Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Always Start With Your Future, Not Your Present.

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It is so very easy to become dismayed about the future. It can seem out of focus or out of reach. One reason for that lack of clarity is that we are discouraged about who we are in the present.

We can lack the fortitude to move forward because our identity needs an upgrade in the here and now.

God uses Scripture in a personal and relational way with His people. He gives us promises that He intends to be realized in our life circumstances.
Several decades ago, He gave me Numbers chapters 13 and 14; the story of Caleb. When the Lord gives you Scripture with someone’s name in it, He intends that you will have a similar encounter and experience of Him that this particular individual enjoyed. In my case, Caleb became “a man of a different spirit” from those around him. He became a stand out person both in his own tribe and to successive generations of Israelites.
I have sought to partner with the Holy Spirit in the cultivation of that identity. My outlook on life, problems and difficulties stem from the sense of majesty that Caleb obviously adored.

Our vision of the future must impact who we are now.

We are in Christ who is our prophet, priest and king. Therefore, the prophetic part of His nature empowers us to interact with our future as we relate to God in the present. That means in prayer and devotion we can explore the future plans of God now in fellowship. We can go into the future in our sanctified imagination and dream of what the Lord is seeing, thinking, planning and speaking. We can get a sense of how it looks and feels to be in that place of favor.
In Exodus 7:1, God invites Moses to do just this.
“See, I have made you as God to Pharaoh and Aaron shall be your prophet.”
What an amazing invitation to explore the future and bring back the identity required to go there in the present!
Moses got to travel over the ground he would have to take within himself so that he could stand before Pharaoh with an authority and majesty greater than this earthly ruler possessed. This is where we learn to partner with the Holy Spirit who takes what belongs to Jesus for us, and makes it real in us. (John 16:15) So, then, we are made in His specific image according to the call on our lives in the Kingdom.

The future is designed to make our present become brilliant.

That’s part of why God created prophesy in the first place. He speaks from the future into our present so that we have a clear path to go there in fellowship with Him.
Prophecy gives us an outcome, which means that from prophecy spoken to prophecy fulfilled, everything between those two places is now designed to train us to become the person God saw when He spoke over us. The process to fulfillment is our training and proving ground where we cultivate the identity and develop the faith, focus and favor required to move in the Spirit at that level.
Our possibilities in Christ can be limited by the vision of our identity (who we are in God’s eyes) in the present. That is precisely why God speaks to us. He must upgrade our vision to His. We learn to view where we stand in relation to where we are going. We learn to comprehend how to stand in relation to who we are becoming.
Everything begins and ends with God. He is both the Author and the Finisher (Hebrews 12:2) of our faith. That means the outline of our story is established in His heart and he has titled the ensuing chapters of our lives. The outcome of His intention is the finishing line He intends that we reach.

When we start with the future and work back to the present we get to understand the outline of our story and we can partner with the Holy Spirit to walk the path of that particular process.

God uses our imagination to cultivate His intentions for us. We partner with His intentionality and discover the faith, focus and favor that He willingly makes available. If the outline of our story is already written, isn’t it time that we understood it; stepped into it; and began partnering with God in its unfolding process?  

P.S. For a more complete understanding of this revelatory truth, be sure to pick up a copy of The Wisdom Series.


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