Gift Exhorter

RGI CD05.01 Behavioral Characteristics

The redemptive gift of exhortation seems to be God’s primary choice as the go-to gift for a world changer. So many of the strategic things that have happened in secular history, as well as in religious history, have been in the hands of an exhorter. And yet this gift, like any of the other gifts, can fail miserably if they do not understand the battlefield, the make-or-break battlefield, that God has placed before them.

Behaviorally, this is probably the easiest gift to spot. Someone once said that an exhorter is a party looking for some place to happen. They’re very horizontal in their focus, very relational.

They don’t know a stranger. They know how to sit down next to an individual they’ve never met and find the key to his heart in very little time. They have an ability to cross every kind of barrier, every social line, every economic line, every racial line, every religious line, and to relate to people wherever they are at whatever time.

I’ll never forget when I was nine years old and I went to Disneyland. I went with a group of people and one of them was a lady who was an exhorter. She was a couple hundred pounds overweight.

When she got from the parking lot into the gate of Disneyland, she was exhausted and her feet hurt. So she sat down on one of the little white benches right inside the entrance to Disneyland. She proceeded in a matter of three minutes to build a relationship with a stranger that was also seated there.

Before I knew it, she was witnessing to them. They were very pleased with being witnessed to. It was a novel experience for me to watch that happen.

During the rest of the day, the rest of us in the group rode the different rides. She stayed there by the entrance. She moved from one little white bench to the next one, to the next one, to the next one, sitting down next to strangers, making a relationship with them in very little time, and moving into sharing the gospel with ease.

I had never in my life seen anything like that before. This is vintage exhorter. The ability to understand people, the ability to relate to people, the ability to make people like them, and the ability to transition from small talk, from relationship, into the sharing of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is nobody that does evangelism like the exhorter. There is an unparalleled anointing upon them to go into difficult situations and share the gospel. While the servant may have a higher anointing for the hard cases, while the servant may have a higher anointing for porcupine hugging and spending tenacious time, years at a time, with the hard cases, the exhorter is the one that God uses for the major in-gatherings time and time again.

The exhorter is capable of having significant disagreements, even loud arguments, without alienation. It is amazing how the exhorter can express his or her feelings with another individual, have a significant exchange over solid differences in theological views or pragmatic administration views, and yet still maintain relationship. They are skilled above all others in creating and sustaining relationships at all costs.

The flip side of that is that they don’t like being alone. They thoroughly need to have people around them, and short periods of time alone are about all that they can tolerate. Even in small activities, they prefer to have another person or several people with them going from point A to point B. The exhorter tends to be the master communicator of all the gifts.

While the teacher can teach, the exhorter is generally more eloquent. While the prophet can be passionate, again, it is the exhorter that can craft the message of the Word of God more skillfully to touch more hearts on a broader basis with less alienation. There is a significant power relationally upon the gift of exhortation.

They are very flexible, very quick to see opportunities, very quick to abandon the plan they had in hand to take advantage of what God is doing at the moment. They are not intimidated by new ideas and new truths. In fact, they gravitate to them.

The exhorter is one of the visionaries among the gifts and tends to see a broader picture than even the prophet. The prophet can see farther, the prophet can see deeper, but the exhorter sees broader. The exhorter is focused on the largest number of people that can be helped, can be ministered to by the work of the body of Christ, by the work of the church.

If there are some downsides to the superficial behavior of the exhorter, it is that they tend to govern by relationship and by persuasion, not by principle. When they are in an administrative setting, they tend to take the opinion polls, they tend to get a feel for what the board thinks before they aggressively announce the course they are going to pursue. This is not wrong in and of itself, it’s just an observation that the carnal exhorter can tend to fall short of where God wants him to go if he is dependent on getting there with the approval of people.

The prophet, on the other hand, is quite at the opposite extreme, not necessarily a healthy extreme for the prophet, but it is a commitment to abstract truth. If this is right and if God has said it, the prophet is committed to go and go now, regardless of whether anybody follows. The exhorter, on the other hand, is more attuned to the feelings of people.

The exhorter is more attuned to the time frame that it takes for somebody to embrace a new idea. And so many times you will find a prophet bringing a new word into a community, causing a certain amount of reaction and alienation, and the word is picked up a little later by the equally visionary but more tactful exhorter who is able to take that word, recraft it, and present it in a more acceptable way to the congregation and to bring people along the pathway. This is good, this is vintage exhorter, this is admirable, this is wonderful.

The reconciliation that takes place in cities is typically headed either by an exhorter or by a teacher. The teacher, because they are a safe person with their priestly anointing, and the exhorter because of the ability to establish relationships with people. But as good as this is, if the exhorter has to choose between going where God has called him to go and losing some people, if he chooses to keep the people versus obeying God, he has fallen short of his calling.

As we look at scripture, we see at least three magnificent exhorters. The first is Moses, the second the prophet Jeremiah, and the third the apostle Paul. Each of these world changers in different ways in different times, each of them intensely relational, each of them accomplishing much more than their peers could accomplish.

And we will relate back to these three repeatedly as we walk through the various other lessons about the exhorter, because they typify not just what God does through them, but they typify what God does in them, the kinds of things that God has to do to equip, to prepare the exhorter to be the world changer that he has called them to be.

RGI CD05.02 Sun, Moon and Stars

Let’s go now to Genesis chapter 1 to the fourth day To understand the foundation in the sevens for the gift of exhortation Genesis chapter 1 beginning in verse 14 God said let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and Days and years and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth And it was so and God made two great lights the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night And he also made the stars God set them in the expanse of the sky To give light on the earth to govern the day and the night and to separate light from darkness and God saw That it was good and there was evening and there was morning the fourth day as I look at creation I marvel at the diversity of what God creates I Remember reading years ago in a magazine that there were a quarter of a million different kinds of spiders in the world You would think that even for ecological balance a mere hundred thousand different kinds of spiders would have been adequate but God is an extravagant God who creates and creates out of the joy of creation and yet for all of the extravagance all of the diversity of Living creatures the diversity of trees the diversity of flowers all the diversity God has created Nowhere, did he create as much diversity and as much expanse and as much intensity as in the stars we’ve been studying the stars for generations and The larger the telescopes that are built the more Telescopes we launch into outer space to see beyond what we can see from here The more is revealed the diversity and the vastness the endlessness of galaxy upon galaxy upon galaxy Now with all of our technology it is still Humanly impossible with the very best that we have to map the stars and even one single galaxy let alone the galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies This is Part of the picture of the Exhorter the vastness of the Exhorters call The diversity of those that will be included and just the sheer numbers that God has called the Exhorter to deal with More than any other gift the Exhorter is called to interface with a vast number of people and in his fulfillment the fulfillment Centers as we’ll see after a while around the numbers of people that the Exhorter deals with the second component of the fourth day of creation is the Sun and I pondered for quite some time the Use of the word govern because the Sun was to govern the day the moon was to govern the night I looked it up in the Hebrew and the word govern is a very strong Emphatic word it does mean to govern and yet as I looked at all the Exhorters that I know and I know many of them from beginning Christians to international leaders Governing being in a position of dominant running a command and control operation is not the primary thing on their heart They’re very likable people. They’re much more into relationship than into dominance for the sake of dominance And as we ponder this and as I met with a team and we searched the Lord for the meaning of this verse we came to understand that the Exhorter governs passively More than aggressively the Exhorter governs Typically in a group setting rather than with individual confrontation in other words if you get out of line The Sun does not Roast your house to the ground the following day. There is no individual assault no Forcing you to obey the Sun does what it does day in and day out without singling anybody out for Particular judgment, and it is in the passive Provision of sunlight that we see the governing the regulatory power of the Sun imagine a tree a Tree has good soil that is drawing from much nutrition in the soil plenty of water strong root system healthy trunk branches leaves Everything is there for the tree to function for the tree to reproduce for the tree to grow everything is there except the sunlight and It requires the sunlight hitting the leaves for photosynthesis to take place It requires the sunlight hitting the leaves for the tree to be able to absorb the carbon dioxide from the system to manufacture good things from the nutrients brought up from the soil to convert the water and the nutrients and the carbon dioxide into the Starches and the other things that the leaf needs and that the tree needs and then to release oxygen into the atmosphere As huge as a tree is a giant oak or a redwood or any other massive tree It is still dependent upon the sunlight with all of the nutrition and all the water It cannot accomplish its task without the sunlight and the sunlight regulates governs controls the amount that the tree grows in Areas of the world where there’s more sunlight The vegetation is more lush in areas where there is less sunlight or less heat from the sun There’s less vegetation, and I’ve experienced both I grew up in the Amazon jungle I grew up where the three dominant colors were green green and green We grew up with every form of vegetation, and it was lush because the sun blazed for 12 hours a day all year long And I remember last year when I was in Alaska and had occasion to Go to the northern part of Alaska to be above the tree line as we were on our way to Arctic Circle hot springs and the visual assault of seeing nothing growing Not a tree not a twig not a leaf not a color Nothing, but one white mountain and another white mountain and a white hill and a white hill white on white on white Without a single piece of vegetation was overwhelming to me.

I had never even been able to Conceptualize what it would be like to not have vegetation And that is the power the governing power of the Sun Now let’s hold that and look at the other half of the analogy, then we’ll bring it together to a spiritual application The Sun governs the day the moon governs the night the moon does not particularly provide light for photosynthesis rather The significant contribution of the moon is the gravitational field That controls the ocean and because of the moon’s pull as it waxes and wanes throughout the month twice a day Incomprehensible volumes of water are moved from one side of the ocean to another creating high tide and low tide Humanity cannot even begin to approximate the movement of that amount of water And as the water moves up and down some portions of the world have tides as high as 10 or 12 feet That moves the air in the atmosphere up and down twice a day and it provides the cleansing effect So much of the weather patterns of the world in the atmosphere are controlled by the moon controlled by the tide and controlled by the interaction between the Sun and the moon and What happens down here? without analogy then We come to the exhorter and to his role in governance not singling people out with a heavy hand, but in provision and Even the geometry of the illustration is indicative because so far Everything else has happened here on earth or in the immediate atmosphere, but suddenly we have left the earth. We’ve left the trees we’ve left the water we’ve left the atmosphere of the first three days and we are in outer space and That vertical dimension is the major key to understanding the exhorter by nature Superficially and the visible behavior The exhorter is horizontal The exhorter relates to people The exhorter operates in the arena of people the exhorter enjoys people The exhorter cracks the code to people the exhorter gets in the heart of people The exhorter inspires people the exhorter mobilizes people the exhorter exhort people however beyond that superficial application We have the question of what it is that the exhorter is supposed to give to people. What is that catalytic truth? What is that piece of? understanding That people need and the answer very simply is knowledge of God The exhorter must go vertical the exhorter must get to know his God the exhorter must understand from the pages of Scripture and from experience in his own life who God is and It is that missing truth about the nature of God or God’s Application in each situation or in each culture or each contemporary event.

That is the missing piece That the exhorter brings to the table To govern to control to modulate to regulate the work of the body of Christ Now let’s test this against the biblical model We look at Moses first of all The secular view of Moses is that he led Israel out of Egypt and that was his claim to fame But that is so very very superficial Because the reality is that Moses job was to reveal God to Israel even at the burning book His question was not how do I get Israel out of Egypt? His question was what do I tell him? Who are you and beginning with that statement? I am who I am and Going on to the miracles that he did the rod that became a snake the hand that became Leprous and all the rest of that it was a time of teaching the people about God God did not have to take ten plagues to get Israel out of Egypt Centuries later when it was time for Israel to leave Babylon return to the land God made it very simple The king one day said you can go as a matter of fact, here’s money. Here’s wealth. Here’s the temple treasures Here’s tax exempt status and here’s tax money to offer sacrifices for me go do it rebuild the temple offer sacrifices I bless you get out of here God could have done that with Pharaoh and the only reason God hardened Pharaoh’s heart to cause there to be all the difficulties and all the months of turmoil and the ten plagues Was to teach people about their God Imagine all they had was a 400 year old memory of the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob There had been no new revelation No prophetic word No intervention.

No promises. No manifestation of God for over 400 years and They had truth They had promises They continued to cry out to God and it was because of their proper cries to the God of Israel that in fact God answered them and yet it required an understanding of the nature of God for them to move beyond Being slaves with a heritage to being free men to walk in dominion The issue in Israel was not an issue of power The issue was knowing their God and knowing the call of God on their lives as you look at Exodus chapter 1 It says in verse 8 then a new king who did not know about Joseph came to power in Egypt Look, he said to his people the Israelites have become much too numerous for us come We must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous etc. He dealt shrewdly with them He did not understand the covenant and the problem is Israel did not understand They did not remember the covenant they had with the previous Pharaoh they did not have to be enslaved but out of ignorance ignorance of their legal right and Ignorance of their God ignorance of their heritage ignorance of the promise of their forefathers.

That is what caused the slavery and Moses came Not to bring the power of God, but to bring the knowledge of God this is the role of the exhorter and So God caused the ten plagues each one was a teaching tool each one was an opportunity for the Israelites to get to Reacquainted with the God of their forefathers this vintage role of the exhorter was carried out by Moses I think of the verse in Daniel chapter 11 verse 32 that speaks of turbulent times in the future and says those that know their God will Do great exploits the issue is never the power of God. It’s always there The issue is whether people know their God and more than any other gift It is the exhorter that is called upon by God to know the nature of God that applies to the current situation to apply that missing truth of God to the situation and then to mobilize the troops and The mobilizing the troops is represented by the moon and the gravitational pull Moving the tides and the winds one way or the other the exhorter is the people person the exhorter is a mobilizer is a gatherer Is a networker the exhorter is the one that God uses to inspire people to do things But the carnal exhorter the exhorter that does not know his God Inspires people around a vision around an activity around a doable plan And God has called the exhorter to inspire people Because they know their God So much of what goes on in the church today is no different than the business realm in the secular arena Secular people can mobilize individuals can inspire them can accomplish things. God is not looking for organization God does not need human intervention or human help for his power to flow in the world that God is looking for exhorters will know their God and out of the knowledge of God Will make known to the church the purposes of God and the power of God and the truth about God for the season in which they live Again, I say that the exhorter is gifted of God in so many ways One of those ways is to be able to see God in Scripture It is not difficult for the exhorter to open the Word of God and to find the jewels the rest of us have overlooked My life has been shaped and molded time and time and time again By the work of exhorters who are able to see things in passages that I’ve studied many many times It was an exhorter who first understood the principles of these spiritual gifts understood that the group of gifts And Romans was in a class by itself That had been looked at by the church for 1900 years and more and it was an exhorter who saw this liberating truth It was an exhorter who came to me and showed me that the sevens in Scripture parallel the gifts I have worked it out But it was an exhorter who saw it as the exhorter that is able to see God in Scripture where we can

RGI CD05.03 Time

And if this is the birthright of the exhorter, if the church so desperately needs to know their God, if the exhorter is good at seeing God in Scripture, and if the exhorter who knows his God is the world changer that God goes to, why do we have so few? And it is tragic that the answer is so simple. It is lack of control of time. Again, you go back to Genesis chapter 1, and there was the evening and the morning, the first day, the evening and the morning, the second day, the evening and the morning, the third day, because God decreed that it was so.

But the things that mankind has used from the beginning of time to chart time, namely the sun and the moon, were not created until the fourth day. Time is the battlefield for the exhorter. And when the exhorter’s time is under control, he is able to pull back from the horizontal, pull back from the activity, pull back from leading people, pull back from the relationships in order to have time allocated to go vertical and seek his God.

There is absolutely no shortcut for the exhorter. There is no way for him to get to know his God without sizable chunks of time. There is no way that he can get an impartation or take a pill or take the fast class or the shortcut to get to know his God.

The birthright and the anointing will not become reality until the exhorter allocates significant chunks of time to be in the word to get to know his God and to know what it is that God wants to reveal to the given generation. They’re so close, and yet so many fall so short. Their intentions are wonderful.

I have shared this message face to face with exhorters all across this country, people sitting in the pew and the leaders of leaders on an international basis. And every exhorter that I’ve shared it with has agreed that that is the battlefield. Every exhorter that I’ve shared it with can look at the times in his life when he was away alone with the Lord and the revelation that came from those times of the Lord.

Everyone has the first fruits in their life, has the hallmarks, knows that they are anointed to see truth in the word of God. Everyone intends to spend more time in the word of God, and yet they procrastinate one hour at a time. They intend to, but they don’t get around to it.

They plan to, they hope to, they wish to, they want to, but because of the tyranny of the urgent, because of the people around them, because of the opportunities to do things in different ways in different times, they completely fail to possess their birthright. It seems like a harsh statement. It seems like a difficult thing, and yet is the simple reality.

Now contrast the exhorter with the prophet, and we’re going to use a caricature here, the extremely carnal prophet, the extremely carnal exhorter. The carnal prophet is willing to confront. The carnal prophet does not care about relationships.

The carnal prophet thinks that truth ought to stand alone, and anybody ought to rejoice over getting slapped upside the head with the truth, and so they’re willing to confront anybody, anytime, anyway, regardless of how much it hurts the other person, and it doesn’t take more than about two weeks for word to get through the church that so-and-so is dangerous, and so this prophet that has truth and is willing to confront can’t get within 30 feet of anybody. The flip side is the exhorter who has the key to everybody’s heart, the exhorter who can relate to everybody and does relate to everybody, the exhorter who is trusted, the exhorter who is a safe person, the exhorter who is fun to be around, can get close to anybody, can tell anybody anything, and yet because of the carnal exhorter’s fear of alienation, not wanting to hurt anybody, or because of the carnal exhorter’s lack of knowing God, there’s nothing to put into the open hearts that they have unlocked. The exhorter who does not know his God is like a Rolls-Royce with three wheels, and it doesn’t matter how much good there is in a Rolls-Royce if you don’t have the fourth wheel, it’s just a pile of junk cluttering up the driveway.

And so I say again and again and again, the exhorter must know his God, and the only way to know his God is to allocate chunks of time, and the only way he will allocate chunks of time is by saying no to people, by saying no to relationships, by saying no to activities, to be able to have time alone in the presence of his God.

RGI CD05.04 Jehovah Shalom

Moving on now from the issue of the first day of creation to the compound names of Jehovah, we come to the fourth of the compound names of Jehovah, which is Jehovah Shalom. That was given to Gideon in the context of the issue with the Midianites. The Midianites were in the land.

Israel was being judged for their sin. They were crying out to God because of the oppression of the Midianites. Gideon was threshing wheat in a wine press, hiding.

God showed up to him uninvited, which is a message in and of itself, and said to Gideon, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior. And if we can paraphrase the biblical translation into the vernacular, Gideon said, yeah, right. He said, I’ve heard about God.

I know what God used to do. I know about those interventions. I know what he did for our forefathers.

I’ve heard the miracles of yesteryear. But to be perfectly honest, I haven’t seen God anywhere lately. All I’ve seen is Midianites in the land.

And so for the next hour or two, however long it took, there was this interaction between Jehovah God and Gideon. At the end of the afternoon, after the miracle, after all the discussion, after prophetic words, after the sacrifice, the meal was consumed as a sacrifice. God disappeared, spoke one more time to Gideon, and then Gideon made the incredible statement, Jehovah Shalom, that God is peace.

What is significant about the story is not the fact that God is peace, because God has always been peace. What is significant is that the only thing that changed was Gideon’s perception of God. He was still in the wine press.

The Midianites were still in the land. There was no army. There was no battle plan.

There was no victory. Everything was purely theoretical. The one thing that had changed was that in the morning, he saw God as a distant God, an uninvolved God, a detached God, a God who had abandoned his people, a God who did stuff in yesteryear and was not currently involved in Israel’s politics.

At the end of the day, he saw God as present in his life. Because of his perception of God, because he saw God as a present tense God, an intervening God, a God who had a plan to deal with the Midianites, a God who was willing to deal with the Midianites, and a God who was willing to work with him, he had peace. Classic exhorter situation.

The circumstances are not the issue. The issue is, how do you see your God? He brought to the nation of Israel a message that God is present, God has a timetable, God has an agenda, God has a strategy, and that brought peace. But there was more.

Because that same night, while he’s still reveling in the peace that he has, knowing that God has a plan for the nation, God turned it up a notch. God said, I want you to take your father’s bull, the second bull, and I want you to take the altar of Baal in front of your father’s house and the Asherah pole, tear all that stuff down, take it up to the hill over the town, build a new altar, a proper kind of altar, chop up the Asherah pole, use it for firewood, sacrifice the bull. And he cheated a little bit.

He was afraid of the townspeople, so he did it all at night, thinking he could get away with it. Set fire to the firewood under the bull, and he probably cut and run after that. Sure enough, the next morning, there was a mob at the front door getting ready to lynch him.

Now think for a moment. Why is it that the altar to Baal and the Asherah pole were in front of his father’s house? I don’t think it was coincidence. I think it was because Gideon’s father was the head idolater in the town.

And so Gideon’s hiding in the back bedroom, knocked kneed with terror, wondering what in the world got into him to listen and think about whatever happened yesterday, because now he’s going to die and the Mennonites will still be in the land. His father goes to the door. The mob says, it’s simple.

Give us Gideon. We’re going to kill him. And out of the blue, the father says, well, you know, this doesn’t make sense to me.

If Baal is such a hot God, why don’t you let Baal kill Gideon? And the people scratched their head and said, you know, now that’s a novel idea. Let’s go for it. And the mob was over and the lynch mob dispersed.

And Gideon was back there in the back bedroom saying, I can’t believe what I just heard. My father was an idolater yesterday, and today he doesn’t believe in Baal. And the townspeople just shrugged and walked away when 10 minutes ago they were planning to kill me.

God set the situation up to teach Gideon another important lesson. Yesterday, he learned that God was an intervening God who cared about Israel. Today, he had to learn that God was an intervening God who cared about Gideon.

And that became the central issue for what happened next. The whole issue of putting out a fleece has absolutely nothing in the world to do with finding out the will of God. God’s will was very plain.

God had spoken it repeatedly. And Gideon even says in Judges chapter 6, if you are really going to deliver the Midianites into my hand, I mean, he knew what God’s will was. His question was, God, are you an intervening God? God, are you going to stay with me all the way through? God, are you going to set me up and have me start an impossible battle and then disappear and let me die? The issue was nothing about God’s will.

The issue was everything about God’s character. Can I trust you to keep me alive when I obey you doing something that is insane in the natural? And it was out of those episodes in the subsequent situation that he came to know his God personally and experientially. And it is out of that experiential knowledge of the nature of God that Gideon became someone who had authority.

Now, hold this thought for a moment. Let me go get another strand and then we’ll weave the two together. In 2nd Corinthians 1.3, it says we’re to comfort one another with the comfort we have received from God.

Realize that God does not need to work through people. As he demonstrated on the road to Damascus, as he demonstrated with Gideon, as he demonstrated with Jonah, he’s perfectly capable of going one-on-one with any person and restoring order to their life. And yet God’s preference is to use what I call second-hand religion.

God’s preference is to minister to an individual and have that individual take their incarnated truth, their experience of the truth of God, the things that they know from the Word that have become reality in their life, and to minister to the next person down the road. That’s God’s plan A. Let me illustrate it this way. I’m a man.

I’ve been married for 25 years. I’ve never been widowed. I have, as a pastor, ministered to widows.

I can take the Word of God. I can minister accurately. I can minister truthfully.

I can minister comfort to a widow. But I’ve never been widowed. I haven’t walked that way.

The truths that I’m sharing are purely theoretical for me. They’re right, they’re true, they’re proper, and they carry a measure of comfort. But there’s nothing like a woman who has been widowed, who has taken those same truths and walked them out in her own life and experienced the power of God in her loneliness, experienced the power of God in the red tape, experienced the power of God in the finances, experienced what it is like to find a new identity after your identity as a wife has been lost.

And that woman, that widow who has incarnated truth, can minister to another widow and use the same verses I use and use words that are far less eloquent than what I use, can bumble around and say it poorly compared to how I can say it. And yet the authority that comes from incarnated truth far transcends my eloquence. And that is what God wants for the exhorter.

And so God took this exhorter, Gideon, through this difficulty, through this situation in order to give him earned authority, incarnated truth in his own life because he has gone to the mat on the issue of who God is in his life as well as for Israel. And so he would stand up in front of the army and say, I’m going to take these 300 men and we’re going to defeat the Midianites. And the 300 men says, sounds good to me, let’s go.

That is not natural. That is the earned authority of an exhorter whom God has designed to be a leader based on incarnated truth that came through pain and suffering in his own life.

RGI CD05.05 Exhorter’s Birthright

This is God’s model, this is God’s plan. And so the words, Jehovah Shalom, the Lord is peace, is not just an issue of peace, it is an issue of somebody who knew their God and did great exploits because of it. This is the birthright, this is the heritage, this is the calling that is upon the exhorter.

But unless you know your God, unless you have the experiential walk with God, unless the abstract truths from scripture have been incarnated in your life, you will not have authority to mobilize people. And unless you take the time away from people to know your God, you will have very little depth in the vertical and so you will be ineffective in your horizontal. And so God took his world changers and he forced them to get to know him.

Each one of the three that we’ll look at was forced by God to have a season of time alone in order to know their God and to be mighty in what he had called them to do. Moses, the man of God, spent 40 years on the backside of the desert, alone, nobody to talk to but sheep. And during that time, God molded and shaped him.

The prophet Jeremiah began his ministry, a very busy man. He was at the city gate, he was at the city dump, he was at the temple, he was at the palace, he was taking his underwear to the river Euphrates, he was going back to get his underwear from the river Euphrates, he was in the public eye, he was busy, he was running every which way. And God knew that he did not know his God well enough.

So there came a season when God told him to go into hiding, to go into total isolation. And there in that isolation, he wrote some of his best prophetic words. And God prepared him to lead the remnants that remained in the land after the Babylonian captivity.

You look at Paul, God born again, was filled with fire and was preaching the day after he was saved in Damascus. Got run out of Damascus and went to Jerusalem, started to preach in Jerusalem. And God didn’t show up to Paul very many times in his life, but God had to show up to him and say, Paul, cut it out.

And God took him out of Jerusalem, out of the ministry, the ministry that he did not want to give up, and took him to the backside of the desert. And if we understand Galatians correctly, I think the timeline was maybe three years on the backside of the desert and then another 14 years of isolation in Tarsus or somewhere before he was taken up to Jerusalem, before he established relationship, before he was then launched into ministry from Antioch. And even with all that knowledge of God, even with the revelation from heaven, the revelation that nobody else received but the apostle, God flat out had to lock the man up in prison for him to do his best work.

His style was three weeks on a ride, a new church planned and on to the next community. And God arranged for him to be in prison for years at a time. And there in the prison with no email, no fax machine, no cell phone and limited number of visitors, he was able to write some of his best works.

The problem is this, as I deal with people, I see a very limited number of exhorters whom God forces into a position of maturity. There are those like Moses and Paul and Jeremiah who had no choice. God called them and God forced them into isolation and God forced a revelation of who he was upon them.

But the vast majority of the exhorters in the world cannot gamble on God intruding in their lives. The vast majority of God’s world changers were exhorters who will have to get there by personal choice. Choosing to say no, choosing to take dominion over their time, choosing to take time alone with the Lord in order to get to know him.

And for failure to make that choice, they can squander their entire birthright. They can be very popular, very loved, very effective in secondary things, very good at mobilizing people, very good at reconciling people, very good at leading people to the Lord, a useful contribution to the body of Christ, lauded when they die because everybody likes them. But the fact that they have done good, the fact that they have accomplished much, does not mean that they have possessed their birthright.

Because if they do not know their God, if they’ve not taken time to get to know the specific revelation of God for this period of time, then they will fall short of their birthright because God has called them to greater things than just a little reconciliation and a little organizational leadership.

RGI CD05.06 The Candelabra

We move now to the issue of the tabernacle, because God sharpens the focus of the knowledge of God that they’re supposed to have. From the outside in, the first item is a brazen altar for the prophet, the second is the bronze laver for the servant, the third on the right-hand side of the holy place is the table of showbread for the teacher, and on the left-hand side, the fourth item of furniture is the candelabra, the seven lamps that shed light upon two things, the table of showbread and the altar of incense, that shed light upon the gift of teaching and the gift of giving. As we already saw in the last tape, the gift of teaching tends to have an analytical, cerebral, doctrinal approach, a professional relationship with God, not a personal relationship, and God calls the exhorter to know His God and to reveal to the teacher the rest of the message, an experiential relationship with the Most High God.

The giver tends to be religious rather than spiritual, tends to adopt forms and functions and ceremonies and activities rather than the reality of a faith walk with God. And again, it is the faith and the vision and the reality and the experiential walk of the exhorter that sheds light upon the giver and brings balance to their gifting and brings wholeness. I say again and again and again, the exhorter is God’s world changer, the exhorter is pivotal, and when the exhorter does not possess his birthright, he not only squanders his own fulfillment but the lack of provision damages the rest of the body, especially the teacher and the giver.

They both need the understanding of who God is that will come primarily through the exhorter. The body of Christ is dependent upon the exhorter becoming everything God called him to be.

RGI CD05.07 Letter to Thyatira

Let’s move now to the book of Revelation, to the fourth church, the church of Thyatira. To the angel of the church in Thyatira write, these are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are doing more than you did at first.

A marvelous description of the exhorter. Love and faith are hallmarks of the exhorter. We haven’t previously gone to the armor of the believer.

Most people put the armor on from head to toe or toe to head, but if you look at it in the order it’s given in scripture, it parallels the gifts. And for the exhorter, it is the shield of faith. Almost in the same way that faith comes easily to the prophet, faith comes to the exhorter.

And they have faith not only for themselves, but for others to be able to inspire others. When they have that incarnated truth, that earned authority, they have faith for themselves and for the group. God says, I know your love, your relational abilities.

I know your faith. These are good things. He says, your service, your perseverance, that you are now doing more than you did at first.

I do not know of any one of the gifts that works as hard or as long as the exhorter. I assume that somewhere out there, there’s a couch potato exhorter, but I haven’t met him. And all the exhorters that I know in the Christian ministry, all the leaders are people who are intensely busy.

And I am a hardworking person myself, but just about every exhorter I know can work me into the ground. They put their money where their mouth is. They’re diligent and they do more and more and more.

They function on very little sleep. They’re early in the morning and late at night, wearing many hats, involved in many projects, doing an abundance of things. And God says, I know all that.

I acknowledge it. It’s good. Nevertheless, nevertheless, I have this against you.

You tolerate that woman, Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching, she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling.

So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. In fact, I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I’m he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay you according to your deeds.

Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan’s so-called deep secrets, I will not impose any other burden on you. Only hold on to what you have until I come. Let’s deal with the issue of Jezebel, because that has become a distorted teaching in the church, and we need to restore it to basic simplicity.

An individual can have a Jezebel attitude within them apart from demonization, and it comes from a very simple source. The Jezebel syndrome begins when an individual is wounded by their authority. It can be a man or a woman.

The wounding can be overt, such as a father molesting his daughter. The wounding can be passive, such as a father who is missing from the picture. And the fact that there is a wound does not necessarily mean a Jezebel spirit will result, because there’s many different ways that an individual can respond to the pain of wounding.

But when an individual makes the vow, consciously or subconsciously, I will never be hurt again by authority, they have crossed over the line into the Jezebel arena, because then they need to control. And this wounded individual begins to control situations around them, fairly and unfairly, using manipulation or using overt power, it doesn’t matter which. Where there is control for the sake of safety, you have a Jezebel attitude at work.

Again, the fact that there is a wounded person in the camp does not necessarily mean that you have a demonized situation. But in the extreme demonization with the Jezebel spirit, you have somebody who is a pathological controller. They’re controlling for the sake of control, whether they need to control or not.

And that creates havoc in the church. The presentation here in the Church of Thyatira was the absolute worst case scenario. Not only was there control for the sake of control, but there was immorality and there was occultism.

In order to control effectively, this Jezebel had tapped into the deep secrets of Satan. However, the issue in the church is not the Jezebel. The issue is the exhorter.

The exhorter does not like rejection. And it is important to understand when you’re working with the exhorter that they have in their mind an us-them scenario. Someway, somehow, the exhorter divides the whole world into insiders and outsiders.

And the exhorter does not mind opposition from the outsiders. In fact, the exhorter almost rejoices in it. You look at Paul’s writings, and he shrugs off very briskly the opposition, as long as it is from outside.

But when someone from inside the camp, from the church at Corinth, questions whether or not his apostleship is legitimate, the ink flows for page after page after page after page, because the exhorter cannot tolerate reaction and rejection from inside the camp. The exhorter is almost more sensitive than the mercy to rejection or any sort of criticism from inside the camp. And the insider who would seek to challenge the exhorter, to stimulate them, to motivate them to walk a more holy walk, needs to walk very, very gently, because they will be deeply wounded by a criticism from inside the camp, where if the same thing were said by somebody that psychologically is outside the camp, they would be able to brush it off.

And so in this context, the exhorter is unwilling to confront sin in the camp, because he is unwilling to experience the reaction and the rejection that is inevitable when you confront a full-blown Jezebel. I’ve had many people ask me how to deal with it, and I have a very simple solution. There is absolutely no clean, neat, tidy way to evict a full-blown demonized Jezebel from the church.

The only way to do it is to hit it head-on, take your lumps, and get the job done. And the exhorter will take two steps to the right, two steps to the left, dance around it, reason, make all sorts of excuses to keep from experiencing rejection. And when the exhorter places relationship ahead of purity, he has destroyed his ministry.

When the exhorter is not willing to risk offense, not willing to risk reaction from inside the camp, he is paralyzed. And whatever good he has, all of his relational abilities and his knowledge of God are not going to be effective or not going to be used for the kingdom. And God says that he himself will come.

God says, I have given her time to repent, but she is unwilling. And so God will judge, and he will judge with suffering. I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely.

And that brings us immediately to the principle that affects the exhorter, and that is the principle of pain and suffering.

RGI CD05.08 Principle of Sowing and Reaping

None of us likes pain and suffering. All of us need to deal with having a right response to pain and yet more than any other gift, it is the exhorter who has to wrap his arms around that issue. So many times there is an out.

So many times there is a way to look at a situation and to sidestep it and to get around it. So many times I’ve seen exhorters come up to the very edge of greatness. Come up to the point where all the table is set, where the prophetic words have been uttered, where the opportunities are present, and they have to go through one final test, which is to confront sin in the camp.

And for failure to confront sin in the camp in the proper season, the hand of God’s favor is removed. And when the hand of God’s favor is removed, instead of repenting and dealing with it, the exhorter will resign the church and go somewhere else and start all over again and experience God taking him up to the limit and not allowing him to step into his full authority until he is willing to risk rejection of church, willing to embrace pain and suffering. God says it’s going to come either way.

You can either embrace pain and suffering that makes you a better person. You can either embrace pain and suffering that brings you to wholeness. You can either embrace pain and suffering that brings you to a position of authority or you can stand by and watch the pain and suffering of those who suffer intensely when the consequences of sin in the church comes to its fullness and its fruition.

I say again, the exhorter is God’s choice for the world changer more times than not. And yet so many exhorters miss their opportunity because they’re unwilling to embrace the principle of pain and suffering, unwilling to suffer rejection. There’s a pattern that flows out of this which is in administration of churches that are pastored by an exhorter or parachurch ministries that are headed up by exhorters.

And I interface with many of these because the exhorter is so visionary, so frequently they are the leader, so frequently they have a heart for reach in the city, so frequently they have a passion for seeing great change take place, and so they’re in those positions of leadership. And yet time and time again, tragically in the body of Christ, I find organizations that are staffed, that are headed by an exhorter, and are staffed primarily by enablers. And the exhorter has surrounded himself with a group of people that are willing to cover for him, willing to pick up his mistakes for him.

And in the name of love, and in the name of loyalty, and in the name of Christian character, he uses them and their Christian character to keep himself from growing, to keep himself from reaping the natural consequences of his own poor judgment, of his own immaturity. Again, trying to avoid pain and suffering, God allows the natural consequences of poor judgment, the natural consequences of violating God’s principles for administration and for leadership. He allows those consequences to be visited upon the exhorter in order to help the exhorter grow, in order to help him become holy, in order to help him know his God.

And if the exhorter surrounds himself by people who are enablers, those enablers will take the rap, they will suffer for him, they will fix the surface problem, and the root problem in the leader remains unfixed. Again, the call is great, but there is no shortcut, and God demands holiness in the exhorter, and he demands a knowledge of God that can only come through spending time in the Word of God.

RGI CD05.09 Why Have You Forsaken Me

As we look at the seven last words of Christ on the cross, the fourth thing that Christ said was, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That sense of isolation, that sense of abandonment by God cuts so very deeply to the exhorter gifting in him. This again fits into the pain and suffering. The exhorter is not willing to face alienation most of the time.

The exhorter is not willing to face isolation, rejection, abandonment by people, especially those that he loves. And yet that is exactly where God takes him. Are you willing to do what is right, even though it may mean a season of alienation? And God’s promise is that to him who overcomes, to the exhorter who is willing to walk by principle, not by relationship, for the exhorter who overcomes by knowing his God and speaking the reality, see the truth of who God is into that particular time and season in society to him who overcomes.

I will give authority over the nations. He will rule them with an iron scepter. He will dash them to pieces like pottery, just as I have received authority from my father.

Hear me well. It is not wrong for the exhorter to desire to lead great groups of people. It is not wrong for the exhorter to be a mobilizer, to be a recruiter, to be a reconciler, to do all of these good things.

It’s in his DNA. And yet God wants it to come about supernaturally, not naturally. And God wants a man to be willing to walk on principle, to risk the alienation of everybody if necessary.

He wants somebody like the apostle Paul, who is willing to be persecuted by his own people, to be run out of town after town after town for speaking the truth. And when he finds that kind of person, God will supernaturally give him much more authority over a much larger number of people over the nations. God will give him much more governance than he could ever achieve in a simple humanity.

And as with every other area of our life, God calls us to die first, and out of that death will then come life. And for the exhorter whom we so desperately need, dying to people, dying to people’s perceptions, dying to activity, dying to relationships, dying to other people’s approval in order to find time to know God, and dying to people’s approval in order to be holy. Those are the two major barriers.

And when he embraces that pain and suffering, then God delights, rejoices in releasing to him authority over vast numbers of people. The history of the church is marked by the exhorters who have embraced pain and suffering. They have become world changers.

And if we read between the lines, the history of the church has been scarred by the world changers that would not walk in holiness, the exhorters that would not walk in holiness, the exhorters that did not know their God, the exhorters who would not confront, and so they did not fulfill the call of God on their life. And they died frustrated, selling for the good instead of the best. And the church suffered acute lack.

I want to take it back now to 1 Timothy 2, verse 1, where it says, all of us are to pray for those in authority over us and to specifically challenge the servant who has the highest authority of anyone to pray for those in authority over them. And we dare not sit self-righteously in the pew and condemn the exhorter who is so busy doing good things that he does not have time to know his God. Rather, we must be diligent before God for our sake as well as for his and crying out for time control and crying out for proper firstfruits of time and crying out for the opportunities for this man or woman of God to get to know their God because as they know God, so will we.

I say again and again and again, we owe an incomprehensible debt of love to the exhorters in the history of the church as well as in our generation. And I particularly owe that debt for this material to exhorters. I would not share any of this with you today if the exhorters had not first seen the truth that I then developed.

That is what we miss when we who are not exhorters fail to diligently cry out to God for his conviction and for his anointing to fall upon the exhorters. They hold the keys to an understanding of God that will unleash all the rest of the truth. Without the exhorter’s role, we are like the Rolls-Royce with three wheels.

And without the exhorter’s control of time, he is like a Rolls-Royce with three wheels. The stakes are great. Each gift has a greater anointing.

Each gift has more to contribute. Each gift falls harder when they fail to possess their birthright. Every gift that fails, the church hurts worse.

It is time for us to embrace the command to pray for those in authority as we never have before because our well-being rests upon our authorities, especially the world-changing exhorters who are standing in the wings. This teaching is by Arthur Burke from Sapphire Leadership Group.