Releasing Children Into The Gifts Of The Spirit

In order to see children grow in the gifts of the Spirit, we need to bring them alongside us in ministry and life, with the hope that one day they will go further than us – just like Joshua ultimately took God’s people further than Moses could.

This means teaching them how to worship and be filled with God’s Spirit, then how to hear God’s voice, prophesy, pray for each other and move in the gifts of the Spirit, as mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12. It means teaching them how God speaks through our passions and gifts. It includes showing them how to get a blueprint from heaven, gather wisdom, form a team, make a plan and go on a great adventure with God, seeing the Kingdom come. The arrows need to learn how to be released!

In one of our schools the children gathered around a 5-year-old with a broken ankle (demonstrated by an X-ray) and prayed for her healing. After the prayer she was due a second X-ray before a more permanent cast was applied for her planned six-week recovery time. Amazingly, after prayer, the break could no longer be found! The young girl took part in the school Sports Day that week.

These stories transform the atmospheres of our children’s ministries and entire churches. If we bring our children alongside us and teach them how to minister, then remarkable things can begin to take place in their lives – personal memories and experiences that will never leave them.

To do all this we need to recognise that our children are not only the generation of tomorrow, but they are to be an active generation today. In order for one generation to arise, we sometimes wrongly think another generation has to decrease. But that is not God’s way. No, he wants generations to walk and work together. Adults and children, flowing in the authority and supernatural power of heaven – that’s what Acts 2 prophesies and what the spirit of Elijah creates!

As well as being filled with God’s Spirit, encountering His presence and being able to move in God’s spiritual gifts, I also think God has given us children as secret weapons to win wars.

“From the lips of children and infants he has ordained praise, to silence the foe and avenger.” Psalm 8:2

Read that again if you would – It’s saying that praise and worship from children silences the enemy. That means the worship times in our kid’s activities, or when we are gathered together inter-generationally, can be a powerful form of spiritual warfare! I do wonder if the devil trembles more at children singing than when adults do!

I believe children are meant to be part of our church weaponry today, not simply “tomorrow’s generation.” They are arrows in our hands Psalm 127:4-5 says. If we can mobilise our children in Spirit-filled living, perhaps a whole new sense of presence, power and purpose will open up to our churches. Perhaps new moves of miracles, of prophecy, of healing can flow, if we let them step out in their simple, innocent ways. Perhaps they’ll provoke us grown-ups to jealously and get us stepping out in faith ourselves!

A friend of mine was fitting a new lightbulb in his high-ceilinged home, when he fell off the stepladder, badly injuring his back. Laying in agony he called to his five-year-old son “Get your mother!” knowing she was out of ear shot elsewhere on the property.

Instead of instantly obeying and calling for his mum, the little 5-year-old lad scurried over to his dad and did what he’d seen his dad do many times for others. He popped one hand in the air, the other on his dads injured back, lifted his little voice to heaven in praise and prayer and called out “Jesus, please heal my daddy!”

My friend was about to complain and correct his son when he suddenly realised all the pain had gone! He was healed!

That 5-year-old was a weapon.

We need to bring our children into our places of divine encounter, show them how to pray and how to hear God’s voice and do what God says. Then we need to release them into appropriate levels of ministry, by working alongside them and releasing them to go further than we ever will. We also need to release their praises to fill our homes and sanctuaries, weaponised arrows in the steady hands of caring spiritual parents.

If we do this, we may just find we have a remarkable revival on our hands. And trust me, revival history shows that their innocent, pliable hearts have led the way in many a powerful revival. The transformation of your church, and maybe our whole land, could be sitting in those Sunday School classes of ours, if we could only start a move of God among our children.

AN EXTRACT FROM THE DIVINE RESET book/ebook:

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