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Excerpts taken from
Dancing With Destiny: Awaken your Heart to Dream, to Love, to War
by Jill Austin
God’s Media Army: Global Changers
God’s Dream Team: A Holy Mafia
Staying Clean: A Movie Adventure
Guarding Your Eye Gate
What are the Giants in Our Lives?
Strategic Intercession: How to Defeat the Enemy in Your Life
The Power of Prophetic Intercession
Dressed for Battle
God’s Media Army: Global Changers
Because I am an artist and I was born and raised in Hollywood, clean and decent movies have been a way for me to relax and have fun. There are some great films being released! I love movies like: The Passion, Braveheart, The Guardian, The Ultimate Gift, Chariots of Fire, The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, One Night with the King, The Unfinished Life and many more. I have a real passion for the movie industry, but the contents of many movies today is very evil, perverted, violent and subtly laced with the occult.
But the other side of the coin is that we don’t want to just throw everything in the electronic age out the window! We need to wake up to the power of communications and the media! They are going to be powerfully used by the Lord to harvest whole nations. Dreamer God is on the move!
Being an artist myself, I love the theatre, music, movies, and the dance! It makes me fully alive and in touch with my God, who is very colorful and creative! I have such a heart for the arts!
Part of the war is because these are global trendsetters who will significantly affect all of society. We need to be the forerunners who move with excellence, are on the cutting edge, and we produce the best of the best in all of these fields. This is one of the most strategic battle fronts we face because it affects the minds, hearts, and passions of the masses.
The church should be actively empowering and cheering on the “Bravehearts” who are gifted in these arenas instead of judging and dismissing every one of them as “evil”, which is ignorance. Because we’ve been religious and critical, we’ve lost control of one of the most influential avenues of evangelism of the 21st century! We really need to repent, take back the territory we’ve lost, and infiltrate all of these ranks … for Jesus! Let’s redeem the arts together!
If Jesus were literally walking the earth today, I know He would use the media because it has global impact! He was a master story teller and the Bible is full of parables that are prophetic and carry hidden truths. They are like time capsules of revelation that are released over the centuries. Every movie that is released in Hollywood has cultural influence – for the good or for the bad – that impacts the world and the generations to come. God needs to capture these influential avenues of communication again!
We are up against evil powers and principalities as we contend to take back what’s been stolen. This is heavy spiritual warfare and we need to move with the power of the Holy Spirit, asking for strategies, revelation, keen discernment and wisdom for these battles. We must use “the sword of the Lord”, which I talk about in my book, Dancing with Destiny: Awaken Your Heart to Dream, to Love, to War (Chosen Books – May, 2007).
God’s Dream Team: A Holy Mafia
High adventures await us as we become culturally relevant to impact the world with first class, top-notch, extraordinary performances in all of these avenues! I feel that the Holy Spirit is prophetically downloading fresh scripts to screen writers for theatre, film, and drama. He is positioning actors and actresses, along with musicians, singers and dancers, to speak the heart of God to the masses through every form of art.
Today, Jesus “produces” movies by influencing others in these areas. He also challenges and inspires financiers, marketplace advertisers, and entrepreneurs to help bring biblical truths to humanity. Jesus moves with excellence and He wants to draw the world back to Himself, using the very best plays, movies, music and dance that would astound the world with extraordinary giftedness! Why not!!!
I feel that God wants to give dreams, visions and fresh revelation from heaven for these forms of media, the arts, and communication. Inspiration and revelation with application must accompany these tangible earthly projects. Many people talk about what they want to do but so few actually DO it! This is a call for action! Let’s storm the gates and take the world by storm!! We must put “shoe leather” to our visions and dreams because they will be strategic to awaken peoples’ destinies and callings.
As we are dealing with these areas, we must pray that God will give us the brilliant ideas of the entrepreneurs, the creative imaginations of gifted people in these areas, and the financiers to fund these radical projects. God is raising up men and women who are like a dream team, ones who move in hearing the voice of God and creating world trends.
I love the internet! We live in the 21st century and the electronic age where almost anything is possible and limitations are no longer an excuse. It is amazing because the internet brings an instant platform that touches the world. Computers are in most homes and schools. The world is connecting in internet coffee shops, Muslim and Communist nations, as well as remote third world nations.
With the internet, you are not limited by your education, gender, nationality, age or finances because almost everyone has access to it. Boundless opportunities for learning are at our finger tips!
Not only is the Lord is raising up people in entrepreneurial areas but He is also moving creatively through stay-at-home parents, retired folks, internet bloggers, savvy yuppies, bed-ridden people who have access to computers, the techie twenty-somethings, and even little children who can travel through electronic windows and electronic highways of the world.
Staying Clean: A Movie Adventure
We cannot take the Holy Spirit for granted and assume that He will move through unclean vessels. Many times we think we get away with watching sex, violence and profanity on TV or at the movies, but the Holy Spirit is right there with us telling us He is being offended. We are not filled with the Holy Spirit only when we witness to the lost; we are modern-day Arks of the Covenant wherever we go, all the time.
A number of years ago when our ministry team was in the Midwest, a couple took Naomi, one of my actresses, and me to a movie. After five minutes, I began to “see” in the Spirit - demons were coming out of the screen and filling the theatre. I realized that I should I leave but I was so looking forward to a relaxing time since it was my first night out after holding meetings all week. Besides, wouldn’t it offend our hosts?
I was wrestling with all of this but the Lord kept telling me to leave. He told me that I would be ministering to His people the next day, and He wanted me to be clean. He did not want me to watch that movie.
It was not okay for me to get slimy at the show when He had told me to leave. I could not become covered with all kinds of filth, and then say, “Forgive me, God. Amen.” I would not have been a fit vessel for Jesus in the meetings if I had stayed.
I leaned over to Naomi and said, “Do you see anything coming out of the screen?”
She said, “Oh, no, Jill. You mean we have to leave?”
I whispered that we would be in trouble if we stayed. We both knew it would not be worth it.
I explained to our hosts that the Lord was not allowing us to sit through the movie (sex and violence started in so we knew we must leave). They said, “Well, we have paid our money. If you want to wait in the lobby, that’s fine.”
Naomi and I plopped down on benches in the lobby for the next hour and a half. The best part was that God moved powerfully the next day in both of the services. I knew in my heart that I was clean before the Lord and obedient to what He wanted.
Guarding Your Eye Gate
I’ve had people tell me to see a certain show because it was “so prophetic” and when I went, I had to walk out! We can’t afford to wade through 90 minutes of all kinds of filth to capture a few “prophetic” scenes in a movie! Our hearts and our eye gates need to be sanctified and pure.
The war has increased because we are being infiltrated with the electronic age of television, movies, computers, the internet, radio, video games, cartoons, etc. The written word also affects the eye gate with pornographic magazines, books, newspaper ads and articles, comic books, etc.
We are being bombarded with constant onslaughts and inroads of visual evil and the danger is that we can become so culturally desensitized that this seems “normal” because it’s so familiar. The line between biblical truth and cultural acceptance becomes fuzzy after awhile. The enemy also helps us justify and rationalize our behavior when we see other believers going to movies - so if it’s ok for them, then it must be ok with us.
Visual images stick in our memory bank and that is why pornography is so destructive and imprisoning. The visual pictures come back, a path is created, and the more you go down the path, the wider it gets and the easier it is to enter it. It seems “normal” but soon people have no conscience. What you give yourself to, takes you.
There are many battlefields we fight in spiritual warfare: One is the most powerful weapons of the enemy is to pollute our eye gate, which opens us to that whole seductive realm in the spirit. Another deceptive weapon of the enemy involves an anti-Christ spirit that wants to kill and manipulate our passions through various perversions, moral failures, and addictions to alcohol and drugs and many other things!!
I tell you, there are dark satanic windows that are flooding our homes. What is your secret life like? Are you a “double agent” where you go to church, worshipping and praying, yet you entertain yourself in dark movie theaters, polluting your eye gates with violence, witchcraft, sensuality, fantasy, unfaithfulness in marriages, gambling or internet pornography?
You may be asking the Lord to be able to see in the Spirit realm but then you go to a movie and watch all kinds of perverse things. You cloud your eye gate from being able to see in the realm of the Spirit by doing things like this!
Another subtle ploy if the enemy can look like this. You know that you need to be running after Jesus and attending a meeting where the presence and power of God is moving and you’re learning to hear His voice. Yet, your child is sitting next to you reading Harry Potter books, beguiling stories from the second heaven – the satanic realms. Both are supernatural gates.
We desperately need discernment and wisdom. We must be watchful and let the Holy Spirit speak to us about what to do and not to do! Then obey Him!
The enemy has anesthetized us and we don’t even recognize the compromise in our own lives! It is important that we humble ourselves and repent where we have sinned. Repentance and humility break the power of the enemy and that breaks the power of strongholds in our lives.
What are the Giants in Our Lives?
We really need to go before the Lord and say, “Lord, what are the giants in my life?” Before you have the authority to bring freedom to others, you must deal with those sins in your own life! Can you confront darkness if there is corruption in your own members? You cannot.
I believe that we limit the Holy Spirit any time we are not aware of our senses—what we see or hear, what we smell, taste or touch. Our senses are open gateways for God—or for the enemy. Do you know, for instance, that you can smell demonic activity around certain people just as you can smell the perfume of the Lord coming into a sanctuary?
When I am in a service, I look at the people. I look for signposts. Once when I was ministering at an altar area, a man pushed the other people out of the way and said, “I want prayer now.”
He put his hands into mine. I looked at him and before I even thought about it I said, “Pornography. Your hands are unclean. You are involved in pornography.” I could feel the filth and the sexual perversion all around him.
He turned bright red, started sobbing uncontrollably and the Lord touched him beautifully as he repented and went through deliverance.
Note, too, that sometimes when the Lord wants to impart a word of knowledge for healing, He might give the intercessor the exact pain or symptom that He wants to heal in the person. That’s unusual, you might think. I don’t remember having hives three minutes ago. That is clear direction for prayer.
Strategic Intercession: How to Defeat the Enemy in Your Life
Soldiers must pray without ceasing. Jesus wants us to go into the war room and get weapons for the new battles we will go up against each day (see Jeremiah 33:3). We can take comfort in the fact that Jesus ever lives to make intercession for us (see Heb. 7:25). Prayer, fasting and worship accelerate our hunger and passion for Him. As Oswald Chambers said, “Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work.”
In the hour of history we live in, moving in the Spirit is essential to our survival. Hearing God’s voice in everyday life is no longer an option but a necessity. It is imperative that we all live supernatural lives and spend time in the secret place with the Lord. He is calling all of us to a deeper intimacy and prayer in the hour in which we live.
The Lord is mobilizing global prayer warriors to invade the kingdom of darkness that threatens the borders of our nations. These intercessors will stand in the gap to bring down fresh strategies and blueprint plans from the Kingdom of God. I feel like the Lord is raising a remnant of valiant prayer warriors across denominations, all around the earth. Radical prayer furnaces are springing up and they are saying, “Lord, we don’t want to just pray little prayers, we want to go into the heavens and see what is happening so we can impact our world.”
Reese Howell was a radical apostolic intercessor in World War II. He was a man who would go up into the heavens with a group of intercessors and they would see the strategies of the enemy and the strategies of God. They would start to intercede from the heavens and change the course of the war. The Lord is saying that He is looking for people who are willing to move on a governmental level, asking Him what is over the land and territory.
He also wants us to ask Him to show us what is happening right in our own homes! It is imperative that we start to get fresh strategies to move in the counsels of God and hear His voice to bring down fresh mandates. He is asking you to cry, “Jesus, help us to be a people who would know the times and seasons and bring down revelation and application that can start to break open territories with revival and a great harvest of souls.”
The Power of Prophetic Intercession
We are living in a kairos hour in history right now and it demands that we know the times and seasons we are living in today (not what the television, newspapers, and magazines are telling us!). Can we go into the counsel of the Lord and get the fresh strategies and war plans for today?
I want to share an important testimony with you. During the Gulf War, I kept seeing the same battles taking place on television. I started to get very frustrated and said, “Lord, I don’t want just natural television.
I want Your “tell-a-vision”. I want to see what is really happening in the heavens over the Middle East. Lord, what is on Your heart? There must be more information. I feel that we are shown bits and pieces of information, but Lord, what are You doing in the realm of the Spirit?”
On Sunday morning my pastor of a congregation of 3,000 told us to stand and pray for Israel. All of a sudden I heard the audible voice of the Lord saying, “Michael”.
I asked, “Michael who?”
He said, “Michael, the Archangel.”
Suddenly I had an open vision of Michael fighting over Israel. I asked the Lord what he was doing. Instantly I saw the Prince of Persia and Michael in a fierce battle.
The Lord continued, “The Prince of Persia is trying to pre-empt My timetable so that’s why I’ve released Michael. The war will end in three days.”
The Lord spoke again and He said, “Gabriel”.
I asked, “Lord, what’s Gabe doing?” Immediately I saw Gabriel moving families and individuals so they wouldn’t be harmed.
The next night I was at a Baptist pastor’s house and met a pastor from Israel. As I shook his hand I said, “I saw Michael over Israel. The war is going to end on the third day.”
He said, “Michael is the archangel over Israel.” When the pastor was flying back to Israel on Purim, the war ended that very day, which was three days later.
You see, we must be willing to have your antennas up twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Ask the Lord strategic questions about your life, family, work, school, city, and world events. The Lord is raising up prophets in this hour, men and women who will go into the counsels of the Lord. Intercession, fasting, and worship accelerate the call of God on each of our lives. Are you available to go deeper into the war room of God?
Dressed for Battle
This is an excerpt taken from my book, *Master Potter, (Destiny Image) which is an allegory about a young woman named Beloved, who is in heavy spiritual warfare and is being fit with the full armor of God. This is how the Holy Spirit, who is called Amazing Grace in my book, is equipping her for battle.
“Beloved, fight for life! I’m here to help you. You don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, Beloved, but against demonic principalities and powers.”
The words of Amazing Grace impart hope and faith. She cries out, “I don’t want to die! I want to live for Master Potter and my children!”
Turning to command the dark forces He declares, “She has resisted you. You must leave now!”
The enemy sullenly retreats for a moment and Amazing Grace walks her back to the path.
“Beloved you’re in heavy spiritual warfare and the enemy is trying to kill you but you must always remember that Master Potter loves you, even in your weakness.”
“But I keep messing up His plan for my life,” says Beloved.
“Master Potter has a destiny for your life and the lives of your children. You are the only one who can thwart Master Potter’s plan; the enemy cannot steal it from you unless you give up the fight. You must put on the whole armor of God to resist the fiery darts of the enemy.”
As He speaks, ministering angels gather around to dress her for battle. A form-fitting bodice of golden mail is slipped over her torn dress. It has a delicate appearance but it takes on an invincible power as the breastplate is strapped on.
Then they place a silver crown of salvation upon her bruised head to protect her mind from the lies of the enemy. A golden belt of truth is girded about her waist and leather sandals are placed on her feet and laced around her calves. They hand her a glorious shield of light with the word “Faith” emblazoned in scarlet.
Now dressed as a warrior bride, Amazing Grace holds out a sword to her with “The Word of God” engraved on its golden handle. He tells her, “As you speak the Word, this sword will be activated. You are armed and dangerous. You are my Beloved, no longer a victim but an overcomer.”
* Master Potter – chapter “Dressed for Battle” (pp. 183-184) Destiny Image
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