Tag: corey russell

HOLY SPIRIT

On By CaitlynIn Bible Stuff1 Comment

Put your hand on your belly.

In John 7:38 Jesus said that whoever believes in Him, “out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” The next verse explains that He’s talking about the Holy Spirit. The word “belly” is from the King James Version, and most of your translations probably say heart, but the Greek word koilias actually means “belly.” In the Hebrew way of thinking, your belly represented the seat of your emotions and your deepest inner parts, the way we talk about the heart.

No, it’s not actually literal; of course the Holy Spirit is not squeezed inside of you next to your large intestine, but it does kind of make a lot of sense. We know that the belly is often the emotional centre of the body. Sure, we feel things in our heart, but we also feel them in our stomach. Your stomach’s tied up in knots. You have butterflies in your stomach.

Actors and singers know this too. If you’ve ever taken an acting or voice class, you’ve been told to “breathe from your diaphragm.” The diaphragm is the muscle in your abdomen that makes your lungs expand. I was always told, “feel your stomach expanding like a balloon.” I spent a lot of time in all my acting years concentrating on my belly as the centre of my breath.

That very breath in your lungs that fills your belly—what is it? Where does it come from? Genesis 2:7—it’s the breath of life. The Spirit of God.

“Out of his belly will flow rivers of living water.”

Right now, if you have believed in Jesus and given your life over to Him, you have that living water inside of you. Historically, “living water” referred to a river that was clean and flowing. Pure and moving. This is true of the Holy Spirit, but it’s also more than that. He is actually the LIVING. WATER.

You have right now the Spirit of God living inside of your body. You are His temple. You are the building that He lives in.

The Holy Spirit is not a force. I love to watch Star Wars and think about God, but the Holy Spirit is not the Force. He’s a Person. He has a personality. He has a mind. He has emotions. And He is the Eternal Living God.

And He lives inside of you.

1 Corinthians 2 says that no one knows a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit. Only you really know what you’re thinking at any given time unless you tell someone, right? Because you live inside of you. So only the Spirit of God can know the thoughts of God, right? BUT GOD put His Spirit inside of you. We have the mind of Christ. The Holy Spirit searches the deep things of God, and then He reveals them to us. It’s His favourite thing to do.

Put your hand on your belly. Close your eyes and picture the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of you.

The Bible uses several different images to talk about the Holy Spirit. It says that He’s like wind. (John 3:8, Acts 2:2)  The very word “Spirit” in Hebrew (ruach) and Greek (pneuma) means “breath” or “wind.” Wind can be a cool, gentle breeze, or a mighty rushing hurricane. He loves like a hurricane.

He’s like water. (John 7:37-39, Isaiah 44:3) He’s like rain (Hosea 6:3), or like the ocean. When you go to the beach, you can choose how much you get in the water. You can get your toes wet, or you can go in up to your knees, or up to your waist, or even in over your head where you can feel the waves rhythmically pounding around you and the salt and sand and water rushing through your hair. (cf. Ezekiel 47) But even then, you’re still at the beach. You can never go to the bottom of the ocean floor, and you can never touch every drop of the ocean. You can never reach the end of God’s Spirit.

He’s like fire. The fire of God rested on the disciples at Pentecost. (Acts 2:3) The fire of God burns before the throne of God. (Revelation 4:5) God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:29) When we pray for fire to come, that’s not just cool revival language. We’re asking for a Person.

So as you have your hand on your belly, pick one of those images of the Holy Spirit. Imagine that fire or that river living inside your belly. He’s here because He wants to be. He actually chose to live inside of you forever. This is the climax of the story of this age, not that God became a perfect Man, but that GOD. LIVES. IN. BROKEN. HUMAN. VESSELS.

Jesus said, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16 7 ESV)

Having the Holy Spirit living inside of you is better than having Jesus in the flesh sitting in the chair next to you. Because if Jesus were all you had, you still couldn’t get inside Him and He couldn’t get inside you. You would have to talk the old-fashioned slow way, with mouths and words.

But the Holy Spirit, the very Spirit—the essence—of Jesus, lives inside you.

Talk to Him.

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Onething 2013

On By CaitlynIn IHOPKC Life

I arrived back in Kansas City on December 27. I would have stayed in California longer, but I was eager to get back to Kansas City to attend the annual Onething conference December 28-31.

Onething 2013
“Rightly do we love You, Son of God, Son of Man. Rightly do we love You, Jesus…”

Since 2002, IHOPKC has dedicated the last few days of the year to a massive young adult conference with the chief aim of growing passion for Jesus in the “one thing” spirit of Psalm 27:4. In 2002, over 4000 people attended; in 2013, over 35,000 people filled Bartle Hall in downtown KC. I had just taken ten days off of work to go home, so I didn’t want to take any more time off for the conference, but I made sure to be there every chance I got. Since I had so little time to be there, I signed up to serve every session I could. I served two shifts in the bookstore and two on the ministry team. As much fun as I had working with books in a retail environment, my favourite times were when I got to wear the blue “Ministry Captain” vest. I got to go up front during worship and sing my heart out with the crowd of young people pressing close to the stage, then move through them during the ministry times and lay hands on them and pray for God to move in their lives. I believe God gave me several divine appointments with people He wanted me to pray over, and a few of them keep coming to mind and I’m still praying for them.

This year was extra special because we had several special guests. Matt Redman, Jesus Culture (including Banning Liebscher!), and Francis Chan all joined us. That was of course in addition to our own amazing IHOPKC worship leaders and speakers such as Misty Edwards, Laura Hackett, Justin Rizzo, Allen Hood, Corey Russell, and Brian Kim. Matt Gilman even came back to worship with us! He led us in some very loud, sweaty, dancey worship through midnight on December 31. We entered the first minutes of 2014 with dancing, singing, and shouting praise to Jesus!

The recurring theme through the teaching all weekend was David’s vow in Psalm 132.

“I will not enter my house
or get into my bed,
I will not give sleep to my eyes
or slumber to my eyelids,
until I find a place for the Lord,
a dwelling place for the Mighty One of Jacob.”
(Psalm 132:3-5)

This vow highlights the urgency of forsaking personal comfort for the pursuit of God having a dwelling place on earth. In David’s time, that meant building the Temple. Ultimately, that will mean Jesus’ personal return to the planet. Throughout all times, however, it means the manifest presence of God dwelling among us. We want God here. We want to create an environment in which God is welcome. We are not okay without Him. Everything else is secondary.

We need to regain this urgency.

I need to regain this urgency.

Francis Chan and Misty Edwards both spoke about Revelation 3 and the slow slide into lukewarmness. The scary thing is that we can be in such a spiritually dynamic environment and still realise one day that we don’t have the same fire we once did. I once wrote in my journal during the final few weeks of my internship:

“I’ve learned that going dull is not acceptable. And it can be fought with actual tools I’ve been given. I was created to live in communion with Him. If I can’t hear His voice, that’s a problem. If I can’t seem to remember why I need to, that’s a full-blown crisis. I need to live inside His heartbeat… If I read this later and realise I’m not–consider this the trumpet sounding in Zion. Shields up, red alert. Houston, we have a problem. There is no neutral in the Kingdom. You’re either going forward or back… if you don’t have that constant communion with Jesus, get on your face, figure out why, and then do whatever it takes to get it back.”

This is what’s been striking me the past few weeks. I’m hearing that Joel 2 trumpet sounding in Zion. I want to hit 2014 running harder than I ever have before. I am not okay without the daily presence of God.

Lord, help me.

Watch the archives of the Onething 2013 conference here: IHOPKC.org/onething And don’t miss Corey Russell’s teaching on Psalm 132!

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Prep Rooms and Thursday Outreach

On By CaitlynIn IHOPKC Life1 Comment

Hey, guys! I’ve got a few more fun little updates for y’all!

As an internship, we’ve added a couple new optional things to our schedule that are really challenging but really amazing. One of them is “prep rooms.” Every night during our first hour in the prayer room, we set aside a couple of the small side rooms to crowd into and pray in tongues for an hour straight to prepare ourselves to go into the main prayer room. Almost all of the interns have their prayer language (and the ones that don’t will be getting one soon!) and we are being encouraged to put it to use, to really align our spirits with God’s Spirit. It really is a pretty beautiful and amazing gift; I don’t know what I did before I got the gift of tongues in 2009. Actually, I do know what I did—I continually hit a wall of where I couldn’t sustain prayer and would just run out of words. I LOVE being able to pray in the Spirit!

One of the other things we’ve added is regular outreach every Thursday afternoon on our day off. Some of the guys started doing this on their own early on, and in the past few weeks it’s grown to be an official IHOPKC*/OTI scheduled thing for whoever wants to come, headed up by a guy from IHOPU who works with the outreach department an is really anointed for evangelism and healing. I went for the first time last week, and it was pretty amazing. We did it “Treasure Hunt” style, which means on the way there we were all asking God to give us pictures of things to be on the lookout for, ie specific clothes, locations, etc. We went to a local mall and broke up into groups of two or three, so I was with a guy and another girl wandering with purpose around the mall looking for people to pray for. We got to pray for a lot of people, and although we didn’t see any healings or salvations, we definitely got to see God touch a lot of people.

The girl who was with us had “leather sandals” and “pretzel” on her list, so when we saw a woman with leather sandals standing in line at an Annie’s Pretzel shop, we stopped to pray for her. We decided to wait until she had made her purchase, so as we were standing there leaning over a railing on the second floor, I saw a girl below wearing yellow flip-flops. “Yellow sandals” were one on the items on my list, so I left my partners and hurried downstairs to find her. By the time I got there she had disappeared, so I walked around the corner praying for God to show me what to do, and right there was a different girl wearing pink and yellow sandals standing in line at a different Annie’s Pretzel shop! The “coincidence” was too much to pass up, so I waited for her to get her pretzel, then explained that she had been highlighted on our treasure hunt and asked to pray for her. She was pretty excited and asked me to pray for guidance for her. I did, and we were both blessed as I went back upstairs to discover that in my absence my two partners had prayed for the woman in the leather sandals, her back had gotten partially healed, and they received a prophetic word for her which brought her to tears! God is so good. I am so excited to go back next week and be even bolder in praying for healing and in preaching the gospel. I never have shared the gospel with a stranger before, and maybe this is finally my time.

*I’ve been trying to refer to IHOP as IHOPKC now, because since they recently settled the lawsuit from the International House of Pancakes, part of the agreement was that they transition to a new acronym. One of the interesting tidbits I learned in the full staff meeting last week–yes, I count as staff. I feel cool.

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