Some engagements open with a question. This one opened with a Person already standing there.
Stephanie began the way I have learned to begin before anything else: What is upon Your heart, Father? Who are we supposed to meet with today? It is a small question, but it reorders an entire session. It says we have not come to Heaven with our list. We have come to receive an assignment.
The answer did not make us wait.
“Someone is standing in front of me with a very large sword,” she said. “The point is already on the ground. The sword is illuminated—it’s as if light is coming out of it—and it’s as tall as the person standing here. His hand is around the top of the handle.”
“The hilt,” I said.
“The hilt, and there’s a vibration to this sword. I can feel it. I can hear it, too.”
That is worth pausing over. She did not say she saw a vibration. She said she felt one and heard one. When the realms open, your senses do not politely take turns. The Father is not limited to your eyes, and He rarely uses only one door.
She greeted him, thanked him for coming, and asked whether he was our teacher for the day. Then she said, “His voice was very interesting and deep, and it sounded like water.”
And he answered: “I am the thunder.”
Before we go one step further into what he taught us, I want you to see what we did next, because this is not optional and it is not a formality.
Stephanie asked him, “Do you serve Jesus Christ?”
He bowed his head. “I do.”
Every believer who engages the unseen realm must learn to ask that question and then wait for the answer. Ministers of the Kingdom of Heaven have no difficulty confessing Jesus Christ as Lord—they are delighted to do it. Anything unwilling to bow is telling you exactly what it is. Test the spirits. Then proceed with confidence.
She asked his name, and he would give her nothing else. “I am the thunder.” That was the whole of it. Some of Heaven’s servants are named for what they do rather than who they are, and the assignment is the introduction.
Stephanie, the LifeSpring COO began, “I have noticed something over years of these engagements: Heaven’s teachers rarely lecture. They ask.”
So, Stephanie asked, “What do you bring us from the Kingdom of Heaven? What do you want to teach us?”
And Thunder answered with a question of his own. “What is the sword?”
“Will you tell us?” Stephanie asked.
He replied, “It is the light that is radiating from within. It is the Word. He is the Word. He is the two-edged sword that cuts.”
Then he lifted the sword and Stephanie said he began to wield it, back and forth, and that she could hear wind moving with it.
“When you wield the Word,” he asked, “What does it do?”
“It brings forth truth,” she said.
“And thunder,” he added.
That was the hinge of the entire session. Most of us have been taught that the Word of God is a sword—Scripture says so plainly—and we have learned to use it defensively, the way the Lord Himself used it in the wilderness. What we have not been taught is that the Word carries a voice, and that voice is thunder. It does not merely correct the enemy. It announces the presence of the Most High over a place.
Stephanie went to Scripture, and the pattern is everywhere once you see it. Job says that God thunders marvelously with His voice; He does great things which we cannot comprehend (Job 37:5). David writes that the voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders (Psalm 29:3), and then tells us that same voice is both powerful and full of majesty. At Mizpah, the LORD thundered with a loud thunder upon the Philistines that day, and the confusion that fell on them won a battle Israel had not fought (1 Samuel 7:10). And in Psalm 18:13, the LORD thundered from heaven, and the Most High uttered His voice.
Water and thunder, together, over and over. Which is precisely what Stephanie had heard when he spoke—a deep voice that sounded like water.
Revelation that never touches ground is entertainment. So, I said, “Center it over the property.”
Stephanie asked the angel to do exactly that—to center the sword over the LifeSpring property, to set the point of the blade on the earth, and to cut. And we called on the thunderous voice of the Lord, the voice of many waters, to sound over Robertsdale.
We were specific, and I want you to be specific too. We named the finances that had been robbed. We named the destiny helpers who had been held back. We named the sickness that had come. Then we asked for the Word to cut through each one and for the voice of God to thunder over every one of those situations.
He reminded us, “Vague prayers get vague results. If you cannot name it, you are not yet ready to war over it.”
“Keep reading in Job 37,” I told her.
That chapter does not stop with thunder. Elihu moves straight from the roar of God’s voice into snow and rain and downpour, into the tempest that comes out of its chamber, into the ice formed by the breath of God and the broad waters frozen hard. He describes the Lord loading the clouds with moisture and scattering His lightning through them, and then says something that ought to stop every son and daughter cold: at His direction, those clouds turn and swirl over the face of the whole earth to do whatever He commands them.
“Do you notice the winds,” I said?
She did. And then she landed on verse fourteen, where Elihu tells Job to stand still and consider the wondrous works of God. What Heaven was showing us in that moment was not merely that God governs weather. It was that we have been invited to converse with Him about it—the clouds, the lightning, the poise of a storm that has not yet broken.
Then came the verse that turned the whole session into a courtroom. Teach us what we should say to Him, for we can prepare nothing because of the darkness (Job 37:19). Every translation Stephanie read carried the same freight. We cannot draw up our case because of our darkness. We are too ignorant to make our own arguments. We cannot state our case because we stand in the dark before an unsearchable God.
That is not a closed door. That is a request for counsel. And Heaven answers requests for counsel.
“Ask Thunder what he would have us learn from this,” I said.
His reply was almost blunt: “When you call upon the thunderous voice of the One of many waters, He answers. So point the sword on the property, and call upon the voice of the One who thunders—the voice of the Lord.”
So we did.
Father, we call upon Your voice, the voice of the One who thunders, over this property. Make Your name known here. Let every spirit and every demon flee.
“And every prince has to bow,” I said.
And every prince must bow its knee as the tip of Your sword cuts through—the two-edged sword of Your Word, the words that come out of Your mouth, the thunderous voice of the God of many waters—over this property, over Robertsdale, over Baldwin County. We bring our case before You.
Stephanie saw the sword standing on the property and felt again the reverberation she had felt at the beginning, now running out into the land.
She thanked him, and then she asked one more thing: would he co-labor with our angel Ezekiel (the Chief Angel over LifeSpring), with his commanders and ranks, and with the angels assigned to all of us who serve in Baldwin County, to bring this to pass?
“I will,” Thunder said, “because you asked.”
Write that on the wall of your prayer room. Because you asked. Heaven is not stingy. Heaven is waiting.
I asked whether there was anything else we should be asking for, and the answer came without hesitation.
“Ask for the stalemate to be removed.”
“What’s a stalemate?” Stephanie asked.
“Where you are not making progress,” I told her.
And that is the word I want to leave with you, because I suspect some of you have been living in one and calling it something else. A stalemate is not defeat. It is not loss. Nothing has been taken from you this month. But nothing has moved, either. The board is full and the game is frozen, and after a while you stop noticing that you have not advanced in a year.
Heaven noticed. Heaven named it. And Heaven told us to ask.
So we asked, in the mighty name of Jesus, for the stalemate to be removed.
“It is done,” Thunder said.
If you are standing still in a season where you know you were sent to advance, do not settle for the quiet. Take up the Word, ask the Father for His thunder, put the point of the blade on the ground where you live, and ask Him to break the stalemate.
He answers, and He is not quiet about it.
