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The journey of trust
Jeremiah 17: 5 Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. 6 For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. 7 Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. 8 For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought (drought: or, restraint), neither shall cease from yielding fruit.
Jesus has redeemed us from all the curses of the law, having been made a curse for us-gal3:13. A person, who is really trusting in the Lord, is not concerned about what the enemy is doing. We have a place in the affections of God, in the heart of God. What we are learning in our journey, is that at the time we came into the kingdom we were inhabitants of this world, subject to all the pressures from the world around us, so our view point was drawn from the world around us.
Everything in the world is concerned with cooperation; partnerships and so on with the people around them, so all the solutions in the world are manmade. Everything is we are it-we are the solution to your problem, so all our solutions are manmade, we look to each other. So this is what we naturally do. But we are in the world, but not of it.
When we became a believer we were translated from the kingdom of darkness, into the kingdom of His beloved Son. So now we are in Christ and Christ is in us, so we are now citizens of heaven living here on earth. We are aliens and strangers in this world that we find ourselves living in, because we take all of our cues and directives, all of our promises from an invisible domain that is just as real to us as is the natural world we are living in. We have an inner reality of Christ in us and us in Christ in which we are learning to allow this inner reality to become more powerful to us, more real to us than the world around us.
The world around us lives externally, they live in their circumstances, they live in their situations, they live in their poverty, their problems, but we do not. We live in Christ so we have an internal reality of Christ in us the expectation of glory, therefore we are not subject to the world around us, we are not vulnerable to the world around us, and we are believers we are not in a credit crunch. We do not have budgetary situations around us because we are part of a whole different kingdom and that world can come in and overshadow the world that we are naturally living in. we can have solutions that come from another place, that we could not get in this life or situations from the world around us. We are vulnerable to God we are learning how to be subject to a higher place.
We are a new creation; all the old things have passed away. Part of The old things is being subject to what the rest of the world is subject to, that we have a victim mindset that we have problems to deal with, that we are subject to the economies and the situations of the world around us. That we are on our own and we have to make it through somehow. This is all part of the old way of life. We now live in a space in the affections of God where we are in Christ and Christ is in us, so that there are different rules that apply.
We are a new creation living in an old creation. we get all of our cues (a signal to speak or act- something said or done that provides the signal for somebody, especially an actor or performer, to say or do something, prompt or reminder- something that prompts or reminds somebody to do something, response-producing stimulus- psychology a stimulus or pattern of stimuli, often not consciously perceived, that results in a specific learned behavioral response) and directives from this new life that God has given us. We are learning how to live from the inside to the outside. We have to learn how to live this life, it is a gift, we cannot earn it, but we have to learn how to abide in it. It is given to us, but we have to learn how to stay there. We have to learn how to inhabit that place properly in the spirit, and this is what our new life becomes solely concerned with.
Salvation is a gift, abiding takes action, effort, or work, it becomes a living work. We are learning how to abide in this new life. We are a new creation, all the old things have passed away, everything has become new, and all those things are of God. So our new role in life is to rejoice in the gift that God has given us, and then to commit ourselves to living the life that God has set aside for us to live.
We came into a relationship with God by an encounter. We did not wake up one morning and decide to be a Christian. The Spirit of God began drawing us, and then He sent someone into our path, to witness to us. Then the Spirit of God convicted us, He convinced us to make a decision to open up our heart and let Him come in. we may not even have been thinking about God at the time, but He sent some weird person who planted a seed.
God invaded our space because He is the original space invader. The Lord brought us into an encounter with Him, and now we are learning how to live out that encounter by learning how to think like Him, see like Him, speak like Him, act like Him and become like Him, because our new God given goal is to be made in His image.
This means that we have to say goodbye to our upbringing, to all our learning that we have become a product of, we have to unlearn some of that.
This means that there is no longer a real place for logic, reason and rationale (underlying reasons, the reasoning or principle that underlies or explains something, or a statement setting out this reasoning or principle) in our life, now we have to substitute those things for trust and faith. Trust and faith have no logic attached to them.
We can see through all the stories in the bible, that trust and faith are always illogical and unreasonable. Gideon was outnumbered, yet God continued to reduce the number 32,000 until it was only 300. In the kingdom everything is turned upside down. And yet God’s way works. It is better to trust in God with 300 than to trust in 32,000. It seems like God has never been logical or reasonable or rational. God is wise beyond belief, the only time He reasons with us is when we have sinned, though your sins are as scarlet they shall be as white as snow.
His reason is I will take that red thing and make it white. The rest of the time He says trust in me with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. When God says something we naturally think that doesn’t make sense. This is the most fortified city upon the earth and we are just suppose to walk around it for 6 days and just don’t say anything and then on the seventh, walk around it seven times and then just shout and the walls are just going to fall down. I don’t have time to just walk around for seven days and do nothing.
Most of the things that God does are totally illogical, if you want to rescue a people from Egypt you send an army, you don’t send a man who stutters’ with a stick. When you send out an army you do not put the musicians out in front.
When we are part of a supernatural kingdom, the natural doesn’t make sense to us anymore. The only thing that makes us viable (practical or worthwhile-able to be done or worth doing, able to grow, to develop, able to survive outside the womb) as a person is being supernatural like God, this is our journey. We need to get excited about this; it is not like we have a choice anymore in the matter. We are learning how to be supernatural. We are learning that the normal ways of thinking are not going to get us very far, we have to think in faith, we have to walk in trust, we have to see in peace, that we are no longer vulnerable to anxiety and fear and worry and all those things, instead we are learning how to be vulnerable to the goodness of God. We are learning how to revel in the majesty of God; we are learning how to be occupied with who God is. We are learning how to live by encounter and experience. We have suddenlies where God shows up in our lives and gives us an encounter- we are amazed, this is amazing we feel like we are ten feet tall, like bring it on, I can do it. When we have an encounter with God we have to translate that encounter into an ongoing experience and this is called process.
We have two ways of walking with God, one is by encounter and one is by process. Sometimes we have the encounter first and then we learn how to establish it, we learn how to abide in it, we learn how to make that encounter become a part of our lifestyle. At other times God gives us the process first, he gives us a word, a prophecy, a promise and we are learning how to stand upon the word, we are learning how to walk in that word or prophesy. We are learning how to walk with the word of the Lord, as the truest thing in our life. We learn the process of how to stand with God, how to press in, how to be with Him and then somewhere in this process, we know that we are going to have an encounter. Either way it happens, whether the encounter comes first or follows later, God is still in charge. What we are learning is how to trust the Lord wholeheartedly, which means that we do not go to people first. We go to the Lord first.
When we get in trouble we all indulge in the ministry of hints, I am struggling right now, we hint around about it, what we are doing is asking for help on a human level. This is what we naturally do but it is not the highest thing.
At some point we are going to have to trust the Lord and the Lord alone, and then He is the one that directs our paths, he is the one who decides if He is going to fully meet our need Himself or whether He is going to use someone else.
We cannot have a walk with God, unless the Lord becomes our number one source. This is where we learn how to pray, where we learn how to worship, how to give thanks in everything because God wants us to give thanks in everything because it positions us to receive.
Thanksgiving opens us up to all the to all the claims of God, to his majesty and power, to the affections of God, it opens us up to faith and trust for our self so that we begin to experience God as He wants to be experienced, and we learn to live from the inside to the outside.
We are engaged in process before God, we are processing everything. Process (a series of actions directed toward a specific aim, a series of spiritual occurrences that produce change or development, legal proceedings, spiritual outgrowth. to treat or prepare somebody in a series of steps or actions, to deal with somebody according to an established procedure.)
Every one of us is going to walk with the Lord in process. Process is a series of steps that takes us from where we are now to where God wants us to be. It is the process that makes us rich not the outcome. The outcome is astonishing. The process is the actual act of walking with God through the situation that makes us rich and powerful and breaks the power of the enemy and makes us bigger and bigger in our circumstances until we become a strong person in the power of His might that empowers other people to discover who God is for them. We are learning not to trust in people around us as our primary source, but we are learning how to trust in the Lord. When we are not fully trusting in the Lord all that we are concerned about mostly is rescue. We are asking the Lord to get us out of a situation that he may very well have led us into. The Lord wants to teach us who we are in this situation. Some of our situations God deal’s with suddenly, others He doesn’t. Some of them He imparts His authority and power so that we can move them. Other situations He imparts His patience, this is going to work just as powerfully but it is going to take a few extra weeks. The thing is we cannot learn patience in a weekend. We don’t learn patience by being focused on our circumstances we learn patience by being focused on God in our circumstances. We are learning process- a series of steps. This process will be different in different situations. We are learning the process of how to stand with God, how to walk with God, how to hold God’s hand, how to have fellowship with God, how to see God working in us and through us, no matter what is actually working against us. We are learning the business end of abiding. There is no substitute for being with God in a situation. The problem with many of us is that we get a problem or a difficulty and we come to God for a solution, when we should be coming to God for relationship. Everything that God does is relational, everything is relational first. The Lord is making us in His image; His primary concern in every situation is that in that circumstance we become like Him. This is His primary objective for us to be made in His image and the secondary objective is the resolution of the difficulty. He comes to us in a relational context, very often we come to Him in a functional one.
We offer up a prayer and expect to get answered so that we get rescued from the situation. The Lord says I don’t want to rescue you from it, I want to make you more powerful in it, so that you can step out of it and be who you are. Process is us aligning ourselves with the purpose of God in the situation that we are in. This is classic Rom 8:28- all things work together for good-the two reasons- to those who love God in the situation, and those who live according to His purpose. We have to ask the question-what is your purpose for me in this situation, what is it that you want to be for me now that you couldn’t be for me any other time? What is it that you want to be for me in this situation? What is it that I am learning? What is it that I need to become? What is changing in me? What are you touching in me to make me more like you? These are the things that are important to God, therefore they should be what are important to us, what we are giving thought to. Process is where we take the steps necessary in our situation to become like Jesus. So we don’t lean on our own understanding, we trust Him that first of all we need to become like Jesus in this situation. And as we give ourselves to this, the situation is going to open up and other things become possible. If all we are doing is standing on the side lines and lamenting that we got this problem and not cooperating with God we don’t get to become what God wants us to be and very often we don’t last in the circumstance, we become prayer less we stop believing and we are just waiting for something to happen anything to happen, we are waiting for the angel to stir up the water so that we can jump in and be healed. We end up believing in a myth or a rumor or something that is never going to happen, instead of understanding that we are in Christ and Christ is in us and we have a different expectation of life, and putting that expectation to work by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Most people in the Christian world just want encounter, they don’t want the process. They are looking for a ministry to give them an impartation, looking for some kind of miracle, so that they can be delivered from their circumstances and be made into a new person and they don’t have to do anything. This is not impartation, that is magic and God does not do magic. If God wants us to learn something through our circumstances, he will be totally committed to walking with us in such a way that we learn the thing and we become the person that He wants us to be and then there is a resolution of our circumstances. There will be times when God will do something sovereign but that is at His discretion. We cannot just keep asking for that and we can’t have a spirituality that is totally based on that.
It is the process that makes us rich, learning how to walk with God, learning how to stand with God, Learning how to live under the smile of God, Learning how to live in the exuberance of the Holy Spirit, learning how to live in the affections of God.
When we are in the world acting like the world time is significant for us, so we want to know how much longer do I have to be in this place? We want the time to be over. We start learning bad stuff and make confessions like, I will be glad when this is over, which basically means that we are denying ourselves gladness now. We will be glad when it is over because obviously we are not glad this moment in time. How much longer is this going to go on for?
The longer we live in this kind of realm, the more we start thinking in terms of being a victim. Why me? Why now? And the why question never gets answered on earth because it is the wrong question. It is a victim question; it is an invalid question that makes us an invalid when we ask it. It is not a question of a person who is growing up into Jesus will ask, and it is not a question that Jesus is going to answer, he never answers the why question, because it is the wrong question.
What does this mean? And what must I do? Those are the questions that God answers. So what does this situation mean in context with my relationship with you? And what must I do? What is it that you want to be for me now since I am in this situation and how do I walk in that with you, what must I do, how do I stand, how do you want me to see, what do you want me to see and then we are move in it. There is sometimes a subtle turning away from the Lord as we open up to primary help from other sources. David said my help comes from the Lord; He is the one who chooses whether He introduces other people into that, or He is going to help us solely Himself and we might need both of these. It is a wonderful thing to just keep things between us and the Lord and to watch what the Lord will do in our life personally and intentionally. Process, this is what it is and this is what it looks like.
A person who is really trusting in the lord is not concerned about time. How long is something going to take? When we are focused on the Lord and who He is for us we become still, we become peaceful; we are waiting quietly for the Lord to do what He is famous for doing.
When we are not focused on the Lord we do not see our situation as a learning thing, we do not see it as a growing opportunity, so there is little or there is no spiritual increase within, all we want to do is get out of the situation and God will bail us out but then that situation will come around again because we have to grow up into Christ in all things. So we can duck a situation but it is just going to be repeated. We have been in the same situation over and over again. We keep going around in circles we have got to resolve this thing. We have to grow up in this area of our lives. We cannot keep asking God for rescue. We have to become the person that God wants us to be. In this situation we have to see it as an important thing for our personal growth. We have to see it as an important situation because this is where we are learning how to trust the Lord. This is an absolute necessity. If need be we will keep going through this until we learn how to overcome this type of situation.
This is a great situation for us to learn faith, this is a brilliant situation for us to learn patience, guess what God is teaching us.
we have to learn what our learning is, what God wants to be for us, what do we come under concerning God’s permission and promise. What is being adjusted in us? Because if we keep getting rescued we never change. Which means we keep attracting the same situations to us. If we don’t change then we have to have those similar situations come around again because this is our change agent. It doesn’t seem pleasant but maybe it is good for us. We cannot become different if we keep dodging the issue. We can’t become a new person if we keep sticking to our old routine. Something has to change and it is not going to be the Lord. The Lord will tell us just so we know, just between me and you, I don’t change. The Lord will say to us that you and I are incompatible and I don’t change. Which is god saying come on now it is about time you let me adjust that thing. The Lord will say that you are in pain right now because of the choices that you are making and I need to make a chiropractic adjustment to your posture before me because you look really weird in the spirit.
Part of what is happening to us is that we are learning how to become beautiful. What is beauty in the eyes of God? It is joy and peace in believing, it is trust, it is honor, it is integrity, it is righteousness. All these things make us beautiful. If we avoid all the circumstances that make us integrious, honorable and righteous and so on then we don’t grow up in our beauty.
We can see Jesus standing by the throne room saying Dad, can we delay the second coming because I am not marrying that, she needs more than an extreme makeover. She needs a head transplant.
When we don’t walk with God in process we develop situational trust. We trust Him for things, events, situations and circumstances and our language reflects that. We say I am trying to trust the Lord right now. We are always coming to God in functional issues seeking situational trust, when all trust is primarily relational. We trust in who God is first and then we trust in what God wants to do.
When we trust in who God is then we stand there positioned so that God can do what He wants to do, what He needs to do in us so that we develop a lifestyle of trust. So that trusting is like breathing, we do it all day long. We know that we have learned to trust the Lord, when some difficulty emerges our first response is to thank the Lord.
When someone is in situational trust and have not developed a lifestyle of trust, when something happens the first thing they do is worry, complain, panic and react, get anxious, get angry, they lose their peace, their reaction is not peaceful, it is not joyful, it is situational.
When trust becomes a lifestyle the first thing out of our mouth is praise the Lord, thank you Jesus. I just rejoice in you that you are with me; you are for me, so help me learn the right thing in this situation.
How do I respond, and what attribute of your nature do I need? What do you want to be for me now, that you couldn’t be for me outside of this situation? How do you want me to stand before you? What is this thing for, what must I do?
When we are in this place we are in the zone. We are responding to this thing internally, so the inner man of our spirit is affecting our outer man of the soul, rather than our soul affecting our spirit. We are positioned. So this is how we can tell if we are living in situational trust. God is not situational about anything, He is always relational. He is always seeking to build trust as a lifestyle.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose hope is in the Lord, for He will be like a tree planted by the water that extends its roots by the stream and will not fear when the heat comes and its leaves will be green and it will not be anxious in a year of drought nor cease to yield fruit.
We are talking here about a tree that yields fruit in a time of drought, a tree that is not subject to the conditions that other trees are subject to, because it has a different source for life and living.
The blessed means happy, fortunate, to be envied.
There is a three stage process in faith and trust. Firstly it is a trust that is released in us from our own measure of faith. As we remain connected and abiding in the Lord there is this residual place of trust, there is enough trust there to get us coming to the Lord in worship. There is enough trust in us because we have this measure of faith to rejoice and give thanks and to praise and give worship.
Worship positions us before God. The Lord is looking for people who will worship Him. He is looking for people whose first response is to give thanks. Whose first response is I worship you Lord with all my heart, thank you. Our first response is to get into the presence of God. We have a measure of faith so that we can worship.
Faith grows by use and always bears fruit, in every situation we are learning the business of how to stand and confess and declare who God is for us. God is the object of our confidence. The continual giving of thanks makes the lord our focus. We looked to Him and our faces were lightened-radiant. Ps 34:5 this is where our strategic anointing comes through the foundations of our life. In all the situations that we face, we are not knocked over, but we continue standing and are ready for something.
When we understand about process, that process is designed to bring us into a lifestyle of relationship with God, where trust is relational, peace is relational, where we have joy and peace in believing, we are expectant living in hope which is a glorious expectation. We are learning how to move from trust into faith, and all of these things are relational, and they are a part of our lifestyle and that is how we live. It makes us a fearsome proposition to the enemy. The enemy is just trying to make us a victim, like we always were, before we came into a walk with God. We are not in that place anymore; we are not that creation anymore. We are becoming different; we are becoming a people of substance. It is the paradox of encounter and process that makes us the people that we are. And it is out of this that our strategic anointing comes that enables us to walk in the nature of God, in who the Lord is for us. we are not just empowered by His presence, but we are empowering others. We chose the identity that God wants us to have in the situation that we are in. Jesus is the author and the finisher of our faith. what we are doing is that we are looking to Jesus. We are fixing our attention on Him, we are focused on Him ,we are like david said, my heart is fixed Oh God, my heart is fixed. We are fixed on Him being the author, He is the originator, He is the composer, He is the creator of our faith, and He is the finisher of it. He is the one who stays to the end, who completes the process, He is the one who perfects us in that situation. Faith begins and ends in our relationship with Jesus. Our part is to fix our attention on Him. We are learning how to change our inner state to a place of security in Him. So the very least that we do is we stop being anxious, worried and fearful.
There comes a point where the fruit of the Spirit becomes more powerful than our negative emotions. We need to understand the power that is in the joy and peace of believing. Are we believers? If we are anxious, worried and fearful, what are we believing? We have to learn how to overcome negative emotions or we will never mature fully in the things of the Lord. We are not supposed to have highs and lows. We have a place in the heaven lies where we can be seated with Him, where we actually get to live above our circumstances and not beneath them.
We are partnering with God so that we do not live below the line of our priviledge. Jesus gives us a life above things. The whole point of learning how to overcome is so that we become more than a conqueror. This is when the enemy looks at us and realizes that he is not able to bring us down to a level where he can affect us, so he does not even try. It means the devil is a no show in the fight. This is living in the secret place. It is like being in heaven on earth. We change the whole atmosphere around us. It is able to touch the whole community. There is a power here that is expedient- suitable for achieving a particular end in a given circumstance, characterized by concern with what is opportune. When the church comes together in one mind and accord it affects the whole city.
In our walk with God we are learning how to let our inner state, be the place of security in Him. We can walk into a room and raise the level of faith just by being there. We need to set our heart to be a warrior; it is one of our identities. We have to like to fight. We especially like the odds against us. we are learning the power of the one with the one. One person walking with God is always in the majority. Just think what a thousand walking with God in the same intentionality can accomplish. We rise up as one person and put to flight thousands upon thousands of the enemy because we are walking in the majesty of unity. This alters the landscape all around us, it brings the kingdom down.
We need a focus of trust and hope, so that we can pull together in the purposes of God. trust in Hebrew means to trust and look for a refuge, to find security in God. he is the object of our attention, and we come to learn how to trust in the Lord with all our heart. It is the most delightful thing that we can do. Spirit filled words taste good in our mouth. Some prayers are so brilliant we write them down. There is only one prayer to pray and that is what Jesus is praying. We need to ask the Lord what He is praying right now, and what is the Holy Spirit praying. Jesus is interceding before the throne and the Holy Spirit is groaning here on earth that we might get it. we are the third part of a threefold cord of prayer. Prayer is about finding out what God wants to do and then asking Him to do it. we are not learning how to pray towards God, we are learning how to pray with God. jesus and the Holy Spirit are praying we are just joining in. we are learning how to pray from victory not towards it. prayer changes our personality. When we pray the same prayer as Jesus, we can feel His joy. We write it down, that is the only prayer we are going to be praying until this situation shifts. There is this delight in being with God. there is a delight in trusting God. this makes every situation potentially more enjoyable than we imagined. God has given us a great life. The situations that we are in are not more powerful than the Lord, there is light, truth and revelation, hope, joy and peace in believing and we are learning the power of the one who is with the one, he is the one that makes everything joyful, because he lives in everlasting joy and we live in him, so we are subject to His happiness and nothing else. If God is happy we can be happy too. The Lord is going to work with us through these things and through the process we are going to be turned into another person. these situations are going to be the making of us not the breaking of us and that is the word of the Father. So we need to rest and relax and enjoy the journey.