A fresh encounter with the presence of God is coming. Our theologies, our cultural barriers, and our personal opinions will not be able to stand in His way. Time is compressing under the weight of His passion. An explosion of His presence is ready to fill the Earth to accomplish things not imagined without a renewed mind.

In 1979, I was a young man running away from a commitment I made to Jesus as a child. The denomination I was part of in my youth loved God but did not believe in a present-day charismatic expression of the Spirit or the gifts. They said that all ended with the first apostles. In the middle of the night in 1979, Jesus walked into our bedroom and stepped through all my prohibitions and baptized me with the Holy Spirit and gave me the first syllable of a heavenly language. He could do this because He was God. He did not need my permission or a belief system that agreed with His approach. That night, I was wrecked and remain wrecked to this day because of God’s invasive love.

If you do even a cursory read of Scripture you will find my encounter with Jesus in the middle of the night was not an odd occurrence. From Genesis to Revelation, nothing has been able to stand in the way of God’s love. On the road to Damascus, Jesus met Paul and turned his life and theology around. Immediately, he began to love what he wanted to destroy. Peter went back to fishing after miserably failing Jesus three times. He would have an encounter with the Lord over an early morning shore-side breakfast that would restore him and reset the trajectory of his life. I could make a list of people in my own life who the Lord had to come and get because their current understanding of theology, culture or personal opinion did not have a gate through which the Almighty God could enter and begin a process of transformation. Jesus does not need a gate. He crashes through our puny little gates of objection and ignorance because His love knows no boundary or restriction.

God is coming to encounter His Church in a new way for a new season. When He arrives, He will crash through our foolish little barriers of sectarianism and our ornate gates of religious opinion. When God crashes through our opposition it will happen because He has arrived as God – the sovereign, all-powerful, loving God who can do anything He wants at any time He chooses. He can even violate our idea of who He is or how He should conduct His Kingdom business.