The Kingdom In Heaven

Peter was preaching to a crowd that had gathered when he and John healed the lame man at the Beautiful Gate when he told them that Jesus would be in Heaven until “the restitution of all things.’ (Acts 3:21 KJV). Revival is a word that means “bring back to life.” Restitution means something was paid for, or repaid after theft, or restored to an original condition.

Some of the gifts and works of the ekklesia of Jesus in the earth had hardly begun at that point in time. Many gifts and works were stolen from the ekklesia at a later time, during the days of Constantine and other misleaders. Some of the restitution has begun to be made; it is not just adding water to something that was dried out, though. It is a bringing forth of things of old that are becoming more than they ever were, by becoming now what they are meant to be.

The Scriptures were restored when Martin Luther and others began to translate them into languages that people spoke and understood. This precipitated the restitution of the gift of teacher. In the days of John Wesley and George Whitfield, the gift of evangelist was revived. In the 1990’s, the gift of prophet was brought back to strength and function. Around the turn of this century, people began to grasp that the Spirit was telling them that they are apostles, and started discovering what that meant they should be doing.

Paul, in his letter to the congregations at Ephesus, wrote that those 5 leadership gifts were given to the Church by Jesus to equip the rest of the ekklesia to do the works of serving Him (Ephesians 4:7-16). I have been sensing that to mean the next restitution would be the ministries of all of the believers. I believe that what will follow that (and both are already in motion) will be the restitution of the works of spirits who serve God in heaven.

Many of these beings we call “angels,” which can be translated to English as “messengers.” Many others are very different in their work from simply carrying messages. Some, people who have seen cannot even gather words to describe. Four of the servants who are so close to God that they surround His throne, John could only describe by saying they were made by God, and they are alive and they look partly like a man and three animals (Revelation 4).