CHILDLIKENESS IS UPON US!

Welcome to a new day, a new year and a new sound!

I hear the call from above in this new season to move beyond the disappointments, disillusionments and hindrances of yesterday and step into the grace of trusting, believing and renewed faith of today. As I’m writing this, we are slicing through the wintery German countryside on the autobahn at supersonic speeds (literally around 200k or 125 mph)! En route to cap off a 15-city Burn 24/7 tour across the United Kingdom and Germany, we will have held 19 fiery gatherings of prayer, worship and impartation in a little over two weeks! I am overwhelmed at the hunger and fresh longing across Europe to apprehend the fullness of what has been promised in this day!

Despite the strenuous demands of this schedule, there has been a supernatural ease and wind of heaven blowing on our backs! I feel this same ease is being released over the body of Chris to cut through the landscape of the past with “swiftness” and precision and accelerate onto new and exciting destinations!

Childlikeness Is Upon Us

The year of 2010 was a very challenging and intense year for the body of Christ in America. This can be reflected with an overall drop of church attendance, the exposing more leaders caught in moral failure and an economic slowdown that paralyzed missions, outreach and numerous church programs. Many of us, myself included, also lost the earthly presence of great heroes, parents, children and men and woman of valor. Although heaven gained the souls of our beloved, we still feel the sting of loss. The enemy has been hard at work to discourage, dishearten and bring complications to the clarion calling of the radiant church to “Arise and Shine” in these days (Isaiah 60:1).

In order to be positioned to steward what we are being given from above in this fresh season, we cannot allow our focus to be distracted or embittered on the last seasons loss, failures or disappointments. I believe God wants to uncomplicated the complicated, bestow “beauty for ashes,” (Isaiah 61:3) relight the fire of our first love and energize us with a renewed expectation for what lies ahead.

Jesus put it this way in Luke 9:62:

“No one who puts His hand to the plow and looks back is fit service in the Kingdom of God.”

It is a new day and there is no more looking back. We must choose to trust. We must choose to press on. We must choose to simply believe again like a child.

A season of childlikeness is upon us! With packed houses of hungry hearts across 15 European cities the last two weeks, I have fallen in love with Jesus all over again! Approaching each night with no agenda but Him and His presence, I have been reenergized and refocused to become recklessly and foolishly fascinated with the beauty of God in 2011. What a great way to launch out onto a new day!

Spontaneous Eruption at Midnight

Something like I’ve never seen or felt took place on New Year’s Eve as the clock struck midnight. In typical Burn 24/7 fashion, we were ringing in the New Year with 50 hours of fiery, hot, unhindered and passionate worship in Harrisburg, PA. Streaming in all the way from Antalya, Turkey to Kona, Hawaii, our tribe converged to let loose a sound from deep within and light the flame in our hearts again for a new day. Because we frequently get lost in the Presence of God during the hours of worship on New Years Eve, we do not watch the ball drop on the screen and sometimes forget to announce when midnight approaches. There was not a chance that was going to take place this year!

The intensity began to build and the fire increased as the last hours, minutes and seconds went by of 2010. It felt like the cataclysmic build up of Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser as the multitudes could sense a bubbling and raging deep underground. The last few minutes leading up to midnight, something I only can describe as “divine hysteria” blanketed the room. There was a totally unplanned, unrehearsed and completely spontaneous eruption of undomesticated joy that broke out. Childlike excitement and jubilance gripped the auditorium and not a single soul was sullen or silent.

It was not a remorseful chant of “whew, I’m glad that year is over,” but an uncontained and unrestrained burst of expectation and glee for what lies ahead! High levels of faith, hope and courage sprung up in the hearts of everyone who was present. No one preached, gave an altar call or even a testimony that night. But it was a pure, vertical worship encounter that pulled down something fresh from Heaven for the New Year. If this is any small indication of what is coming our way, then let us walk in that same confidence, hope and joy in these first days, weeks and months of 2011!

Oslo’s Newness

Not even two weeks into 2011, I found myself sitting in a European sized hotel room in downtown Oslo, Norway pressing through jetlag and preparing for a large Burn 24-7 gathering that night. Due the nature of the midweek trip, I was coming from Canada and had to return back to New Jersey the next weekend. With the travel time it takes to get to Europe and back, I was left with less than 40 hours on the ground in Norway! Sounds crazy I know! But I was honored to be apart of a weeklong gathering of nonstop worship and prayer with over 20 churches gathering in downtown Oslo. Feeling a strong calling to this nation, I had to walk through this open door!

In that little hotel room while I was preparing for my worship session that night, I began to think of all that awaited me in this busy upcoming season. If being a new father wasn’t scary enough, the call to be a faithful husband and leader of a global movement in the in the midst of traveling, writing, meetings, projects and all that demanded attention was quite overwhelming in the moment!

Never wanting to get to the place where ministry and my calling is considered drudgery or even just “familiar”, a fervent prayer came off my lips in that moment asking God to “just make it all new again!” Instantly, I began to feel things rise in my heart that I have not felt since I was 16 years old. During those innocent days of two chord youth meetings (which was all we knew how to play at the time!) and a lot of broken guitar strings, raw passion is what guided us into deep realms of encounter beyond our imagination. Those same feelings of anxious joy and anticipation I felt driving on those summer Virginia nights to the humble primary school hall overtook me. They were feelings of expectancy and faith along with 350 other hungry young hearts that gathering on those Wednesday nights to believe that “God, could do anything tonight!”

I have never felt the same since that night in Oslo. Something got on me that just won’t get off in the midst of life’s monotonous, rigorous and demanding pace. It’s newness, freshness and a baptism of childlikeness. Oh how I would not dare live without it!

Overwhelming Joy in North Korea

A mere three months ago, we stepped onto the soil of the darkest, hardest, most oppressive and impossible nation on the earth. God only commissioned our team of revivalists with one strategy. The open door to North Korea was God’s faithful answer to prayers I have been praying since a boy. I was 12 years old when I created a “bucket list” with my father of the most closed nations on earth I felt called to. I have since been to four out of the five on that initial list and North Korea was on the very top!

When you are going into the nation listed as #1 on the Voice of the Martyrs for Christian persecution over the last several decades, intense preparation, prayer and fasting is non-negotiable. This was not a quaint missions outing to be taken lightly. There are no guarantees of safety, security or even diplomacy in a nation like this.

With furrows on our brow and the typical intercessor “grimace” on our faces, we gathered in Beijing as a team to pray the night before our entry into North Korea. The only verse I was getting from the Lord leading up to that night seemed as if it had nothing to do with the intense atmosphere of spiritual warfare we were about to encounter – or so I thought! During our days of fasting, prayer and even the plane ride over, the same verse would not escape my thoughts.

“How blessed are the people who know the joyful sound! O Lord, they walk in the light of your countenance, In your name they rejoice all the day, And by your righteousness they are exalted.”

Psalm 89:15-16 NASB

As we shared and prayed into this verse that night, something supernatural blindsided our team! We were infected with a sound and song of joy and could not help ourselves! In spite of the most intense atmosphere of any nation I have ever visited, from those first steps on the soil, there was a tangible lightness in the spirit that overwhelmed us with childlike joy! Our furrows and grimaces were transformed to giddy and victorious smiles! We literally rejoiced “all day long” during our week in the nation!

This sound and joy caused a shift in the atmosphere everywhere we stepped our feet and a wind of grace and ease followed. We worshipped where we were not allowed to worship. We prayed where we were not allowed to pray. We shared Jesus with those we were not allowed to share Jesus with. We found ourselves in unheard of situations and encounters I cannot even share here. We basically broke every rule that was given to us and did it with a smile on our face! Even by the last few days of our trip, the staunch government-mandated guides assigned to our team curiously asked many questions. Indoctrinated from an early age that the USA is their most fierce enemy, they could not understand why we loved their nation so much and were happy to pray, sing and share Jesus. The joy was infectious and quickly began to spread to crack open the hardest of hearts!

The Great Fire of London

Last weekend, a crazy encounter took place right before a gathering of worshippers in downtown London, England. We were grabbing a quick coffee across the street from the church when a five-year-old boy randomly leaned over a few feet from my face and began to yell with an intense British accent: “The great fire of London…The great fire of London…The great fire of London!” He repeated the phrase over and over as it grew louder and louder as if we were the only two people in the coffee shop (although it was packed with people). I was caught in total bewilderment and could not believe what I was hearing as I actually felt anointing on this little boy’s words!

His father rushed over to cover his mouth and quickly told me as they walked out the door that his son had recently become obsessed with the great fire of London of 1666. From a small out of control blaze in a Bakery on Pudding Lane, the entire city of London quickly burned to the ground including 70,000 out of 80,000 homes. Although it was a catastrophic blaze that razed the great city to the ground, many historians believe it also cleansed and saved the entire British Isles from the horrible bubonic plague that went on to wipe out half of Europe’s population! It was the fire that quickly spread, cleansed and made way for an entirely new city.

That boy’s father also told me that this great fire began no less than 100 yards from where we were sitting and even closer from where our meeting was that night! I took it all as a divine sign and word from above and that “out of the mouth’s of babes” God was prophetically calling forth a fresh blaze on the hearts of the people of England!

The gatherings that night and the following morning in London were a highlight of the entire European tour as we watched the fresh fire of His presence relight love’s flame in the hearts of hundreds of worshippers! A wave of childlike wonder, joy and fascination hijacked the meetings and the “joyful sound” truly came forth! I’ve never seen such “proper” British Londoner’s have so much fun during worship! I could not help but laugh and begin to yell out like that little boy in the coffee shop: “The great fire of London…The great fire of London…The great fire of London!”

A fresh blaze is being lit on the altar of our hearts in this hour and childlikeness is upon us! I have been singing over and over again in almost every city, nation and church I visited since that New Year’s eruption:

“There is a grace, a grace for childlike faith…

A grace, a grace to believe again.”

Receive the grace even right now being poured out all over the world! Choose to move beyond failures, fears and worries and simply trust, believe and sing! In Matthew 18:3, Jesus encourages that “…unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

There is so much to receive and enter into in this new season! Lets not miss a single thing, but lets receive childlikeness!

Sean Feucht

Founder, Burn 24-7