Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yes, we depend upon Him. Am I in relationship with the Spirit? If yes, then the gift, the gifts, are always operational as long as I'm in friendship with him, at least to their fullest potential, at least in a way that pleases him and brings glory to his name.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the well, An Elam Fellowship Leadership Podcast. My name is Kevin Neville. I'm the communications manager at the Fellowship and it has been a blast. It's been a real fun start with these podcasts as we began with the Oasis teachings, the teachings from the Oasis Conference 2025 that we are able to bring you every week.
And that's what this is going to be. It's going to be bringing together teachings, conferences, interviews, events across the Elam family. We're going to dive in over the next few weeks to something new. We started this this year back in July 2025 at the prophetic Conference.
And so one of our first speakers, Jonathan Evans, just brought an amazing word from the Lord. So let's dive in to Jonathan Evans.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Oftentimes you see in your own churches, I'm sure you might see a husband and a wife, that they live in the same house, but they don't share the same life.
And somehow they rationalize, well, we live in the same house, so that's good enough.
But they live completely other separate lives. That's not a recipe for a good and healthy marriage.
The goal is to share one life. The Holy Spirit doesn't want to live in the house of my heart in one bedroom.
He doesn't want separate bedrooms, so to speak. He wants to share his life. He wants to fill my life. That's the power of the friendship of the Holy Spirit, that He begins to take things over.
Here's one of the scariest thoughts to me recently in life and ministry that it seems to me, and I'm willing to be corrected, but it seems to me that God might be content to use me at 50%, even when he wants to use me at 75% or 100%, that he is so good and committed to his glory and his purposes that he might say something like, jonathan, if all you want to give me is 50%, fine, I'll use that.
That scares me that I would get to the point in a friendship with the Holy Spirit, that I would be content with him just using 50%, so to speak, of my gifts and my skills in my life when he actually desires all of me.
I don't want to be content with just a 50% usefulness to the Spirit of Christ.
I want it to be all or nothing, so to speak.
Take not your Holy Spirit from me, said the psalmist. Said David in 51, verse 11. Take not your Holy Spirit from me.
There's a gravity in that statement, and I don't know because I wasn't there. You know? Is it a prayer born out of crippling fear?
I think the deeper you go into ministry, the more you realize that unless he's with me, I have nothing to give.
That's one reason or one way of living in awe of the Holy Spirit, that unless he is here, we have nothing.
We have nothing.
But I think on the other hand, it's also a prayer born out of deep love. Holy Spirit, take not your presence away from me. The power of God is never impersonal.
It's always personal, because in fact, it is a person. That person is the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we do not. And we cannot use the Holy Spirit.
Rather, we receive his power when. Listen to me. When we receive Him.
And we receive him by treasuring his presence and walking under his authority.
If we can do that as a people, we experience the power of the Holy Spirit's friendship, our life.
And I would submit to you that there is nothing more precious or joyful in life than walking in fellowship and friendship with the Holy Spirit.
God has gifted us the person of the Holy Spirit.
There is the power of the Holy Spirit's friendship, and then there is the friendship of the Holy Spirit's power.
Slight turn of phrase.
There's the power of the Holy Spirit's friendship that transforms you. But then there's the friendship of the Holy Spirit's power. And I use it that way just to communicate the proximity and the closeness and the intimacy that is tied in and through and with the power of God at work in our lives.
Jesus, again in Acts 1:8, said, you will receive blessings. Power to be my witnesses.
Do we believe that we can always walk in the power of the Holy Spirit?
Absolutely. I hope you do.
If we walk in friendship with the Spirit, we can always walk in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is. Is the power of the Trinity, so to speak. He is for you. He is in you. He is with you at all times, in all places. You are the kingdom of. Of God.
Can I, using the topic of this conference, the gift of prophecy, can I prophesy at will?
It's an interesting question.
Can I prophesy at will?
On the one hand, if it's a gift, the gift is with me always.
I have the gift of playing the piano. It goes with me everywhere I go.
But not everywhere I go is there a piano to play.
Can the gift of prophecy operate anywhere I go?
Absolutely.
But only by the operation of the power of the Holy Spirit in my life.
Only in. And if I depend upon him which makes life exciting, that you can go into a gas station or your favorite coffee shop and be minding your own business. You know, one of the greatest investments I ever made was buying large white noise canceling headphones because my office is being renovated for the expansion. I had AirPods and I would go in and people. People would interrupt me.
I thought, well, fine. This obviously is not large enough for them to recognize that I'm busy. So I buy the big ones and there's still one or two that pull up a seat and start talking to me.
But you can be in a coffee shop and be, quote, minding your own business. But the business of the Holy Spirit is to give you insight into somebody's life.
I'm doing things I never thought that I would ever do, like praying for the sick on streets.
Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would be doing that.
And it's not every sick person, but it's the sick person that the Holy Spirit moves you to pray for in that moment, in that hour on that street, for some eternal reason known only to himself.
But you're being led by the Spirit. His power is within you, Submitted to his leading and to his guiding as a force to be reckoned with.
Yes, we depend upon him. Am I in relationship with the Spirit? If yes, then the gifts are always operational as long as I'm in friendship with him, at least to their fullest potential, at least in a way that pleases him and brings glory to his name in friendship with Him. Holy Spirit, what do you want me to do?
That's a relational question. That's not a power question.
What do you, the person of the Holy Spirit, want me to do in this circumstance?
The other day I was watching a show and I don't know how I ended up on it. Probably was wasting my time based on the topic. But I started talking about waiters and servers.
Have you ever gotten caught up in the reels?
Yeah, right. And all of a sudden they were saying, the best waiters and the ones making the largest tips, those who learn to be invisible.
By invisible, they meant that they anticipate the customer's need.
And before the customer knows what they need when they're going to need it, the waiter is there.
And they said, the server making the least impression makes the best impression.
They anticipate your need.
I wonder if there's not something to that. In the realm of the Spirit and being servants of God and being instruments of his power, that the goal is not to go out and to make noise for yourself.
The goal is not to go out and make an impression for yourself.
The goal is to be invisible behind the Holy Spirit, that his friendship and his friendship with you anticipates the needs of the people he has called you to serve.
And power meets it.
Power meets it. When we walk behind him, when we walk submitted to him, there's a closeness, there's a nearness, there's an intimacy to the power of God for those willing to pay the price, which is friendship and fellowship with the Holy Spirit.
I'm saying all this again because the topic is the gift of prophecy and the gifts of the Spirit, all of which we need because the work is worth it. But if the gifts are worth it, we cannot forget the person, the giver, the great gift himself. If we know the gift of the person of the spirit, you won't have to worry about the gifts, so to speak.
He wants to give them to you.
He wants to give them to you.
A few weeks back I went in, I coach a CrossFit class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
And I went on, on a Thursday, getting ready to coach, and nobody showed up.
And so I thought, well, maybe I'll just go home early. And then I thought, well, since I'm here, I might as well do something.
So I throw some weight on the barbell and I begin to just, you know, to play around with my favorite Olympic lift.
And before I know it, I start to feel good. I'm warmed up. I'm like, things are feeling pretty good today. So you start throwing on more weight, throwing on more weight, doing more reps, throwing on more weight, doing more reps. And eventually I realize I'm at a weight that I've only ever done two or three reps at.
And I decided to go for it.
I got 20 reps.
That's what I thought about myself. I was like, whoa, you just did what?
And then I heard.
I'll just say it was the voice of the spirit. But maybe it was just my own thinking.
But in that moment I heard this phrase, Jonathan, you can't plan a a breakthrough.
You can only prepare for one.
In other words, I could never have planned that particular breakthrough. Said on this day of June, whatever It was, at 4:45pm I'm going to plan a breakthrough, it just doesn't work that way.
But you can prepare for one by being disciplined, by staying true to the habits that are healthy for you.
And if you prepare for one on a daily basis, eventually the breakthrough will come.
I mean, I know that Phil has all kinds of breakthroughs that he would love to see for the fellowship.
It would be great if you could plan those. Could you get us a calendar, Phil, so that we can be ready, but you can't plan them any more? That you can plan for a miracle to occur or for somebody to be born again.
That's not our job.
Our job is to prepare so that when the Holy Spirit comes, we're a people ready.
We're a people ready. In and through the power of the Holy Spirit. I want to be used by the Holy Spirit in power. We've all said, I want to experience the power of the Holy Spirit in my life. We've all desired the. The secret is to prepare and to stay prepared.
And I want to suggest that the way that we prepare and we stay prepared for all that the Holy Spirit is going to do is that we walk in friendship with the Holy Spirit.
And I believe that if we walk in friendship with the Holy Spirit as a fellowship, as pastors and leaders in our own individual congregation, if we walk in fellowship with the Holy Spirit, I promise you this, you will not miss a thing, because the Holy Spirit has found in you a friend, a vessel to be used and to be filled with his treasure. Paul said, the one who sows to the Spirit will, from the Spirit reap eternal life.
That's it.
If you sow to the Spirit every day in friendship and in fellowship, you will reap the things that are on the heart of the Spirit.
Which is what this is all about.
The gifts of the Spirit, reaping the gifts of the Spirit.
But how do we do that? By staying in fellowship. Paul put it this way. Pray without ceasing.
Pray without ceasing.
Walk in friendship.
Walk in power.
Walk in friendship.
Then you can walk in power.
I end with a story again, back to my trip to Mexico.
At the end of the sermons, we were praying. We would pray for the sick.
And at the end of the last service, a woman came forward and she had a cancerous tumor on her arm.
And she said to me, before we prayed, she's like, I beg my doctor to defer or to delay my surgery until tomorrow because I wanted to come and to see if God would heal me.
Now all kinds of things are happening in your head at this Point, what do you do?
You pray.
And I put my hand on her arm and a heat immediately began.
She started to shake and to cry.
And we were done praying. The tumor was gone.
Now she'll have to go to the doctor and get that confirmed. That was an incredible moment. Those are the things that you like. I read about stuff like this, but I also knew that the Holy Spirit months before, had begun to speak to me about gifts of healing, something that was never on my radar before.
And you begin to pursue things in the spirit that at the time don't make sense. But you trust your friend.
You trust the Holy Spirit because he knows things from beginning to end.
And wouldn't you know that opportunity would come and the Holy Spirit, it appears, did something incredible. But here's. That's not the point of the story is it came time to leave, right? And like, it's time to go, the driver's here. And so there's this pressure within you, but you know, okay, I guess it's time to go. But you know, there are people. And so you pray and you're like, okay, we gotta go. And I took one of our elders with me, his name is Dan. And we were walking up the aisle way to leave the church. And he said, but, Jonathan, we forgot to pray for that woman.
And I looked back and I was just caught in between.
Do I go back and pray or do I go with what's being told to do?
And I left.
Now it's hard now. I looked back one more time and there were people praying for her. I'm not the healer.
Jesus, I believe, and I prayed, healed her without me because he doesn't need me.
But the point in that story is in that moment, just this prayer just arose with me. Like, Holy Spirit, I want to so walk in friendship and fellowship with you that I am willing to just hear your voice and to forget the ride that's waiting for me, to forget the meeting that's scheduled to say no to this, to say no to that person, if this is what you're calling me to do. In the moment, there's a sensitivity and an intimacy to the friendship Holy Spirit that requires development and growth.
But if we can be that kind of people who hear the whisper of the Spirit, who feel the gentle blowing of the Spirit, there is nothing, there is nothing that he cannot do and will not do in and through a people who are committed to staying and to walking in fellowship with Him. The recipe for ministry. It's not complicated. It's simple. But it's costly Holy Spirit, what do you want me to do?
And that's the question I want to end with.
I want to end with all of us asking the Holy Spirit that question.
Peter's walking into the temple in Acts 3.
I think it's a lame man.
Would you give me something?
And Peter says, I don't have silver or gold, but what I do have, it's the most valuable thing that I have.
In the name of Jesus Christ, rise up and walk.
The greatest thing we can give the world as a fellowship, as churches is not silver and gold as important as that is.
The greatest thing we can give the world is the life and the presence and the power and the good news of Jesus Christ that comes in and through the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. It does not come to us any other way.
And if we forget the Holy Spirit, we're cutting ourselves off.
The life and power and presence of Jesus Christ on earth comes in and through the gift of the person of the Holy Spirit, let's walk in fellowship with him.
I want you to bow your heads.
And I'm going to take like two or three more minutes.
But.
But for some of you, this is.
This is a moment of surrender.
This is almost like a point of no return.
But listen, what we're leaving behind is nothing compared to the promise that awaits.
And I think the simple question the Spirit asks of us again, do you want to do what I want you to do?
Do you want to do what I want you to do?
I just want to encourage you to just take whatever position of humility or surrender that you might normally take. Maybe it's just to bow your head, maybe it's to get on your knees, maybe it's to lift your hands, but let's just make this a holy moment. This is holy ground because Jesus is here. Because the Spirit of God is here.
And so, Holy Spirit, we bow before you.
The fellowship is not ours, it's yours.
Our churches are not ours, they're yours.
Our ministries are not ours, they're yours. Our studies and our sermons are not ours, they're yours.
If we've tried to make them on our own, then, Holy Spirit, we ask you to forgive us. We repent from putting our hands on holy things.
And we ask Holy Spirit that you would come and that you would strengthen us right now.
What? It sounds weird to say that usually we need strength to pick up something, but today we need strength to let go of something, to let go, Holy Spirit, of all that we have inadvertently or on purpose called our own.
But nothing is our own, because we are not even our own.
It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life I now live.
I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.
Holy Spirit, we surrender to you afresh and anew, every room of our heart, every aspect of our church and our ministry.
We surrender it to your fellowship.
We surrender it to the power of your friendship that you might find in us, corporately and individually, a people that might walk closely, intimately with the power of the Holy Spirit.
That Holy Spirit, we might be swept up into you and with all of our being and all of our skills and all of the gifts that exalt the Son of God, Jesus, I have no doubt believing that we are skilled enough, that we have enough gifts and charisma and strong personalities to build a successful church in ministry and fellowship.
But Jesus, if we're going to build your fellowship, your church, your ministry, then we need you.
And we're not about building our own things.
We are about building your thing.
And so we surrender to your thing.
And we surrender to your power and your and your tools and your gifts for building your thing.
And Jesus, we recognize and confess that all of those things are bound up in the person of the Holy Spirit. And so, Holy Spirit, I pray that in this moment you would fill us, you would equip us, you would empower us, you would overshadow us, you would blow through us, you would sweep through us, you would run through us and carry us into new dimensions of the fellowship of the spirit of friendship with the spirit of the living God, God, Holy Spirit, we give ourselves to this great purpose.
May we go with and in and live through the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the well An Elam Fellowship Leadership Podcast. Though I hope to see you guys next week.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: God bless.
[00:24:54] Speaker B: God bless and have a wonderful.
