Supernatural Transformation: Change Your Heart Into God’s Heart (43 page)

Continuous Transformation

Only when we are exposed to higher levels in the Spirit—realms of faith, anointing, glory, miracles, provision, and more—and when we respond to those revelations with an open heart, will we understand that God is greater than everything we have seen and heard to this point. I have witnessed God supernaturally heal the blind, deaf, mute, and lame; create new bones and organs; raise the dead; and even control the weather. I have seen many transformations take place in people’s lives: drug addicts have left their addictions, agnostic intellectuals and atheists have come to faith in Christ, churches have grown from hundreds of members to thousands in a short period of time, and so forth. I could list many other such miracles and works that God has done in my ministry, as well as the ministries of my spiritual children.

Yet I still hunger for God’s presence. I still seek transformation daily. I know there are dimensions of His glory that I have not yet seen and that I will enter only if I keep my eyes on Jesus while being transformed into His image—His heart, His mind-set, and His glory. (See Philippians 3:12–14.) We must wait on God so that we may hear His voice and follow His direction. Then, He will bring a change of season in our life that will lift us out of our dry spiritual state to receive the Wellspring of living water.

To enter a greater dimension, we must die to what we know and to what we have accomplished up to this point.

Many people are afraid to submit to a supernatural process they aren’t familiar with and don’t understand. They fear losing control, and they fear losing themselves in God. In the following testimony, a pastor named Edgar from Bolivia shares how his life was transformed when he surrendered his will, stopped doing things his way, and began doing things God’s way. “As a new graduate with a bachelor’s degree in theology, I was named pastor of a two-hundred-member church. I began with great momentum, but all my plans failed over and over again. The members would attend Sunday services, but they refused to commit to God and His work. Desperate for change, I saw Apostle Maldonado on television and immediately identified myself with his word, his personality, and his anointing. I traveled to Miami to King Jesus Ministry with the intention of asking for financial help, but nothing happened as I had planned. The word I received in the conferences confronted me, and I realized that I had many religious paradigms; thus, everything was strange to me. I used to think that the changes I had made in my church had been enough, but then I found myself in another level of revelation.

“I had gone to Miami with a beggar’s mentality—to ask for help—but the ministry’s response was this: ‘We don’t help with money. Here, we lead you to your purpose. We don’t give you the fish; we give you the fishing rod.’ This concept revolutionized my spirit! God broke through my beggar mentality and my religious paradigms and transformed my heart. Two years later, I came under the spiritual covering of the ministry. While we worked on the transition from the pastoral to the apostolic, my own church began to change. We established an apostolic, fatherhood government. We adopted the vision of King Jesus Ministry, and each teaching and impartation we received from our spiritual parents pushed us from level to level and equipped us with powerful kingdom tools.

“We are not the same! The prophetic word we received from King Jesus Ministry was foundational. It gave us direction and activated us to advance. Our congregation went from 300 people to 4,500. We identified and formed leaders (sons and daughters of the house) and sent them to establish new ministries. We were once a passive, dying church, but today we are impacting our city and our surroundings. The demonstration of supernatural power in our ministry has become a regular occurrence. We continually see powerful miracles.

“In the beginning of my ministry, I couldn’t get a movement going, but today, we host monthly crusades—supernatural evangelistic programs that are carried out on the streets and in people’s homes—and people are being won to Christ, discipled, and activated into leadership. We have learned to pray, to intercede, and to do spiritual warfare in which breakthroughs begin to take place and in which we win battles. Our finances, which had been barely enough to pay for our basic needs, have increased 900 percent. We have more than 25 pastors and leaders working full-time at the local level. We started construction of an orphanage without any outside help. We have television and radio programs—an impossibility for most churches. We purchased land and built a church for 6,000 people—debt free!

“The greatest problems we faced when establishing the vision were the betrayal, defamation, lack of understanding, and isolation by other pastors in our city, but they could not prevail when they saw the evidence of the fruit produced by our ministry. This is supernatural acceleration, breakthrough, and multiplication! God has transformed our mind and heart, and everything that used to be impossible is now a reality.”

Many pastors who have turned from religion and conformity to enter God’s supernatural movement have lost up to half their congregations. But after they made the transition, God brought in many new people in only a brief period of time—people who were in love with Jesus; who were hungry to see change, the movement of the Spirit, and the manifestation of divine power; who entered into the supernatural realm of transformation and expansion. Today, the numbers in these pastors’ congregations are double or even triple what they used to be.

Many people resist entering into God’s glory because to do so means exposure and change.

God’s works are limitless. To talk about God is to talk “big” and to think “big”—to think of multitudes of people belonging to Him, always growing and maturing under His direction and care. God blessed the human race with the potential for multiplication. He told Adam and Eve to
“be fruitful,”
“multiply,”
and
“fill the earth.”
(See Genesis 1:28.) He gave Abraham the great vision that his descendants would be as innumerable as the stars in the sky. (See Genesis 22:17; 26:4; Hebrews 11:12.) Jesus commissioned His disciples in the power of the Holy Spirit to make new disciples in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and onward to the ends of the earth. (See Acts 1:8.) God’s mind-set is one of continual growth, multiplication, and expansion, and He calls us to have the same mentality. Many church leaders make statements such as, “I may not have quantity, but I have quality.” We should have both!

One of God’s smallest creations is a seed that has the potential
to grow into a great tree. Everything God creates has the potential to grow and to multiply.

Keys to Transition from Conformism to Transformation

There are times when God will allow us to feel dissatisfied or discontent because He is leading us to seek something more in Him than what we have yet seen or experienced. Consequently, we begin to hunger and thirst for something new, something greater, something stronger, and we start looking to Him more and reaching for higher levels of His glory.

Are you feeling uncomfortable with the spiritual level at which you are functioning—one that you have perhaps been “stuck” in for a long time? Does your spirit cry out for transformation? If so, don’t be afraid of undergoing change, because God is the One who has placed this desire within you. It is as if your spirit is in labor, getting ready to birth new spiritual fruit.

Transitions are birthed in the midst of spiritual dissatisfaction and frustration.
The spiritual hunger inside you is evidence that God is calling you to a greater dimension.

Please understand that, during this time of transition, you may feel as if you don’t fit in anywhere. Others may misunderstand you and your motivations, because they do not share your spiritual hunger—the spiritual desire that burns in your heart. You may feel alone for a time, but then God will connect you with other people who have the same hunger for transformation and expansion. When you come out on the other side of this experience transformed, you will be ready for the new dimension of the glory of God that He wants to bring to your life and/or ministry.

That is what happened in the life of a man named Moises from Mexico. The following is his testimony: “Six months after coming to know Jesus Christ, I became a youth leader and then the national secretary of youth. I attended a seminary and became an evangelist. I preached at healing campaigns in Latin America and the United States, where I planted three churches. But I reached the point at which I knew there had to be more—I needed something new and more powerful in God.

“During a conference, I met Apostle Guillermo Maldonado. What I experienced at that conference was a supernatural transformation that impacted me so deeply that I requested his spiritual covering to take this transformation to my church in Mexico. In my thirty-one years in ministry, I had never experienced anything like it. When I entered this supernatural move, changes began to take place. We went from 800 members to over 3,000 in only a few months; and the conversions and miracles multiply daily.

“We purchased land and built an auditorium. We established a ministerial school to prepare new ministers. We participate in community outreach programs that help homeless children, and we bought land to assist with this purpose. We support pastors who are experiencing financial need. Our intercession and spiritual warfare have released miracles, multiplication, and breakthroughs. With the transformation of our heart, we have entered into the ‘new’ of God where the supernatural has brought acceleration and growth to every personal and ministerial area.”

Transformation begins when we expose our true heart to God in order to be changed into our true identity in Christ. When we are transformed into His image, Christ will live in us, and the world will see Him through us.

When you have used up all of your resources but still find yourself in the same place, transformation is necessary—and urgent!

Has your Christianity somehow changed from being a relationship with Christ to being a religion—a trap of stagnancy and spiritual dryness? If you are willing to break through that reality in order to transition to a higher level of spiritual reality, then put into practice the following keys, which will enable you to cooperate with the Holy Spirit as He performs this work in you. Open up your heart to God so that you may be transformed by Him. He has only good things in store for you—above and beyond what you can now imagine. (See Ephesians 3:20.)

1. A Spiritual Diet of “Solid Food”

Many believers have not progressed from “milk” to “solid food” in their knowledge and understanding of God’s Word. The milk of God’s Word contains only the fundamentals of faith and doctrine.
“
Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.
But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil
”
(Hebrews 5:13–14 niv).

The “meat” of the Word is our “solid food.” Unless we progress in our spiritual diet from “milk” to “meat,” we may experience spiritual “starvation.” We need specific nourishment from the Word for each stage of our spiritual growth. It is only as we advance from basic doctrine to the deeper spiritual truths of the Scriptures and God’s revelation that we will be able to continue to grow and to mature, being continually transformed into the image of Christ.

2. The Activation of the Fivefold Ministries

“And
[Jesus]
Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,
till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God”
(Ephesians 4:11–13). Christ established the five spiritual offices—known as the “fivefold ministry”—listed in the above passage. He gave them to His church as “agents of change” to perfect His people. Jesus invests Himself in the leaders He has appointed so that they, in turn, can invest themselves in others. When the church functions under the structure of the fivefold ministry, believers are enabled to receive revelation from God from each of the spiritual offices. In that way, they can partake of the balanced diet of “solid food” they need in order to be transformed into the image of Christ.

In fact, every believer should share what he has received from God with others, especially his fellow Christians. This keeps our spiritual lives fresh and current. We can’t just “fill up” on revelation knowledge and wisdom, spiritual anointing, and ministry gifts. When we fail to “empty” what we have received into the lives of others, we eventually become spiritually stagnant, having a selfish, religious mind-set.

I impart the vision of our ministry as I preach to believers in churches around the world. I also train their leaders to become vessels in God’s hands that will “empty” themselves into the lives of others. These leaders are manifesting genuine demonstrations of God’s supernatural power and grace. God is continually revealing His presence and power in new ways, prompting people to seek Him and to experience the ongoing transformation of their heart.

If you are a pastor, and your local church does not yet fully function according to the fivefold ministry, I encourage you to begin establishing relationships with other Spirit-filled leaders and outside ministries who can support you in the offices in which you are lacking. Then, your people will be able to grow spiritually in a comprehensive way. As always, you and your members must desire transformation, or you will not allow the anointing of these five ministries to be effective in changing you.