The Price of Breakthrough | Michael W Thompson

I stand corrected. Never talk about an accordion that the pastor's wife mom played.

Note to self, it has been so fun to be with you guys.

We had a great weekend. Wow, Tony Kim, good grief.

What a reformer and a raiser of reformers. Steve Backland. He's just like

a carpet bomber. He comes in and just you know, every time he

starts talking, I just know something is in my Arsenal's going to die.

He just does such a great job of challenging our mindsets and thank God,

did some wonderful things. I'm not Brian Simmons. I have read his books.

Brian is a friend and we're in the same revival group for Bethel Revival

groups down in Florida. I want you to pray for him, if you

would. This illness he's been fighting for six weeks or better. It's s

gootten crazy. He lost his hearing and nobody kind of knows why in the

midst of all of this. So if you would, over the coming days,

would you pray for Brian and ask God to word declaring his complete restoration

and healing. And I you know, I have this vision whenever the enemy

does something like that. My friend Robbie Dawkins says for everyone he takes,

I get three. And that's kind of how I feel about this. I

believe that Brian's going to come out of this with some things he heard when

he couldn't hear. That's going to go right back on the enemy's head.

So if you guys would pray for him and then buy all his books on

the way out, that'd be a blessing to him. But hopefully he'll get

back next time. But I was so on on Wednesday when I got a

call my dear friend Michael Proctors. Michael still here. I talked to him

there he is, is Penny with you? No? I want to give

you a word and you can take it home to Penny if you would.

Would you stand up? I heard this over you and Penny during worship.

This is from Isaiah fifty eight. I believe God is doing a Simian and

Anna thing in the church today where older men and women who have believed for

a long time and something God was going to do that you're going to see

them reignited. And the enemy thinks he's put us out to pasture. All

we've been doing is feeding and getting our strength back. Michael, this is

what I heard over you in Penny. The Lord will guide you always.

He will satisfy your needs in a sun scorched land and will strengthen your frame.

You will be like a well watered garden, like a spring whose waters

never fail. Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the

age old foundations. And here's what I heard directly for you in Penny.

You will be repairer of broken walls, restorer of streets with dwellings. I

believe that God has a fresh new thing that He's going to release for you

guys in the coming season, and it'll be a season where the two of

you are called and released by God to restore and repair. You're going to

be reaching into young, younger people's lives who have been broken, especially those

in ministry who've been crushed by ministry. You're going to reach in and restore

for them, repair for them to be restored. You're gonna be repair for

them to be restored. And there will be in a generation to come ministers

who affect and impact the generation because you went and repaired so they could restore.

So, Father, I pray over this power couple. I pray over

them that you would release them and bring them in contact with the broken ones.

They're hurting ones, the ones who were targets, targets in the battle

and the enemy took them out, Repair and restore in Jesus's name. Amen.

Amen, Wow, Wow, wow wow. I want to speak to

you as a church from it before you jump into the word. Biggest danger

in being part of a prophetic community is that you will get used to it.

A church that carries the anointing of worship that yours does, you'll get

used to it. A church that brings freedom and deliverance. The danger is

you'll get used to it and you'll start taking it for granted. You need

to know what you have here. You need to understand this is a deep

well and God is bringing people and He will continue to bring people pastors that

desperately need the water of life from this well. They can't go other places

because they haven't dug deep enough. They haven't done deep enough for the water

of life that these hungry people need. So please search, Honor the house,

Honor the work that God has done here, Honor the fact that this

isn't normal. This doesn't exist everywhere. What happens up here, that's not

everywhere. And you need to come in and cherish what God is doing because

as you honor what he does, he will do what you have not even

seen. My pastor's son, Josh, he's our worship pastor, incredible man

of God. He has this passion and he and my middle son Caleb,

who are really close, came to us and said to me and Roger,

because we were involved in this revival in the nineties. My son looked at

me, he said, Dad, when am I going to get my revival?

When is our generation going to receive our move of God? We love

hearing about yours, but we want ours. And Josh started. He started

documenting the move of God in our county because back in the nineties we didn't

all have all this stuff. You know. I came into my church the

first Friday of Renewal in nineteen ninety five. We seated a thousand. You

couldn't even get in the aisles. Our fellowship hal was full. We didn't

have cameras and that kind of stuff. We hung a sheet on the front

of the building and I had one of those big ol' honking projectors out there

and you could barely see, and there were people out the hundreds of people

outside of the church watching on this thing with a couple of speakers stuck up

there because that's all we had. So there was no documentation that went on

of this move of God that lasted almost three years in our region. And

Josh came to me, he said, I want to document this. He

said, I want to go back and I want to interview people. And

so over the last couple of months we've been interviewing leaders who were there,

and for me, it's been reliving moments of indescribable supernatural move of God that

after a while you kind of forget how amazing God was in those days.

But Josh came to me and he said, the reason I want to do

this is I want to honor the move of God in your generation so that

we can receive the move of God for our generation. You see, it's

not enough for one generation to tell the next about what God did. We

need to be telling them about what God will do for them. Every revival

is an Ebenezer. It's where God did something and we stand a stone of

testimony there and we say hitherto has the Lord helped us. God brought us

this far. But every generation needs its own ebeneze or its own testimony that

God did what no one could have done. I want to see a move

of God from my children and my grandchildren. I want to see stuff happen

that can only be blamed on God. I was raised in Portland and Boise,

so I have a heart for the Pacific Northwest. But there is a

move of God in the heart of God for this region. You know that,

and you haven't seen it yet. What you've seen is amazing. What

you haven't seen will take your breath away. If God can prophesy to us

that the desired of venations will come, Heck, the desired of the Pacific

Northwest is nothing for him. I want to challenge you church, believe for

your region. We meet together as pastors in our area. There's all thirty

thirty five pastors that meet every week for prayer cross lines. Because what we

saw God do in our region in the mid nineties was a down payment of

what He wants to do. See. What God does sometimes is he comes

for visitation to see if you will welcome him for habitation. I believe God

has come here in this house for visitation that he has question for you?

Do you really want habitation? Do you want him to be here where he

sets down and throned on your praises? What does that mean? He runs

it, he's the one on the throne. Do you want visitation or do

you want habitation? There's some challenges with that. See, pastors, if

you came to my house for visitation, there's a lot of stuff I just

shove in the closets, you know what I mean. We'd make it look

good in the spaces you were going to visit in. But if you're going

to move in, I can't shove all the junk in the closet. I

gotta clean it out. Sometimes when he comes for visitation, we hide everything

in the back room. But when he moves in. Here's the worst thing

about it. He doesn't even give you a choice. He just says,

get out my way. I'm gonna clean it up myself, because if I'm

gonna live here, we're not gonna have a mess. So there's some challenges

with habitation. But oh the rewards. We were in a pastor's meeting.

There are about five or six of us that have been there each of us

well over thirty almost forty years in our community. And my dear friend him

Franklin, pastors the Trees pastored the same church for thirty eight years through that

whole season of revival. He is involved in leadership. When the wave ebbed,

he and my pastor Roger, they they said, no, no,

no, no, this isn't this isn't going to happen. And they have

contended for revival for thirty years. And he began to weep in our meeting

and he said, the only reason I stayed in this county is because of

what God has spoken over it. And it hit me, you know when

when I'm sorry, I'm not preaching yet. You'll have to wait for that.

When when when Joel prophesied about revival that came on the day of Pentecost,

and he said, I'll pour my spirit out on all flesh. You

talked about your young ones prophesying your sons and daughters. I love what I

saw over there this morning. But he said this, your young men will

see visions, your old men will dream dreams. I was thinking about that

one day and I thought that sounds backwards, because you see a vision is

something that hasn't happened yet, but you know that it will. So you're

right on the edge of the fulfillment of a vision. You would think the

old guys like us would get the visions because we ain't got a whole lot

of time to see it get done, and the young men they would get

the dreams because the dreams are bigger, and they overarch, and they last

longer. They take longer to get there. But you know what he was

saying. He's saying, I want the old men to dream dreams that will

outlast them by generations, so the young men can and feed the vision and

get it accomplished generation by generation. That's why I believe we've got to Simon

and anything that's gonna happen. And I want to be one of them.

I'm an old man who wants to dream dreams. I want to have the

Benjamin button anointing older I get the younger I am. I don't talk like

this everywhere I go, but I don't sense this everywhere I go. It's

kind of like this. When I walked into the building, I went like

this. I've smelled revival before, and I smell it in this house.

Shut that head back I'll say one more thing and then I'll try to preach

in ten minutes. I'm not gonna try real hard, but I'll try to

preach into it. First Friday of January nineteen ninety five, Randy Clark had

been there at our church. It was housed in our building because we had

more seats than anybody. But it was a regional thing, and we had

a regional leadership that worked with him in this revival. And God was moving.

We were seeing miracles and signs and wonders. And he went down to

do an interview in Vero Beach at a radio station, and God moved while

he was at the radio station, and a church in Vero Beach that housed

that radio station filled up with people who heard on the radio God was moving,

and they showed up at the church, which wasn't even part of the

renewal. In fact, the pastor was fishing that day. We got called

down there to help them pray for people because they didn't even know what to

do. And for an entire day, God moved in a place that hadn't

even been asking him to come. We went down to do this interview with

Josh to record. I was there that day with Randy, one of the

pastors that was there, wasn't involved in renewal, but he came and God

used him, and he said this that day changed every day since that day.

And he wept thirty years later saying how that day changed his relationship with

his wife, with his children, with his ministry. It changed everything one

day. I want to tell you, my friends, it is illegal for

us to ever get like this and not believe this could be that one day

that changes every day that comes after it. When you come to this house,

come with that faith. This could be the day, this could be

the It's what Simeon did every day of his life. He went to the

temple looking for the baby, and then one day, just one day,

he put his arms in it and looked up to the father and said,

this is it. He is here. M turn in your bibles to Mark

chapter two. I'm gonna try to talk to you for a minute. What

we're talking about here, as I'm sharing my heart with you, is you

as a church are on the edge. You break through. I can see

it, I can feel it. You can feel the enemy flexing against you.

It's the reason your worship leaders struggling with her voice right now. There's

a reason that happens, because as you press to new places, he resists.

And the one thing he doesn't want to happen is new horizon to have

breakthrough from the pressure the place that you're at right now, because what's on

the other side will shift the atmosphere of this city and in fact this region.

So he's going to oppose it. He's going to push back. That's

what he does. I want to talk to you for just a minute about

the cost of breakthrough, Mark chapter two. Let me read it to you

real quick. First twelve verses, Mark two. A few days later,

when Jesus again entered Pernium, the people heard that he had come home,

so many gathered that there was no room left. God give us that problem,

not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them.

Some men came bringing to him a paralytic carried by four of them. Since

they could not Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd,

they made an opening in the roof above Jesus, and after digging through

it lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. And when Jesus saw

their faith, he said to the paralytics on your sins are forgiven. Now,

some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, why

does this fellow talk like that. He's blaspheming who can forgive but God alone.

Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this is what they were thinking in

their hearts, and he said to them, why are you thinking these things?

Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven,

or to say, get up, take up your mat, and walk,

But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to

forgive sins. He said to the paralytic, I tell you, get up,

take your mat, and go home. And he got up and took

his mat and walked out in full view of them all. And this amazed

everyone, and they praised God, saying, we have never seen anything like

this. There's a scripture in Psalm thirty four, verse three. It says

this, Oh, magnify the Lord with me. That's the most oxymoronic phrase

I've ever read. How do you magnify something that's already larger than everything in

the universe. The only way to make God bigger is to see God bigger

In other words, you have to see aspects of God you've never seen before.

You have to watch him do things he's never done before. He's magnified

when he becomes the largest thing in the field of your vision. And in

order for Christ to be seen as he's never been seen and do things he's

never done, there has to come a breakthrough from the farthest place we've ever

been with him. Every one of us has a border, a boundary that

we've reached with God, and we've seen him do that. But there's something

on the other side of that, and the question is do you want to

see that? Do you want to see that? So you're pressing up against

the extremities of what you've known of God, of what you've seen him do.

And as you press up against that, the resistance of the enemy is

there because he knows every time there is breakthrough, he loses territory. And

every time you get a breakthrough, it dominoes to other people and they get

breakthrough. And if you get enough breakthroughs happening for individuals in a body,

the body gets the breakthrough. You get enough bodies getting breakthroughs, and the

region gets a breakthrough. And some people say well, my breakthrough really doesn't

matter. Yours might be the one that knocks over that domino and starts the

whole process. So the question is do you really want to break through?

I was praying about this because I'm at a place in my life where i

want it so bad I can taste it. And the Lord asked me a

question. He said, what are you willing to wreck to see your breakthrough?

And he drove me back to this familiar story. You see, sometimes

when we're up against that pressure of resistance and we're not getting the breakthrough,

it's because we won't honestly deal with what's in the way. These guys love

this friend of theirs, and they got sick and tired of seeing him broken.

That's the first step in church breakthrough is when we get sick and tired

of seeing the brokenness of the world unchecked in people's lives. So they made

a bed and they laid him in it, and four of them grabbed it

and said, we're going to get you to Jesus. I bet that was

quite a journey. They probably talked about all the things they'd heard about Jesus

and what he had done, and they were building the guy's face, and

they may have joked with him and said on the way home, you can't

your own bed. But then they got there and it says they couldn't get

him near Jesus because there's too many people. So as they stand there,

they see the people problem, and the people problem is standing between them and

breakthrough. So what do they do. I've always gotten real realistic. I

have a big imagination about these stories in the Bible. These four guys are

standing there, They're looking at the crowd. There's no way in. They

can't see it. Which one of these idiots goes, I got a plan.

Let's raise the roof. Somebody had to have enough vision to say this

may not work, but we're going to find a way to get what matters

to us in the presence of Jesus. And so they get up and tear

the roof off somebody's house. We say that like, it's no big deal.

You let me come over there to your house with a skills saw and

start chopping on your roof roof and we'll find out. Right we I have

this great vision of Jesus in there teaching who knows what he's teaching about the

words of the kingdom or coming out of it. He's got a whole front

row of the religion, is sitting there trying to pick it apart, but

all the hungry people behind him are listening, and all of a sudden,

Hey starts raining down in front of him. And they kept digging. Brian

Simmons translates it until they broke through. They kept digging and digging and digging

until they created an open heaven, an unwanted skylight in that house right above

Jesus. And they lowered the man down. And he's sitting there on the

ground in front of Jesus, and everybody in the room is asking, what's

he going to do now? I would imagine everybody had an idea that he

would do something like this because he'd done it before. Son, get up,

take up your bed, and walk. But that's not what he said.

He said, son, your sins are forgiven. See his friends had

brought him for his broken legs, but Jesus was more interested in his broken

life. He said, what good is it if you get up and walk

out of here with the same broken heart you had when you came in.

Who cares if your legs work? Sometimes we at the church we've tried to

get people's legs fixed, and we try to make it as easy as possible.

So we make it friendly, and we lead them in a little prayer

and we promise them they're going to get to heaven, and the world around

us remains unchanged when what Jesus wants to do is heal people's lives. So

when they walk out of the room, it's in front of everybody, and

all the people around them say, well, we've never seen anything like that

before. You see breakthrough demands that somebody is willing to wreck the roof to

get their friends free, wreck the roof to get what's important to them right

up in front of Jesus. And sometimes in the church, we've been too

worried about the roof. You know, somebody gonna have to fix it when

we leave. We don't want to make too big a mess go. We're

gonna have to clean it up over the day, and we don't care how

big the mess is. We just want to hear Jesus say your sins are

forgiven. So the boys drop him down in front of Jesus. Jesus deals

with the religionous resistance, heals the man's legs, that he gets up and

he walks out. I love the end of that chapter where it says he

walked out in full view of everyone. Why because the testimony of Jesus is

the spirit of prophecy. And as he walked out, everybody that knew anybody

with broken legs start going it wait wait, wait, wait wait wait.

Maybe this Jesus can help them to The more public the testimony, the more

powerful the fire it starts. And it says that all of them looked at

each other and said, we'd never seen anything like that. Pastoral along for

the day when people get up from our church services and walk out the door,

and that's the testimony. We've never seen anything like that. Are we

hungry enough to see God move in such a way that when people encounter what

happens in this house, all they can say is, we've never seen anything

like that. We've never seen people get up at a wheelchairs and walk.

We've never seen blind eyes open, we've never seen deaf ears unstopped. But

we've seen it. Now, what about shun it? About that? I'm

a Coosa. I'm willing to raise the roof to hear the people of my

city say we've never seen anything like that before. So my question is to

you, what are you willing to do? What are you willing to wreck

for breakthrough? Two years ago this month, I preached Sunday morning at Bethel

Church, first time in twenty five years. It's a long story, and

I could tell you why it's such a miracle that that happened. But my

pastor and Tim Franklin that I told you about, they went with us and

their wives and my son Caleb. He's thirty nine years old almost. He

was just a kid thirty years ago when God moved in our city, so

they didn't really get to experience all of it as little kid. He remembers

going to church a lot and seeing stuff happen all around him, but he

felt like he's too young to really absorb it. So he and Lily went

with us to Bethel and we were there at Randy's conference the week before I

preached, and my poor son just got fried, I mean wrecked. Holy

Spirit got all over him, got drunk one night, we had to drive

him home, got one night, got electrocuted. You ever see anybody get

electrocuted? I mean like that for an hour. Well, at Bethel,

if you get the Holy Ghost on you. Even if your eyes are fluttering,

you better watch out because they're on you like ugly on an eight.

I mean they jump on you, pray for you, and I mean there

was a lot of them just crawled up on top of him. Looked like

a dog pile, and he got absolutely undone by the Holy Spirit. Now,

Caleb, you need to understand he not only is the guy that had

all the ducks in a row, he knew their names, how old they

were. I mean, he was like that since he was a little boy,

always eminently successful, graduated high school early with a four point whatever gpa,

and went to university, and he got so many scholarships he got paid

to go to school. He was managing a restaurant while he was in college.

At nineteen years old, became a very young manager of Whole Foods and

earth Fare and wound up at managing a big old super target and just climbing

the ladder, you know. But he came back, He came back from

that trip realizing that's not what he wanted to do with his life, and

it's not what God wanted him to do. That doesn't mean it's not for

everybody, but for him something was different. So he came to me a

few months later. He sat down with me and he said, Dad,

I don't believe I'm supposed to do this the rest of my life. And

he said, uh. He said, I think I'm gonna make a change,

so we're gonna do so. I'm ea quit my job. I'm gonna

sell my house on the golf course. I'm gonna buy a forty four foot

trailer RV and I'm gonna live in it. And I'm gonna go chase the

dream God's put in my heart. And I said to him, as Lilia

on board said she's pushing, We're going for it. And then he looked

at me with tears and he said, Dad, do you think I'm crazy?

And I said to him, Son, I'm not worried about you being

crazy. I'm worried about you getting to my age and looking back and wish

you to done it. Go chase his dream for you, son, Go

chase it. Sell whatever you have to sell, living whatever you have to

live in. Chase his dream. And when he exercised his faith like that,

it not only radically changed his life. My older son, who had

been running for God for twenty three years, He grabbed him by the throat

and drug him back into the Kingdom, the domino effect. A couple of

months ago, they started a business together, chasing the dream. What's it

worth to you? What are you willing to wreck to see God move?

What are you willing to change to get visitation to become habitation? What are

you willing to sacrifice and lay aside? What roof are you willing to tear

off to get an open heaven and get what you love before Him who loves

it more than you do. I want to challenge Church. You're at a

point. Can feel it. I can sense it. You can. You

can feel the stretching, You can feel the tension of the enemy pressing back

against you. You are at a place a breakthrough. I just came here

this morning to tell you tear off the roof, wreck the roof, and

then go make a bunch of beds and go get them folks, and drag

them in here before Jesus. I want the worship team to come back.

I want to pray for some of you as individuals. You're sat here and

you've listened to me ramble on, and you realize that in your life something

started making sense this morning. Some of that resistance, some of that stuff

you've been up against, started making sense as we talked here today. Because

you're pressing for breakthrough. I want to challenge you, press on, push,

push. It isn't about earning it. It's about positioning and posturing yourself

so that God can be to you what he's never been before. You will

see things you've never seen before, and people will look at your life and

what God is doing and say, I have never seen anything like that before.

To stand with me, Ministry team, would you come down real quickly.

I want to pray for some people this morning that this particularly has resonated

with you. You know you're in a position or you're pressing up for breakthrough

in your life. It could be radical changes like my son. It could

be spiritual breakthrough. It could be familiar breakthrough. It could be breakthrough in

some part of your job or your work. But you know you're pressing up

against it. You can feel the tension. I want you to get prayer

this morning. I want you to have somebody agree with you that God will

give you the courage, the desire, the strength and the passion to keep

pushing, keep pushing until it breaks. Papa, I asked by your Holy

Spirit you fill this house with the passion of your heart right now. Lord,

I know this church has fought hard to get a portal and open heaven,

and we sense what you're doing, the God. What you've done that

we sang about. What you're doing is only indicative of what you want to

do that we haven't even dreamed about. Yet. You are the God who's

able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we've asked you to do and all

that we've imagined. Lord, I pray for those who stand at a point

of breakthrough in their life. Give them the courage this morning to make one

more push, one more push Jesus' name. If that has resonated with you,

I want to ask you to come. Let somebody pray with you.

We're going to worship, and I just want you to allow the Holy Spirit

to bring you to that place where breakthrough is yours. Come, Holy Spirit,

Calm, Holy Spirit. There's a breakthrough, Yeah, breakthrough, break

through. God. We ask you to release a breakthrough anointing right now.

We heard about it earlier, the breaker anointing, breakthrough, breakthrough. There

is nothing like your nothing like I. I just want to be with you,

and some of you have to leave, that's fine, feel free to

do so. Like your st ime only spirit, come, Holy Spirit.

I just want to be away. I just want to be long. There

is nothing like yours. Receive, just receive. Your only job right now

is to receive it. Father, expand our capacity to receive this money spand

our capacity to receive. I just want to be away, just want to

be with you. I just want to be your Just want to be with

is nothing like your like O, there is nothing like you who keep saying

I don't just wanta be I just want to be waring you. But I

just wanna be here you. There is nothing like your Lord,