What's Wrong With June Cleaver? by L K Mercer

     Recently I heard a sermon delivered by a woman that I respect, however she did say one thing I take exception with. She claimed "I'm not June Cleaver!" to the applause of the crowd she was speaking to. What I would like to ask now is "What's wrong with June Cleaver?". I think the women of that generation have been maligned and disrespected long enough. Those women were amazing and the world was a better place for them. They were there to greet their children when they came home from school, they were there to welcome their husbands coming home from work. They were THERE!
     I didn't grow up in that kind of home and for a large part of my life I haven't been able to be that type of woman, but I can definitely see the benefits from their lives! The families were stable, there wasn't such a large need of counselors, there wasn't so much violence, there wasn't such an issue with obesity, there weren't so many unplanned pregnancies and I'm sure if I looked into it I could find many more positives that this type of woman made to society.
     Yes, I always hear that families can't get by without two incomes "these days". Why do you think that is true? Maybe they would be able to get by with one income if the value was placed on the family instead of what the family purchased? Does the second income actually purchase a better life or does it purchase another car, more cellphones, more clothing, more electronics, more fast food, more gasoline for the extra cars and extra activities, more insurance to cover all of the extra "treasures"? I don't believe the extra income actually is "extra" if you put all of the extra expenses in a ledger to support it and I don't believe the things it is used to justify enriches our lives in anyway.
     I believe the "June Cleavers" were actually a pillar in our society that were underrated and under appreciated. Unfortunately we'll probably never be able to recover from the loss of them in our society. Our women have been given a role model now of a super woman that is able to balance family and job that does not exist in reality. Women today are encouraged to throw themselves on the alter of  "mammon", sacrificing not only themselves but the stability of their families, marriages and finally society.
     Once again I ask you, "What's wrong with June Cleaver"?

God's Word by L K Mercer

When we don't read scripture for ourselves, we are easily lead astray. Even when we do read we need to ask for God to reveal His word to us, but at least we won't be taken down a path that is merely someone else's interpretation. Don't be satisfied to simply listen to a sermon, spend time in the word, get to know the fathers, the prophets, the disciples, the apostles...let God speak to you through the history of those who have gone before us. God's word is inspired, it never goes out of date, it is new each time you read and meditate. Let it be alive through you, and you alive through it~

When We Are In God And God Is In Us by L K Mercer

     I would like to share an idea that has been in the back of my mind for awhile now.
     While we were still living in Tulsa, God put the desire to fast on my heart and Lane joined me. We shared a fast of 3 days and I was truly looking forward to my prayer time at the end of the fast! I knew it was going to be really special. 
     On the morning when it was time to break my fast I put praise music on, sat in my corner of the world at that time and started praying. I had a very personal time with the Lord, my heart was eagerly seeking Him and He responded. I felt the Lord touch me, it was such a wondrous feeling, unimaginable and extremely hard to describe. I felt as though the Lord's Spirit merged within me, it was the most complete, languid, satisfying experience ever. I realized as the feeling receded that we humans totally unaware of what we're doing, are trying to create that feeling artificially. The many addictions that people become involved in are our feeble attempt at trying to capture the complete feeling that we're really only able to find in God.  When we are in God and God is in us, we are complete! Anything less leaves us with a need that we throw many things at, trying to fill. Our only satisfaction and completion will be found in Him, this doesn't sound like a difficult concept, does it? Yet we spend most of our time, energy and money chasing temporary fixes for the emptiness within us. I challenge you, throw everything you have into Him and see if you don't find the fullness you've been yearning for!

Turn Back by L K Mercer

     The United States citizens are being stiff necked and forcing the Lord to retract His protection. He has blessed us to the point that we have forgotten Him and our dependency on Him. We live in the lap of luxury compared to many other nations, yet we focus more and more on ourselves, as a spoiled child would do, demanding more and more of our wants be met, instead of turning and worshipping the One that has so blessed us.
     Tonight I was awakened to plead mercy for the United States people, yet even in my own heart I see the wrong turn of our thoughts, our wants, our lives, our actions. Still I pleaded for mercy, for the Lord to withhold justice and instead give the people conviction of the mistakes they are making and living. Conviction strong enough to make changes in their paths! We are the ones that put a loving God in the position of having to lift His protection, we are the ones that are strong willed and go our own ways, living out our wants, no matter the consequences and then when the repercussions take place we turn around and say "No Fair! How could a loving God let that happen in our world?" I am not claiming perfection or complete innocence in my own life, I have reaped plenty of things that I have sown that were huge mistakes, so I am speaking from experience and also from God's word.
     We in America know what 9/11 is, but do we know what Isaiah 9:11 is? Isaiah has prophetic words written to Israel(God's chosen people). We now are God's people also, we have been grafted in thus these words speak to us as well. Isaiah was delivering words to Israel to turn to God or they would face having His blessing and covering removed. It is chilling to read Isaiah 9:11 "Therefore the LORD raises against them adversaries from Rezin And spurs their enemies on". The importance of these words and this verse is that our leaders (John Edwards, Tom Daschle and President Obama) proclaimed Isaiah 9:10 “The bricks have fallen down, But we will rebuild with smooth stones; The sycamores have been cut down, But we will replace them with cedars.” over our country after the destruction at the World Trade Center. When we should have been turning to the Lord in prayer, we (as a nation) spoke in arrogance and stated all of the things "we" would do, just as Israel did before they were given over to their enemies.
     Our founding fathers dedicated our country to God, we have been so blessed because of that dedication. Now we have turned to our own ways and we have become arrogant and unless we are convicted (collectively) and turn back to God we will face untold trials as justice is allowed to take place. We will be left to our own ways and then we will turn and blame God? We are the ones that have "gone our own way" why not confess our sins, beg for mercy and live a life devoted to the one that has made us?
    **Since proclaiming Isaiah 9:10 over the United States, John Edwards and Tom Daschle have already fallen in disgrace from their positions of great authority in our Nation.**

Let's Dance! by L K Mercer

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. Acts 2:42-47

      If we had continued in this way, we would have taken the world for God by now! Why did we stop? Where is our unity? What happened to our "awe"? What happened to our "glad and sincere hearts"? We can always point our finger in many directions, but maybe we should check the mirror first? Do I have a "glad and sincere heart"? Do I live with "awe"? Do I give without holding back?
     What do you think? This isn't an impossible dream or goal, it did happen and it's what is our ancestry as Christians, if we still lived this way, people wouldn't use the title "Christian" as a derogatory title! They would want to join us! Let's get back to what we are supposed to do, we were called to worship, prayer and fellowship! If we were truly dancing in God's fields of grace, the world would definitely want to join us! Let's do it! Let's Dance!

The Gentle, the Rude and the Great Awakenings By James W Goll

James W. Goll:

The Gentle, the Rude and the Great Awakenings

In the book The Call of the Elijah Revolution, which I coauthored with Lou Engle, I speak of three stages and types of the overall awakening. We can see these three awakenings – the gentle, the rude and the great – in world events and Church history as well as in the Bible.

Gentle Awakening

If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you will know that the past twenty years or so have been marked with a growing awareness of God's desire for intimacy with His people. God's awakening process has taken the form of outpourings of His Spirit that are designed to help people fall in love with Him. These outpourings have been called "The River," or "The Father's Blessing," or simply "Renewal" – or even "Revival." People across the earth have experienced God's presence first-hand and have grown in their freedom to love and laugh and enjoy the goodness of the Lord.
Within the same time frame, an intercessory prayer movement of unprecedented proportions has risen up, one which shows no signs of waning. It has taken many forms, from multiple prayer-oriented ministries such as 24/7, "harp and bowl," worship and intercession, the Global Day of Prayer, to simple, faithful, individual prayer and fasting to name a few. Our ministry hosts an Internet-based Global Prayer Storm where people around the world enter into "The Hour That Changes the World." Christians, especially those in the Pentecostal / Charismatic / Third-wave segment of the Church, have been awakened by their loving Father and are now devoted to "keeping watch" night and day.
This prophetic restoration has come in on the heels of the restoration of evangelism as an important task of the Church. Each of these – prayer, prophecy, evangelism – are aspects of God's gentle awakening.
Alongside signs of revival in the Church, we have seen many developments among the Jewish people and the nation of Israel. Messianic Jewish congregations are multiplying, even within the nation of Israel, and unprecedented waves of immigration from all over the world have swelled the population of that country.
Historically, the Jewish people have experienced waves of revival in terms of coming to faith in Jesus as the Messiah. The first waves, of course, were captured in the first chapters of the book of Acts. In more recent history, in the 1880s through 1900 (prior to World War I), a new wave hit Europe; some say that as many as 100,000 Jewish people came to faith.
Between 1967 and 1975 (at the same time that Jerusalem was being re-established under Jewish control), the charismatic renewal, which gave rise to many of the developments I mentioned just above, was burgeoning all over the world. This charismatic Jesus revolution scooped up many Jewish people across America. That's when Jews for Jesus and other similar organizations were born, proclaiming, "Yeshua is alive!" The news was met with skepticism for sure, but a number of people, especially young people, became His disciples. Messianic leaders, "fathers," if you will, rose up in fulfillment of Malachi 4:5-6 (NKJV):

"Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse."

Not only did the "fathers" rise up, but the "children" took hold of the covenant that God had made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as they learned how to honor the patriarchs.
In the early 1980s, the nation of Israel experienced a minor revival – which was major for those days. Perhaps fifty to eighty thousand Jewish people became Believers in Yeshua as the Messiah. Subsequent to that, in the early 1990s, significant parts of the former Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) saw stirrings and awakenings. Thousands of "people from the land of the north" emigrated to Israel. Wave upon wave of Jews have come (to faith, and/or to the Land), and they keep coming. While the exact meaning remains a mystery, Revelation 7:4 gives a specific number, 144,000 from the twelve tribes of Israel, who will be "sealed." The fruit of that sealing is portrayed in subsequent verses:
"Behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands; and they cry out with a loud voice, saying, 'Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb'" (Revelation 7:9-10).
The plan is underway. Gradually and gently, the Jewish people have begun to wake up. Gentile Believers have been waking up too, becoming aware of their responsibilities toward their Jewish brethren even as they become yoked with God's agenda. They have learned that praying for Israel means tapping into God's purposes for the nations of the earth. World revival is coming and so is the Lord Himself – and all of it is connected to the Jewish people. Each of us has a role to play. We have to wake up to the global realities even as we act locally in obedience to the Holy Spirit.
These developments are part of what I am calling the "gentle awakening" where He woos His people. In His kindness and mercy, God wants to restore people to righteousness and true life. When they don't respond to His repeated, gentle overtures, He – still because of his kindness and mercy – resorts to what I call "a rude awakening."

Rude Awakening

When people turn their faces to the wall and refuse to wake up to the Lord's gentler awakenings, they set themselves up to be shaken awake, rudely. Central to the Lord's awakenings is holiness. The prophet Amos described how He drops His plumb line to see how the obedience of His people measures up.

Thus He showed me, and behold, the Lord was standing by a vertical wall with a plumb line in His hand. The Lord said to me, "What do you see, Amos?" And I said, "A plumb line." Then the Lord said, "Behold I am about to put a plumb line in the midst of My people Israel. I will spare them no longer. The high places of Isaac will be desolated and the sanctuaries of Israel laid waste. Then I will rise up against the house of Jeroboam with the sword." Amos 7:7-9

When God's plumb line, which is His absolutely perfect standard of righteousness, exposes how sinful people are, He begins to set off alarms to get their attention. This can entail much shaking and quaking, often quite literally. Natural disasters fall into the category of rude awakenings, as do terrorist attacks and wars.
God wants to wake up as many people as possible in time for the global great awakening that lies in the near future. Time is growing too short for a merciful God to wait for everybody to respond to His gentle awakenings.
Rude awakenings often are not pleasant. In fact, they can feel like one disaster after another. And yet they can be effective. Rude awakenings drive people to their knees in surrender to their sovereign Lord. People repent, which is another way of saying they begin to line up with that divine plumb line.
Where Israel is concerned, the rude awakening can be used to drive people back to their ancestral land. It can give them a new heart a "heart of flesh," to replace the old, stony heart of blind disbelief.
This is truly "life from the dead" for the Jewish people and for the world (see Romans 11:15). It will precede the greatest awakening of all time and the final return of Jesus Christ, the Messiah.
The whole world is gripped in a war. Some, speaking prophetically of the days in which we live, term it "World War III." It's a war of terror and jihad in which radical Islam is out to destroy the West, including Israel. Threats are credible. Violent death occurs daily. And yet most Westerners are quite comfortable, relatively unaware of the situation and, for the most part, unaffected by it. They ignore the defiant threats of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the late Osama bin Laden while they concern themselves with personal matters.
This world war touches every continent. It features human rights abuses, genocide, corruption, and overt hatred, which are, more often than not, clothed in religious terminology. It's a spiritual war with physical manifestations. Now hear me out: It's going to get worse. The right response is not fatalism or denial, it's prayer, and lots of it. Pray for protection and relief, and don't forget to focus sharply on the real goal – awakening. Nobody should sleep through such a rude awakening. It's time to wake up! Why? Because God declares it is also going to get better! The dark will get darker and then light will shine and penetrate this temporary present darkness!

Global Great Awakening

On the other side of the gentle and rude awakenings lies the greatest awakening of all time! This awakening will affect all people, because it is the prelude to the climax of the ages, the return of Jesus/Yeshua, Christ and Messiah. No one knows fully what this awakening will look like.
But we do know how to prepare for it. What should our preparations look like? For starters, they should include a response to the voice of God, whether His voice is an inaudible whisper or He is shouting through our pain (to paraphrase C. S. Lewis).
Having gotten their attention, God is calling to action a large number of Believers across the earth. These Christians are radical. They have heard His call to become modern-day Nazirite. They are single-minded and single-hearted, sold out to the task of reclaiming a lost world for the Kingdom of God. Disregarding the high personal price, they have banded together and are willing to live sacrificially and to pray and fast and take a stand for righteousness and revival.
The goal of their prayers is the ultimate awakening of Israel. "All Israel will be saved; just as it is written, 'The Deliverer will come from Zion; He will remove ungodliness from Jacob'" (Romans 11:26). The second part of that passage is quoted from the prophet Isaiah, who wrote, "'A Redeemer will come to Zion, and to those who turn from transgression in Jacob,' declares the Lord" (Isaiah 59:20).
The prophets pointed to this. Jeremiah wrote (31:34): "...'They will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,' declares the Lord, 'for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.'"
This is a final awakening, a pronouncement of the story to God's chosen people, the Jewish people. The last days are upon us. Whether you're a Gentile or a Jew, wake up. Don't miss the Day of His manifested presence and His soon-coming!
May Jesus be exalted in all things!
James W. Goll
Encounters Network • PrayerStorm • Compassion Acts
Email: info@encountersnetwork.com
Available on Elijah List at https://www.elijahlist.com/words/display_word.html?ID=10276

Lesson From My Deck by L K Mercer

This last spring there were some beautiful petunias at the store, some were a vibrant purple and some a delicate shell pink with tinges of a deeper pink. I couldn't choose so I bought both colors and brought them home to plant. I enjoyed them on our deck with the colors a cheerful accent to the green of the trees across the lake. One day I looked out to see the whole plant wilted and no flowers! Checking closer there were about six big, fat, ugly worms eating away! I pulled the worms off and through them over the edge of the deck to their own fate. In one short night they had eaten over fifty percent of the plant and it was pathetic. I have been watering the plant now(for about two months), with little hope of it even surviving. I had started to pull the plants out and put something else in the pot to grow, but the plants still had a little(very little!) life in them and I didn't have the heart to deny them a chance at survival and yet here it is again blooming! It has happened so slowly that I hardly even noticed that it was blooming until there were several beautiful flowers.  There are so many thoughts available in this one example I don't want to even limit the lessons learned from this one example by encompassing it with my thoughts and words. Okay, just one thought, from despair and little hope to blossoms and beauty! Okay, one more, faithfulness (keep watering) and results!