Six days out, we each answered the same three questions — separately, without reading the other’s. What is God speaking to you in this season? What is He doing in His people? What is He saying to you for this Encounter? Both answers are posted unedited, before the room fills.
September 8, 2026 · Written before the room
We start where He starts — with what He is saying to us before we say anything to you.
A brother asked me how I was doing. I told him the truth: all is well with us — and there’s a lot.
Here’s the lot.
God has had me looking at what the body of Christ is building right now. And what I keep seeing is the church running the world’s blueprint and putting Jesus on top of it.
The clubs. The music. The parties, the mocktails, the dating groups, the book clubs, the content. We take the entertainment engine of the world, hand it a Christian label, and call it ministry.
Hear me carefully, because there is a fine line and I’m standing on it. Most of these things are not sin. They’re lawful. Nobody is going to hell over a worship night in a converted club.
All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful.
And a lawful thing can still take the place of a Presence.
The Lord gave me the picture for it.
Moses is on the mountain forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:18). Getting the pattern. Getting the blueprint. And at the bottom of it, the people get restless and say to Aaron, “as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him” (Exodus 32:1).
Read what they actually wanted. Not a different God — a visible one. Something to look at while they waited.
And Aaron — Moses’ own brother, the man God had already named to serve as high priest — took the gold, and he was skilled enough to shape it.
He received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made a molded calf.
Aaron had the tools. That’s the part that keeps me up.
He didn’t lack skill. He lacked resolve. And under pressure from a waiting people, the man with the craft built the thing they could look at.
While you’re waiting for the King to return — what are you building?
Because we have pastors, teachers, creators, and platforms who are gifted and genuinely skilled — and some of us are shaping something for people to look at while they wait. And then putting His name on it.
Come watch my video. Buy my book. Get a ticket to my conference.
Some of it is good. Some of it is God. But it can also replace the very thing it claims to point at.
And here is where it turns deceitful, so let me say it plainly.
The scribes and the Pharisees were not atheists. They believed in God. They knew the Scriptures better than most people in any room today. That’s what makes it the sharpest warning in the book — the enemy does his best work inside a house that already believes.
These people draw near to Me with their mouth, and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.
Having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!
The danger was never that we’d stop believing. It’s that we’d keep believing and build a calf anyway.
Now the word He gave me for myself, and it’s the one I needed.
Thomas — you are the steward. You plant. I water. I give the increase.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.
Neither he who plants is anything.
So it is never how good the music was. How full the seats were. How the food was, how the room looked, how the post performed. Do not put a single one of those things in front of My children where they start worshiping it instead of waiting on Me.
And a brother named Charles said something I haven’t been able to put down:
“Whatever you’re feeding off of — that’s where you go when you starve.”
If the source isn’t Christ — if it isn’t the closet, the chamber, one-on-one time with Him — you will chase performance, numbers, and human validation for the rest of your life. And you’ll do it with His name in your mouth.
Since the last Encounter, God has been revealing a lot to me about myself.
He’s shown me that there’s been resistance in me to accepting the totality of my call. Not the parts I’m comfortable with — the whole thing.
And He’s shown me something harder. There are deficits in how I see myself that came from wounds that are still healing. As those heal, He’s showing me the places that haven’t yet — and how they show up in ministry. Not only ministry to other people. Ministry to myself.
I believe He is preparing my heart and my spirit and my soul for what He’s about to walk me and my husband into. Because if my heart isn’t prepared for what’s coming, it can get hurt — and it can get twisted — very quickly.
Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.
So here is what He’s asking of me: to see myself the way He sees me. One hundred percent of it. Not just in some areas.
Because the truth is, I don’t treat myself as well as I treat other people.
And when I’m not treating myself the way I should, it spills over. It shows up in how I minister. It shows up in how I interact with people. My heart just isn’t in a good place, and everyone around me ends up living inside that.
I’ll be transparent. There have been times recently where things offended me easily, and I couldn’t extend grace.
And I’ve realized it started somewhere else. I couldn’t extend grace outward because I hadn’t been extending any to myself. I have been extremely critical of myself in this season, and I honestly don’t fully know why.
The grace I need to give myself is the same grace God gives all of us.
His children. His beloved. I don’t get to make an exception for me.
As a father pities his children, so the LORD pities those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.
He knows what I’m made of. He isn’t disappointed by it.
What I’m practicing right now is awareness. Knowing where I actually am with myself. Being okay with the fact that I don’t like where I am. And then taking it one step further instead of stopping at the disappointment — asking, okay, how do I change this? And, why is this even a thing?
God is magnifying me to myself. Not to puff me up — to show me that I don’t show up for myself the way He’d want me to. And that further down the road, as He grows me into what He’s called me to, that will cost me.
So He wants it dealt with now. And I believe He’s right.
Not what He is doing in us. What He is doing in the whole body right now.
Not louder people. Radical. People whose first order of business is the kingdom, and everything else is second.
But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.
Seek first — not seek only. I want to be clear, because this word gets abused. This is not permission to neglect your family.
But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
A man who burns his home down to build a ministry has not obeyed anything.
What I mean is a reordering.
I was good at business. I pursued it hard and it had most of my focus. Now the focus is the kingdom — building His people, seeing people saved, delivered, and rooted. If a business comes out of that, good. It comes second and it stays second.
Then He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” They immediately left their nets and followed Him.
So when they had brought their boats to land, they forsook all and followed Him.
Some of you are being asked to put down a good thing. Not a sinful thing — a good one. A skill He gave you. A business that actually works. And He is saying: put it down and go all in on the house.
And I believe there is a revival starting in the seven cities. Hampton Roads. The 757. It doesn’t start in a building — it starts in people who let go of the nets.
If you know, you know.
I believe God wants His people to see His hope for humanity — and His plan of redemption for it.
And I believe He wants to strip away the ideologies and the perversions.
When I say perversion I don’t mean what people assume. I mean anything that’s been taken out of context and turned into something God never intended. Something that doesn’t edify Him. Something that bears no fruit.
He wants those things exposed, and He wants the truth underneath them revealed — the truth He wants His people to walk in, to live out, and to live in community around.
As one church. Not separate bodies. We are all, as believers, the church.
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism.
And I want to be careful how I say this next part.
Yes, He is magnifying the places where He isn’t pleased. But not as harsh correction. Not as condemnation.
What I hear Him saying is closer to this: I sent My Son so that when you fall short, you come through Him to Me. You don’t have to carry what you used to do — I’m going to forget it, and you’re going to forget it. I want you concerned with right now.
I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; and I will not remember your sins.
So walk in truth. Live in truth. And love truthfully — genuinely, not conditionally.
Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good.
He wants us to know His true character and to walk in it. To name the things that aren’t His character — and to embrace the things that are, and live them.
Six days out. Written before the room fills, so it can be held to afterward.
This one feels different, and I want to tell you how.
The first one carried anticipation. It was new. This one carries weight.
He has shown me that I will have to live every word I’m about to preach. I will not be able to teach what I’m not walking. That sounds like pressure. I’ve decided to receive it as protection — because a man who has to live what he preaches will not preach what he can’t live.
On August 10, you made room. He filled it. People surrendered. Things came out of hearts and minds and off of lives. That was real, and I’m not walking any of it back.
But making room was never the finish line.
Now He is teaching us how not to lose ground.
Hear this clearly: you have the Holy Spirit and the enemy still does not leave you alone. If anything, he works harder. Your sealing is not in question — “you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise” (Ephesians 1:13). You cannot be vacated.
But you can hand over ground.
Nor give place to the devil.
Place. In Greek, topos — room, ground, opportunity, a foothold. Not residence. Ground.
And three verses later:
And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
Sealed and grievable, in one paragraph. Paul put them together on purpose.
So the distinction for this Encounter is this: you made room. Now learn to hold it.
Don’t grieve the Spirit. Give no place. And put on the whole armor of God.
Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
Not charge. Stand.
We made room. Now we put on the armor.
For this one, I believe God simply wants His people together.
No agenda. No ulterior motive.
Nothing but praise in our mouths. Burdens left at the altar. Praying for one another. Covering one another with sweet praise.
Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.
Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.
And I believe He wants to use us to set the atmosphere — for the people in that room who believe, and for the ones who don’t yet.
Written September 17, 2026. Three days after.
Monday was different from August, and I am going to tell you the truth about it instead of writing a highlight reel.
There was a heaviness in that room.
Not on everybody. But on enough of us that I felt it from the front, and some of you told me afterward that you felt it too.
It was a Monday. School had just started. People walked in off a full workday, off carpool, off a weekend that did not rest them. Life was happening outside that room and it came in with us.
And there is something else.
We spent this whole month living the word that was going forth. Fourteen days of devotions. A fast for some of you. A word about ground, and armor, and standing. You do not carry that for four weeks and then walk into a room weightless.
I mean that carefully, because both are real. Ephesians 4:27 says you can give him a foothold, and that is true.
But being tired is not a foothold. A hard Monday is not an attack. A heavy season is not always spiritual warfare. Sometimes it is a body that needs sleep and a week that asked too much of you.
If we get that wrong, we end up rebuking a devil when the problem is a schedule. And we miss what God is actually doing.
He had just called fire down from heaven. The largest public victory of his life. Four hundred fifty prophets of Baal, and God answered him in front of everyone.
And in the very next chapter he is lying under a tree asking God to let him die.
Then as he lay and slept under a broom tree, suddenly an angel touched him, and said to him, “Arise and eat.” … And he arose, and ate and drank; and he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights.
Read what God did about it. He did not rebuke him. He did not send a deliverance team. He did not tell him he had given ground.
He let him sleep. Then He fed him. Then He let him sleep again, and fed him again.
Only after that, rested and fed, did God speak. And when He spoke it was not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. It was a still small voice.
Sometimes the most spiritual thing happening in your life is that God is letting you rest.
Both are true at once. Some seasons God feeds you and lets you sleep. Some seasons He tells you to get up and go stand.
The discipline is knowing which one you are in, and standing on what is true about you either way.
You are sealed. “You were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise” (Ephesians 1:13). A heavy Monday does not undo that. A tired body does not undo that. A month that took something out of you does not undo that.
Press forward. And stand in God’s truth about your life while you do it.
People stood up.
They told the truth about their lives in front of other people, which is one of the harder things a person can do.
And some of you stood and spoke about this ministry. About what it has meant to have a room where the only thing on the schedule is God.
That is why Quella and I started this. Not to build a service. To build rooms where people encounter Christ for themselves, through worship, the Word, prayer, and fasting. Not through somebody else’s testimony. Their own.
Thank you for standing. We heard all of it.
I mean that literally. The Scope, in downtown Norfolk. Thousands of people in one room, not for a concert and not for a conference, but for worship, the Word, prayer, and fasting.
That is the picture we have been given, and we are not going to shrink it so it sounds reasonable.
And there is a word we received that I am not going to sit on.
Five hundred people in these Encounters by December.
I was told plainly not to sit on that word, but to work toward it immediately, starting now. So that is what we are doing.
Hear how I am holding it. If it is God’s will, we receive it. I am not going to predict it and I am not going to promise it. But I am going to work like it is true, because the alternative is receiving a word and doing nothing with it.
Five hundred souls. That is the number. That is the work.
We made room. We are learning to hold it. And we are going to need a bigger room.
Thomas and Quella