A TIME TO DECIDE

I have sensed for sometime that God has been urging me to return to the subject of “Mentoring the Joshua Generation” and consequently I will be using the next several President’s Newsletters to discuss this very important topic.  I urge you to share these letters with your members, pass them on by email or by hard copy, but share them you must; I believe it is God’s heart for the Fellowship in this hour.

Several weeks ago Roger Sonnesyn, a man whom I had mentored in the Fellowship a decade or so ago, asked me to fly to Minneapolis to assist him in starting several FGBMFI Chapters in the state of Minnesota.  On Tuesday evening I was taken to the University of Minnesota’s “Dinky Town” where I spoke in a Campus Coffee House called the “Hot Spot”.  When I arrived at the Coffee House the meeting was in progress and the students were being led in worship by a young man; after 15 minutes or so several students went to the microphone and offered short prayers.  John Tolo, a young man in his thirty’s who was the leader and founder of the Hot Spot, brought a young blond girl named Caroline, in her early twenties, to the microphone and encouraged her to give a short testimony.  She was dressed in a two piece dress with a low cut top revealing more than a fair share of her bosom. Her hair was fashioned into two Gnostic pigtails that reached toward heaven like the horns on a Viking’s helmet.  Her lower lip and ears were pierced with a silver rings and the visible portions of the anatomy were decorated with several tattoo’s.  Her eyes were trimmed in heavy black mascara. This young lady had only recently accepted Christ as her savior, and I gathered that this was one of her first opportunities to share before the group.  She began to emotionally share how alcohol and drugs had destroyed her family, apparently causing several of them to die early deaths. As she shared she broke into tears and her mascara began to mix with the tears making dark streaks down her cheeks.  Soon a number of other students had surrounded her, hugging her, and offering her love and comfort.

Later after I had spoken and began to minister to the students, she came forward for prayer; she related that she had pain in her knees.  I asked her to set down in a chair; I laid my hands on her knees and commanded the arthritis to leave.  She stood up, walked around and did several knee bends and proclaimed that the pain had left! Then John Tolo said I believe it is time for Caroline to receive the Baptism of Holy Spirit, and he asked me to pray with her.  After she had received the Baptism of the Spirit and had prayed in tongues for a short time she began to weep, so I asked her why she was weeping.  She said she was sorry that she didn’t know how to save her grandmother.  I asked her where her grandmother was, and she said she was dead.  I asked “when did she die?”  I assumed that the Grandmother must have died recently.  She replied that her grandmother had died when she was ten years old.  Although I didn’t ask, I gathered that her grandmother must have been one of the few people in her life that really showed her love and affection. 

After the meeting was over, I was standing by the front door of the Hot Spot waiting for my friend Roger to take me back to my room.  Carolyn, the young woman I had prayed for earlier in the evening came up to me and asked if she could hug me.  I said ‘yes’ and she threw her arms around me, a great grandfather, in a warm embrace, and she didn’t let go.  She continued to hug me for a long time, so long in fact that I became a little embarrassed and I gently pushed her away.  She looked up at me and said twice, ‘You are a wonderful man!’  ‘You are a wonderful man!’ I ministered to many students that evening, and the Holy Spirit manifested in a wonderful way, there were students who were touched by the Spirit all over the floor, but none affected me like that young blond girl, named Caroline.

Caroline is a member of Generation “X” we Christians call them the “Joshua Generation”.  When I use the term ‘Joshua Generation’ I am referring to the generation born during the period from roughly 1960 to the year of 2000.  It is the young men of the “Joshua Generation” that God has called you and I as leaders in the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship to mentor.  You are the “Moses Generation”, the men who were born before 1960, and like the biblical Moses you are called to mentor the “Joshua Generation”.

1960 is the dividing line between the two generations. The sixty’s were a pivotal time for our nation, the courts forced corporate prayer out of our schools, and soon even opening a Bible in a classroom was considered a violation of the law.  In the early 1970’s Roe vs. Wade, made abortion legal; and by the early 1980’s Satan’s strategy to destroy and marginalize the Joshua Generation was well underway.

Satan has tried to destroy the Joshua Generation before it was born by abortion, has robbed much of it socially of the nurture and direction of a Father and Mother, tried to destroy it physically by alcohol and drugs and tried to corrupt it mentally through Secularism, (the belief that religion impedes human progress because of its focus on superstition and dogma rather than reason and the scientific method.) Relativism, (the belief that truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the person or group holding them) and Pluralism (The belief that all religious paths are equally valid and that one should accept all religions as equal). “Generation X” is a generation in which only a small number of its members (one survey says less than four percent) have a knowledge of biblical values, A generation in which the lines between male and female genders have been blurred, and same sex marriage is considered a normal relationship.

It is a generation that has grown up in the electronic age; they have cut their teeth on video games. The desktop computer is more common than the typewriter was to any previous generation.  They communicate by cell phone, which is a must for every member of Generation X, and they operate them with the speed and skill of a trained technician.  While text messaging and twitter are Greek to the Moses Generation on they are a standard means of communication between the under forty generation.  While these technological advances have been a blessing in many ways, they have made explicit sexual material readily available, and contributed to the lowering of the younger generation’s moral values, and caused many of them to become addicted to premarital sex and pornography, and caused some to become involved in kinky sex and child pornography.

Many of the Joshua Generation has grown up in homes without fathers; consequently they have never developed discipline in their lives.  I see the symptoms often in young business men, they are particularly careless with their words; they agree to complete a task on a certain deadline but do not keep the deadline, they say they will meet at a certain time and routinely show up twenty to thirty minutes late.  They say that they will attend a particular meeting but do not show up.  When one tries to contact them by telephone they are greeted by their voice mail, and they do not return the call. When one sends them an email it goes unanswered; they seem to think that they can ignore your attempts to communicate with them and still maintain a normal relationship.  They place little value on the integrity of their words.

Secular society calls this generation “Generation X” but we Christians call it the “Joshua Generation”.  Joshua was a young man who was mentored by Moses to lead the next generation; the generation who were under the age of twenty when the Israelites came out of Egypt, and those who were born during the forty years that they spent in the wilderness.  Joshua led his generation to conquer and possess the land that God had promised to them.

How did Moses mentor Joshua?  He spent time with Joshua; the scriptures tell us that Moses took Joshua with him when he spent forty days and nights on the mountain with God. (Exodus 24:13-18) Later when Moses placed the “Tabernacle of Meeting” (the place where he and the Israelite people went to seek the Lord) outside the camp, Joshua stayed in the tabernacle, in the presence of the Lord. (Exodus 33:7-11) Moses was a great leader but he wasn’t perfect, he made mistakes, just like you and I have made mistakes.  But regardless of his imperfections Moses spent time with Joshua, and demonstrated by example how to seek the Lord, and how to obtain the wisdom and courage required to lead the Israelites to victory in the Promised Land.

We men of the Moses generation have made many mistakes, both in business and in ministry.  We have witnessed a great move of God during the Charismatic Renewal Movement of the 1950’s through the 1970’s, and we have seen the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life corrupt the church in America and nullify much of the progress that was made during that renewal.  By 2009 the church has fallen to the place where we can hardly tell the difference between the church and the world.  God wants our generation to share our victories and defeats with the young men of the Joshua Generation.  Perhaps in doing so we can help this generation avoid the same mistakes and cause them to rise to a higher level in ministry and the Marketplace than we did.

It is my observation that God is granting a special authority in the Spirit, to the young men of the besieged “Joshua Generation”.  We are seeing the beginning of it now, these young men will not respond to the lukewarm ways of the Laodicean Church! 

We in the Fellowship have witnessed and experienced the anointing that has fallen on some of them, Jason Westerfield, Joshua Alverez, James Leveske, Timothy Berry, David Regan… but God is raising up many more men both in the ministry and in the marketplace.

I believe that God wants to use our Fellowship to give these young men a platform, just like the Fellowship did to the Benny Hinns, the Kenneth Copelands, and many others during the 1950’s though the 1970’s. Young men with the glory of God upon their lives to whom many established churches are reluctant to open their doors. And there are also many Young business people with the gifts of God within them, gifts of which they are largely unaware, gifts that need to be stirred up and released. Men in the marketplace that God desires you and I of the Moses Generation to mentor. 

They are like you and I were 30-40 years ago, they are inexperienced and naive, and they will be tempted and sifted by the devil like you and I, they will make the same mistakes that we made, and they lose a lot of time wandering in the wilderness indulging in the same excesses that we have, unless they are mentored and encouraged by an older and more experienced Moses.

These young spiritual Joshua’s need spiritual fathers;

.  They need someone to develop a relationship with them, someone to offer them counsel and advise, and someone to really care and value them in the process.

In my Next Newsletter I will discus What a mentor is and what he is not.

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