Hi, this is Dave Olson. I'm the senior leader of
Heartland Church located in Ankeny, IA.
I hope the following message challenges, encourages and
ultimately changes you. Thanks for joining us, man.
The, the men's conference, the men's summit was so good.
I, I'm still chewing on things. Just such good teaching.
And matter of fact, I'm going to speak at the men's breakfast
next Saturday. We're going to follow up with
some of this stuff and keep keep going after it.
But I so appreciate appreciated Dean making the the trip over
from Kansas City. When Roger had called me and he
was, he was wondering who we could get and I said, well,
let's ask Dean. He said that's who I thought,
but I didn't think we could get him.
So I called him and Dean came and we just so appreciated all
that he brought. Dean's been with us on on a
Sunday service, I think three other times.
And if you've never heard him, you're in for a treat.
I want to want to highlight Dean's website is Dean Briggs,
briggs.com, deanbriggs.com. He's got a tremendous amount of
resources on there you wouldn't want to avail yourself to and
just some good stuff. I've, I've bought a subscription
to one of his classes and have gone through a good share of it.
And it is meat you're, you're going to work your jaws to to
get through. It's it's good stuff.
So anyway, without further ado, let's give Dean Briggs a good
hand. I love this man, appreciate him,
appreciate his friendship. Dean, give him heaven.
Thank you. Be seated.
I really love coming to Heartland.
I've felt the Lord uniquely here and have enjoyed my friendship
with Dave over the years and that kind of extends through
many of you. I, I feel very welcome and I
feel like a little bit of home away from home.
And so stepping in, I just feel comfortable talking to you from
my heart and and trusting that the Lord's going to give some
things that will help you at a personal level, but also speak
to the body at a corporate level.
And so I want to talk this morning about how a body is
meant to see. You know, the human body is a
revelation of the body of Christ, right?
We are made in the image of God, and so I can look at my wife and
see certain parts of who God is that I can't see looking at
anyone else because a woman reveals God in certain ways.
And I can look at a brother and see God in certain ways because
a man reveals God in certain ways.
There's the divine math of Genesis 1 is not 1 + 1 = 2, but
1 + 1 = 1. And so God has revealed himself
in male and female in such a way that we really see him clearer
when those genders are distinct. And that's not, you know, that's
not to say there's, there's guys that like Broadway and there's
girls that like to climb trees. It's not about that, right?
It's not about stereotypes. But I believe part of what the
enemy is attempting to do with such painful confusion and
demonic ideologies and politics is essentially erase the image
of God by making there be no distinction.
Everything's blurry. I don't know who God is if I
can't understand his image. Well, part of his image is we're
constructed in certain ways. Hands, feet are internal organs
and and we take for granted some some of our faculties that are
fundamental to daily life. There are some people that
suffer from a lack of vision and they have to learn to live
without that and it's a part of their life that is defined by
the absence of what is otherwise considered normal to the human
experience. Vision is a part of what it
means in the body of Christ. Vision is normal, not abnormal.
We need vision. We need better vision.
We need more vision. We need clear vision.
The human body is built to see, and the body of Christ is built
to see. That prophetic function is
typified in the body by the eyes.
The prophets are eyes to the body of Christ.
The prophetic function has multiple expressions, words of
wisdom, words of knowledge, discerning of spirits.
These are the gift of prophecy itself, tongues and
interpretation of tongues which is like prophecy.
These are all prophetic expressions.
You have people that function with those gifts in a certain
way, and we need those gifts to function with more and more
strength, not less and less strength.
We all know that the famous passage in Proverbs 29.
Without vision, the people perish.
Blindness can be an existential threat and the clarity with
which I see today may not be sufficient for the challenge of
the fog and darkness of tomorrow.
Our eyes achieve various contributions to our well-being.
They can warn us of danger and obstacles.
Our vision gathers information for comprehension,
communication, context, and clarity.
It can supply Intel for strategy and tactics.
With vision, we realize possibility and opportunities.
Vision permits either breadth of attention or narrowness of
focus. I can either see this whole room
with vision, or I can focus on one person with vision.
Vision can. A properly articulated vision
can reveal and release callings destinies.
Other faculties may thrive in darkness, but vision
fundamentally depends on light. You cannot have vision in
darkness. It's a contradiction of terms.
However, light does not guarantee vision.
Even in the presence of light, a blind eye still won't see.
I'm just going over some kind of obvious statements, but they're
helpful to get a sense. Natural vision is highly limited
to a certain spectrum of light, but total vision actually
encompasses other invisible dimensions.
You know, when you put a bag of popcorn in your microwave and
turn it on, there's actually a spectrum of light called a
microwave. That's why it's called a
microwave that you can't see but your popcorn bag still heats up
because it's real, you just can't see it.
An X-ray, a gamma ray, ultraviolet light, these are all
actual wavelengths of light that formed the totality of the
revelation. That's possible in the natural,
but our eyes aren't tuned to see those.
I kind of wonder what did Adam and Eve see before the fall?
What was the range of possible vision that was limited by the
fall? Hearing is similar.
There's sounds on a spectrum that go beyond our ability now.
But I actually think part of what the Lord is restoring.
And in the resurrection, I think we will see all of that.
We will comprehend the vastness and wonder of creation with a
full set of senses that goes beyond our experience now.
But the important thing to recognize is just because you
don't see that realm now, it's there.
And so spiritual vision and the gifts of the prophetic are meant
to help compensate for some of what we don't see as we should,
even within our normal capacity. Vision is rarely absolute or
uncontested. You go to the eye doctor and
2020 is the standard, meaning what you should be able to see
at 20 feet, you can see it 20 feet.
But if your vision is 2050, it means you have to be at 20 feet
to see what someone else can read with 2020 vision at 50
feet, right? So our vision is is variable.
You can have color blindness where you look at the same thing
as someone without color blindness, but you don't see
what's really there in certain tones or colors.
Blurriness versus clarity, color versus Gray, all of these
represent degrees of clarity of sight.
And while some is better than none, blurry vision poses
challenges. When you go to get your driver's
license, they want to know how well you can see because you're
about to get behind a vehicle that could cause harm to others.
And so they mark, you know, needs corrective vision,
whatever they mark on your license.
Is vision a part of a problem for you?
Because if it's a problem for you, it's a problem for those
around you. In other words, all of our
varying capacities of sight has an interconnected reality.
What I do or don't see clearly does not only affect me, it
affects you too. And what you do or don't see
clearly affects me. I mean, make just a couple more
observations. Personal vision may stir and
produce personal faith, but personal vision must be declared
and spoken to produce corporate faith, because faith doesn't
come by vision, it comes by hearing.
Hearing comes by the Word. So I can have a vision from the
Lord, and it can move my faith personally, but I can't expect
you to be moved unless I declare that vision.
And the declaration produces faith.
Corporate faith comes by hearing, not by seeing.
Eyes not only see light, they depend on it.
And in that sense, prolonged darkness can produce further
impairment. I remember one time many years
ago, I went to, I think it was Merrimack Caverns in Missouri.
And you get deep, deep, deep down in there, and you're on
lighted trails. And then the guide says,
everyone you know, stay where you are, don't move.
And then he turns off the light. And when you're deep in the
earth in a cave and they turn off the light, you discover what
total darkness really is. Have you ever done that?
Have you ever been in a cave and done that?
Most of us, night time is not total darkness.
You walk into the bathroom here and turn off the light.
It's not total darkness. There is always, in most of our
experience, trace amounts of light and your eye will adjust.
You know, your eye dilates or whatever and and you might be
temporarily kind of blinded by the darkness.
But then your eye is trained to adjust to the faint amounts of
light that are leaking under the door or coming in through the
crack in the window. And it kind of normalizes where
you can make out at least a little bit in total darkness.
You don't see anything. You don't see this, you don't
see anything. And our guide said in the
darkness, I haven't been able to verify this, but our guide said
in that total darkness, he said within 60 days without light,
you will go color blind and within six months of total
darkness you will become totally blind.
There is something in your eye that requires light to see.
It's not just that your eye is built to see with light.
It is built in such a way that light helps you keep seeing.
And, and, and Jesus touched on this.
He talked about the problem of a person whose eye is darkened and
he said if a person's eye becomes darkened then their
whole body can fill with darkness.
He talked about to the pure, all things are pure, but to the
crooked, everything starts to look crooked.
The lens that you look at life with the vision of your life,
the way you perceive begins to shape the way you perceive.
It's a reinforcing cycle. We're meant to live in
revelation. We're meant to live in truth.
We're meant to live in the light.
God is light, and in him there is no darkness.
Christ is shown in our heart to give the light of the knowledge
of God. In the face of Christ, we're
called out of darkness and to his marvelous light.
Paul prayed that the eyes of our heart would be enlightened.
The word is fotizo. It's where we get our word
photo, photograph, photons. Your heart, the perceptive
faculties of your inner man, have a corollary to how you see
with your natural vision. You are meant to live in a state
of revelation that is dependent on the light of the face of
Christ. You're meant to live out of
darkness in his marvelous light, and when you do that, your eye
stays healthy and presumably gets healthier and healthier
because you're looking on the source of life itself.
We know the word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our
path. The Word is the clearest, most
inarguable source of light in your life.
The fact that our Bibles collect dust on our night stand is a
tragedy beyond the measure. It is light.
It illuminates your immediate environment and gives you a path
to put your feet on. Why is the world so dark?
Well, I think one of the reasons is because we have allowed the
sources of light that God has given us, and the people of God
have become a thermometer rather than a thermostat.
We don't set the temperature, we've become the temperature,
and that is a process of yielding to the darkness rather
than walking with clarity. Spiritual vision, revelation,
illumination, and the eyes of the body as the prophetic are
meant to create corporate opportunity in the declaration
of vision in the word of the Lord for faith to rise.
And everyone starts to see a little clearer.
Everyone starts to walk with a little more confidence.
Corporate promises among you are not going to be realized by
individual faith. They're going to be realized by
corporate vision being declared and declared and declared until
the hearing of the word produces corporate faith.
And together you move into things that have been hanging
over, I believe this body, your families, your marriages,
There's the, the micro application, there's the macro
application. This heartland is a place that
is rich with promise. And you all have tasted and seen
much of the goodness of the Lord.
And yet we all live in the in our own lives.
That prophet that came by 7 years ago, 15 years ago, when he
spoke that word over you and there was a moment of revelation
for you. The eyes of the body gave you as
part of the body, revelation and light.
It produced faith in you. But do you know that faith can
be ignorant? Faith can be real.
And it can be ignorant of the process of what it takes for
faith to be realized. So you may have had a moment of
faith where you were like, yes, I've received that.
I lay hold of that. You truly believe.
It was a true revelation. Light hit your soul.
The eyes were doing their job. They spoke and you believed.
But then with some bad theology or bad application, what we
essentially do is believe that God through that prophecy has
guaranteed an outcome rather than invited you to a journey.
And so we look and we say, I remember, you know, we kind of,
we pull out in our journal. I remember that word.
A message like this might stir you.
Hey, go look. Find those words hanging over
your life, your marriage, your family, your children.
Find those words hanging over this corporate body.
I'm here to challenge you. Dig those things up.
They were moments of illumination and revelation that
were real and that matter. But the problem is we look at
that promise, and between the giving of the promise and the
realization of the promise, there's this giant window of
time called delay, and it's a gap.
And almost any time scripture talks about gaps, it also is
asking where is the person who will stand in that gap.
You may not have known the promise without the eyes who
spoke a prophetic word to you, but once that word is released,
the gap between you and the promise is a space you have to
fill with a contending faith, not a passive faith.
The gap is an invitation for you to insert yourself and it is an
error that sounds noble and high minded to assume that the
sovereignty of God in declaring a promise is going to has
basically scheduled a day for the fulfillment of the promise
and all you have to do is pass enough time to get to that day
on the calendar. Rather than realizing that the
frustration and the delay that you feel is meant to fuel
something in you that matures you to be the person who can
inherit the promise. It is meant to make you zealous
for the thing to desire. Daniel 7 talks about the Saints
will one day receive and possess the Kingdom.
Those moments of prophetic revelation are a day you receive
something. But then there is the gap in the
waiting and the delay in the frustration of the possession.
And what God is doing in those seasons of delay is not so much
about fulfilling time so that you finally get to the point he
already knew you would get to. And then it kind of pops open
like a magic door and and you just simply waited long enough
for him to finally give it as if you're waiting on God.
God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Omni.
He's everything. He is complete.
He is absolutely complete. You aren't waiting on him.
If there is a deficiency, it is something He is waiting on us to
become, the thing that longs for it enough and fights for it
enough where it's not a matter of time being fulfilled, but Him
fulfilling something in you. You know, the worst thing is to
get an amazing gift that you aren't prepared to manage and
you break it and you feel the loss of that thing and the shame
and the embarrassment. I've been to Africa a couple of
times and you will have, you know, a car or a motorcycle is a
very rare and, and precious thing there.
But part of the problem is they just don't have the
infrastructure to to they, they haven't been trained to change
the oil to take care of the thing.
There's not an O'reilly's or an AutoZone.
There's not parts stores. And so they will spend the save
up for years, spend the money to get something that is now a huge
asset, but they don't have the ability to take care of it or
manage it, and they'll drive it into the ground.
The Lord actually wants you to thrive in your calling and your
destiny. And so He uses the eyes to give
you a glimpse of what that could be.
It's good you want it. He wants you to want it.
And then in the mystery of God, He allows delay to make you
agonize with the desire for that thing that shapes you into the
person that can possess it. The agony is a gift.
The agony is part of the promotion.
Whenever you feel tested, you have to go back to school.
When you took finals in the 11th grade, it was the final
promotion to your senior year. The test is not about holding
you back, it's about measuring your readiness to move forward.
We've got to shift our perspective.
This too is part of vision. We have to shift our perspective
with the right kind of light to see what God is really doing.
Otherwise, we will blame Him and hold against Him the things that
aren't developing in our lives, as if He is the great resistor
of our destiny rather than He is the one who prepared works
before the foundation of the world for you to walk in.
He knows the hairs of your head, He counts your tears in a
bottle, He knows the number of your days, and he's he releases
gifts in prophetic moments so that you can see what he sees.
You can glimpse your life through his divine vision.
Your whole body gets a moment of light.
And you're like, I want that thing.
Yes. And then the testing comes and
we're like, oh God, you must not like me very much.
It's like, no, you have no idea how much I love you because I
don't want you to just receive it.
I want you to possess it. Well, this becomes a challenge
because you can get beat down in life in such a way that personal
vision almost or prophetic activity can almost leave a bad
taste in your mouth. It creates messes.
It creates. The problem with prophecy is it
comes from a timeless dimension in the eternal heart of God.
But when it lands, spoken corporately or individually, how
does eternity compress itself into the construct of time?
It does so with an urgency and an immediacy where we always
misjudge the timing. The hardest thing for a prophet
to get right is how long this is going to take.
They deliver the word with an urgency that makes everyone
believe this is coming tomorrow. The power of the word strikes
you. I'm ready to receive.
Yes, we start dancing. 700 Tomorrow's later.
We're still waiting. Do you know almost every St. in
the Bible could be defined as a person who waited one of their
chief characteristics, and in fact, Hebrews 11 defines all of
them as still waiting. All of the Hebrews 11 Hall of
Heroes of the Faith waited longer than they expected in
their lifetime, and they are still waiting.
And you know what they're waiting on?
Says they're waiting on us. They can't actually enter their
inheritance until we enter ours. So now how you see, what you
see, how you wait, how you persevere in waiting, how you
hold on to faith. Everyone wants a testimony.
First you get the test and then you get the monies.
We don't consider the test to be the very vehicle of promotion.
We consider it to be a demonic assignment or the opposition of
God. So we're either casting out God,
I bind the spirit of delay on this thing, God's like you
aren't going to bind to me. Or we're giving the enemy
tremendous latitude in our lives and become focused more on what
the enemy is doing to stop us than what we are meant to do to
possess. So we get discouraged.
Paul had to say, hey, guys, don't despise prophetic
utterance. Why did he have to say that?
Because the prophetic comes in and messes things up and people
are like, I don't ever want to hear a prophetic word again.
I don't want to hear that. Don't talk to me about that.
Just get, you know, I'm just going to do my daily thing.
What you're actually doing is saying I prefer less light in my
life and I would rather see a smaller picture than a bigger
picture. And I would rather be mad than
glad at what God is doing. You receive a prophet as a
prophet you receive a prophet's reward.
It's just that easy. You don't receive it in the
spirit that it is given and you won't receive the reward.
But if you do, you will in how you execute.
Think it's First Chronicles 2020 Second Chronicles 2020.
Believe in the prophets and you shall prosper.
And it interesting this 2020, how clear is your vision?
Well, let me end with the last couple of observations.
At a corporate level, how you move forward together is often
not the result of how well you see the Word over your life, or
how much you receive it as a word from the Lord, but how you
regard the Word over a brother's life and your cumulative
investment in each other's outcome.
And we end up with darkened vision.
Not because we have not received the prophet as a prophet and
receiving the prophet's reward for our own life.
Not because the Lord has spoken something and we're contending
in faith. But because we get distracted in
our offense against each other and our eye begins to darken
corporately because we're no longer on the same journey
together. I shared this in the first
service. I'll share this and start to
wrap up. They did a study years ago.
They did a study years ago where they put people in a room and
they had one group walk from one end of the room to the other.
But in the in the way they had laid out the room, I don't know
exactly how they did it. It wasn't immediately apparent,
but people would end up stumbling over something.
And so they, you know, send 100 people through and 2/3 of them
end up kind of stumbling. But there's also an observation
room behind AA1 way mirror and there's a group of people
watching the people walk. OK, this group walks and most of
them stumble and at the end they ask them what happened and the
people who walked and stumbled inevitably blamed their
circumstance. Something in the floor was
uneven, I don't know what happened, my shoes were too big.
They blame something in the circumstance.
The people that watched the people stumble.
We're also asked what happened and they inevitably would blame
the person. Well, they just aren't paying
attention. They were sloppy.
They should have been more focused.
They would blame their character, their attentiveness,
the person. In other words, when I'm
walking, I feel the stumble and I blame.
I don't tend to take responsibility for it myself.
I tend to blame what caused me to stumble.
When I watch you stumble, I blame you, and when you watch me
stumble, you blame me. And now we're all looking at
each other's delay. We're all looking at each
other's delay. And when it's my delay, I'm
like, oh man, things have just been hard.
There's been so many challenges. I haven't really been whatever,
whatever. I look at your delay and I'm
like, well, if they just would press in more, they just grab a
hold of a word of God and get the promise in their life.
They just would trust. And so now the very thing that
is meant to bring common revelation and common faith,
because of our own tendency to operate in a slandering spirit,
an accusing spirit, a judging spirit, our common promise
becomes a cause of division and conflict.
And rather than Some hills must be taken together.
There are very few critical, critical battlefields that are
determined by one man. There are hills to take that a
company of people must take. I encourage you to listen to the
first message because I talked more out of Psalm 15 and Psalm
24 as part of this ascending the hill of the Lord, I believe
heartland in my own small prophetic way.
I'm here to tell you, you're meant to take hills in the
Spirit. You're meant to ascend to the
hill of the Lord, and I want you to get a revelation of that in a
new way. You've been steeped in this.
You know the promises. Your leadership has been
faithful to talk about this. You're here because you, you
bought you, you bought in. But there is a time to dig it up
again, open your eyes again, dare to believe again, and then
fight together for that thing. Press in together for that
thing. I would rather be with a bunch
of misfits who aren't the special ones in the Kingdom of
God, but who love each other and fight for each other's destiny,
than to be with the most exalted of Saints who in behind closed
doors are just tearing each other down.
I would rather be with the lowest of the low who walk in a
common grace and anointing, than humility together.
There is something precious in the heart of God, where love
covers a multitude of sins, and it's the cleanest, clearest
light you can live under. Thanks for listening to our
podcast. If you'd like to help more
people hear this message, you can get the word out by
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If you'd like to support the ministries of Heartland Church,
you can do so at Heartland Church online.com/give.