Has God ever done something so fantastic, unexpected, and undeserving for you that simply blew your mind?  Have you ever been in a moment of desperation, a time when you were in need of a miracle and did not know which way to turn?  I can answer yes to these questions a thousand times over.  Many believers today, however, suffer because they have low expectations.  They have no great project in life anything that would command the forces of heaven to give them a miracle.  This is why we need more churches to become “Gate Churches.”   A Gate Church is a place that prepares you to receive God’s blessings, miracles, and favor.  The blog for today focuses on an incident in the life of Jacob, an experience that changed his life forever.  We believe in such life-changing experience and have adopted this idea as our theme for 2011:    “God’s Gate Church:  A Call to Greatness” (Genesis 28:17 & Daniel 11:32)         

        Our thought for today centers on Genesis 28: 10-22.  In these verses, a couple of key ideas are being raised and we will refer to them in our messages, during Bible Study and during our daily impartation sessions.   The Genesis passage tells the story of Jacob’s life-changing dream, the dream in which he saw a vision of Heaven.   He saw the doors of heaven being opened, a ladder that extended from heaven to earth.  Angels descend from Heaven’s doors and they ascended back up to Heaven.   When he awakened from the dream, Jacob made a wonderful declaration:  “What an awesome place this is! It is none other than the house of God, the very gateway to Heaven!” (Gen. 28:17).

        This verse is pregnant with challenge for the Body of Christ.   The church must strive to be the kind of place where every worship service becomes a “gateway to Heaven.”  In his book, The Gate Church, Frank Damazio talks about what it means for the church to see herself as a “gate” church.  He challenges leaders and members to become intercessors and accept the call to create a climate in our churches where the very “gates” of Heaven open for all to receive of the richness of heavenly anointing, gifting, miracles, and life-altering power.  There must be the sense that the worship service has opened the very gateway of Heaven and Heaven itself must come down to visit with us.  We must see, feel, and hear, the voice and presence of God. We need the visitation of angels, and we need the miraculous to come upon us afresh.   Just as the case with Jacob, our churches must be places where people have such powerful experiences of God until their destinies are transformed.  The experience changes Jacob, the young Trickster, into Jacob the Patriarch of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.   Jacob was on the run; you see, he had tricked his father and stolen his brother’s blessing, and he had swindled his brother’s birthright at a time when his brother needed him most.  So he left home because his brother was threatening to kill him.  Ahead of him was a life of uncertainty; he was on his way to live with relatives, but it was an uncertain time in his life. He did not know this place and these people as he did his immediate family and the region where he lived.  He was rich, young, and single. There were no children to take care of and other such things.  But there was so much fear in him because of his past; there was so much uncertainty about what would happen to him in this strange land.   There were questions about how long he would stay and whether or not he would be successful in this new place.  Would he like his relatives?  Would they like him? 

        In the midst of all of this uncertainty in his life, Jacob got a word from the Lord; he had a life-changing dream.  He spent a place in a regular place that was transformed into the “house of God.”   This experience changed his life.   His vision of God’s heavenly gateway made him a new person.  It changed his name and in changing his name, it changed his destiny. 

This is the challenge to us today; will we become a “Gate” church?   Will we be the place where people can have a life-changing experience of God? Imagine the difference there would be among us if we lived with the expectation that God was going to show up in a miraculous way every time we gather together. Imagine what will happen among us as men and women who have been used to doing things their own way, of carniving, scheming, taking advantage of others, cheating, and being toxic persons.