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Malachi 4:5 “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. 6 He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”
The first “great and dreadful day of the Lord” took place 2,000 years ago at the First Advent of the Messiah Jesus. At that time Malachi’s prophecy above was fulfilled through the coming of John the Baptist.
Luke 1:17 And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
BUT…
Malachi 4:5 must be fulfilled a second time—since there will be a second “great and dreadful day of the Lord” at the Second Advent of Messiah Jesus.
Matthew 17:11 Jesus replied, “TO BE SURE, Elijah comes and WILL restore all things. (12 But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.” 13 Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.)
Since we are now in the very Last Days before the Second Advent of Messiah Jesus, Malachi 4:5 is now being fulfilled again. “The spirit and power of Elijah” is now being restored. What is “the spirit and power of Elijah”? The prophet Elijah demonstrated the spirit of extreme boldness and manifest power at Mt. Carmel where before the assembled crowd he triumphed in his extremely bold challenge against the prophets of Baal—thereby bringing the backslidden Israelites to fall prostrate and to exclaim, “The Lord—He is God! The Lord—He is God!”
This very same “spirit and power of Elijah” is now being restored to God’s servants in the Third World, especially in India. In the Fundamentalist Hindu state of Orissa (Odisha) where baptism is actually illegal, 1,500 house churches consisting of approximately 56,000 new believers have been planted in less than five years. This is the fruit of “the spirit and power of Elijah” at work through trained Indian gospel workers providing irrefutable evidence that Jesus is the Messiah and the only way to the One True God. They do this just like Elijah did at Mt. Carmel by totally outdoing local sorcerers, priests and Hindu gods by healing the sick miraculously and casting out demons in front of the amazed Hindus in the wondrous name of Messiah Jesus.
And now “the spirit and power of Elijah” will be restored to the Church as well—“to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” through powerful miraculous works during these very Last Days before The Return of the Messiah.
Our specific calling in The Elijah Challenge is to train servants of God and disciples to heal the sick and cast out demons in “the spirit and power of Elijah—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
Just as “the spirit and power of Elijah” made ready and prepared God’s people the Israelites for the First Advent of the Lord 2,000 years ago, so “the spirit and power of Elijah” will make ready and prepare God’s people—THE CHURCH—for His Second Advent.
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The spirit of Elijah in Liberia, West Africa
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The spirit of Elijah in the Democratic Republic of Congo