Chapter 1
What the Devil Doesn’t Want You to Know

part 3

And to fully understand paradigm shifts, we need to understand their beginnings in prophetic acts. A prophetic act is the modeling in microcosm of a truth that is not evident in the corresponding macrocosm. It is a living parable in which the performers embrace and represent truth that is being denied or opposed in the larger context. For instance, when a group of white pastors humbly wash the feet of nonwhite pastors and beg their forgiveness for the horrible sin of racism, such action constitutes a prophetic act. This gesture in and of itself is too small to heal the scourge of racism; but it is a representative act that is powerful enough to launch or aid the healing process that eventually will eradicate racism.

We are instructed not to despise small beginnings (see Zech. 4:10). Small beginnings, like the tiny stream that eventually joins others to form the mighty Amazon River in South America, have the built-in potential to expand exponentially. A paradigm shift, though small at first when introduced through a prophetic act, is never irrelevant. There is no telling how much an almost imperceptible shift in paradigms can change everything around us. This is what happened in my hometown in 1997.

I was born and raised in the city of San Nicolas, Argentina. As a teenager, I sat by the bank of the Parana River on Thursday evenings to talk to God about revival. During the 1960s and 1970s my city became a spiritual beacon of hope as the Church and its many congregations grew and infiltrated the city’s social strata with the light of the gospel. Scores of lives were changed. New church buildings sprang up in barrios. A new batch of pastors joined the old ones to care for increasing numbers of new converts—until something happened that was intriguing at first but catastrophic in the end!

A spiritual entity disguised as Mary, the earthly mother of our Savior, “appeared” to a simple local woman. The apparition known as the Queen of Heaven took the form of the
weeping virgin, as tears showed up on the marble face of a statue of Mary. Pilgrims began to flock to San Nicolas in huge numbers, and soon a shrine was built. Unfortunately, as this
new cult flourished, the city wilted. Major industries shut down. Commerce came to a standstill. Crime increased beyond the power of the police to control it. Nasty church splits
took place. Pastors died prematurely, pastoral oversight of the city became nonexistent, and the spiritual climate turned hostile. Our shining city on a hill, spiritually speaking, crumbled into a valley of despair, and a spiritual oasis turned into a wilderness.

However, all of that began to change through a prophetic act on July 21, 1997. Our team from Harvest Evangelism, along with 360 delegates from four continents, joined the pastors and elders of the Church in San Nicolas at the seven gates of the city to perform a three-part prophetic act. First, we repented publicly for sin inside the Church that had allowed catastrophic sin to come into the city. Dr. Charles H. Kraft writes that demons are like rats who have in-fested a house because they are drawn to the spiritual garbage inside. If you have a prob-lem
with rats, don’t blame the rats. It is your garbage. Clean up your garbage, and the rats will go someplace else.2 The pastors of San Nicolas took full responsibility, because they now understood that every major problem in the city (macrocosm) is always a magnified expression of unresolved problems in the Church (microcosm). Darkness can only prosper in the absence of light.

Secondly, we declared in united prayer at the gates of the city that the city of San Nicolas belonged to God. The pastors then drove into the ground stakes inscribed with Bible promises at each one of the gates. They took turns with the hammer, and each blow was accompanied by a prophetic utterance. Declarations such as “San Nicolas is a city of victory and not of defeat” and “Jesus is the Lord of the city, not the Queen of Heaven” were spoken out loud and in faith.

Thirdly, a proclamation was read, stating that San Nicolas belongs to the Lord, who bought the city with His blood and who keeps it by His grace. The proclamation was broadcast all over the city on radio.

This exercise was followed by united church services the next day and by three evening radio broadcasts, Monday through Wednesday. The broadcasts were hosted by pastors representing the denominational composition of the Church in the city. These broadcasts enabled believers all over town to do three things: (1) to dedicate their homes as lighthouses of prayer on Monday; (2) to spiritually cleanse their homes on Tuesday; and (3) to prayer walk their neighborhoods on Wednesday. By the end of the three-day event, there were lighthouses of prayer in every neighborhood, and the entire city had been prayed over. Many found the Lord at a prayer fair held the following Saturday, and the week climaxed with a powerful and moving united Communion service the next day.

The results? That week the crime rate in the city dropped dramatically. In fact, not a single major crime was reported. Pastors who had been a party to divisions repented publicly and made restitution to those they had wronged. The media opened their doors to the Church. Public officials asked for personal prayer and for prayer meetings to be held in government buildings. Best of all, prodigals returned to Christ, and unbelievers were asking to be led to the Lord. In just one week, the spiritual climate over the city had changed dramatically.
But that was not the end of it. Many of the 360 visiting delegates went back to their home countries on five continents and performed similar prophetic acts with similar results. Today, scores of cities have experienced a change for the better in their spiritual climates as an indirect result of what was done in San Nicolas—an impressive harvest whose genesis was the unpretentious seed first planted in my hometown. On October 16, 1999, from Madison Square Garden in New York, we broadcast to 572 television downlink sites in 50 states to facilitate all over the United States what was pioneered by the pastors in San Nicolas.

At the time of these events, we did not see clearly the implications of our prophetic acts; but now, with the perspective of time, we are able to better grasp why so much hap-pened in such a short time in San Nicolas and why these wonderful things continue to happen all over the world. Shifts in paradigms made them inevitable. The prophetic acts of the pastors in San Nicolas were powerful, not in and of themselves, but because they provided a conduit to express on Earth what God had already decreed in heaven.