Whenever anyone makes us a promise, we are entitled to call it in, depend on it, and trade on our trust in the one who made it. When we receive a promise from someone, we qualify it according to the character and integrity of the one who spoke it.
When we believe in the word spoken, when we trust in the integrity of the speaker, all fear and nervousness are banished from our heart. Peace is elevated above worry and anxiety in our minds. We are settled. Our hearts are fixed.
What is true in the natural is much truer in the Spirit. When the father speaks into our lives with a promise, all that he is becomes enshrined in our response. He is righteous. He can only do what is right. He is truth. He can never lie, flatter or deceive. He is holy, pure and innocent, without sin and with no guile.
The promise, therefore, is guaranteed by the quality of his nature. When we know what God is like it is easy to believe him.
What we believe about God, how we think about him, what we trust about him-these are the most important issues we’ll ever face in life. Indeed, all of our life, all our spirituality, is derived from this foundation. On this rock, he builds his church and hell has no hope of prevailing against the beloved of God.
A promise from him is a cast iron guarantee. When a promise is given, the Holy Spirit is given with it. He becomes our tutor to school us in response to it in faith. A promise must be fully received before it can be entered into and realized in full.
Firstly, the promise must be studied and fully understood. What is God’s saying? Are there any obvious conditions that need to be fulfilled? The Holy Spirit is given to us to establish us in God’s grace. Grace is the empowering presence of God to enable us to enjoy the process of development and ensure that necessary conditions are met. All personal promises are conditional, whether those conditions are implied or stated. We are all in Christ, learning to be Christ like, and loving the learning.
Promises are given in order to increase presence. Promises are relational. They enhance our fellowship with the Godhead. They create opportunities for advancement. There is a quickening spirit attached to them; A righteous shortcut to transformation, an accelerated but irregular way of doing something profound. We have our normal lifestyle routines of walking in the Spirit: worship, praise, thanksgiving, rejoicing, prayer, waiting on the Lord, daily devotion, trust and the delightful influence of righteousness-empowered in the holiness of the Holy Spirit, the joy and peace in believing, and the beauty of unceasing, unfailing love that constantly elevates us to the status of being the beloved of God.
Into that delicious mix the father drops a promise, a declaration of upgraded intention. A promise is like rolling a six in a board game, it increases momentum by creating a fresh opportunity for advancement.
When a promise comes, our normal routine is given a major boost. Something tangible and explicit has been placed before us. Favor has been specifically expressed.
Now, the Holy Spirit, our in-dwelling resident genius, can school us into a response that propels us into the new place that has been set aside for us-irregular, profound, and quite brilliant.
We are learning that when a promise comes, all our immediate possibilities are wonderfully increased.
Grace and peace are never measured, but always multiplied to us. The father is lavish towards us in his pursuit of our fullness in Christ. Grace and peace bring us into a dynamic encounter with who Jesus really is for us. The father is absolutely delighted with the sacrifice of Jesus and all of the possibilities that are opened up for us to know him fully.
He puts us into Christ so that our learning to relate to him would always be joyful, wonderful and peaceful. When we have seen Jesus, we have seen the father. They are fully one. When we know Jesus, we know the father. In scripture, knowledge does not just come by study but also by an experience of what we have discovered. If our study has not led us to practical encounter, then our head will always overrule our heart in matters of faith.
Our knowing about Jesus only becomes relational transformation when he is made real in our experience. The father has put us into Christ so that his divine power, the Holy Spirit could accelerate our growth into fullness. Everything that we will ever need to become Christ like has already been given to us.
We are learning the difference between knowledge and true knowledge (2 Peter 1: 3). Knowledge without experience maintains our immaturity in the things that matter. Just knowing the Bible results in a poor relationship of a new person in Christ, with the Father. Theological understanding will always come second to a close walk with God (Acts 4: 5-14). Obedience to the will of God will always trump academic theology (John 7: 14-17).
Theology without experience can never be truth. It can be right. It can be accurate. However, if it does not release people into personal freedom and transformation, it is not the truth. It is merely true. The truth sets us free. It unlocks our prison, unshackles our chains, overcomes our oppression and removes all accusations of the enemy.
The book points to the one true God. Scripture is true because Jesus is the truth (John 14: 6). The truth is a person, not a book. Knowing Jesus by experiencing and encounter will set us free to become like him. Any other form of knowing is just a verse we know by memory.
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free (Galatians 5: 1). In that freedom we are put into the one place that guarantees that everything pertaining to life and godliness will be made available to us. We are put into Christ.
The true knowledge of that position will lead us into practical experiences of the glory and the excellence of the Lord Jesus Christ. Man has fallen short of that glory, and it has been restored in the Messiah, as he is, so are we in this world (1 John 4: 17).
Into this context, all promises are released and fulfilled (2 Peter 1: 4). All promises are given to empower us to become like Jesus. It is vital that we see promises as being both precious and magnificent. Unless we understand that promises are much more than assurances, we will not realize their true value.
A promise is a particular part of a whole Covenant that comes to life to us. It carries all the weight of the father’s commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ.
By putting us into Christ, the promise is made as much to Jesus as it is to us. That is why when Jesus (whoever lives to make intercession for us) prays before the throne, he is petitioning the father for the promise on our behalf. He is joyfully reminding his father that: you said it and you promised it.
As we join with him in prayer, our hearts become aligned in obedience and cooperation. By these promises we become partakers of the divine nature. Adherence to the promise makes us like Jesus. Becoming like Jesus triggers the fulfillment of the promise.
Promises are God’s way of elevating our relationship with him. Being in Jesus is a state of exalted spirituality that makes our life become of inestimable value in the Kingdom. We are priceless. We are cherished. We are his beloved. There is a bond between the father and the son that is glorious. We are included in that place and relationship. The bond between us and the father is made glorious by the Holy Spirit who makes us into the image of Jesus.
Our spirituality is not earthbound but heavenly. Promises exalt us to the place that God has set aside for us in Christ. They are guarantees of God’s intent. They release us to all the possibilities of becoming the men and women that God sees when he looks at us in Christ.
We respond to prophecy in the same way that we would to promise. We must become doers of the word, whether it is written or spoken. We live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God (Matthew 4: 4).
Jesus came to elevate the prophetic word back to its rightful place in the relationship between God and man. He came saying, you have heard it said, but now I say (Matthew 5: 21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43). The spoken word became the written word. The law began as prophecy (Exodus 20-23) It was given as a direct word of God.
The commandments of Jesus are prophetic; They are spoken as a direct word of God. John the Baptist was the last of the Old Testament prophets bowing the knee to Jesus, who is the first of a new line of New Testament prophets. Jesus came as a prophet, priest and king.
Israel severed the law from its prophetic origin and roots and it became a system of rules and regulations as men tried to establish their own righteousness. Instead of a prophetic word, they created a ritualistic, sacramental word that they used to establish their own performance as a means of righteousness. That is why in the same chapter, Jesus makes this statement.
Matthew 5: 20-for I say to you, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the Kingdom of heaven.
The same thing that happened to Moses also happened to Jesus. His prophetic words have now been evangelized into the system. The sermon on the mount, instead of being prophetic, is now a code of conduct.
All prophets in the Old Testament continuously call people back to their prophetic origin: to obey prophetic commands and return to a loving God and walking in his ways. We see the same in Paul’s teachings. Galatians 3: 24-the law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ. The law is not an end in itself; It is given to prophetically restore us to Christ. The foolish Galatians (Galatians 3: 1) got off track. The law speaks of righteousness embedded in Jesus, not in us. The law is therefore dynamic because it leads us to the sufficiency of God.
The prophet’s task is to establish relationship with God through a living response to a living word. The law began as a specific now word to that generation. The tragedy is that it was downgraded to a general word of God for every succeeding generation.
Separated from its prophetic source, it became highlighted and elevated to become a conventional word when it was a defining and distinguishing a now word to that generation. It’s so blinded the generation around Christ that it prevented them from hearing the now words spoken by Jesus.
We see the same today when scripture is elevated in some circles to the point where prophecy is outlawed and deemed satanic. A conservative approach to scripture has robbed it of its prophetic power to renew, refresh and restore people to God’s ongoing Kingdom power and purpose.
Scripture must be read prophetically as a now word. We must recapture the true essence of scripture. It is not a conventional word spoken to a conservative people to help them maintain a standard on earth that does not exist in heaven. It is not present to provide endless material for self-help teachings. Four steps to a happy marriage. Six steps to a better prayer life. How to walk with integrity in four easy steps. How to witness to people at work.
The standard in heaven is glory. People are measured by how much of God’s glory is present in their life. When Moses prophetically spoke the law into being, his face shown from being in the presence of the Lord. When the Pharisees interrogated Peter and John (Acts 3) they observed their confidence; They knew they were uneducated and untrained men, but they took note that they had been with Jesus (Acts 3: 13). What did they see?
Jesus restores us to glory, and wonder. When we read scripture prophetically, as the now word, our sense of majesty increases. In scripture we must hear the voice of God speaking now to his people. We must respond to God’s voice and live by every preceding word out of his mouth. Prophecy is much more than inspired preaching. It is a dynamic thing that creates breakthrough, transformation, and the restoration of majesty that overcomes all obstacles and opponents.
Our response to the now word is crucial. Do we let the word live or do we allow it to die? Our response to the prophetic word is so vitally important that the apostle James gives us this injunction.
James 1: 22-but be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; For he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.
Those who hear without doing are prone to delusion because they continually forget what God has said. It is very easy to forfeit some sense of the power and glory, the marvel and the miracle of hearing God speak into our life and situations. Almighty God, the absolute creator, has a heart so huge that he can be personally acquainted with hundreds of millions of people. He finds time to hear, speak, and respond to countless millions of prayers daily. He speaks countless messages of love, peace, truth and blessing on an hourly basis.
When God speaks, he does so with purpose, to create life, faith and an awareness of himself in the lives of his people. He wants to bring change, correction, direction, renewal, restoration, redemption and encouragement. His words are always strategic and contain real purpose. They reveal his heart and plans for us. All he asks in return, is for us to respond to him.
Scripture should lead us to the place of encounter and experience. In the same way, our response to prophecy creates opportunities for us to receive God’s promise and to become what he intends.