Author Profile
Graham Cooke
Graham Cooke is part of the leadership team at The Mission, Vacaville, CA. Graham is a popular conference speaker and is well known for his training programs on the prophetic, spiritual warfare and intimacy with God, leadership and spirituality. He functions as a consultant, specifically helping churches make the transition from one dimension of calling to a higher level of vision and ministry.
He has a passion to build prototype churches that can fully reach our postmodern society. A thinker and a strategist, Graham is also a builder with a particular desire to establish resource churches that are prophetic, progressive and supernatural. In this capacity, he acts as a consultant on the process of transition to a wide number of churches, cities and networks for the development of new prototype churches.
Website: www.grahamcooke.com | Resources: www.brilliantbookhouse.com | Books here
WONDERFUL WONDER! - Graham Cooke
Jesus’ own sense of wonder surfaced whenever He saw others who walked in innocence and purity. One of the few times Jesus said “behold”—or, as we would term it, “wow”—was when He first met Nathanael, a man who later became one of His disciples. “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!” Jesus exclaimed in John 1:47 (King James Version).
What did Jesus see in Nathanael? He saw a man without deceit. The Message version of the Bible translates Jesus as saying, “There's a real Israelite, not a false bone in his body.” Jesus saw his innocence and loved it.
Innocence is a quality we are born with and then slowly lose through the experiences of our life. Every time we have one of those bitter experiences, as we call them, a part of our purity erodes away. The way we think and perceive things in the spirit withers as we become guarded, wary, mistrustful, and suspicious. When another bitter experience occurs in our life, another layer of grime is placed on our sense of wonder. Given enough time, we become unsure that we were ever innocent. Meanwhile, we look at everyone around us and see the worst.
Jesus, the same Man who saw and loved Nathanael’s purity, also allowed Judas Iscariot to be close to Him. Jesus’ own sense of wonder about who God was allowed Him to be true to Himself and love the unlovely. He was a friend to sinners without being tainted by them.
Innocence is always under the threat of attack. But purity isn’t about what others can do to us, it’s about who we want to be. We can remain pure in heart and remain watchful for unscrupulous and disrespectful people at the same time.
We are in control of our own sense of wonder. Jesus dealt with this idea when, in Mark 7:6, He defined what He considered hypocrisy to be: “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.” When our hearts are bitter, hard, callous, unfeeling, cynical, judgmental, angry, suspicious, closed, wary, distressful, jealous, skeptical, derisive, contemptuous, pessimistic, unbelieving, sarcastic, or scornful, we hurt ourselves—these things are corrosive to innocence. The damage we do to our own purity is far greater than the damage we can inflict on anyone else’s. Giving in to impurity grieves the Spirit of God. Our hardness grows as we protect ourselves from people and situations. We get hurt and we swear an unholy vow: “I’ll never let that happen to me again.” Immediately, we begin to insulate our hearts from taking another chance on someone or something. We close ourselves off relationally.
As we can see from Luke 9:46-48, Jesus always knew what people were feeling in their hearts:
Then a dispute arose among them as to which of them would be greatest. And Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a little child and set him by Him, and said to them, “Whoever receives this little child in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me receives Him who sent Me. For he who is least among you all will be great.”
Unless we become child-like in innocence and purity, we won’t be able to see the wonders God wants to show us. Jesus wanted us to throw away our pride and self-protectionism and live a truly spiritual life.
TRANSFORMATION & FAVOR - Graham Cooke
Affection takes a disciplined mind toward our relationship with the Holy Spirit. We have to focus our attention on Him. As Paul wrote in Colossians 3:2—“Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.” To love God, we must let our mind dwell on His nature. That makes meditation a key to intimacy. We need to think long and hard about who God is, maintaining an unbroken fellowship with Him.
“In everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus,” Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:18. Intimacy has a voice—thankfulness. We need to be extremely vocal in our gratitude, practicing our thanksgiving.
Real intimacy cannot be hidden because it is a transforming force. When you learn how to stay in the presence of God—to “keep yourselves in the love of God,” as Jude 24 puts it—you come into favor and into the future of fulfilled prophetic words. Favor rises out of the heart of God for us, and He puts us in a place of continuous blessing.
God wants to transform us to look like Him. The goodness He is developing each of us can overcome the evil that permeates throughout the world. Intimacy with God produces goodness in each of us, and that goodness can touch an entire community. What if the favor over your life is actually an umbrella that can cover an entire neighborhood, church, or even city? What if the favor on your church corporately is so large that it can cover and bless thousands of people in your town? When we, as believers, do not live in the favor of God, we allow evil to flourish around us.
Imagine a community protected and enhanced by God’s favor! It all starts with Christians falling in love with Jesus and releasing His goodness to the people around them. What if God decreed that you will be so full of His presence that no one around you will be safe from a blessing? What if your role in life is to go and bless as many people as you can? What if God has marked out a specific territory for you to cover with His blessings and kindness?
It is important that we explore the current level of our favor. We need to take our favor out for a spin. Just as Jesus grew in favor with both God and men, so we have to discover both of those veins of favor. God wants us to press our favor with those around us, taking as much territory for His Kingdom as possible.
It took a long time for the ancient Israelites to learn this principle. When Moses dispatched twelve spies into Canaan, only Caleb and Joshua came back ready to press God’s favor to their advantage. Everyone else was terrified by the cities and armies of Canaan. In Numbers 13:33, we see how fear overcame favor—“There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.” But Caleb and Joshua knew they had favor, and a prophetic word that this was their Promised Land.
They tried to explain that God had given them an advantage, but the Israelites didn’t listen, as we read in Numbers 14:7-10—
They spoke to all the congregation of the sons of Israel, saying, ‘The land which we passed through to spy out is an exceedingly good land. If the LORD is pleased with us, then He will bring us into this land and give it to us—a land which flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the LORD; and do not fear the people of the land, for they will be our prey. Their protection has been removed from them, and the LORD is with us; do not fear them.’ But all the congregation said to stone them with stones.
No one told the Israelites to feel like grasshoppers; they simply took on that persona. In the end, God had to wait until a new generation of Israelites emerged and were willing to push His favor as far as they could. When God puts a giant in front of us, it is to inspire us to see how big His favor is for us. Giants shouldn’t frighten us; they should gets us excited for the victory that’s about to come.
Our favor can overwhelm the obstacles in front of us. God will often allow an issue to arise that seems to large for us to overcome. Yet this is His way of pushing us to use our favor to its fullest advantage. When the teenaged David faced Goliath, all he had was a slingshot, a few stones, and a prophetic promise that he would be king someday. David could have hid, like Saul, and let someone else handle it. Goliath wasn’t his fight, after all. But David wanted to take his favor for a spin. In the blink of an eye, David went from being a goofball teenager to a warrior hero. That’s the power of God’s favor.
Ebb & Flow - Graham Cooke
It is one of the paradoxes of God’s nature: He is constant, and yet He works seasonally. Our humanity has trouble dealing with such a concept. Everything the eternal God does is seasonal. In the natural, He created four seasons to guide the earth through times of sowing, reaping, working, and rest; the same holds true in the spiritual realm. But for some reason, most churches strive desperately to find a perfect balance. They want to be consistent and balance teaching and worship, the Word and the Spirit.
God, however, rejects that notion of balance. His Spirit ebbs and flows in our lives. There are times when we flow in the Word of God, and times when we flow in the Spirit. Our job is to see what God is doing and react to Him in it. If He is revealing mysteries through Scripture, than we need to focus strongly on the Bible. If He is unveiling things through the gifts and work of the Holy Spirit, then we need to run with that.
We cannot live in a continuous flow of the Spirit. It’s unnatural. For every flow, there must be ebb. For every high tide, there is a low tide. When we are ebbing in the Spirit, God brings us to the constancy of His Word. That Word then underpins our next season in the Spirit—God uses the ebb to teach us about our next breakthrough. What we do in the low tide of the Spirit is absolutely vital to the next flow God wants to bring us into. He sees both the ebb and the flow as a way for Him to lead us.
Christians must begin to embrace the constancy of God’s seasons. If He doesn’t speak initially, He always does eventually. Until that Word comes, we must learn to rest in Him. It is absolutely impossible to be both established and exploring at the same time. God has not given us the capacity to balance such a paradox. Instead, we swing between the two extremes, depending on what God is doing in that season. At times, we will be absolutely established and welded to the Word of God. At other times, we will be on a deep journey, exploring the mysteries of the Spirit. To stay in a continuous stream of the Word will only reduce God to an intelligent thought—we will only love Him with all of our mind. But when we explore, we begin to love Him with all of our strength, becoming reliant on Him. Our lives must go through both wonderful winter seasons of the Word, and sizzling summer seasons of the Spirit.
Imagine a church that understood the ebb and flow of God. When the Spirit was moving, its people would be released to explore and worship using the highest forms of praise. Nights would be spent on simply worshipping God. Power encounters would be daily events.
And that same church would have the maturity to realize when God was calling them back to His Word. Such a church would become a dynamic place of teaching and truth. It would trust that God’s Word, placed in the hearts of His children, would accompany them on a deep exploration into the Spirit. Its people would rally around the teachers and the pastors, knowing that they were being prepared for the next great flow in the Spirit.
The Word and the Spirit enjoy a marvelous relationship. They are never in conflict; they know when to submit to one another. They know when to ebb and when to flow.
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