Blog In Audio:
Greetings:
The kingdom of God is in our hearts. It is Christ in us that is the hope of glory. The unshakable kingdom is who we are, not what we do. Who we are determines how we do every ‘what to do’ in life. Moses had to encounter the God of fire in the bush. He had to become consumed with the passion, zeal, and purpose of God in His heart. God showed up in a throne bush in the familiar world of Moses. Moses may have even experienced thorns in the past from this very bush or one like it. It was when he turned aside to look, that he experienced the presence of God in the bush. He had to be willing to turn aside and look into something that was familiar to him and had likely even wounded him in the past. We must be willing to look at the mundane, and sometimes even difficult experiences in our lives to find God for all the situations of our lives. When we see that God is an overcoming strength to us in the places of our pain, we can become empowered to know Him in His power in all the circumstances of our lives. Moses had to know who God was and who he was so he could lead a generation of slaves into becoming a people who could overcome all things for the sake of God and the generations of God’s children. As leaders, we are also called to lead people out of societies of darkness into the reality of living as sons and daughters of God in the light. We set an example in overcoming the influences of the power of darkness by the power of the kingdom of God working in our hearts. We overcome the things that try to shake us in life by the power of the unshakeable kingdom of God in our hearts. That unshakeable kingdom is the fruit of God’s manifest presence in our lives, even in our places of wounding and pain. We set an example and we also inspire those we lead to do the same in their lives.
Exodus 3:4 So when the LORD saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”
In the same way that Moses needed an encounter with God as his God, we need a constant encounter with God in our lives. We can then lead others into an encounter of their own. We all must know that there is no separation between us and God. We also need to know that God and we lived together in all things. Moses needed a transformation by the life-giving God of heaven to lead God’s people into that same encounter in life. The deliverance of Israel from Egypt was more about becoming the testimony of the children of God upon the earth than about being freed from Egypt. This was but a shadow of what we live in as New Covenant people of God. Being freed from a life of sin is only the invitation to become an expression of God’s life-giving people upon the earth. God wants us to become heaven powered from within. When we are empowered from within, we can do all things without.
When Moses had his encounter with God in the burning bush, it was a commission for him to lead God’s people into the land of promise. The land was a good and a spacious land flowing with milk and honey. It was a land of blessing, but it was also a land of resistance. In the land was the Canaanite (self-seeking), Hittite (fearful), Amorite (bitter), Perizzite (superficially individualistic), Hivite (wicked – disconnected), Jebusite (trodden underfoot – trampled/defiled) and the Girgashite (discontent & wandering).
Deuteronomy 7:1 “When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, 2 and when the Lord your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.
These inhabitants of the promised land are a testimony to the ways of the kingdoms of the world. The administration of the kingdoms of the world and the justice system of the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, has humanity bound to worldly testimonies. The administration of the knowledge of good and evil is not the same as an administration of life. When we embrace a justice system of knowledge we tend to approach life from a fair or unfair paradigm in our thinking. We measure justice by whether something is right to us or wrong. I believe that there is a right and there is a wrong, but the real issue is not right and wrong. The real issue is life and blessing or death and curse. Only a relationship with God can give us the true fire of life. When we have a relationship with God in our hearts we are given the ability to increasingly embrace an administration of life. We can receive a revelation of God’s love for us and thus we can be empowered to love others. The internal motives of our hearts can change from motives of self-desire to living for the wellbeing of others. By this we overcome the temptations to be self-seeking, fearful, bitter, superficially individualistic, wicked and disconnected, trodden underfoot and defiled, and the discontent and wandering in our hearts. It is for this that we lead!
Food For Thought,
Ted J. Hanson
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