This weekend we're starting the Breakthru Conference here in Gainesville.  We're running it parallel with a World Race training.

We began last night with a little worship and prayer.  Right away, it started - a young man came up to me and asked for prayer.  He just found Jesus a month ago and left a life of drug addiction.  As I prayed for him, I got a picture of Jesus looking for his lost sheep.  Elsewhere people were seeking prayer just like him and beginning the process of getting a breakthrough.  And this morning the Spirit is already moving powerfully in people's lives.

Last night around 2 a.m., I awoke from a dream. In my dream, everything I had ever earned was in a car in a suitcase.  And a thief came and took the suitcase.  In my dream I felt a tremendous sense of loss and violation.  Upon waking I felt God saying, "that's what your enemy wants to do - he wants to take everything from you.  He is a thief.  You need to resist him." And this morning at breakfast, I shared that with the participants here. We're all alike insofar as we've been targeted by an enemy who hates us and wants to steal everything from us.

The premise of the conference is that while Jesus came to set the captives free, many of us haven't really learned to walk in that freedom. We find ourselves slowed down by our past and by our habits.  We've embraced Jesus and his saving power, but we don't experience what it is to walk in his grace.

American Christianity struggles with the concept of a personal God. Many of us have been taught that he only speaks through the Bible.   We grow up thinking "God doesn't speak to us like he did to the disciples in the New Testament."   We take the supernatural out of the faith that Jesus came to give us.  And we live bankrupt spiritual lives - talking about freedom, but not walking in it.  Yet we sense that.  Our spirits within us sense the disconnect.  The Southern Baptists just did an exit poll of those leaving the church and the number one reason they gave is that "the church is not spiritual enough."  Western rationalism has robbed us of our heritage.

Ron Walborn is one of our speakers at this conference and he related to us a time that Jesus spoke to him and said, "For American Christians I've become the God of the last resort."  He's challenging us to believe the word of God more than we do our own bankrupt experience.  He's saying that some of us when we get in a pool are "toe dippers" and others of us run and jump and do a cannonball.  He's encouraging us to do a cannonball for God this weekend.

I wish you could be here with us, but wherever you are, I pray that you are passionately seeking your own "breakthru."