Tuesday, March 9, 2021

New Season of Growth in Wisdom and Stature 4: How God Increases His Credibility Through US

 

Psalm 19 says that the heavens are always speaking. The sound of heaven never ceases, so as I was seeking the Lord to reveal the hidden things of heaven I heard something that amazed me. It was Mark 12:30-31, “And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.’” NLT


I had never thought of this Scripture in the way I was seeing it this time! The Lord said that He uses everything about us to show His credibility to the world we’re called to influence. As we surrender to Him, He puts passion in our hearts about things that show His love and delivering power to others. He uses our soul through our personality, style, and wits to attract those who will receive His message through us.


He uses our mind to give us knowledge or show pictures of the different methods He uses to reveal Himself to us and through us. Our minds can absorb so much from our environment that we could spin around and find Him everywhere we turn because His whole creation is a message to us. We just have to determine ourselves to seek Him and ask Him to help us see and hear Him in every way He chooses to speak to us. 


As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I remember about ten years ago when I was driving, suddenly I thought to pay attention to the license plate of the car in front of me. I didn’t know why I felt driven to look so intently to it, but I looked at those letters and numbers and could see what the Lord was speaking to me through that license plate. “Wow!” I thought to myself, as I saw that He was directing me to pay attention to the clues He was sending me that would help me identify what my new season was bringing. This has become one of the fun ways He speaks to me and directs me to Scripture ever since.


The Scripture in Mark 12 also says that we’re to love the Lord with all our strength. This means that the gifts and talents He gives us are another way for us to interact with Him, discover more about what He has placed within us, and what He wants to do through us on behalf of others. To give an example, prior to 2010 writing for the masses was not even a thought I entertained. Before then, I was focused on my gifts as a fashion designer and stylist. I had a business where I put those gifts and talents to work which helped me measure my growth and particular strengths as a designer. 


But then came a change of season, and as some of you already know, the Lord directed me to close my business and focus on two different gifts that I never thought would be part of who I am. The first one was writing. Initially, writing came to me supernaturally. This started at the end of 2009 when the leader of a prophetic meeting I attended told a man there that he was going to write a book. At that time the Lord spoke to me and told me that He was giving that word to me too.


During that time I only wrote letters and cards with words of encouragement to friends and family. But as soon as the year 2010 began, something was different about me. The Lord sent me on a retreat, and there He woke me up one morning and I immediately had a vision of some liquid being poured on me. I saw several buckets of what I later discovered was milk and honey poured on me. The following week He sent me with my family to our new place of transition where I was provided with a laptop, and pretty much everything else I needed to begin to write. But write about what? 


Then for several mornings, I couldn’t sleep. I needed to get up and write because I was receiving massive amounts of divine downloads. So much that I thought I was going to burst. When I closed my eyes, all I saw was a printing press at work and I couldn’t help but get up to write whatever was coming to mind. Out of this experience came two manuscripts that I was not permitted to publish yet because the content was for a later time. Some years later, in order to get even better in my writing for the masses, as I do through this blog page and now as I’m beginning to publish the things the Lord has given me, the Lord sent me to college to study communications. 


The other thing the Lord did when He changed my season from fashion designing was that He sent me to college to study entrepreneurship and finances. There I learned business, financial, and investment lingo and terminologies that helped me better understand what He was teaching me about the financial system of His Kingdom. But this also helped me understand the people He would assign me to serve at the end of my process. 


Nothing from the early or previous seasons is lost. It’s all part of what God uses for us to love Him and others with everything within us. In my case, I learned my style to deliver the messages He puts on my heart for my audience whether in writing or through my teaching videos, or when I’m mentoring them about how to navigate the different seasons in their lives. Or even as I teach them financial principles of the Kingdom to help them recover the things the enemy stole from their family lineage so they can advance to their destiny and even become Kingdom financiers. 


For this, as seen with my examples, God directs us to the different seasons in our life that will help us discover new gifts and talents as well as how to develop them so His credibility through us increases. But that’s not all. The other area God makes sure is taken care of properly, is our servanthood because we cannot serve what we do not love. That being the case, whatever pride or worldly view we have about what God is calling us to love is removed in the process He sends us to in the wilderness of testing. Ezekiel 36:25 says,


“I will sprinkle you with clean water, and you will be clean. I will wash away all of your dirtiness, and you will be clean and pure, free from the taint of idols. I will plant a new heart and new spirit inside of you. I will take out your stubborn, stony heart and give you a willing, tender heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit inside of you and inspire you to live by My statutes and follow My laws.” VOICE


As the wrong motives and worldly views are removed from us by the testing and trials, and as we pursue greater levels of righteousness, purity, and holiness, God will make us be more acquainted with the sufferings of those we’re called to love. This way, we will develop a servant heart that becomes passionate about making things right for them as we see the injustices they suffer. We see this with people who pursue to end child trafficking, poverty, or illiteracy in a sector of the world. All these justice seekers want is to alíviate the suffering of these people so they can have a better future. They didn’t wake up one day with that thought all on their own. God was driving those desires within them and preparing them to take on those causes as part of their calling. 


God developed them in heart (servanthood), mind (with knowledge and understanding of their field or cause), soul (with the style of delivery of the help they can provide), and their strengths (with education, or even supernatural endowments to fulfill their calling). By this, they are living and walking conduits of the glory of God as they partner with Him to manifest His Kingdom on behalf of those they learned to love and serve. A Biblical example is Moses who learned many things while he was raised in the Egyptian palace with Pharaoh, king of Egypt. He was educated in the Egyptian way, but God had already given him the heart of a deliverer although he first approached his calling with carnality (Exodus 2:10-14).


Not until He was driven by God to the wilderness, Moses learned to serve the flock of his father-in-law Jethro to learn servanthood and to have transforming encounters with the Lord that prepared him for when it was time to go back to Pharaoh. But this time, it was to demand that God’s people the Jews be set free to worship Him. God had turned Moses into the kind of deliverer His people needed—one who could protect them and bring them out of the bondage of Egypt. Hosea 12:13 says,


And by a prophet (Moses) the Lord brought Israel up from Egypt, And by a prophet Israel was preserved.” AMP


Jesus was also made like His brethren to understand their suffering. Hebrews 2:14-18 shares, “Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying. We also know that the Son did not come to help angels; he came to help the descendants of Abraham. Therefore, it was necessary for him to be made in every respect like us, his brothers and sisters, so that he could be our merciful and faithful High Priest before God. Then he could offer a sacrifice that would take away the sins of the people. Since he himself has gone through suffering and testing, he is able to help us when we are being tested.” NLT


Isaiah 61:1-3 expounds, “The Spirit of the Lord, the Eternal, is on me. The Lord has appointed me for a special purpose. He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to repair broken hearts, And to declare to those who are held captive and bound in prison, ‘Be free from your imprisonment!’ He has sent me to announce the year of jubilee, the season of the Eternal’s favor: for our enemies it will be a day of God’s wrath; For those who mourn it will be a time of comfort. As for those who grieve over Zion, God has sent me to give them a beautiful crown in exchange for ashes, To anoint them with gladness instead of sorrow, to wrap them in victory, joy, and praise instead of depression and sadness. People will call them magnificent, like great towering trees standing for what is right. They stand to the glory of the Eternal who planted them.” VOICE


Just like Jesus and Moses, the Lord sent me to the wilderness of testing where He grabbed hold of my heart, my mind, my soul, and my strengths to see Him and learn to love Him in a brand new way. And through the sufferings I endured, like Joseph, I waited to be called to go to the palace God had appointed for me so I could tell those God transformed me to love in the way He loves them as Luke 4:18-19 says, 


“The Spirit of the Lord the Eternal One is on Me. Why? Because the Eternal designated Me to be His representative to the poor, to preach good news to them. He sent Me to tell those who are held captive that they can now be set free, and to tell the blind that they can now see. He sent Me to liberate those held down by oppression. In short, the Spirit is upon Me to proclaim that now is the time; this is the jubilee season of the Eternal One’s grace.” VOICE


To God alone be all the glory. *


Image by Google Images 

No comments:

Post a Comment