Are you hungry for a deeper, Spirit-filled life where the supernatural becomes natural?

Join me for a special live webinar with my guest, Dr. John Burpee, as we explore how to recognize, develop, and exercise the spiritual senses God has given every believer.

Together, we will discover how to hear God’s voice more clearly, discern His leading, and minister with greater faith and confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit.

This practical, biblically grounded teaching will unpack the relationship between spirit, soul, and body and reveal how your spiritual senses can be trained through consistent practice. Whether you are new to the gifts of the Spirit or have been walking in them for years, you will be equipped and encouraged to grow in sensitivity to the Holy Spirit in everyday life.

Webinar Times - Free Registration

🇺🇸 USA & Canada—Eastern Time
Tuesday, July 28
7:00 PM EDT

🇦🇺 Australia—AEST
Wednesday, July 29
9:00 AM AEST

Register Free:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/YdXW0CDPTXicjZkgf1as5A

Registration is free but required. Once you register, Zoom will send you a personal link to join the webinar.

Register by Monday, July 27, and you will also receive the complimentary webinar notes.

A Special Bonus

My new book, Unsettled: The Unexpected Path to God’s Purpose, releases on August 18. You can download a free chapter and preorder the book at a special discounted price at:

https://unsettledbook.com

I believe this webinar will deepen your walk with God and equip you to minister with greater discernment, faith, and confidence in the Holy Spirit.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Grace and peace,

Glenn Bleakney
Awake Nations
Kingdom Reformation Community

Watch Awake Nations TV for free! Visit https://AwakeNations.tv

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Discover how disruption can become preparation, loss can deepen dependence, and separation can signal the beginning of a new season.

Unsettled by Glenn Bleakney is available August 18. Download a free chapter and preorder for a special discount at https://unsettledbook.com

In Jesus,

Glenn Bleakney

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But what happens when the plan falls apart?

A door closes. A dependable resource dries up. A relationship that once felt secure comes to an end. In moments like these, it is easy to assume we have failed—or that God has forgotten us.

But sometimes what feels like disruption is actually divine redirection.

The apostle Paul had a worthy plan to preach in Asia, but the Holy Spirit prevented him from going. That closed door redirected Paul toward Macedonia, opening the way for the gospel to advance into Europe.

Elijah experienced something similar when the brook that sustained him dried up. The empty creek bed was not evidence that God had abandoned him. It was a signal that the season had changed. God was leading him toward Zarephath, where another miracle was waiting.

Not every disappointment is directly caused by God. Human decisions, our own mistakes and life in a broken world can all affect what happens to us. Yet none of these things place us beyond God’s ability to redeem, redirect and use them for His purposes.

The most difficult part is often the space between doors. The old season has ended, but the new one has not yet begun. You no longer have a map, so you must learn to listen for God’s voice.

That unsettled place is not wasted. God uses it to deepen your dependence, strengthen your character and prepare you for what comes next.

God is not trying to leave you rootless. He is a planter. When He permits your roots to be disturbed, it may be because He is preparing to establish you in soil where you can flourish.

If your plans have been interrupted, your resources have diminished or familiar relationships have changed, do not assume your story is over. God may be redirecting your steps toward a purpose you cannot yet see.

Feeling Unsettled?

Download a free chapter of my new book, Unsettled: The Unexpected Path to God’s Purpose, and preorder your copy today at a special discounted price.

Download the free chapter and preorder at UnsettledBook.com

Subscribe now

We’re back!

Are you hungry for a deeper Spirit-filled life where the supernatural becomes natural?

Join me for a special live webinar with my guest, Dr. John Burpee, as we explore how to recognize, develop, and exercise the spiritual senses God has given every believer. Together we’ll discover how to hear God’s voice more clearly, discern His leading, and minister with greater confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit.

This practical, biblically grounded teaching will unpack the relationship between spirit, soul, and body and show how your spiritual senses can be trained through regular practice to become more sensitive to the Holy Spirit in everyday life. Whether you’re new to the gifts of the Spirit or have been walking in them for years, you’ll be equipped and encouraged to grow in a lifestyle where the supernatural is natural.

Webinar Times

🇺🇸 USA & Canada (Eastern Time)
Tuesday, July 28
7:00 PM EDT

🇦🇺 Australia (AEST)
Wednesday, July 29
9:00 AM AEST

Register Here

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/YdXW0CDPTXicjZkgf1as5A

Registration is free, but required. Once you register, Zoom will send you your personal link to join the webinar.

I believe this teaching will strengthen your walk with God and equip you to minister with greater faith, discernment, and confidence in the Holy Spirit.

I look forward to seeing you there!

In Christ,

Glenn Bleakney
Awake Nations
Kingdom Reformation Community

AwakeNations.tv

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Sometimes the path God leads us on isn’t the one we expected.

Doors close. Plans change. Dreams seem delayed. We find ourselves in a season of uncertainty, wondering if God has forgotten us.

But what if your season of being unsettled is actually God’s way of preparing you for something greater?

That’s why I wrote Unsettled: The Unexpected Path to God’s Purpose.

Through Scripture, personal stories, and practical biblical insight, you’ll discover how God often uses seasons of disruption to redirect us into His best.

📖 Download FREE Sample Chapter

I’d love for you to read the opening chapters before the book is released.

Visit:

👉 https://UnsettledBook.com

There you can instantly download your complimentary sample chapter and begin reading today.

🎉 Special Pre-Order Pricing

While you’re there, you can also pre-order your copy at a special discounted launch price before release day on Amazon.

Official Release Date: August 18

Whether you’re walking through transition yourself or know someone who is, I believe this book will bring hope, clarity, and fresh confidence that God is faithfully leading every step of the journey.

Don’t miss the launch pricing.

Visit now: https://UnsettledBook.com

Thank you for your encouragement and support. I can’t wait to place this book into your hands.

Grace and peace,

Glenn Bleakney

Author of Unsettled: The Unexpected Path to God’s Purpose

P.S. If these sample chapters encourage you, would you consider sharing UnsettledBook.com with a friend or family member who may be navigating a season of transition? Sometimes one book can change the direction of a life.

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Shaneen spent more than twenty years in a church in the UK before enduring what she now names plainly as spiritual abuse. In her words, it was mostly the misuse of authority, the kind that grows in a celebrity culture where everyone assumes the leader is right and everything he says must be from God. She knows the cost from the inside. She lost trust in leadership, wondered whether her marriage, her finances, her reputation, and her faith would survive, and reached the place where she wanted to give up. “I’ll still love God,” she remembers thinking, “but I don’t know if I could carry on in ministry.”

She did carry on. And her testimony now is that recovery is possible.

NAMING WHAT WE HAVE TOLERATED

There is a line Shaneen offered that I have not been able to set down: what we confront will die, and what we tolerate dominates. For too many years the church has tolerated toxic culture, and toleration is a kind of permission. We have watched a pattern repeat across the world, in Australia, in America, in Europe, in Asia; a moral failure surfaces, and behind it we discover a culture that was already unwell, leaders who knew something and said nothing, people who felt intimidated and stayed quiet. The failure was the symptom. The tolerated culture was the root.

Part of what has done such deep harm is the weaponizing of Scripture, bending the text to defend the leader or to pressure the wounded. Shaneen named the prosperity distortion especially, the give-and-you-will-be-blessed, withhold-and-you-will-be-cursed manipulation that has bruised so many. I know the genuine scriptural basis for generous giving; that is not what either of us is describing. We are describing the misuse of holy words to control God’s people.

This is why silence is not neutrality. When leadership avoids the truth to protect the institution or the reputation of a leader, it deepens the wound. Shaneen was direct: we minimize what victims have been told, we defend the wrong thing, and we withhold the whole truth. The healthier way is full disclosure, honestly facing what actually took place rather than rushing to defend a system.

THE HEALING IS REAL, AND IT IS PRACTICAL

If you are in the middle of this, Shaneen walked through the practical steps that carried her, and I want to hand them to you plainly.

Call it what it is. Acceptance comes first. Stop defending the abuse. Many of us feel guilty even using the words spiritual abuse, as though naming it were the sin. Naming it honestly is where healing begins.

Forgive. The big “F word” in the church, as she put it. Forgiveness is not a verdict that what happened was acceptable; it is the guarding of your own heart against bitterness, resentment, and the trap of a wound that never closes.

Regain trust. Trust is rebuilt through relationships, face to face, not only through a screen. When we are hurting we isolate, we hide, we carry shame that whispers we did something wrong. Reconnecting is hard precisely there, and it is exactly where the mending happens.

Step back and take counsel. Seek a trusted third party who can assess the situation from every angle. Shaneen did this; she went to two mature elders who took her cause to the leaders. The leaders refused to meet, and Matthew 18 was never honored, and her wound went deeper because a biblical principle was denied. Her counsel still stands: get wise, outside help.

See a therapist if you need one. There is good Christian therapy available, and there is nothing unspiritual about it. Churches, of all places, should be the ones encouraging it.

DON’T LET GO OF THE CHURCH

Here is the part I most want the wounded to hear, and it comes from someone who earned the right to say it. Don’t isolate yourself. Don’t let go of the church.

Shaneen reclaimed her faith and her healing by going back to community. Not the polished, trending, everything-looks-perfect environment she had known for years; she now belongs to a small local village Bible study, and she has found there the authenticity and the deeper, meaningful connection her soul actually needed. “We don’t find community,” she told me. “We build community.” She lost friends in the season of her hurt, people who judged her and fell away, and she grieved them; but others stood beside her, and those are the ones she chose to build with.

The Scripture we opened with was Hebrews 10:25, that we not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another, all the more as we see the Day drawing near. The Day is drawing near, and it is dark out there, and we were never meant to walk this road alone.

MEND BEFORE SEND

I shared with Shaneen something I teach here often. In Ephesians 4:12, the word for equipping carries the sense of mending or repairing. The fivefold ministry does not exist merely so you can identify your gift and your calling; it exists to make you whole, to form Christ in you until we come to the full stature of Christ. God wants to mend you before He sends you.

That is the reformation I believe we are living through. Not the destruction of the church, but its divine reconstruction; leaders being revived and made healthy, relationships being realigned, the authentic gospel being recovered after a decade of sugarcoating. A generation that will not settle for half-truths is asking, honestly, what is true, and where can we go if we cannot trust the church? The answer cannot be a better facade. It has to be a church with a pure heart and clean hands, a place where Jesus is truly honored as Lord and people are loved because they bear His image.

So if you have been hurt, hear this from someone who has been where you are and has come out the other side. It took her a while. It may take you a while. But healing is possible, community can be rebuilt, and the Father is near to the brokenhearted.

Be brave. Reconnect.

Shaneen Clarke has ministered for thirty years across Europe and beyond. You can connect with her at shaneenclarke.com. This post is drawn from our conversation on the podcast; a fuller follow-up on spiritual fathers and mothers is on the way.

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Drawing from her own journey and years of guiding others, Shaneen offers a compassionate roadmap for those wrestling with their spiritual identity after experiencing emotional abuse in faith settings. She tackles the challenging question many face: how do we reconcile our image of a loving God with painful experiences in His church?

This episode delves deep into the healing process, offering practical wisdom for rebuilding trust and finding authentic community after church hurt. Shaneen shares transformative insights on the power of forgiveness without diminishing the validity of pain, while providing concrete tools for those ready to step into their next chapter of faith.

Whether you're personally processing church trauma or supporting someone who is, this conversation offers both validation and hope for the journey ahead.

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Dear friends,

I’m excited to share that my new book, Unsettled: The Unexpected Path to God’s Purpose, is launching on Tuesday, August 18, on all major platforms.

This book has come from a deep place in my own journey with the Lord. Unsettled is for anyone who has ever found themselves in a season of transition, disruption, waiting, or uncertainty, and wondered what God was doing beneath the surface.

So often we interpret unsettled seasons as signs that something is wrong. But what if those very moments are part of God’s process of leading us into deeper trust, greater intimacy, and a fuller expression of His purpose?

In Unsettled, I share biblical insight, practical encouragement, and spiritual perspective to help readers recognize the hand of God in seasons that feel unclear, uncomfortable, or unfamiliar. My prayer is that this book will help people stop resisting the process and begin discerning how God is preparing them for what is next.

JOIN ME FOR THE LIVE LAUNCH

To celebrate the release, I’m hosting a free online launch on Tuesday, August 18 at 10:00 AM AEST which is Monday, August 17 at 8:00 PM Eastern Time in North America, streaming live on YouTube.

Watch the live for encouragement, and a first look inside Unsettled. Bring a friend — everyone is welcome.

Click here and tap “Notify me” so YouTube reminds you the moment we go live:

The book is also available for pre-order on Amazon now, and you can read a free sample chapter at unsettledbook.com.

I would be so grateful if you would help spread the word. Perhaps you know someone who is navigating change, waiting on direction, or feeling unsettled in this season. I believe this message could truly encourage and strengthen them.

Thank you for your friendship, encouragement, and support. I’m praying this book impacts many lives and helps people encounter God in the very places they may have least expected Him.

Blessings,

Glenn Bleakney

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In this thought-provoking conversation, Glenn Bleakney sits down with Dr. Mark Chironna to explore how efficiency, branding, celebrity leadership, and consumer-driven models have reshaped the Western church. Drawing on George Ritzer’s concept of “McDonaldization,” Dr. Chironna challenges leaders to rediscover a Christ-centered, cross-shaped vision of ministry rooted in spiritual formation rather than performance.

Together they discuss the influence of Enlightenment thinking, the rise of CEO-style leadership, the loss of theological depth, the dangers of celebrity Christianity, and why the Church must return to the ancient way of Jesus. This conversation offers a compelling call to recover authentic discipleship, servant leadership, and the transforming presence of Christ.

Whether you’re a pastor, ministry leader, or passionate follower of Jesus, this episode will challenge you to rethink what it truly means to lead—and to follow—the King.

Download the Apps for Awake Nations TV

Take Awake Nations with you wherever you go by downloading the Kingdom Community TV app on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Roku, iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Browse all available apps at https://www.kingdomcommunity.tv/apps or install the Roku channel directly at https://channelstore.roku.com/details/d1b95e000082771470c3caafe2089e45/kingdom-community-tv.

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There is a parable buried in the practice of the Australian cattlemen, and like most parables it conceals its wisdom beneath the dust of the ordinary.

Across the vast interior of this continent, where the land stretches past the horizon and the heat presses down like a hand, the rancher faces a problem that no fence can solve; the territory is simply too large, too unyielding, too expensive to enclose. To wall in such country would be an act of futility, a labour that consumes the whole of a man’s strength and yields him nothing but a perimeter he cannot defend.

And so the wisest among them have abandoned the logic of the fence altogether and embraced the logic of the well. They dig down into the hidden aquifers, the deep cool reservoirs that lie beneath the cracked surface of the earth, and they bring the water up; and the cattle, having tasted it, do not wander. They remain near the water not because a barrier compels them but because their thirst is satisfied.

The herd is held not by restriction but by refreshment; not by the threat of what lies beyond the boundary but by the abundance of what lies at the centre.

I do not introduce this image as a charming illustration to be admired and set aside; I introduce it because it names, with a precision that our ecclesiastical language has lost, the crisis confronting the church in this hour. We have become, by long habit and unexamined inheritance, a fence-building people. We have invested our energies in the construction and maintenance of boundaries, and we have grown skilled at the work; we know how to mark the line that separates the included from the excluded, the credentialed from the uncredentialed, the member from the stranger. But while we have laboured over our perimeters the springs have run dry, and a herd dies of thirst inside a perfectly maintained enclosure as surely as it dies wandering in the open country.

The question before us is not whether our fences are strong. The question is whether there is any water within them.

THE CRISIS IS NOT WHAT WE HAVE NAMED IT

When the church examines its own decline it tends to diagnose a problem of doctrine or a problem of mission; we conclude that we have believed wrongly or that we have failed to go, and we set ourselves to correcting the creed or reviving the programme. These are not trivial concerns, and I do not dismiss them; but I have become persuaded that beneath the failures of doctrine and the failures of mission there lies a deeper and more structural failure, a failure of leadership design. We have built our common life upon a faulty pattern, and the pattern reproduces its faults in everything it touches.

Consider what has happened to spiritual authority in our generation. The authority that the apostles carried was the authority of the well-digger; it flowed from their proximity to the source, from the manifest reality that those who drew near to them drew near to living water. But somewhere in the long institutionalisation of the faith we exchanged this authority for something that wears its clothing and counterfeits its voice: we exchanged authority for control.

Authority gives life; control merely manages it. Authority draws; control contains.

The two are not the same, and the difference between them is the difference between a spring and a cistern. The leader who carries authority need not enforce his position, for the water vouches for him; the leader who possesses only control must defend his position perpetually, because the moment the enforcement ceases the people scatter, having found no reason to remain.

And so we arrive at the strange spectacle of a church that is exhausting itself in the work of management while the very thing that management was meant to protect quietly evaporates. We have substituted the fathering of movements with the administering of systems. We have substituted the cultivation of presence with the enforcement of programmes and the conferring of titles. We have, in short, become very good at the wrong thing, and our competence in the wrong thing has obscured from us how completely we have abandoned the right one. The reformation that God is working in this hour is, at its root, a summons to return: to lay down the trowel of the fence-builder and take up the spade of the well-digger.

BOUNDED SETS AND CENTRED SETS

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch have given us a vocabulary that illuminates this distinction with unusual clarity, drawing upon a contrast that originates in set theory but finds its truest application in the life of the community of faith; they speak of bounded sets and centred sets, and the two describe not merely different methods of organisation but different theologies of belonging.

A bounded set is defined by its border. It exists to answer a single question, asked and answered at the perimeter: who is in, and who is out? It establishes the line and then expends its energy patrolling it. Its markers are external and they are many—the denominational affiliation, the doctrinal subscription, the behavioural code, the cultural conformity—and membership is determined by one’s position relative to the wall. To belong is to be inside; to be outside is to be other.

A centred set operates upon an entirely different principle. It is defined not by its border but by its centre, and the question it asks is not where a person stands relative to a line but in which direction a person is moving relative to the centre. Are you oriented toward Christ? Are you moving toward Him, drawing nearer, being formed? In this configuration the energy of leadership is not spent at the edges, for there are no edges to patrol; it is spent at the centre, in the deepening and the clarifying of the source toward which all are invited to move.

A well has no perimeter. It does not concern itself with how far the cattle have ranged; it concerns itself only with the purity and the depth of its water.

The leader who grasps this stops trying to control the edges, and the cessation of that effort is itself a kind of liberation; for the policing of boundaries is endless labour, and the leader who lays it down discovers that he has been freed for the only work that finally matters, which is the work of cultivating a Christ-saturated environment where the living water rises. Our Lord Himself established the principle in His conversation at the well in Samaria, where He declared to the woman:

“Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14, ESV)

Here is the entire vocation of spiritual leadership compressed into a sentence: we are not the water, and we were never meant to be; Jesus is the well, and our calling is simply to lead the thirsty to Him and then to step aside that they might drink.

THE APOSTOLIC PATTERN WAS NEVER AN EMPIRE

When we turn from our inherited assumptions to the actual record of apostolic leadership in the New Testament, we encounter something that ought to unsettle us, for it bears almost no resemblance to the structures we have erected in its name. We look at Paul and Barnabas, at Priscilla and Aquila, at the whole company of those who carried the gospel across the Mediterranean world, and we do not find empires; we find movements. We do not find central headquarters issuing directives to compliant branches; we find decentralised communities bound together by something stronger than organisational hierarchy. The relationships among them were built upon trust rather than positional control, upon covenant partnership rather than denominational bureaucracy; and the instinct of these leaders, when they raised up others, was not to retain them but to release them, not to hoard the platform but to multiply the platforms by giving them away.

This was the fivefold ministry functioning as it was designed to function, which is to say functioning as spiritual family rather than as institutional apparatus. The apostle, the prophet, the evangelist, the pastor, the teacher—these were never offices to be occupied and defended; they were equipping gifts, given for the maturing of the saints and the building up of the body, and their whole orientation was outward and downward, toward the equipping of others rather than the elevation of self. The leaders of the early church were not gatekeepers stationed at the perimeter to regulate access; they were well-diggers labouring at the centre to deepen the source, drawing the people to the water of the Spirit and the water of the Word.

TEN WAYS THE WELL IS DUG

If this is the crisis and this is the calling, then the practical question presses upon us: what does it actually mean to dig a well in the soil of our own context? I offer ten disciplines—not techniques to be applied mechanically, but postures to be cultivated in the heart of the leader who would create life-giving space.

Read more

If you’re ready to move from control to covenant, from systems to the supernatural, join the Kingdom Reformation movement.

📖 Learn more at

https://kingdomreformation.org

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In a culture filled with confusion, competing voices, and biblical illiteracy, the Church needs leaders who can rightly handle the Scriptures and communicate them with clarity, conviction, and spiritual power; yet the truth is that this need extends far beyond the pulpit, reaching into the boardroom, the classroom, the small group, the Zoom meeting, and the ordinary conversations where lives are quietly shaped.

THE SKILL EVERYONE NEEDS

Whether you teach in a classroom, lead a team, preach from a pulpit, disciple new believers, pitch in a meeting, or simply want to share your thoughts more persuasively, the ability to communicate is one of the most valuable assets you can develop. The most gifted communicators in history were not born with a rare gene; they learned principles, practised them, and grew. Clarity can be cultivated. Confidence can be built. Connection with an audience can be taught. And the difference between someone who speaks and someone who moves a room is almost always a matter of skill that has been intentionally sharpened.

This is why effective communication is worth pursuing whether your platform is sacred or secular. The preacher and the professional are drawing from the same well: understanding your audience, structuring your message, speaking with authenticity, and helping people move from merely hearing to actually responding.

BUT WE HAVE SOMETHING MORE

Here is what sets the believer apart. The skilled secular communicator has technique; the anointed communicator has technique and the Holy Spirit. This is the unfair advantage. Skill will help you arrange your words; the Spirit will take those words past the intellect and into the heart, where genuine transformation happens. The most polished speaker in the world can inform an audience, but only the Spirit of God can convict, awaken, and change a life.

So we refuse the false choice between being highly practical and being deeply spiritual. We pursue both. We sharpen the craft to the highest level we can, and then we lean fully into the power of the Holy Spirit; for when natural skill and supernatural anointing meet, communication becomes something no audience can easily shake off.

NEW MODULE: TEACHING AND PREACHING GOD’S WORD EFFECTIVELY

That is why I am excited to invite you to our next Sent College module. Beginning Thursday, July 16 at 6:00 PM (Australian Eastern Standard Time), this practical and inspiring course is designed to equip you to communicate the Scriptures in ways that inform the mind, strengthen faith, and transform lives.

Throughout this module, you will learn:

• Principles of effective Bible teaching and preaching

• The difference between teaching and preaching, and when each is needed

• How theology grounds and fuels powerful communication

• How to prepare messages that are biblically sound and engaging

• Communicating with clarity, confidence, and authenticity

• Understanding your audience and connecting with listeners

• Teaching and preaching under the influence and power of the Holy Spirit

• How to give invitations that call people to genuine response

• Helping people move from hearing God’s Word to living God’s Word

Teaching and preaching are more than communication skills. They are sacred responsibilities. When God’s Word is communicated faithfully, people encounter truth, faith is strengthened, disciples are formed, and lives are changed.

FLEXIBLE STUDY OPTIONS

The module runs over five consecutive Thursday evenings at 6:00 PM AEST. Can’t attend live? No problem. Every session is recorded, and students can watch the videos and complete the course at their own pace. Whether you join us live online or study through the recordings, you will have access to all teaching materials and resources.

My prayer is that this module will help raise up communicators who are grounded in Scripture, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and equipped to teach and preach with effectiveness and impact.

STUDY FOR CREDIT — US$150

Complete assessments and earn academic credit toward a Sent College USA qualification:

• Associate Degree of Ministry

• Bachelor of Theology

• Bachelor of Ministry

• Master of Divinity

Tuition: US$150
Register for Credit: https://buy.stripe.com/00wdR96NQ4zLaxh0mlfAc06

AUDIT STUDENT OPTION — AU$100

Prefer to participate without completing assessments? As an audit student, you will receive:

• Access to all live teaching sessions

• Class notes and resources

• Lifetime access to recordings

• No assessments required

Please note that audit students do not receive academic credit, grading, coaching on assignments, or qualifications.

Tuition: AU$100
Register as an Audit Student: https://buy.stripe.com/fZufZhfkm0jv48T8SRfAc0i

Registration closes July 10.

Once registered, we will send everything you need, including your learner guide, Zoom access details, and course resources.

If God has called you to teach, preach, disciple others, lead in your workplace, or communicate His Word in any setting, this module will provide the practical tools and biblical foundations to help you grow in that calling. And it will help you learn to do what no course on public speaking alone can ever offer: to carry the unfair advantage of the anointing.

I’d love to have you join us.

Grace and peace,
Glenn Bleakney

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Subscribe now

In a culture filled with confusion, competing voices, and biblical illiteracy, the Church needs leaders who can rightly handle the Scriptures and communicate them with clarity, conviction, and spiritual power.

Whether you teach in a classroom, lead a small group, preach from a pulpit, disciple new believers, or simply want to share God’s Word more effectively, developing your ability to teach and preach is one of the most valuable investments you can make.

That’s why I’m excited to invite you to our next Sent College module:

New Module: Teaching and Preaching God’s Word Effectively

Beginning Thursday, July 16 at 6:00 PM (Australian Eastern Standard Time), this practical and inspiring course is designed to equip you to communicate the Scriptures in ways that inform the mind, strengthen faith, and transform lives.

Throughout this module, you’ll learn:

• Principles of effective Bible teaching and preaching
• How to prepare messages that are biblically sound and engaging
• Communicating with clarity, confidence, and authenticity
• Understanding your audience and connecting with listeners
• Teaching and preaching under the influence of the Holy Spirit
• Helping people move from hearing God’s Word to living God’s Word

Teaching and preaching are more than communication skills.

They are sacred responsibilities.

When God’s Word is communicated faithfully, people encounter truth, faith is strengthened, disciples are formed, and lives are changed.

Flexible Study Options

The module runs over five consecutive Thursday evenings at 6:00 PM AEST.

Can’t attend live?

No problem.

Every session is recorded, and students can watch the videos and complete the course at their own pace. Whether you join us live online or study through the recordings, you’ll have access to all teaching materials and resources.

My prayer is that this module will help raise up communicators who are grounded in Scripture, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and equipped to teach and preach with effectiveness and impact.

Study for Credit — US$150

Complete assessments and earn academic credit toward a Sent College USA qualification:

• Associate Degree of Ministry
• Bachelor of Theology
• Bachelor of Ministry
• Master of Divinity

Tuition: US$150

Register for Credit:
https://buy.stripe.com/00wdR96NQ4zLaxh0mlfAc06

Audit Student Option — AU$100

Prefer to participate without completing assessments?

As an audit student, you’ll receive:

• Access to all live teaching sessions
• Class notes and resources
• Lifetime access to recordings
• No assessments required

Please note that audit students do not receive academic credit, grading, coaching on assignments, or qualifications.

Tuition: AU$100

Register as an Audit Student:
https://buy.stripe.com/fZufZhfkm0jv48T8SRfAc0i

Registration closes July 14.

Once registered, we’ll send everything you need, including your learner guide, Zoom access details, and course resources.

If God has called you to teach, preach, disciple others, or communicate His Word in any setting, this module will provide practical tools and biblical foundations to help you grow in that calling.

I’d love to have you join us.

Grace and peace,

Glenn Bleakney
AwakeAus.com

This is not a medieval problem. It is a present crisis.

The chronicler’s account of Rehoboam deserves far more attention than it typically receives in the contemporary Church, because what it describes is not merely a political tragedy but a prophetic prototype — a pattern preserved in Scripture precisely because the Spirit of God foreknew we would need it in this hour. The ancient is always the prophetic. The historical is always the instructional. And the bronze shields of a compromised king in ninth-century Jerusalem have something urgent to say to the twenty-first-century Church that has confused the maintenance of religious appearance with the presence of the living God.

I want to take us slowly through this passage. Not because it is obscure, but because it is too familiar — and familiarity is its own kind of blindness. We have heard about the bronze shields in passing, used them as a sermon illustration, moved on. But the Spirit is not giving us permission to move on. He is pressing us to stay here, to feel the full weight of what is being described, because the Church in this hour is not merely adjacent to the Rehoboam pattern. In far too many expressions, we are living inside it.

THE INHERITANCE REHOBOAM COULD NOT SUSTAIN

Rehoboam did not begin in poverty. He inherited Solomonic excess — gold-plated magnificence, the fullness of covenantal favour, a temple that was not the product of fundraising campaigns but of divine commission. The shields of Solomon, pure gold, hung in the House of the Forest of Lebanon as silent testimony to what it meant to govern under the blessing of heaven. Wealth, wisdom, international renown, the proximity of God’s manifest presence — these were not achievements Rehoboam had earned. They were gifts he had received. And gifts, when mistaken for entitlements, become the very instruments of our undoing.

Within five years, it was gone.

“After Rehoboam’s position as king was established and he had become strong, he and all Israel with him abandoned the law of the LORD.” — 2 Chronicles 12:1

Strength was the undoing. The Hebrew ḥāzaq — to be strengthened, to prevail, to be established in one’s position — marks the precise moment when self-sufficiency displaced covenant dependency; and the moment any leader mistakes institutional stability for divine favour, the trajectory toward Egypt has already begun. There is a theology embedded in this verse that the contemporary Church desperately needs to recover: the consolidation of position is not evidence of God’s blessing; it is a test of whether we will remain tethered to Him when the pressure of survival no longer compels us toward prayer. Many leaders pray intensely in the building phase. The crisis of the mature phase is whether they continue to pray — to genuinely seek, to genuinely depend — once the building is built.

Rehoboam had no crisis to drive him toward God. He had stability, reputation, and a functioning religious infrastructure. And so, in the silence of comfortable establishment, the slow drift began. He abandoned the law of the LORD. Not in a dramatic public renunciation — there was no announcement, no formal decree of departure — but in the quiet accumulation of small substitutions, small independences, small preferences of his own wisdom over divine instruction, until what had begun as covenant devotion had become ceremonial maintenance, and no one had marked the day the transition occurred.

Shishak came with 1,200 chariots and 60,000 horsemen not because God had abandoned the covenant but because Rehoboam had; the withdrawal of divine protection simply made visible what was already spiritually true. The enemy does not create our vulnerabilities. He exposes them. And the exposure is, in the economy of God, an act of mercy — because the alternative to Shishak’s invasion is the continued fiction that nothing essential has been lost.

What followed is instructive. Confronted with existential threat, the leaders of Israel and the king humbled themselves: “The LORD is just” (2 Chronicles 12:6). This is notable. They did not dispute the prophetic word. They did not construct theological arguments for why their situation was more nuanced than Shemaiah’s pronouncement suggested. They bowed. They acknowledged. They said, with remarkable candour, that God was righteous in what He was permitting to occur. Heaven’s response, delivered through Shemaiah, was measured — and deliberately so:

“Since they have humbled themselves, I will not destroy them but will soon give them deliverance. My wrath will not be poured out on Jerusalem through Shishak. They will, however, become subject to him, so that they may learn the difference between serving me and serving the kings of other lands.” — 2 Chronicles 12:7-8

Deliverance, yes — but measured deliverance; not restoration, not the return of former glory, but enough mercy to keep the kingdom intact under reduced conditions. This is the principle of the middle space: not judgment unto destruction, but not fullness of presence either. A preserved institution; a diminished glory. Enough grace to survive; not enough surrender to thrive. And the purpose of the subjection to Shishak was pedagogical — so that they might learn the differencebetween serving God and serving the kings of other lands. The lesson was not punitive; it was educational. God was teaching through consequence what they had refused to learn through covenant. If devotion in the prosperous season had been authentic, the lesson would not have been necessary.

The distinction the text draws is critical: they humbled themselves, yet the chronicler notes in verse 14 that Rehoboam “did evil because he had not set his heart on seeking the LORD.” The humility was pressure-induced, not disposition-formed; it was a response to threat rather than a posture of the heart. Crisis-humility and covenant-humility are not the same thing, and heaven distinguishes between them with a precision that our theological categories often fail to capture. The first produces enough of a response to avert the worst; the second produces transformation. The first is sufficient for survival; the second is necessary for glory.

And heaven, who searches the reins and the heart — bāḥan kelāyôt wālēb — knew the difference, as He always does.

This is where the bronze shields enter.

THE WEIGHT OF WHAT WAS REPLACED

Shishak stripped the temple and the royal palace. Among what he took: the gold shields of Solomon. And Rehoboam’s response — his ecclesiastical problem-solving, his ministry innovation in the aftermath of loss — was to replace them with bronze:

“King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned these to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace. Whenever the king went to the LORD’s temple, the guards went with him, bearing the shields, and afterward they returned them to the guardroom.” — 2 Chronicles 12:10-11

Read that carefully. The ceremony continued. The procession still happened. The king still went to the temple. The guards still flanked him. The visual of kingship moving toward the house of God was maintained with apparent integrity. But the shields were now stored in the guardroom when not in use — maintained as props for liturgical display rather than displayed as permanent testimony to covenantal reality. They were brought out for the occasion and returned when the occasion was over; they were instruments of appearance, not substance; performance, not presence. And they were bronze, not gold.

The distinction in Scripture between these two metals is not merely aesthetic. Zāhāb — gold — is the metal of divinity, covenant fidelity, and unadulterated divine nature; it does not corrode, it does not combine with baser elements, it does not compromise its composition under ordinary conditions. The Ark of the Covenant was overlaid with pure gold. The mercy seat was formed of solid gold. The lampstand, the altar of incense, the vessels of the inner sanctuary — all gold, because gold in the Levitical economy represents that which belongs to God Himself, that which comes from above, that which cannot be produced by human ingenuity but must be received as gift and maintained as stewardship. The interior of the Holy of Holies was gold not because Solomon wanted expensive décor but because God was communicating something about His own nature: unaltered, undiminished, uncontaminated by the fallen metal of human effort.

Nəḥōšet — bronze or copper — is the metal of the outer court, the place of sacrifice and purification, the altar where the distance between fallen humanity and holy God was processed before approach could be made. It is an alloy; it is produced by the application of human craft, the combination of copper with tin or arsenic to produce something stronger than its components but still fundamentally manufactured. In the prophetic imagination of the Hebrew Scriptures, bronze often appears in contexts of judgment, human strength, and the fallen condition requiring divine intervention: the bronze serpent in the wilderness, the bronze gates Samson carried, the bronze fetters of Zedekiah in his humiliation. Bronze is not evil — God ordained it for the outer court — but bronze has its proper place, which is on the far side of the veil, in the space where purification happens, not in the inner sanctuary where God’s manifest presence resides.

When Rehoboam replaced gold with bronze, he replaced that which God had provided with that which man could manufacture. He replaced the divine original with the human approximation. And because bronze can be polished — because it catches the light impressively in procession, because from a distance, to the untrained eye, in the right conditions, it can be made to appear not entirely unlike gold — the exchange went publicly unchallenged. The ceremony looked the same. The shields gleamed. The guards marched with apparent grandeur. Jerusalem carried on.

But the guards knew. The men who carried those shields every time the king went to the temple knew the weight difference. They felt it in their arms — the gold had been heavier, denser, more substantial; it had carried a physical gravity that bronze cannot replicate. They knew what they held. And those who had carried the original, who had felt the weight of the genuine article, could not pretend that nothing had changed simply because the ceremony continued.

This is the anatomy of spiritual substitution at its most sophisticated: it does not abolish the form; it hollows out the substance while preserving the appearance. It maintains the procession while changing what is carried in it. It keeps the liturgical shape intact while replacing the covenantal content with something manufactured, something producible by human effort, something that catches the light well enough in public ceremony but cannot withstand the scrutiny of those who knew what the original felt like.

THE SPIRITUAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE BRONZE SHIELD

What I want us to understand is that Rehoboam was not trying to deceive anyone. This is important. He was not a cynical manipulator constructing a deliberate fraud. He was a leader who had lost something he could not afford to lose, who lacked both the spiritual depth to acknowledge the true nature of the loss and the covenantal devotion to pursue genuine restoration, and who therefore did what pragmatic leaders in every generation do when glory departs: he maintained the appearance of what had been, worked with the materials available to him, and called the result adequate.

This is the Rehoboam Syndrome in its purest form. Not malice but pragmatism. Not deception but self-deception. Not the deliberate rejection of God’s gold but the quiet substitution of it with what human hands could produce, dressed in the same ceremonial context, assigned the same functional role, and gradually accepted as normal because the institution required it and the alternatives were not immediately obvious.

Consider the specific details the text provides: the bronze shields were kept in the guardroom and only brought out when the king went to the temple. The gold shields had been permanently displayed. They were part of the visible testimony of the house — present whether or not the king was in procession, witnessing to the reality of God’s provision whether or not a ceremony was underway. The bronze shields, by contrast, were only produced for performance. They existed for occasions of display, not as continuous testimony. They were event-specific, ceremony-dependent, brought out when needed and stored away afterward.

How precisely does this mirror the spiritual architecture of much contemporary ministry. The presence of God becomes event-specific — produced for Sunday, maintained for the duration of the service, and then, in a practical sense, returned to the guardroom when the gathering ends. Corporate encounters that do not form the continuous atmosphere of a community’s life but are scheduled, managed, produced for occasions, and stored in the theological guardroom between performances. Leaders who carry gold in the pulpit but live from bronze during the week. Communities that have learned to generate the appearance of spiritual momentum without the substance of covenant relationship with God that makes momentum unnecessary to generate because it is continuously present.

Notice also what is absent from the text: there is no record that the substitution was ever announced, discussed, processed, or grieved publicly. Rehoboam made bronze shields. The text moves on. Life continued. The temple visits continued. The nation adjusted. And perhaps the most chilling detail in the entire passage is the implication that no one raised a formal objection — because everyone had already adjusted their expectations to what the middle space of measured deliverance could provide.

This is how the normalisation of bronze occurs. Not through crisis but through continuity. Not through a dramatic moment of departure but through the gradual recalibration of expectation downward, until the community no longer remembers clearly what gold felt like and therefore cannot name precisely what it is missing. They know something is missing. The most spiritually sensitive among them carry a hunger that the current environment cannot satisfy and an awareness that something essential has been exchanged. But the community as a whole has absorbed the bronze as its reference point, and what was once a substitution has become the standard.

WHAT BRONZE MINISTRY PRODUCES

The chronicler’s verdict on the Rehoboam era is damning precisely because of its moderation. He was “not totally destroyed.” There was “some good in Judah.” The kingdom survived. The temple remained open. Religious life continued.

“Not totally destroyed” and “some good” are, in theological terms, the most alarming commendations imaginable. They describe a community that retained enough covenantal shape to avoid annihilation but had lost the fullness of manifest glory — a people functioning under a measure of deliverance, permanently subject to the very systems from which their fathers had been delivered, because they had never established the heart-posture of those who seek the Lord with whole-heartedness.

Dārash — to seek, to inquire, to pursue with intentional diligence, to resort to for instruction — is the word the chronicler uses in the indictment of verse 14. Rehoboam did not dārash the Lord. And this becomes the diagnostic test for every generation: not whether ceremonies are maintained, not whether the building is full and the programmes are functioning and the budget is being met, not whether the institutional infrastructure is sound and the leadership team is capable — but whether the leaders and the people have set their hearts to seek Him with genuine relational intentionality, to dārash Him as their first and final reference point, to make the weight of His presence the measure against which all other weights are evaluated.

What bronze ministry produces, practically, is a community that functions well enough to sustain itself; whose visible metrics — attendance, activity, social media presence, event quality, financial giving — suggest health to the casual observer; whose members may even experience moments of genuine encounter, because God is merciful and moves in bronze-shield environments more graciously than we deserve. The Spirit of God does not abandon a community merely because its leadership has substituted bronze for gold. He remains, mourning the exchange, working within the constraints of what is offered, producing as much as genuine surrender will allow. But underneath the functioning, there is a spiritual stagnation that the most hungry in the congregation can feel and cannot name.

Seasoned saints who have carried actual gold — who have felt its weight, who remember what the presence of God feels like when it is not being scheduled or produced or managed — experience a deep disquiet in bronze-shield environments that no amount of programme improvement can resolve. They sense something is missing but find themselves unable to articulate it in ways that the institution can receive without defensiveness, because the institution points to its metrics as evidence that all is well. The building is full. The budget is met. The programmes are running. What, precisely, are you suggesting is absent?

What is absent is the weight. The kābôd. The glory-as-gravity that the word carries in its root — kābed, to be heavy, to be weighty — the manifest presence of God that does not merely create an atmosphere of spiritual warmth but settles on a community with the kind of divine gravity that changes people permanently, that produces transformation rather than inspiration, that confronts rather than merely comforts, that draws the unbeliever to genuine conviction rather than pleasant religious experience.

And the casualties in a bronze-shield ministry are not programmatic. The programmes are fine. The casualties are human. Dormant destinies that were never called forth because the environment lacked the prophetic weight to surface them. Capped callings that reached the ceiling of what the system could accommodate and could not break through because the system was not designed to handle gold-standard anointing without feeling threatened by it. Hungry hearts that processed years of spiritual stagnation as personal failure because the community around them consistently presented itself as spiritually successful. Gifted people who quietly relocated to other communities, not in rebellion but in hunger, searching for the weight of what they once felt or heard about or read of in history, unable to find it in what they were being offered.

The bronze-shield system also has a specific effect on leadership itself that must be named. When leaders settle into the maintenance of bronze as their operational standard, they develop — usually without awareness or intention — a relationship with the people’s hunger that is managerial rather than apostolic. Hunger is managed rather than fuelled. The exceptional — the person whose encounter with God produces something that doesn’t fit the system’s categories — is viewed with discomfort rather than celebration. Dependence on God is subtly redirected toward dependence on the leadership and the programme, because the leadership and the programme are the source of the religious experience being provided, and systems built on human production require the humans who produce them to remain central.

Meanwhile, the language of gold continues to be used. The sermons reference the glory. The worship songs address the presence. The promotional materials speak of transformation and encounter and the power of the Spirit. And this is perhaps the most sophisticated feature of the bronze-shield dynamic: the gold language remains fully operational long after the gold itself has been removed. The vocabulary of authentic Spirit-led community persists in an environment that has made structural peace with the absence of its referent. And because the language continues, the substitution is harder to name — because to name it appears to be a rejection of the language itself, a cynicism about the things being described, rather than a grief about the distance between the description and the reality.

THE PROPHET’S DIAGNOSTIC

This is why the prophetic function in the body of Christ is so essential and so consistently resisted. The prophet carries gold as their reference point. The prophet has stood in the council of the Lord, has felt the weight of His presence without the mediation of programme or production, and therefore cannot be persuaded that the bronze is adequate simply because the ceremonies around it have been maintained with integrity. The prophet is the guard who knows the weight difference in his arms and cannot pretend otherwise.

When the prophetic voice is welcomed in a community, it creates the possibility of honest evaluation — the painful, necessary acknowledgment that something essential has been exchanged, that the current condition, however functional it appears, does not represent the fullness of what God intends, that measured deliverance is not the target, that “not totally destroyed” and “some good” are not sufficient testimonies for a people called to be the dwelling place of the Most High. When the prophetic voice is resisted — when it is managed, marginalised, or reframed as divisive negativity — the community loses its primary diagnostic instrument and becomes entirely dependent on its own metrics to evaluate its own health. This is the ecclesiological equivalent of removing all the thermometers from a hospital and then declaring, on the basis of their absence, that there is no fever.

The faithful prophetic voice in this hour is not declaring war on the Church. It is grieving over it with the grief of those who remember the gold and cannot accept the bronze as its adequate replacement. It is sounding the alarm not from a position of superiority but from a position of hunger — from the same deep discontentment that God Himself feels when the community that bears His name settles for the manufactured approximation of His presence rather than pressing through to the genuine weight of it.

And the diagnostic is simple, if brutal: Are we seeking, or are we performing? Are we dārash-ing the Lord — pursuing Him with the intentional diligence of those for whom His presence is the only non-negotiable — or are we maintaining the appearance of seeking while actually managing the institution with human wisdom and calling the result ministry?

FROM BRONZE TO GOLD: THE PATH OF RETURN

Isaiah prophesied a reversal of the entire Rehoboam trajectory:

“Instead of bronze I will bring gold, and instead of iron I will bring silver; instead of wood, bronze, and instead of stones, iron.” — Isaiah 60:17

The arc of the Spirit in redemptive history always moves from substitution toward substance, from the outer court toward the Holy of Holies, from the managed approximation of glory toward the manifest weight of it — kābôd, the glory that is not atmosphere but presence, not ambience but God Himself making the space His habitation, filling the house so completely that the priests cannot stand to minister, as in the days of Solomon’s dedication, as in the day of Pentecost, as in the revivals that have punctuated history wherever communities have refused to settle for the middle space of bronze-shield religion.

The path of return is not complicated. It is simply costly in the ways that comfort most resists.

It begins with truthful evaluation — the willingness to look at the shields being carried and call them bronze, regardless of what the ceremony around them suggests. This requires the kind of institutional courage that is rare in communities whose identity has become bound up in the maintenance of their own reputation. To acknowledge that the gold has departed is to acknowledge that something went wrong on our watch, that decisions were made and trajectories were established that led us away from the fullness of what God intended, that the metrics we have been using to measure our success do not actually measure what matters most. This acknowledgment is not self-condemnation; it is the first movement of the dārash posture, the beginning of the whole-hearted seeking that Rehoboam never made and that God in His mercy is still inviting this generation to enter.

It continues with genuine repentance — not the pressure-induced humility of Rehoboam under Shishak’s threat, which averted destruction but did not restore glory, but the disposition-formed repentance that sets the heart to seek the Lord, that makes the pursuit of His presence the structuring priority around which everything else is organised. This is the repentance that does not merely regret the consequences of bronze-shield ministry but grieves the departure from God that made the substitution possible, that understands the exchange as covenantal unfaithfulness before it understands it as strategic error. God is not primarily interested in reforming our methods; He is interested in restoring our hearts. The methods will follow.

It requires prophetic remembering — the active recovery of the testimony of what genuine Spirit-led community looks like, the deliberate exposure to the historical record of what happens when communities dārash the Lord with genuine whole-heartedness, the cultivation of the kind of spiritual hunger that refuses to be satisfied with bronze simply because bronze is what is currently available and the production of gold seems beyond reach. The great revivals of Church history are not curiosities for historians; they are prophetic prototypes, preserved in testimony precisely because the God who moved in those seasons is the same God who is sovereign over this one. He moved then because communities pressed through to genuine dependence. He will move again when communities do the same.

It demands courageous leadership — leaders willing to lay down the validation that bronze-shield success provides, to relinquish the metrics that currently measure their ministry, to question methods that appear successful by every available human standard but lack the weight of genuine divine authorization. This is the most demanding dimension of the return, because the transition from bronze to gold is temporarily destabilizing in ways that institutional pressure makes almost intolerable. Communities that have been sustained by programmatic production do not immediately know how to be sustained by presence. Leaders who have built their ministry on what they can produce do not immediately know how to lead from what they receive. The transition is real and it is costly, and the only thing that makes it navigable is the conviction that what waits on the other side of the exchange is incomparably worth the disruption of crossing over.

And it requires the willingness to build with God’s materials rather than merely reconfiguring the bronze. New wine requires new wineskins; the gold-shield community is not simply a programmatic upgrade of the bronze-shield community, with better production values and more contemporary worship and more skilled communication. It is a fundamentally different structural reality, one organised around the weight of His presence rather than the maintenance of human performance, one in which the dārash posture of its leaders creates the spiritual atmosphere that forms the dārashposture of its people, one in which hunger is the culture and encounter is the expected outcome and the presence of God is not the high point of the Sunday service but the continuous reality of a community that has set its heart to seek Him.

THE CRY OF THIS HOUR

Haggai’s word stands over every community willing to hear it:

“The glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of Hosts.” — Haggai 2:9

The Lord is not calling us back to Solomon’s era; He is calling us forward into something the former house only prefigured. The gold of the Kingdom that is coming is not a recovery of what has been lost but an advance into what has never yet been fully seen — the fullness of the dwelling of God among His people, the manifest presence of heaven filling the earth as the waters cover the sea, the kābôd of the Lord revealed through a community that carries it not in ceremony but in continuous covenant devotion.

But that forward movement begins where Rehoboam refused to go: in the setting of the heart to seek the Lord, not because the threat has arrived and the circumstances demand it, not because the institution is under pressure and crisis-humility has been activated, but because He is worthy, because proximity to Him is our highest privilege and our only source, because bronze — however impressively it gleams in ceremony, however efficiently it functions in procession, however adequately it maintains the appearances required by the guardroom-to-temple routine of institutional religion — can never carry the weight of His glory, and we were not made to carry bronze.

We were made for gold. The house of God was designed to bear His weight. The community of the King was commissioned to display, not the well-maintained approximation of His presence, but its genuine, unmanaged, unproduced, uncontainable reality.

The guards knew the difference in their arms. We know the difference in our spirits. And what we know should be sufficient to drive us, finally and without reservation, to lay the bronze down at the feet of the One who is both the source of the gold and the fire that purifies us to carry it.

This is the cry of this hour. This is the commission of this season. This is the invitation of the King.

Lay down the bronze. Seek the gold. Return to the fire.

Glenn Bleakney // Awake Nations

Have we traded presence for programs, and power for performance?

Are we carrying man-made substitutes instead of God’s pure glory?

This episode will challenge you to:

• Recognize where compromise has crept in.

• Discern the difference between outward success and inward substance.

• Return to authentic, Spirit-empowered ministry that carries the true weight of glory.

Lay down the bronze. Seek the gold. Return to the fire.

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You have probably heard it taught. There are two Greek words for “word” in the New Testament. Logos, we are told, is the written Word, the Bible on the shelf, the settled and unchanging Scripture. Rhema is the spoken word, the living word the Holy Spirit drops into your heart in the moment you need it most. It is a beautiful idea. It preaches well. And for many of us, it was one of the first “deeper truths” we ever learned.

But is it actually true?

TWO WORDS, ONE MEANING

Here is the heart of it. Logos and rhema are both simply translated “word.” And in the Greek of the New Testament, they overlap so completely that the writers use them interchangeably. The Greek Old Testament that Jesus and the apostles read used both words to translate one Hebrew word, dabar, “word.” There is no fixed wall between them. The neat little chart, logos on one side and rhema on the other, was never in the language to begin with.

The fastest way to see this is to look at the very places where the popular teaching would demand the word rhema, and find logos sitting there instead.

THE WORD THAT HEALED

Think about the spoken, living, in-the-moment words of Jesus. If anything should be rhema, surely it is the words that came out of His mouth and changed everything on the spot.

Watch what Matthew writes. “That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick” (Matthew 8:16). A spoken word. A word of power. A word that drove out demons and healed bodies in the moment. And the Greek word there is logos.

Or stand with the crowd in the synagogue at Nazareth. “And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth” (Luke 4:22). Fresh words. Anointed words. Words flowing in real time. And again, the Greek is logos.

By the popular definition, every one of these should have been rhema. They are not.

THE WORD TURNED AROUND

Now let me show you the other side, because this is where the chart truly falls apart.

When the enemy tempted Jesus in the wilderness, our Lord answered, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). This is Jesus quoting the oldest, most settled, most written Scripture there is, the book of Deuteronomy. If any word in the New Testament should be logos, it is this one.

But the Greek word Jesus uses there is rhema.

The chart has it exactly backwards. And it has it backwards because there was never a chart to get right.

WHY THIS MATTERS

You might wonder why this is worth a whole teaching. Let me tell you plainly. When we build a doctrine on the original Greek, and the Greek does not actually say what we claimed, we quietly teach people that it is fine to handle God’s Word carelessly as long as it sounds spiritual. And worse, we leave the door open for someone’s private “rhema word” to be lifted up over the written Word of God, as if a feeling in the moment carried more authority than the Book in your lap. That is a dangerous door to leave open.

WHAT IS REALLY TRUE

So is there any truth here worth keeping? Yes. There absolutely is.

There is a real and wonderful difference, not between two Greek words, but between two experiences of the one Word of God. There is the Scripture you have read a hundred times. And then there is the morning when that same verse suddenly lifts off the page, looks you in the eye, and speaks to your exact situation. The words on the page did not change. The Holy Spirit simply breathed on them and brought them alive for you.

That is not the difference between logos and rhema. That is the difference between reading the Word and hearing the Word. And it is real.

So treasure the living encounter. Open your Bible and ask the Spirit who inspired it to make it burn in your heart today. But anchor that encounter in the written Word, and keep every fresh impression tested by and submitted to the Scripture that never changes. You do not need a Greek myth to enjoy the living voice of God. You only need the Book, and the Spirit who wrote it.

Has a verse ever come alive in your hands when you needed it most? That was not a different kind of word. That was the same God who has spoken, speaking still.

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