What Is and What Will Be
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedToday is the first Sunday of Advent.
For those of you who are doing the daily gospel reading,
today is the beginning of year A in the three year cycle of readings
if you need to figure out
where we are in the lectionary.
If you would prefer to not use an online app,
I can send you a table of the readings for Advent and Christmas.
We talk a lot about listening to God.
God speaks in our daily lives,
God speaks through the scripture,
and God speaks in times and seasons.
Over many years I have discovered
a pattern in God’s speaking to me.
He speaks the most directly
during the Jewish High Holy Days,
and for nearly twenty years
I have taken Rosh Hashanah
as a time to get away with God and listen.
In the past few years,
the Lord also spoke at Yom Kippur.
Usually,
right after this period
a number of abrupt shifts happen in my life
that begin to activate the word.
Many times God will give you a word,
and when He does,
hang on tight.
That word is going to be tested,
you are going to be tested,
and often
the opposite of what God said will happen.
This year the Lord spoke to me about the whole community
of Belonging House International,
and how I would no longer be the only one who gets the revelation,
but that our entire community would become a revelatory culture,
and this would be what attracts
those called to the end-time army of artists.
This revelatory culture would magnetize us
and those who really have been like iron in the fire
will be attracted to us
just like iron filings are attracted to a magnet.
That made me really jazzed up,
and then we discovered that we had a few folks who
actually didn’t like that I spend so much time listening to God
and they wanted me to stop.
It has been a very bumpy few months.
After this,
each year,
just before Advent,
things begin to settle down.
Advent and Christmas are the celebration
of Incarnational Reality.
God became a man,
and moved into the neighborhood,
as Eugene Peterson put it.
This is the time when the words begin to really happen
and the word that God is releasing for the new year
begins to take on flesh.
In the spring
at Passover into Pentecost,
God moves us into the new thing that has taken flesh,
and we begin to shifts and manifestation.
And in the summer months,
I seem to live under an open heaven.
We have seen more miracles,
and more big callings revealed in July and August
than any other time.
In September,
the cycle repeats.
So true to form,
this morning at my favorite prayer spot,
the Lord said
Trust my timing,
You have entered the Naked Now!
God has stripped me
and many in our house right down to nothing.
It feels exposed and naked.
We are now in the next season.
We are going to get clothed by the Lord.
This is the season of new clothes.
New mantles of shrewdness,
wisdom,
and authority.
Since we are in the new,
I want to teach on the lesson from Isaiah 2.
When Belonging House
began in 2006,
the “Seven Mountains” teaching was starting to take hold.
This is the idea
that the world can be compartmentalized
and dissected into seven spheres
and our job as Christians is to conquer
these mountains
and bring them to Christ.
There are a lot of problems with this approach,
mostly coming from the Enlightenment way of thinking.
Life is compartmentalized,
and a secular/sacred grid is reinforced.
The arts and culture
are always sidelined.
Whenever I have heard this teaching,
the person preaching it usually does what
evangelicals do,
they come back to politics.
In their mind the voting box has power over the other mountains.
this is backward.
The Kingdom is just the opposite.
Jesus doesn’t compartmentalize us,
he brings us to wholeness.
The Kingdom is a culture,
not a political system.
And most important of all:
In the Bible
there is only one mountain.
And this mountain is mentioned several times
in Isaiah,
in chapter 2 and in chapter 24.
It is mentioned at the end of the book of Revelation.
the entire Bible story is moving toward
a city
on a mountain.
The mountain of the Lord’s house.
The book of Isaiah was composed in the
mid 8th century before Christ.
The world was going through a convulsion
and was coming out of centuries of a long dark age.
The events of much of the Old Testament
come from a time when civilization collapsed.
The comparatively small nation of Israel
gained prominence at a time when
the larger world was coming apart.
We aren’t taught the Bible is way,
but Abraham left a civilization
that was disintegrating.
There were several centuries of chaos
in the ancient world,
and out of that chaos emerged the nation of Israel.
By the time of Isaiah,
Israel and Judah were divided.
The glory days of the nation were past,
and new empires were rising.
These empires were coming to conquer
and exile Israel.
And against this backdrop
Isaiah says
that the mountain of the Lord’s house
is going to become the tallest of mountains
and all nations will come to it.
And out of this mountain
the law will go forth to all nations.
And all the nations will stream to this mountain.
The whole world will know about this mountain
and the whole world will stream toward it.
When we read Biblical prophecy,
you can understand it three ways.
What did it mean to the original hearers?
What does it mean in the future?
And how can it be interpreted now?
So to the original hearers,
this passage is about the temple.
For them, this was a word of hope in a time of
civilizational unrest.
This little divided country
is one day going to be a global leader.
And all the nations will be coming to the hear the word of God.
It sounds like nonsense when your world is coming to an end
but it is a declaration.
The prophetic word
is the end from the beginning.
If God gives you a word,
He is telling you how things are going to work out.
It is designed to give you prophetic hope.
Hope keeps you going.
A lot of people live in what is
or what was.
They live in what their eyes tell them about now,
or the illusion of their experience in the past.
And out of this,
they get trapped in a poverty mindset
with no possibilities or options.
The Lord lives in what is
and what will be.
I am who I am
I will be what I will be.
The Lord never said his name is what was.
So when we receive a word from the Lord
it inserts itself into our reality.
We have two choices,
we can reorient our perspective to God’s perspective
or we can try to find a way to make
the word fit into our perspective.
You always have to make a decision about
having a kingdom perspective.
When you get a Kingdom perspective,
you are now confronted with other choices.
How God looks at your present circumstances,
and a myriad of options and possibilities for the future.
And if you have a clear word from God,
you also know the end from the beginning,
although you may not know how you are going to get there.
A few weeks ago I was asked to come pray
for the mother of a friend.
She had a serious cancer
and there were visible tumors on her head
and on her body.
I went,
and while I was praying,
I saw Jesus put his hands on her heart,
and light went into her body.
Then the Lord looked at me
and smiled,
and said,
“She is going to be okay.”
I told the woman
what the Lord said.
The next few days thing looked pretty bad.
And everytime I received a text with bad news
I just gave thanks to God
and said,
“She is going to be okay.”
I had a word from the Lord.
Things were looking very bad,
and I was planning a trip up to Lebanon, NH
to pray for her in the hospital.
That morning we took time after the Daily Prayer Furnace
and prayed for her
the way we have learned to pray:
We removed the obstacles to healing,
we got into the flow,
and we let that healing presence of Jesus
flow through us to that woman.
Again,
the Lord said she would be okay.
A day later I received a text
that she was improving,
the next day I received a text that she was discharged from the hospital.
And the next day I received a text
that the tumors on her head were gone.
The other tumors were shrinking.
God knows the end from the beginning.
The mountain of the Lord’s house
has a future meaning as well.
Isaiah is talking about the complete fulfilment of the Kingdom of God.
There is a day
when there will be no war.
The whole earth will walk
in accordance with the Word of God,
and the Lord will reign from Jerusalem.
Someday
we will all learn to live in love
and manifest the fruit of the spirit.
When that day comes,
there will be no wars.
And the world will live under the rule and reign
of our Lord Jesus.
And the fulfillment of this word
will only come
when Jesus returns.
This is why we are instructed
to stay awake,
and to be ready.
The mountain of the Lord’s house
also relates to our mission and calling.
The house is more than the temple.
It is the dwelling of the Person, Presence,
and Power of God in us.
All the nations will be drawn to the believers
who are walking in the reality of Christ in you,
the hope of Glory.
There is only one mountain.
It is the mountain
of the Kingdom of God in the earth.
It is more than just Jerusalem
and it is more than just a temple.
It is a group of people
who have comprehended
John 17,
That we are at unity with the Father
and the Son
through the Holy Spirit.
And the only way you can get there
is to come back to the presence of God
and surrender to the life of God in you.
And when you come back to this place,
you discover something amazing.
Your inner conflict
begins to go away.
Isaiah is describing in this passage a movement
from Romans chapter seven
where I know what I should do but do not do it,
to Romans eight
where there is no longer any condemnation
for those who are in Christ Jesus
because the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus
has set me free from the law of sin and death.
Isaiah 25 says that on this mountain,
the shadow of death will be broken
and it was
when Jesus carried a cross up to that mountain
and died,
and then rose again
on that mountain.
Our inner life can be the mountain of God.
You no longer have to learn to war against problems
and situations in your own strength.
But you can now learn to have rest and peace
because you are the house of God.
And if you have become a house of God,
you can begin to be the presence of God
in the earth.
The house is more than a building,
it is a body of people.
You are the temple of the living God.
You are the one that the nations desire.
You are the one called to carry the Jesus
through incarnational reality.
And as it says in the end of Revelation,
the kings of the earth
will bring the glories of their nations,
into the city
on the one mountain.
The mountain of the Lord’s house
is a place of beauty,
good food,
great music,
and the best of the best of the best.
It is the Kingdoms of this world
becoming
the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.
It is the call on our house,
to build a place for the glory to rest.
Look forward to the future.
Look at the present from God’s point of view.
If you have a word from the Lord,
hang on to it.
Though it tarry,
wait for it,
it will surely come.
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