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How God Chooses to Communicate With Us By Charles Thorell
Since I have been given the task of putting the newsletter together each month, I realize what a “potential” burden it can be. It is a serious responsibility to create and put a monthly newsletter together on time each month. Coming up with material we’re going to publish each month can be daunting but I have given it to the Lord. It’s His publication, so nothing will happen if He doesn’t provide me with the material. I have faith that God will provide! In reading the Bible, it is evident that God cares enough about His creation to interact with us on a daily basis. Many times we will see Him do something big in our life and praise Him for it. But He is also involved in the small details and too often we are so busy that we don’t see or acknowledge the little things. As I am writing this, I can’t help but smile and praise God for His goodness to me. God chooses to operate in my life because He loves me. I know this of God’s character, He never changes and His love is unfailing. (Hebrew 13:8) I am secure in the fact that God loves me and chooses to work in my life!
[Pastor John S. Torell speaking] Today, I am going to be sharing with you a message that woke me up. I had two consecutive dreams. Take your Bibles and turn to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24. “All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity [lawlessness] shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.” (Matthew 24:8-12)
Then the Holy Spirit showed me that I have grown cold over my sins. I want to read again to you Matthew chapter 24 and verse 12: And because lawlessness shall increase, the love of many shall wax cold. I began to realize as the Holy Spirit showed me, that things I used to weep over as sins, I’m not that bothered with today. My heart has gotten callous and then God showed me that this is the condition of His church. Then He began to deal with me. This past week we saw some news clippings from Haiti. They showed an attaché that had tormented the people being grabbed by the mob. The camera man was right there, and as this attaché was actually being beaten to a pulp, the camera recorded it blow for blow. We watch our news around six o’clock and have our dinner, and I thought about the fact that I was sitting and eating my meal, enjoying it, and seeing this man being killed without disturbing my digestion. I want you to think about that. We have become desensitized. Something is happening to us where the love and the compassion and the tenderness that we had early as we were converted is not there. God showed me that it is something we have to guard. Let me share my second dream which followed immediately after the first one, I was the pastor of a small church. It was not this building and there was on the other side of our little building, we were actually in a big square with a huge parking lot in the middle. On the other side was a huge house, a tremendously large building. As I was standing there and gazing with a very small congregation, we were trying to witness, all the doors and windows opened up and hundreds of people came out. They had a powerful sound system with speakers and microphones and began to sing beautiful Christian songs. As I listened to the melody, I suddenly realized that the words were blasphemy. They were the same melodies like you and I sing here, our regular hymns, but the words had been changed. They were singing blasphemy, they were blaspheming Jesus’ name and were mocking His resurrection and death on the cross. Then a very flashy preacher came out in a spotless white suit. He began to speak about a sorry rag-tag bunch across there (pointing at us), I used to be a Christian at one time, but now I serve the Devil, I used to believe that junk about Jesus. He said that he knew better now and began to blaspheme. Then his women would come out and pull their skirts up and dance and wiggle and show everything they had, mocking everything that is dear to us as Christians. I didn’t have a microphone, but I remember that I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, “Well you might mock God but He loves you anyway; Jesus is still Lord of Lords and King of Kings!” Then I woke up. It was one of those dreams where you don’t wake up groggy, I was really awake. Then the Holy Spirit said to think about these dreams, I’m going to give you the interpretation. There are people mocking the name of Jesus today. There are many people walking around that used to serve God but today they are the enemy of the cross. And God showed me through these two dreams, that if we have lost our first love, if we have lost that deep love for Him and the sense of what sin is and be convicted over our sins, we will have no power. We can be comfortable and sin. I want you to think about that. I believe that Satan is pouring out an unholy spirit and I believe that if we are going to keep our love for God, we cannot be sloppy, but we need to hug Jesus and hang on to His love because there is a coldness right now sweeping the world that can take us away. How many of us really are convicted over our sins? I thought about many of you. The Lord showed me that we are tender when we have crashed and have hurts and pain. We seek God with all our hearts. And I went back and remembered the way you prayed, and I remember many times when I prayed with you, that you would weep at prayer meetings. We would be prostrate on the floor and we would simply be weeping over our sins and over the lost ones. We haven’t done that for two years. I haven’t really seen brokenness like we had two or three years ago. You know what is happening? God has blessed us. He’s healed us. He’s financially increased us. We are doing better in our personal lives and the blessings have actually cooled us down. What a tragedy! I want to tell you that I am the chief sinner in this area because I’ve been neglecting it. You can never grow past the leadership. So I talked to the Lord and asked Him to restore my tender heart. We lose that tenderness when people hurt us. We decide to not get hurt again, not to love anyone, not get close to anyone because it is too painful when they break away. It’s just easier to keep people at a distance. You can’t love Jesus and do that. We have to be vulnerable. Jesus warned us that there would be persecution. I’ve been moping around and asking God why is it that some people love me but the majority of the world doesn’t love me? The world didn’t love Jesus; if you tell people the truth, they don’t love you. If you tell people a lie they say, “That great, tell me more.” You tell them the truth and they hush you up because they don’t want to hear it. That’s painful. There will be persecution. There will be suffering for Christ and we are going to suffer more as we stand up for what is right. [Pastor John ends speaking] This was just a portion of the sermon that dealt with Pastor John’s two dreams. I was deeply impacted by them and felt you would also be blessed by it too.
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I
want to share how God works behind the scenes of my life and with all
those who love and serve Him. The other day a woman came to me at church
and handed me a cassette with the intent that I should listen to it. I
looked at and saw that it was a sermon recording from our church in 1994
titled, “And Grieve Not The Holy Spirit.” She said it was an excellent
message. Pastor John was in the Spirit and I needed to hear it. Now I
don’t know about you but my life can be very busy with all the
conversations and phone calls, book and articles to read, what I write and
the various computer work. I can honestly say I am not bored. When someone
comes along with a request like this, I never promise anything so I won’t
be a liar if I don’t follow through. As a result, I thanked this dear lady
for giving it to me and put it in my briefcase and didn’t think about it
until a few days later when I was driving and the Holy Spirit prompted me
to play it. I was awestruck by how great our God is in the way He moves
upon people and how He knows exactly what we need to hear. The following
is a partial transcript of this particular sermon. 
Let
me share the dreams that I had and I will lay out the scenario. It kind of
shocked me; I got up in the morning and wrote them down to make sure that
I would remember. In the first dream, I was in a little house, my wife was
there. I didn’t recognize the house, it was just a house. Suddenly, we had
water that was leaking from a lamp fixture in the ceiling onto the floor.
My wife and I talked about it and found it strange because there is no
water in the attic. So we decided to go and take a look in the attic.
There was a stairway leading up, and when I got up there, I recognized
that there were rooms that we did not know existed. I was surprised and
began to look and realized there was old furniture, toys and other things
from my childhood were there. They had cobwebs on them and it was dusty in
the attic. I saw that some of the toys were moving; there were demons
moving them. Then the Holy Spirit gave me the interpretation. These are
rooms in your past that you have never cleaned out. I remember feeling
good about the old junk. I was attracted to the old junk. And the other
feeling I had was that I was not so much concerned about the hidden things
in the room as I was concerned over the water leaking on the rug.
