I don’t give out a lot of prophetic messages, but this has been sitting in my spirit for the past couple of weeks, and I feel that the Holy Spirit is saying I need to put it out there.
I was thinking about the whole lock-down situation that has resulted from COVID-19, and the Lord dropped the word “confinement” into my spirit. We are certainly being confined because of this virus, but there is a deeper implication to that word. When a woman is about to give birth, we speak of her as “going into confinement.” That is because in former times a woman in the final stages of pregnancy did exactly that. She was shut in her room with drawn curtains, and nobody was allowed to visit her. During that time she had one purpose only: to focus on the upcoming birth.
I believe the Lord is saying that the Church is in confinement because she is about to give birth. This is a time for focusing on what God is about to do, not being distracted by the things of the world and all the conspiracy theories that are running around. It is a time of preparation: preparation for the travail that is about to come. As any woman who has been through childbirth will confirm, it is painful and (except for the very few who have a quick labour) it is hard work. Right now, in this time of confinement, we need to be preparing for the travail that is coming by refocusing our attention and renewing our connection with the Spirit of God.
It doesn’t stop with the birth. Particularly for a new mother, the arrival of her child brings a total change to her life. She has to learn new skills to care for the baby. Likewise, when this revival is born, many of us will find ourselves required to do things that we had never imagined ourselves doing. Like the new mother, we may feel out of our depth and overwhelmed. We will need to draw closer than ever to the One who is able to make us able. The new mother finds that there are things that she did before that she is no longer free to do, and if she is breastfeeding even things that she used to eat that she can no longer eat because it might affect her milk. Likewise, as we nurture the newborn revival, there will be things that we can no longer do – things that are not sinful in themselves, but that could damage the growth of the revival. What are those things? I suspect that they will be different for each of us. This is not a time for blanket, one-size-fits-all answers. Nor is it a time for running off to the nearest prophet to “get a word.” This is a time when more than ever we need to be seeking to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying to us personally.
As I continued to think about the situation, and about other times in history when something similar has occurred, I thought of the Flu pandemic of 1918. Then the Lord led me to think of what came after that pandemic: the Roaring Twenties, a time of unbridled decadence as people threw off the restraints of both the pandemic and the Great War that had preceded it. I believe the Lord is saying that this is Satan’s agenda, to compress the world so much that when the restrictions are lifted there will be an explosion of depravity that will make what we have seen in the past few years look like child’s play. All the conspiracy theories that are flying around are simply a distraction to keep God’s people from seeing what the enemy is really up to. The church needs to rise up in our authority in Christ and tear down these plans. We need to declare in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ that the current restrictions will cause people to turn to the Lord rather than to seek release in depravity. We need to repent that our failure to take up our mandate in God has allowed this world to deteriorate to its present level of depravity. We need to constantly declare that the revival to which the church is about to give birth will not be overwhelmed by the flood of evil that the devil wants to unleash in this world.
Church, stop fussing and fretting about the situation. See this confinement as a blessing and use it as a time to refocus on the Lord. Stop getting caught up in and promoting all the conspiracy theories and see the real purpose of the enemy, and rise up in authority against it.