God has a plan for our lives. He has a destiny for us. God is in the long game. He is our God from now until the day we go to Heaven - and that's when the action really starts. God is sowing into our lives. We are not just interested in good events taking place. These events add up to something more. God has meaning in life and He is raising us up. It is important for us to know the path He has for us in the long game. He is working all things together for those who love Him and are called.

The battle line separates the safe place in our lives from the enemy, the battle, and the place where we will encounter something beyond our experience. It is a place of disdain, discouragement, and reproach. We don’t like to be there. It is the place where the giants in your life shout. It is a place where many tend to shrink back into depression and patterns of avoidance.

On the other side of the battle line lies danger and uncertainty, but also your destiny. It is the place of victory. This is the place we must go, or we will never know where God is.

Instead of shrinking back, step across the battle line. The glory of God will arise upon you.

We often want to look back and compare our present situation with where we were 10 years ago. But God is more interested in where we will be 10 years from now and how we will get there. In order to get there, we must address the things in our past and present that keep us from moving forward into the future destiny that God for us. When we exchange the yoke of the world and connect ourselves with the yoke of Jesus, He gives us great boldness to pursue the preferences He has for our lives.

What do I do when my depression persists? Is God enough for depression? What do I do when my poverty persists? What about my loneliness, my failing career, and the promises of God that haven't come to pass in my life yet? What about pain, suffering, tragedy, oppression and death? What does God have for us when these things persist?

There are certain troubling situations that we face that require more than what we know or have experienced. We may have well-crafted words that we can speak, but if we remain at a distance and don't engage with God in the troubling situation, we will lack the substance required to see the power of God manifest. In order for us to know for ourselves the power of God, we must sink in with God. We must descend into the mud.

When you descend into the mud, you do not know what God is going to do. You are determined to see what God has, so you take the journey in with God. You are not in control and you cannot rely on what He has done, or what you have done before - at all. You are shut in with the darkness. You experience the darkness in your physiology and you don't know whether you will come out alive or not. This is the most profound journey, since there are no maps. It is when you go in, that God begins to do things. You will know for yourself the power of God and His resurrection.

All of us want to do great things, but we don’t all have the depth to do them.

It is in the deep room, the consecrated time we spend alone with God, where God gives us the wherewithal to do great things. It is a painful room where God stirs things up for us. It is a costly space where we go through our distractions until God comes through. It is in this place that God builds up who we are. The things we are going to do will not come easy. How we face difficult situations will depend on how deep our room is. It is important for us to know that hard things are costly. It is the deep room that causes us to not be afraid to do hard things.

The deep room brings us to silence. Silence is different than being quiet. We like it to be quiet so we can be peaceful. But when God says silence, He means it over and against our proclivities and tendency to disobedience. It has to do with stilling our own will and desires. It is an obedience thing rather than a technique thing. In the silence, He impresses Himself upon us.

People who do great things plunge into hard situations. What are your resources for that? What is your God like? How present is He to you? How immediate is He to you? How deep is He to you? He is going to send you to do great things, and that means going into dangerous or scary places. In those places, God will call you and say let’s see your room.

What’s happening in your room?

How do we move from an intellectual, abstract knowledge of God to an intimate knowledge of God and His power to transforms lives? We must experience it for ourselves. If we stay at a distance, in a place where we maintain control and stability, we may have an intellectual grasp, but we really know nothing. Rather, we must enter in and fully engage ourselves in what God is doing. God has a tremendous treasure for us. As you enter in, you may not know if you'll make it out alive - but God is there and you will come to know Him.

Will you take the plunge and cross over to what God is doing, or will you remain at the outskirts? We can pray for God to shake the earth, but it may be possible that the earth will not shake until we cross over. Are you up for it?

Pastor Michael Koh shares a message from 1 Samuel 14...

We may have been abused, hurt, or disappointed by others in ways that have caused us great harm. As a result, we may carry a grudge and want revenge against them.

However, carrying unforgiveness is like living in a tiny room where you cannot breathe properly and it's very hot. That becomes the state of your heart. When you decide to forgive, you open big windows and the air begins to blow in and circulate. Then you are able to enjoy life.

God has forgiven us so many things. We should also continue to forgive much. Jesus tells us that we must forgive not seven times, but 70 times seven. It may be painful, but with the help of the Spirit of God, you can surrender every grudge and hurt to the Lord. The enemy used those people to do what they did, but God used the very things they did as your training for greater things. Trust in the Lord that He may set you free and have His way in your life.

May God help us forgive one another.

Many people are not willing to be committed to experiencing the power, presence, reality and wisdom of God. They are willing to know things about it, but there is some barrier that is preventing them from being committed. It is a commitment to the thing that God is calling you to that is important, that will cause you to really know it. We have to commit ourselves to a relationship with God in which we can hear His voice.

This commitment is really a key thing. Without commitment, you actually will not lose yourself in it. You will always stand at the outside, and you will use the formal knowledge in your head to keep you at a distance. You may be surrounded by people who move in the power of God, but never experience that yourself. You could be surrounded by people who talk about testimonies of how they were transformed, but you are never transformed because you have never immersed yourself into the power of it. You need to immerse yourself in God. For you to immerse yourself, you need to leave your life and die into him. You have to let go of control of your whole life and commit yourself to this thing that God is doing.

When you take the plunge, you will be free from the previous imprisoned life that you had. If you stay and don't give up, God begins to open up the spiritual realm and suddenly you will see God at work.

Pastor Michael Koh preaches from 2 Kings 5...

The Kingdom of God comes as a seed. If you can detect the seed when it is small, and you grow it, you will see the seed get stronger and stronger. The things of God are built up incrementally. Invest your time in prayer, your devotional life and fellowship. You will build yourself up. In life there are many destroyers, but your builders will outpace your destroyers. God is training us to hear His voice amidst all the other voices. The voices of the builders will become stronger than the voices of the destroyers. You will feel the hand of God upon your life and experience His peace.

Those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. To wait is to give your full attention to the one you are waiting upon. When we give God our full attention, we set our heart towards God and praise Him for God Himself. We give up the utilitarian ways in which we praise God so that something good will happen. We will never be free if we use God to get a good life. God is not to be subsumed under the American Dream. God is God. Everything else is to be immersed into Him, surrendered to Him. When we praise God for Himself, the gravity of God's weight begins to pull us to Himself. We don't worry about circumstances any longer. We will be dead to all else, and our minds will be free. We get to a point in which we know that whatever God says, we will be okay. The voice of God gets stronger and stronger in us. We can say, "God, I just want to be in you, whatever you do in my life." When we pray to God for God's sake, not just for a desired outcome, our hearing becomes pure. Whenever negative things happen, we will be able to trace the movement of God through them.

Pastor Michael Koh preaches from Luke 18 on January 6, 2019...