As we begin 2013, God has promoted us to run with horses. He has positioned us in a new playing field, in a new era. We, at Ariel Gate, have heard much about the new era which is upon us. We have listened this year to many messages about change, but I do not believe that we have full grasped the responsibility that is ours, personally, to embrace the change.
Someone once told me that the challenge with many people is that once they have a heard a message or a talk on change and the need for it, they feel they have changed simply because they heard the word. But the reality is that hearing a word does not change us. Change requires commitment to a set of actions. It requires discipline and diligence.
God has thrust us into this new arena because He believes we can do it. He believes because He wrote it of us in the book before we were born. Just as He said to Jeremiah 1:5, ” Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you”. God knows each of us. He knows us as we are today, but He also knows who we are to become. He knows what lies deep on the inside of us. And because of that, He has positioned us in the place where we can fulfil our potential. Our destiny. It is our choice whether we want to fulfil it.
The challenge? We do not see ourselves as God does. We believe that our abilities, our circumstances, our clothes and even our jobs, define us. We believe that these things dictate our destiny. On the one hand, we know what God has said about us. We quote all the verses about God having a hope and a future for us. We ‘rah rah’ in agreement when the preacher tells us about the good things God has called us to, but deep down we do not believe it. Whenever God gives us an instruction to do something, we tell him how we cannot do it. We do not have the time, the finances, the skills. The excuses are endless. And the truth is that at that moment, in the natural, we may not have what it takes. But God is waiting for us to live lives where His truth speaks louder than our circumstances. Lives where our belief in Him supersedes our opinion of ourself.
Apostle Natasha has been telling us since the start of the year – that we are to love ourselves. If God made us and He loves us, then who are we not to? If we are going to overcome in this new era, we must start to believe God and what He says about us.
But more than that, we have to go back to the original scrolls of our lives and read the next chapter. This does not mean that we look for a prophet to prophesy to us, it means that we use the skills we have learnt to access the scrolls and read it ourselves. This will take some work. It is going to take some seeking and some knocking and some asking and some fasting! It is going to take WORK to do what God has called us for. We must deal with our self-image issues. We must settle the internal disputes about whether we can do what God called us for. And we must get the instruction and impartation God has for us for the next season.
NEXT WEEK…What does this mean for ME?
