A Word for 2018
Psalm 71:6 By You I have been upheld from birth; You are He who took me out of my mother’s womb. My praise shall be continually of You. As I was waking this morning I heard the Lord say that his hand has been on my life since I was born and then a prophetic person sent this verse to me today. I think this is not coincidence but a way that God often speaks. I sense that this is a word for our generation. God has protected us for the hour at hand. Our destiny is about to unfold like a precious flower. When a flower begins it starts in the darkness beneath the earth, but in time it comes forth in all the color of its splendor and I declare this over you today also. Recently I was ministering in Calgary, Alberta when a man who was in that meeting started to prophesy over me. He said, “In 1995 I was sitting in a church in the Eastern part of Canada when I heard the Lord say 'A FIRE HAS GONE OUT." He looked at me and said, “I know you are from the east and I know that fire is going to burn inside of you. You will carry it across the nation.” What this man didn’t know was the church that he was sitting in back then was the church that I had been kicked out of the year before in 1994. We had done some incredible ministry there and had been very fruitful. Just before I was kicked, a prophetic voice in that church stood up and said, "Pastor Darren has a fire inside of him and he will be used to spread it to many places." 22 years after that man first heard that word in that little church, he met me and prophesied a new day. I believe that this word is greater than me and for the entire church. Many of you have faced grave challenges to get to the place that you are today. Perhaps like Joseph, who had a wonderful dream about his destiny when he was a boy, you are now sitting in a dungeon wondering when that word, from long ago, will come to pass. I declare “GET READY!” Your days of sitting in darkness and in chains are over. You are about to fulfill a great mandate for the Lord. It will be him that does it, but he will be moving through your life. 2018 is going to be a tremendous year. Many great things are going to be birthed this year. God is beginning something new. Many people are about to step into the birth canal and they are about to come forth as mighty warriors. In 2015 I heard the Lord say, “2018 is going to be a significant year!” I felt that there would be greater fruitfulness. I sense that divine connections are coming to launch you into the place that God has for you. People who you may have known by reputation for year are about to become your friend. They are doing this in order to advance the Kingdom. In order to carry the fire, you have to be humble. God will bring the world to your doorstep if you would just give up your right to known. I know many people, who if they read what I just wrote, would say “AMEN, BRO," but deep in their hearts there is a blindness that keeps them from seeing the cancer that is holding them back. God wants to open your eyes to the things that have stopped your advance so far. He wants to open the doors and to do that he wants you to go deeper with him. Sometimes the surgery that God wants to do in our life takes great faith. The wounds can be so deep that we don’t even trust God to protect us from the pain. But trusting God is humility. You must humble yourself before the Lord and he will lift you up (James 4:10). I have been sensing in the past week the healing that God wants me to go through to get to the next phase of my fruitfulness. I don’t know what this healing will look like, but I do know that it will come to pass. God’s grace is so powerful that he tells us in advance his dreams for us and the way to enter into it. His grace begins to persuade us of the goodness of the course. The advantages that will be obtained are far superior to the momentary troubles that you will face to get there. I have friends, and I mean close friends, who gave up on the course when the time came to get the healing they required to enter their new day. The pain was so deep that they could not trust God with it. As a result some of them have been sitting idle for years. Some of them were ministers with ministries that were fruitful and now they don’t even have a ministry. Some of them are even persecuting those that do. This is not the hour to stop. This is the hour to advance. Let God heal you so that you will accomplish great things. I have always wanted to be a 10-talent person. I want to appear before the Lord one day and hear “Well done, good and faithful servant. You who have been faithful with little come to your reward.” I don’t want to be the man that appears with the 1 talent that was buried. I don’t want to hear God say, “You were not faithful. Take from him that 1 talent and give to him who did more.” Perhaps you feel the same way. I pray for you today and ask the Lord to touch you. I ask him to open up your heart to receive the healing that you need to be more fruitful. I know that this year is going to be incredible, but only those that are humble will enter into it. Many will look and wonder at your fruitfulness. They will only see with their what God is doing in your life. They will wonder why you and not them. It takes humility to enter into destiny and I declare that you are a person who is humble.