God´s Angel comes for Breakfast

God’s Angel Comes For Breakfast

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god’s angel comes for breakfast

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MARIANNE AND WOLFGANG PEUSTER

God’s Angel Comes For Breakfast Discovering a Prophetic Lifestyle

GGE verlag

Geistliche Gemeinde-Erneuerung in der Evangelischen Kirche

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god’s angel comes for breakfast

God’s Angel Comes For Breakfast.

Discovering a Prophetic Lifestyle.

Copyright © 2016 by Marianne and Wolfgang Peuster Unless otherwise indicated, biblical quotations are from the New International Revised Version, copyright © Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530, U.S.A. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

First published in Germany by GGE Verlag 2014 Original title: Gott spricht in meinen Tag hinein.

Copyright © 2014 by Marianne and Wolfgang Peuster GGE Verlag Arbeitskreis für Geistliche Gemeinde-Erneuerung in der Evangelischen Kirche e.V. Schlesierplatz 16 34346 Hannoversch Münden, Germany www.gge-deutschland.de www.gge-verlag.de Translation: Wibke Kiontke and Rachel Chapman Cover & inside design: Katja Gustafsson, kulturlandschaften.com Set in ITC Stone Serif Printed in Germany by GGP Media GmbH, Pößneck ISBN 978-3-9816293-8-5

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content

Foreword .......................................................................... 7 Introduction .................................................................... 9 1. Why we wrote this book ............................................ 12 2. How I learned to listen properly ............................... 17 3. Revelation, Interpretation, Application ..................... 35 4. How does God speak?................................................. 52 5. Prophetic dreams ....................................................... 87 6. Pictures and symbols and what they mean .............. 103 7. What purpose does prophecy have?......................... 133 8. Principles of growth and maturity .......................... 152 9. Prophecy and healing .............................................. 163 10. Do all prophecies come to pass?............................ 172 11. The testing of the prophet and the prophecy ....... 182 12. Practical experiences .............................................. 197 Marianne’s conclusion .................................................. 214 Literature references ..................................................... 218 About the authors ........................................................ 221

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foreword by mike bickle

There are many books on the market emphasizing the Biblical foundation and function of the gift of prophecy.

In this new book, Wolly and his wife Marianne present a refreshing overview on this important topic providing inspiring stories from their own prophetic experiences and lifestyle. Their journey with the Holy Spirit over the last 30 years has been remarkable. Wolly has served professionally as a judge in the court system in Germany and Marianne gives testimony of the many dreams, visions and prophetic experiences over many years. In the 25 years that I have known them, I have seen them grow in their understanding and experiences in relation to the gift of prophecy. This book will encourage the readers to seek to cultivate a closer relationship with the Holy Spirit who desires to continually guide them into more and more of the truth of Jesus, His heart, ways and will for their life. In this way, they will experience the Kingdom of Heaven in action in their lives!

Mike Bickle Director of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (USA) and author of Passion for Jesus and Growing in the Prophetic.

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god’s angel comes for breakfast

introduction

Does God really speak to people today? Of course He does. What’s the use of having a silent God? If God is personal rather than just a force He must communicate.

Communication is at the very heart of what it means to be a person. But I did not first learn about God’s voice through logic. He actually spoke to me when I was 17 years old and saved me from an early death. I was an immoral, reckless teenager until a friend told me that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins. My friend said that if I would trust Jesus to forgive me and to give me a new life, Jesus would come into my heart and never leave me —no matter how badly I might fail the Lord in the future.

December 18, 1965, at 2:00 AM, I heard the voice of God and He came into my heart. How do I know that it really was God’s voice speaking to me and not just a religious or emotional experience? I know because my life changed immediately. I felt peace and love. I had a power to stop doing things that I had not been able to stop no matter how hard I tried. For the first time, I wanted to forgive the people who hurt me instead of paying them back. I wanted to tell the truth even when the truth made me look bad. The life of God had come into my soul and changed me into a new person.

My friend gave me a Bible. He said that it was God’s word and that I should read it every day. He said that God would speak to me through the Bible. I read the Bible

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introduction

every day, and my friend was right. God did speak to me through the Bible. The Bible made sense out of my life.

God’s voice came to me through the Bible giving me direction and hope, and increasing my faith. So I became a very serious student of the Bible.

Sometime during my first year of reading the Bible, I began to wonder about all the supernatural phenomena in the Bible. I asked a teacher about the miracles in the Bible and about the dreams and visions of the prophets. Should we expect these things to happen today? Not really, was the answer. Why? Because now we have the Bible, God’s complete Word, and we no longer need these things. And that was fine for me. The Bible had done so much for me already, why would I want anything else?

I went to the university and got my first degree in philosophy. Some students lose their faith in God when they take courses in philosophy. My faith in God was strengthened. There is a reason that the Bible outsells all of the philosophy books ever printed. There is a reason that the Bible is the bestselling book of all time. It makes sense out of life and helps people discover their purpose in life. Man’s best thinking without God leads to confusion and despair.

I did my masters and doctorate degrees in theology. My professors also shared my love of the Bible. They also told me that we no longer needed the supernatural experiences of the Bible now that we had the completed Bible. They told me that the only way God spoke to us these days was through the Bible. They also told me that dreams and visions were dangerous because the devil used those means of communication now. They told me that if I tried to hear God speak outside the Bible that this was “subjective,” and that subjective revelation would lead us away

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from the Bible. And my trusted teachers gave me a number of theological arguments against God ever speaking outside the Bible. They also pointed to historical example of Christians falling into traps when they tried to hear God’s voice outside the Bible.

Then I became a Professor of Old Testament Exegesis and Semitic Languages and repeated all these arguments to my students. But the one thing I could never find was even a single text in the Bible that stated God no longer spoke to people in any of the “old” ways. I could not find a text that said God only speaks through the Bible. After I had been a theological professor for ten years, I decided to study God’s voice in the Scriptures. In the Scriptures, God spoke in many ways: an audible voice, complete sentences forming in the mind, impressions, dreams, visions, trances, angels and in other ways as well. He did this in the OT, during Jesus’ ministry, and in the NT churches.

He spoke like this to apostles, to prophets, and to ordinary Christians. The Bible shows that we should pursue the gift of the prophecy (1 Cor. 14:1) and that prophecy should be a normal part of the NT church service (1 Cor. 14:29-33). Ultimately what I discovered from this study was that the Bible teaches that God is still doing miracles today. He is still speaking outside the Bible, though never in contradiction to the Bible. After I made this discovery, I actually began to experience a whole new supernatural dimension in my relationship with the God of the Bible.

In the last twenty years, I have seen many other Bible believing Christians make a similar transition.

In 1984-85, I had the wonderful experience of going to Germany and living in the Black Forest while on an academic sabbatical. In Freiburg I went to the same church as Marianne and Wolly Peuster. At that time, neither of

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us believed that God spoke outside the Bible. But then Marianne and Wolly went through a change very similar to mine. When I met them again in Anaheim, California April 1991 I had a very new understanding of prophetic gifting and found out that Marianne is a seer. So during a conference with John Wimber in Switzerland in that summer I asked her to join our ministry team. Whenever praying for people she received such profound revelations that people would burst into tears and be convinced that God had spoken to them. In this book they both describe how the gift of prophecy developed and impressively changed their lives. Marianne and Wolly are not professors of theology, but they are thoroughly grounded in the Bible. Again and again they prove from the Bible that God is still speaking in the same supernatural ways. Both of them offer many fresh insights to familiar passages.

They tell amazing stories of people hearing God’s voice today. They answer many practical questions. What are the different ways in which God speaks to His people?

How can I know that it is God’s voice and not the devil’s?

How can I get God to speak to me? There is so much in this book that will help readers to become better friends with Jesus.

I have known Marianne and Wolly for over 25 years.

They have the highest integrity and a great love for God’s Son. I am honored to write the introduction to such an important book, and I recommend it to you without any reservations.

Dr. Jack Deere International speaker and author of Surprised by the Voice of God and The Beginner’s Guide to the Gift of Prophecy, Fort Worth/Dallas, Texas.

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1 why we wrote this book

Marianne: Writing a book is no easy task especially if you are doing it for the first time. But we had been approached by seminar participants and church leaders to make our material available to a greater audience in a book. I much prefer relating what is on my mind, my thoughts and experiences face to face. And I have had quite a few opportunities to do just that in the past ten years during the many seminars on “Hearing God’s voice” that I have been leading together with my husband Wolly. Wolly’s real name is Wolfgang, but as he has been called Wolly for nearly fifty years now, please just try and get used to the unusual name when reading this book.

Wolly is much more used to putting his ideas to paper in a structured way. Therefore I am grateful to him for helping me organize my thoughts and experiences and to narrate them in a way that the central thread of this book may not be lost.

In the past three decades many books about prophecy, hearing God’s voice, listening prayer and dream interpretation have been published, particularly by Christian publishing houses. We have both read the greater part of them and—when they included corresponding approaches—we evaluated them. Some books, however, are less than helpful. They leave burning questions unanswered or increase the uncertainty rather than giving clarity.

This book is meant to be a supplement, a guideline for

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churches, small groups, leaders’ meetings, study groups and similar settings in which the biblical gift of prophecy has been discovered and is being developed. At the same time, we desire this book to be a practical help for the individual believer who has gained experience in listening prayer. He is now beginning to receive dreams or even visions he believes could be prophetic, i.e. God’s speaking.

At our many seminars in churches throughout Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France and Norway we have noticed a great openness nearly everywhere for the working of the Holy Spirit, in particular in the areas of divine revelation, for the spiritual gifts of prophecy, words of wisdom and knowledge as well as discernment. However, participant questions frequently reveal a certain degree of helplessness as to how one might better understand or interpret God’s often symbolic or encrypted language and how to apply it. Among the spiritually gifted prophetic people in the churches, the number of those able to interpret prophetic impressions still represents a small minority. We receive impressions, pictures and dreams from many people with the request for interpretation and advice on how to apply them. Therefore we have decided to focus on the areas of interpretation and application and also on answering those questions in great detail that typically come up. Mind you, my husband Wolly has reminded me more than once that ‘speaking is not the same as writing’. Still I have tried to stick to the narrative style I have become used to during my presentations at the seminars, wherever possible. In this way I find it a lot easier to relate my personal Holy Spirit experiences in the natural way they usually happen—quite literally out of the blue. In addition, I will describe dreams and prophetic impressions of other people that we have discussed in one

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of our longtime prophetic study groups at home, in the course of a seminar or by a written request to help with the interpretation. Although we have the permission of the people to elaborate their experience, we still want to grant them anonymity. It is my aim to give support by way of offering as many concrete examples as possible. It is not our intention to share or spread spectacular prophecies. We have changed the names of people or places when we deemed it necessary to protect the privacy of the person involved.

Wolly: Marianne and I have always been open to meet new people and we have no difficulty making contacts and developing relationships—particularly in Christian circles. In 1988, we attended a conference with John Wimber, the former leader of the Vineyard movement, in Frankfurt (Germany). One year later in Bonn (Germany) we met the American couple Bob Strain and his wife Bernie, spiritual co-pioneers of the former. When the Strains returned to the U.S.A. in 1990, they continued their association with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and invited us to visit them and learn about this Church Movement. So, I took a year’s leave from my Judge’s duties and we visited churches all across the country for six weeks to witness spiritual awakening with our own eyes.

In Anaheim, California Bob Strain introduced us to John Wimber. Since our first personal meeting in April 1991 a close friendship has developed which has been deepened by visits to California and meetings in Germany and Switzerland. In Kansas City, Missouri we became friends with Mike and Diane Bickle. And in Anaheim we finally met Jack Deere again, who we had briefly met in 1985 in Freiburg, Marianne’s hometown at the foot of

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why we wrote this book

the Black Forest, when he conducted university studies for one year. For many years these three—John Wimber, Mike Bickle and Jack Deere—were our highly esteemed contacts who helped us correctly understand, further develop and refine the prophetic gift, which especially Marianne had already had for many years. Each of these men was permanently surrounded by a team of prophetically gifted people and the regular exchange with experienced “prophets” were a great personal enrichment from which we have benefited very much. When we speak of “prophets” in this context, we do not mean the prophets of the Old Testament. We rather apply New Testament description for church members with a special prophetic gift given to them by the Holy Spirit. So please keep this definition in mind. When in the course of the book we speak of prophets, simply replace the term “prophet” with “prophetically gifted member of the church”.

Although we did write earlier that this book is meant to be a supplement and guideline, we are well aware that we cannot expect the average reader interested in prophecy to have read a number of books on the subject, attended relevant conferences, workshops and seminars, listened to and watched countless audios and videos and to have discussed the matter with theologians and other experts at great length. These are not prerequisites for reading this book, particularly as it is not meant to be a work of reference.

In order to enable each reader interested in the subject of prophecy to benefit personally from this book, it was inevitable to at least give a brief introduction of the nature and characteristic features of prophetic revelations. There are other books, which deal with the matter in greater detail; and we recommend the ones listed in the literature

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references in the annex of this book. Consequently, some things in the first chapters may prove to be a kind of review of existing knowledge for some. However, for most readers these chapters should have many new and helpful, not least of all intriguing things in store. This is what we are hoping for you anyway—and for us, because then all the time and effort have been worthwhile.

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