Our Journey Home | Pastor Malachi Maillot | January 10th, 2021

I want to welcome those of you who are joining uh our church at home from the Colonel Christian Center, as well as Lake Country, and and our spiritual family globally.

It's just really good to be with you and I pray that you've had a great Christmas.

We're looking forward to uh what God has in store for his church and his people in 2021.

The uh pastoral staff have gotten back to me and said that they're going to be spending some quality time and over the next six months talking about um a homecoming journey for fathers and sons.

And uh they asked me if I would tell you a little bit about my own journey, and so that's what I want to do today.

And I'm I'm just gonna go back a little ways.

Um of these stories you may have heard include into before, but it's my hope that the overall sense of what you pick up from it today will really drive home the importance of coming and finding uh our our our way home to the Father, as well as understanding our role in terms of sonship.

Uh for many years I I resisted the idea of what I would call the apostolic movement until a God-designed moment in 1992, which was about 25 years into my response to the call to ministry that I received as a young man, uh went went to a youth conference and uh was there uh trying to find out God's will for my life and went down to the altar.

And I must admit, with a little bit of reluctance, even maybe even rebellion, and saying, God, you better tell me what you want me to do in life, or else I'm gonna be making my own decisions.

And there as I knelt at the front, uh, God spoke into my heart and said, David, I'm calling you to the ministry as a teacher, go to Bible school.

And I was actually ready to get up, thinking that I was trying to convince myself.

And uh someone came up who was in the prayer line and praying for the young people and put his hands on me and said, Uh, God just called you into the ministry uh as a teacher, go to Bible school.

And that was that was the call I received in uh in as a young man uh 25 years prior to this 1992 conference.

I was uh asked to go to uh to listen to some apostolic leaders in Dallas, Texas, and my brother-in-law, particularly, Doug Schneider, had been at a crossroads in his own ministry within a mainline denominational church, and uh he asked if I would come alongside him and pray and and walk with him through his own journey and trying to define next steps for his life.

And after one of the sessions, um he threw his books on my lap and said, I'm going down for prayer.

And I you have to know this stadium.

Uh, there's like 10,000 people there.

And I watched my brother-in-law just sort of make his way through the crowd, just separating people, getting to the front for hands to be laid on him by some apostolic uh uh leaders from Argentina.

When he got back, of course, picked up his book, sat down.

I said, Well, what happened?

He says, uh, I got it.

And my my response to him was, What did you get?

He says, I got it.

I don't know what I got, but I got it.

And there was a significant shift, I must say, that occurred in his life from that point on.

But I I must too admit that I was a little bit jealous.

I too wanted to uh to discern what the next 25 years of my life were going to look like.

And uh the next session, there was a panel with uh Dr.

uh Brown from Pensacola and uh Dr.

uh Peter Wagner, and they were sharing about uh this apostolic journey in this panel discussion, and we're completing the session when I was asking the Lord at the same time, saying, Lord, I really want a word myself for the next 25 years of my life.

And and Dr.

Brown was asked to pray to end a session, and he began to pray, and then halfway in the middle of the prayer, he stopped and said, Romans chapter 1, verse 5 and 6, and then went on praying.

Romans 1:5

Well, I wasn't interested in the rest of the prayer.

There was something that happened in that moment in time and drew my attention to Romans 1, 5, 6, and I had the amplified Bible at that time, and it read, It is through him that we have received grace and our apostleship to promote obedience to the faith and make disciples for his namesake among all of the nations.

Well, from that moment on, I as it was 25 years previous, I had to respond to the call of God, go to Bible school, get trained and equipped for the ministry.

At this point in time, I realized that was a clarion call to me for the next 25 years, and I was going to have to receive it.

And so I did.

And when I did, God began to open sovereign doors of opportunity to the nations and gave apostolic, I would call them strategies for growing our influence as a small church in Rutland globally, not just uh locally and nationally uh or provincially, but globally as well.

And I must say that each one of our board members took on that apostolic role too, and Clinton Diane opened up uh and began building the works in uh in uh Mexico, and Ryan and Judy began to work through Ethostasia with nations with in Asia, and uh another brother uh uh began to open up uh Kenya with Francine and Larry.

And so we uh and Norm began to work uh globally with me in different uh functions in Australia, etc.

So we saw the work of God, that anointing that settled on my life as God raised my life up, he also began to raise others up too.

This created in me a tremendous desire for the Word of God and to understand what the apostolic uh uh calling was in the scripture.

And it it started to overwhelm me when I uh began to understand uh as I studied the Godhead, the f the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And uh when I saw the uh the way in which they responded to authority and uh their unity of purpose that that each was serving one another.

You saw, for example, the father had the overall plan, and Christ was the administrator of that plan operationally.

He he implemented that plan, but the Holy Spirit's role was to manage that plan and to see that plan worked out.

Uh, when you looked at the the honor that they had for one another and the love they had for one another, and the covenant commitment that they carried in their heart.

As a matter of fact, that was the thing that bound them together more than anything else was they covenanted to each other how they were going to respond and how were they gonna work together.

Well, that opened up to me a study of other things, like I wanted to, and by the way, I was brought up in the church, and I understand the church from different perspectives, not just only as a an adherent, but also as a pastor's son who listened through the vents.

And I heard at times the way people talked about my my family, my mom and my dad.

And uh it turned me off against what I would call churchianity and and and and kind of messed with my idea of what it meant to be a uh a Christian and what the church was supposed to be.

Uh, but in this process of studying the fatherhood of God and and apostolic governance, uh, I began to understand what fathering was actually all about, and that it when you look at it, uh, this principle of fathering is located in the nuclear family.

I saw it reflected in the Old Testament building of the church, which was called the Father's House in Isaiah 56, verse 7.

Isaiah 56:7

Uh, we see that in the New Testament, when when Jesus begins to appoint apostles in the New Testament church, and essentially their role was as a spiritual father, with a responsibility to raise up a spiritual family, which I believe was the extended heart of God the Father and sending his Son Jesus to us.

And all of this is it can be wrapped in a prophetic statement that is found in Malachi chapter 4, verse 6, when he says he's gonna at one point in time turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers.

Malachi 4:6

What a what a wonderful promise.

Well, what that did practically in my life was I no longer wanted to function as a pastor of a church.

I wanted to be a spiritual father and raise a spiritual family.

And in that process, I had to commit myself to growing old with people for a long period of time.

Well, in uh in a month, it'll be 39 years of committing my heart to a spiritual family.

I I believe that this generation is in desperate need of the emergence of a fathering um anointing.

Uh this has been talked about for many years, uh, but we really, really need to get that deeply woven into our into our spiritual DNA.

Um you look at what a father can bring, uh, and I'm not just talking about it in terms of one gender here, we know it's fathering and mothering in in very real ways, but when we talk about that, we see in the scripture that that brings us blessing.

It brings us authority and correction, it brings us affirmation and approval.

I can remember uh when when Christ himself heard uh his father speak to him and say, This is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

He hadn't done anything.

That blessing and approval and affirmation was not based upon what he had done, but upon who he was.

We see that fathers and mothers they bring protection and security, comfort and love, provision and prosperity.

They bring an inheritance to their kids, identity, a family name, a purpose and destiny.

And you know, when you take a look at families today, sometimes you see that that calling and anointing and gifting resting on entire families for specific purposes.

But I also saw it in New Testament language where Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4.15, he says, even though you have 10,000 guardians in Christ, you don't have many fathers.

For in Christ Jesus, I became your father through the gospel.

And then again he wrote to the Thessalonican believers in 1 Thessalonians 2.11, he says, You now know, as a father dealing with his children, we used to exhort each of you personally, stimulating and encouraging and charging you to live lives that are worthy of God the Father.

Well, the challenge in my heart was with this revelation that was coming to me from the Word of God about spiritual fathering and the apostolic movement, um, it was to find spiritual fathers who actually understood uh what we were what I was thinking and what I was seeing in Scripture.

I I understood tutoring.

I I had played uh instruments as a as a child growing up, and I got tutors.

Uh, I understand discipling.

I had people in my life that were discipling and training, and I understand the concept of mentoring and life coaching as is uh more aptly communicated today.

But spiritual fathering was something different.

And uh my sense was as I began to study the scriptures that discipling imparted knowledge with the intent of transforming the character of individuals, and that mentoring trained people in their gifts and abilities and modeled the expression of the anointing.

But fathering had to do with something else, and it had to do with that prophetic call resting upon an individual's life, their purpose, their identity, their destiny.

And uh my heart was longing for that, and that led me to a personal reconnect with my own father.

And I've I've told this story at various times in my past, but my dad grew up uh without a dad when uh my my grandmother was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia.

She met a fellow Czechoslovakian in New York City.

Uh, they got married and lived in uh New Jersey, but that that was at the time of the early Pentecostal movement uh back in the 1920s.

And um my grandmother, uh, who was brought up Catholic, got gloriously saved and filled with the Holy Spirit in that early move of God.

And her husband had a real challenge with that.

He essentially said to her, You cannot love two men.

It's either Jesus or me.

And she was, of course, trying to help him understand that she could do both.

But uh he took her on a holiday uh when my uh when my dad was six months old to Florida, and at the end of that holiday, divorced her and brought her back to uh Prathamboy, New Jersey, uh, a single parent, and uh left her.

And he went on to become a very, very wealthy businessman.

Um but my my ma, my grandmother and my dad grew up in poverty, and of course, as a single child.

So I I do really relate to single parent parent family uh and the the challenges that they go through.

And she, of course, turned her heart towards prayer and to Heavenly Father uh for provision and for help.

And so my dad grew up in an atmosphere of prayer and and carried that all of his life.

I I remember him telling a couple stories.

Some I remember, some I don't, but when he was 13 years of age, um his mom had said to him, Go down to the parking lot, this uh this parking lot where your dad has set up uh his equipment and he was uh building turnpikes at that point in time, or what we call a highway, super highway.

And um uh he went on to the site and said to his dad, uh, went up to his dad, hat in hand, and said, Hi, Pops.

And his dad looked at him and said, Don't you ever call me Pops and walked away.

And my dad picked up a piece of wood and uh carved a little piggy on it and sanded it and made it a breadboard for his mom.

And uh I remember in the latter stages of his life when we were cleaning everything out, I wanted to throw that out, and he said, No, don't throw that out.

It's the only thing my dad ever gave me.

That was sad to me.

But I I too remember personally going up with my sister, with my dad to the front steps of the house and um uh meeting his uh uh live-in wife, common law relationship, and she turned and called in and said, John, your your son and grandchildren are here.

We were dressed in our Sunday best, and all I can remember is the voice that came from inside saying, Send them away.

Um I don't have a picture of my grandfather, but I do have a remembrance in my mind of his voice sending us away.

Well, as we as we grew up, uh I realized that that was a trauma, a traumatic experience my dad went through.

I didn't understand it growing up, but I do understand it now as an older man.

Um he grew up looking for a father and carried to some degree an orphan spirit, uh a feeling of being abandoned and rejected and left out, and and uh was constantly seeking words of approval and affirmation from older men.

So when he had time off, he would look for a relationship to an older man to go out, go fishing, uh, do something as a project together, because that was filling a vacuum in his own heart and soul.

Uh from my perspective as a son, I was looking for a father and uh constantly uh disappointed by some of the things that were my expectations.

And uh I remember having a few breakdowns on that level of going, you know, God, I don't understand this.

And times with my wife when we would be praying about it to try and figure out what the what the gap was, what the the stress was.

But um I I remember trying to figure this out one day specifically, and I was sitting on the stairs, my wife was next to me, and I was weeping over an expectation that had not been fulfilled, and wondering, what on earth do I have to do?

Because the the natural intent of of uh of a man that way, when he's not getting his father's affirmation or uh feeling uh that rejection is to become very independently minded.

I don't need you then.

I'll do whatever I want to do in my own terms and my own way, and I just shut a lot of that relationship down and did my own thing.

And I remember that day as we were sitting there in, and I was weeping, and we were also praying and trying to discern it.

I heard the Holy Spirit say it very clearly to me.

Be a faithful son to your father and draw upon his fathering.

And if you will be a faithful son to your father, um, he will become the father that you're looking for.

And man, from that point in time on, I spent uh quite a bit of my life just were uh what a joy it was to work with my father.

Uh, but to take him out, even at the latter stages of his life when he was blind, we would have our father-son times together and we would talk and minister to one another.

But in in becoming a son and treating him, treating him as a faithful son, I began to draw upon his heart the heart of a father out of my dad.

And I want to say by the by his passing, uh, we had experienced many good years as a father's son in relationship.

Well, I believe that process of learning to be a son is a process that even Jesus was required to go through.

The Bible says in Hebrews 5, 8, although he was a son who had never been disobedient to the Father, he learned active, special obedience through what he suffered.

Jesus had to go through that process of responding to his father.

And when his disciples, of course, said, Show us the father, he said, Well, me and my father were one.

And if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

He was, his heart was to be a reflection of his father.

Um, even as a young man, when he was caught in the synagogue talking to the uh the chief leaders, he said, Uh, I'm here because I've got to be about my father's business in my father's house.

So when he gets that affirmation from heaven before he starts his ministry, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased, his sonship then it begins to be tested.

And we go to the temptation, where you see consistently through the temptation, if you are the son, uh, and his sonship was tested.

When he passed the test of sonship, you can see a release of the inheritance that came to him.

He walked out of that uh wilderness, empowered by the Holy Spirit, walked into the synagogue, picked up Isaiah 61, and began to read, Now the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, anointing me to preach, and went out and began to draw upon his inheritance as a son.

Well, I'm convinced that positioning yourself as a son is a response to the spirit of adoption that made us sons of and and children of God to begin with.

The Bible says, and Paul speaks this in Romans 8.15, he says, For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the spirit of sonship, and by him we cry out, Abba Father.

We were all on this journey to know Heavenly Father, and it was the heart of Jesus to come, to reconcile us to God the Father, to help us understand what fathering actually meant.

And I began to realize if it was that important a principle for my life, that it was probably important to have this as a principle within the concept of a church or a congregation or a people that I work with.

And so my heart moved from being just a pastor into a place where literally I wanted, I wanted to be a spiritual father in the house.

And can I say this to you?

I think that there's a concern that I have because I've looked at many pastors who spend probably an average of three to five years in a place and then move to another church.

Um if if natural dads and fathers and mothers did that and broke up with each other three or uh to five years and and then left the family to another father and mother for the next three to five years, you would have very dysfunctional families.

And I believe that that at times is evidence in the Church of Jesus Christ.

We we become dysfunctional spiritual families because we don't have that fathering going on.

And I'm not in any way trying To say we need to go to a Catholic and uh concept of this where now I'm not just the pastor, I'm the priest, I'm Father David.

That's a title that doesn't fit our thinking.

But the concept of being a spiritual father is biblical.

And it doesn't have to be denominationalized, it has to be relationalized.

It has to come from the heart, one for the other.

And so I remember one Sunday morning preaching to the congregation on what I had what I'd felt in my own heart.

And the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, you need to welcome the spirit of sonship into the entire congregation.

And so that morning, and some of you will remember this, I announced that the Holy Spirit wanted to come and deposit a spirit of sonship upon the whole congregation.

And there was something that broke that morning.

There was an orphan spirit that was broken, and a spirit of sonship came upon us, and we were we were no longer looking at it as something of um uh of title and position and authority.

It was all about relationship and developing a spiritual family together.

And I know it was a spiritual move of God because we'd had uh a Chinese son uh come to live with us.

Um I had been going into Taiwan uh for many years, and one time I met uh his mom.

Uh she was dying of cancer, uh Maria, and they'd asked me to go and pray for her.

Um I had encountered cancer in my early years of my life, and so I had a real compassion, prayed for her, and at the end of it, though she could not speak in English, she commented, Would you take care of my son?

And I said, Well, I've got to go back to Canada.

There's no way I can make this decision right now, but I'll be back in three, four months, and um I'll give you my answer then.

Well, when I got back three, four months later to Taiwan, uh she met me at the airport, totally healed of her cancer, and still ministering to this day, and has a uh I work in uh Hong Kong um in a house of prayer that's 24-7, and uh a wonderful worship leader.

And uh, but but Alan came to live with us, and and so he was home that day when I came in the door and he was in the living room and he was crying.

And I came in to see him and I said, Alan, are you okay?

What's what's wrong?

Um he looked at me very clearly and said this.

He says, I want to be your son.

I I don't want to be a homestay.

And it it kind of shocked me to begin with because I'd always treated him like a son.

I'm not a homestay, uh, but uh something happened inside of my heart, and I said, Well, if you're gonna be a son, then as at this moment, I want to tell you, you are my son, and I am your father.

And uh there was something that happened in a moment of time, and I said, Well, if you're gonna be a son, you've got to have an inheritance.

And so I'm gonna talk to my other children, uh Brody and Ryan and Carrie, and I said, Listen, are you willing to accept uh Alan as a son?

And if he is to make him part of our inheritance, and they all bought in on that, and I was so proud of them for that.

But when he said that to me, I want to be a son, uh, not a homestay.

It it was something that went to the very depth of my soul, and I realized this is the cry of a generation, and it was emerging from his heart into my heart at that moment in time.

And uh I remembered a funny joke of this, that but the next day uh just bought a new vehicle and uh the first brand new vehicle of my my life, and it was uh an FJ, and they were just on the market, and uh 2007, I love that little that that vehicle.

And uh my wife gave me the door, and I was in the study working, and she said, Where's your vehicle?

I thought, man, went outside, took a look, it wasn't there.

I my natural inclination was someone stole the vehicle.

And uh, but but something stopped me, uh sort of midstream in the midst of that thought, and I said, It's okay.

It's all right.

And a few minutes later, in came Alan, our water cooler had run out of water, and he had gone and filled it up and brought it in, and he had taken the brand new vehicle to do so.

And Carline looked at me and said, Well, no one's touching that vehicle.

You're the one that's driving it.

Uh, aren't you gonna say anything to him?

I said, No, because uh he was accepted as a son yesterday, and now he's looking at everything I have as belonging to him.

He's an he's an heir in this house, and he has an inheritance.

And so that was something that really impacted my life at that moment in time, and my heart was to see a generation of young leaders grow up that had spiritual fathers in their life.

And by the way, a spiritual father is not there to keep a son dependent all of their life.

The the greatest joy of a spiritual father is to see the son become a father in themselves.

But one day, I'm not going to be here.

And so the modeling of a spiritual father and of heavenly father, and which I believe is my role in the church of Jesus Christ today, is to be a reflection and uh an expression of the heart of the Father to everyone that's there.

Um my heart is to see them become a father and a mother in their own right and raise up sons and daughters in their own right.

And so that we have this true, maturing, seasoned, uh, spiritual family emerging as a result.

But I want to tell you today, the cry of this generation is just like what came out of Alan's heart that day.

It is a cry for authentic, non-transient, organic, spiritual relationship, uh, intimacy.

And the the one story in uh the Old Testament that comes to life to me is the the cry of Esau, who wound up selling his birthright and despising it for a mess of pottage, and then lost out on a sense of purpose and destiny for his life, and cried out to his father when he realized his mistake, saying, Bless me, even me also, O my Father.

I believe that that's at the very foundation of what's going on within our culture today.

People have despised that authority, despised that fathering and that mothering, despised that provision, that inheritance, and now are beginning to realize that really Christianity is all about returning to the Father, developing a spiritual family, and developing an inheritance-mindedness in that community that raises up multi-generationally sons and daughters to carry on the legacy, carry on the heartbeat, the DNA.

So, my heart to you today is, and I'm convinced about this, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, transgenerationally working together.

When we work alongside each other, we can transform culture, we can rebuild cities, just like in Nehemiah's day.

And when we fight alongside each other, um, we can win wars and carry the flags of many victories.

Uh, and when we pray alongside each other, we can bring in a manifestation of the glory of God and of the supernatural.

I believe it's really locked into that relationship that symbolizes the relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who have never had a division, never been separated, uh, never had a breakdown in their relationship.

And look what Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been able to do throughout the generations of time.

When we worship together and shout alongside each other, we can bring down walls of opposition to the purposes of God.

And when we give alongside each other, there's absolutely nothing we can't do and nowhere we can't go to build and strengthen and create a future.

So as I look at at what has been built, and as we're going to look at it over the next six months together as a pastoral team, uh, you know, we have two things in tension that are going on within our culture and within the ramifications of a of being a Christian in a secular environment.

Uh, as a society, we have a responsibility to the government, and we account to them and we're audited by them.

And we have a responsibility to government to ensure that we carry our submission to authority in a proper and a godly way, and that we do what we do with great integrity and excellence that honors the government and their their confidence in us.

But we're also a society that has a spiritual responsibility and we account to God, and in our account to God, we must never forget that the purpose of Christ's coming was to introduce us to the Father and then and the Father's purposes and intentions, and then to put the individual, the solitary, in a spiritual family that becomes brothers and sisters, mums and dads, sons and daughters together, and is able to work together to accomplish the purposes of God and to serve them in our generation.

And so the kingdom of God is all about relationship, it's about accountability to Heavenly Father and his intentions and purposes.

And as a spiritual father, I want to always keep that in mind.

There's two factors of accountability to government, but also and most critically, an accountability to God, an accountability to spiritual fathers, even in my own life, uh, an accountability that uh to a family, uh, and to be a good father to sons and daughters, and to see them raised up to be sons and uh fathers and mothers in their own right, developing a multi-generational anointing that carries on that DNA from generation to generation.

So, over the next six months, you're gonna be hearing a lot of things about the journey to fatherhood, the journey to sonship and uh the homecoming that occurs, just like the prodigal son, when the two get together, and may the Lord bring about a great revelation to us within these next six months as we begin to dissect the scriptures and open up this relational integrity and equity that God has provided for us through his son Jesus into the hearts of everyone around us.

May the Lord bless you.

It's good to be with you today, and I pray you'll pass this uh this opportunity for ministry and hearing this to someone else.

And want to say thank you for your support during these very difficult times.

Know that we're praying for you, love you, and are looking forward to the time where we can uh get that hug again.

Bless you.