The Promise Land
One thing I always find fascinating about the Bible, is you can read it 20 times and you will have new revelation EVERYTIME you read it. So I have to share mine for the day..
I never realized that the land Jacob had lived in with his sons.. WAS the SAME LAND.. as the Promise Land. It’s so obvious but I just never really picked up on the hints to it.
Joseph was taken out of the land to Egypt, where what looked like a terrible situation, turned into his family also being brought into Egypt. So, natural thought would be why would God take them out of their promise just to send them into slavery..
Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever lost what looked like a promise of God.. Have you went thru a season where if feels like you lost everything? Or maybe your in that season right now. You’re so confused on why God took what He took from you..
If God would have kept Jacob in the promised land and never placed a famine on the land.. it would have been fine.. Jacob and his family would have lived there, worked the land.. and had a simple life.. but God isn’t calling us to that.. God is calling us to something so much more amazing.
Exile to Egypt was a time for formation, for the people to learn their identity. It was a time for them to desperately lean on God and know that they couldn’t do it alone. It was a time for covenant with His people.
You may feel like you’ve been exiled to Egypt in your own life right now. Maybe your marriage feels like it’s in exile. Maybe you’ve lost friends or family. Maybe you feel like a slave to life. Lost your job, relationship with your kids is in turmoil.. there are so many things in our life that can feel like an Egypt. We just wanna go back to our promise.
God’s promise is never broken tho. They were ALWAYS going to end up back in the promised land. He told Jacob, to not be afraid to leave because they WOULD BE BACK.
The exciting and amazing fact that they didn’t just come back quietly and take on their old lives again as a family..
They came back as a NATION. They came back REDEEMED. They came back transformed. In relationship with God that was nothing compared to what it was prior. They came back to an abundance of blessings they didn’t even know was possible.
God’s promise is still very much on your life. God may have taken you out of your promised land… and you may be in Egypt right now… but when He brings you back.. He isn’t just going to give you your old life back he is going to give it to you magnified beyond belief. We just have to lean into our relationship with Him. Trust him. Use this time to learn the things He is wanting us to learn. Become transformed thru the slavery of Egypt. So you can also walk back into your calling, LOUD.. TRANSFORMED.. AND REDEEMED.
Back to the basics
Let’s go back for a minute to the beginning.. back to Adam and Eve. I want to talk about something that God has been revealing to me heavily in the past weeks. God’s original design for our lives. If we go back to the garden of Eden. We learn in Genesis 2:16-17 in the garden there was a tree known as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We see here in this verse that God’s instruction is for man to never eat of it. That really got me thinking. You may wonder why the tree was put there in the first place if eating of it would cause death. The answer to this is Love. True love is not possible with out choice. You can’t have real genuine love with out the possibility of rejection. God wanted our whole hearts. He wanted us to love him and obey him because we choose to; not because we were forced into it out of lack of other options. The tree symbolized one’s desire to be independent, to decide truth on their own rather rest in the knowledge of God’s truth. Before eating of the tree Man only knew of good. They only knew of the light. There was no knowledge of the darkness and evil. Does that mean that it didn’t exist… no satan was still very real.. but they were guarded from it. They were safe from knowing it at all.
That was Gods ultimate design for our lives.. for us to never even know the darkness. He wanted us to only be present in the wisdom of His light. Even now in present time we all find ourselves still waiting for the day that we meet God in heaven.. this place we will find ourselves in after this life; where we are absent from remembering the bad, where there is no death or sickness. Where everything is good. We are essentially all waiting to finally be back in true alignment with how God had originally designed us to live.. but what if we chose to walk in that here and now. Matthew 4:17 “ The kingdom of heaven is at hand” a lot of us grew up learning this meant it was coming soon, but the original Greek word for the phrase “at hand” is ēngiken which means that it is present and available, it is with in reach. NOW.
Okay..Stay with me for a second.. because I wanna break down a few other statements Jesus made during his ministry here.
First I want to look into Faith. Greek word peithō. Meaning to be fully persuaded and convinced. Most of us in church have grown up hearing that all you need is faith the size of a mustard seed and you can tell mountains to move and they will.. but what if we were taught all these years wrong. In Matthew 17:20 Jesus in fact says to the disciples that the reason they aren’t able to perform the miracles they are trying to perform is because of LITTLE FAITH. “Because of your little faith. For truly I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” The only version you see size referenced is the NIV version. (Published in 1978) prior to that Jesus is telling you to be LIKE a mustard seed. So what is a mustard tree. The seed is one of the smallest seeds, but the tree it produces… is huge. It’s known to grow 6-12 feet in just one season. It spreads quickly. The roots grow so deep and wide that it takes over anything else planted around it… it grows so tall and strong that its branches are a place of rest as Jesus says for the birds of the air. Farmers during this time wouldn’t have planted a mustard seed in their gardens… because it would literally destroy everything it was planted around. Its known to be wild and uncontrollable.. now I want you too keep this knowledge of the mustard tree.. and faith.. now I want us to go into the verse Matthew 18:3.
“Truly I tell you unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”
The world gives the perception that being naive is a bad thing. That you are lacking in wisdom or common sense. What if we are actually called to be naive. The definition of the word is to be deficient of wisdom of the word, other descriptions include childlike. French and Latin derive the word from natural and innocent. Sounds to me exactly what Jesus was calling us to be.
Gods original design was for us to be naive to the ways of the world. To be naive of the darkness and evil not because it didn’t exist because our God is greater and more powerful than it is.
So what if to live in the alignment of the kingdom of heaven now… we were to walk in that naiveness of evil. To have a faith so strong, big , and wild that it controls everything in our lives. That like the mustard seed it takes over and destroys any other beliefs or ideas. It become the only thing planted in us. Being naive to the darkness… because you have the faith that you know even walking into a room that evil must flee. Being so secure in your alignment with the Holy Spirit that your very presence diminishes evil no matter where you are. We put so much emphasis on the attacks of satan… we talk about how to be prepared for them the closer we get to God. What if we stopped bringing so much enlightenment to the attack. The presence of God doesn’t stir up satan and his demons and make the stronger, it destroys them. It brings them to their knees begging. The presence of evil can only work if you give attention to it. This doesn’t mean that trails won’t come, because they will.. but instead.. Focus your minds on the protection of God. Every room you walk in, every conversation you have, every conversation that your name is even brought up in has the presence of God protecting it.. live like evil and Darkness doesn't even exist for you… because essentially it doesn’t… because it’s already been conquered for you thru the blood of Jesus Christ. Walk in the kingdom of heaven, in the original will of God. There is nothing to fear, or worry about. He has you. Walk in the faith and childlike mindset that he calls you to.
Just a woman at the Well
The Woman at the Well.. Chapter 4 in the Book of John. This happens to be one of my all time favorites. Probably because I spent the first sixteen of my adult life making the absolute worst mistakes a girl could make in the love department. Married when I shouldn’t have been.. having kids before I should be having them.. and if we are being honest being so obsessed with finding “My person” I really didn’t care about any of their red flags as long as they told me they loved me. Multiple marriages and four kids later.. here we are finally figuring it out. What did I figure out you might ask? Was it me? Was I the problem? Were they the problem? Was my picker just broken? Well it could be a little of all those too.. but the number one thing I’ve come to realize is the love I was chasing was never made for a man to fill. My soul was searching for only one kind of love and relationship, that relationship is with Jesus Christ. I was searching for a unfailing, perfect, real love that no human had the capability of living up to. Once I finally realized God was who I longed for the whole time.. I finally decided to surrender all my past relationship mistakes to him. I decided to keep my eyes focused on His will for my life.. and actually date his way instead of my own… what kinda change did that look like?..
Loving myself enough to keep high standards
Abstinence (yes, no sex.. even after four kids and having already been married)
Praying about any potential partner.. and asking God for His will to be done and to remove any counterfeits being sent my way.
Most importantly actively staying aligned with Him and His word, DAILY.
Have I met my “kingdom spouse” yet… no. I may never meet him and I can say with a full heart that I’m actually completely okay with that if it’s what’s meant for me. (If you caught me saying something close to this 10 years ago.. I was lying. The “I don’t need a man” front, was exactly that. A front) I do know I will never be starving for love and attention again. My cup truly does runneth over in that department.
If you find yourself in the same situation I was.. depressed and just wanting to be loved. Maybe you’re married and so unhappy because it’s just not giving you what you want and need. Ask yourself if you you’re searching for the right things in people.. or if maybe it’s not job for a person at all.. maybe Jesus is waiting for you at the well.
The Samaritan woman spoken of.. was just regular woman.. like you and me. Girl had a PAST.. and she was definitely searching for her man too. She had a bit of a reputation to say the least. She had become an outcast. The shame of her choices kept her isolated.. but what the enemy uses for evil.. God uses for good. Her isolation led her right to Jacob’s Well in the heat of the day.. whe no one else was around… except.. Jesus. Jesus showed up. In fact he made a very special trip just for a conversation with her.. Jews typically avoided Samaria during this time, but Jesus had a divine appointment set up with woman.
“Will you give me a drink?” Jesus asks her.. of course she is like “WHAT!? Why are YOU asking me for a drink? Don’t you know who I am?” A Jewish rabbi speaking to a Samaritan women much less asking for water was not likely at this time. Jesus responds.. if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
So basically he is like “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”
But she just becomes more confused.. she still thinks we are talking about real water.
He tells her to go get her husband. 😅
She I’m sure reluctantly let Him know she had no husband to get. 😬
Jesus: “You are right to say you have no husband.. you’ve had FIVE husbands, and the man you’re living with right now you aren’t married too”
You know at first when Jesus responded.. I was like dangggg.. Jesus why you gotta call my girl out like that…
But He wasn’t there to shame her.. he was there to expose her true thirst for love and acceptance.
She knew SOMETHING was up now..
and for the very FIRST TIME Jesus chose to reveal to the rejected woman sitting by a well.. full of shame and guilt… that HE IS THE MESSIAH.
He didn’t choose the religious leaders.. he didn’t choose anyone you would THINK he would.. he chose her.
Just like he chooses you.
What water are you drinking trying to quench your thirst?
Men and relationships?
Big house and nice car?
Addiction?
Popularity?
Sex?
Money?
Your kids..?
We all attempt to fill that thirst with something thinking if we just get that one thing then everything will be fine.. but that’s just a mirage.
Your Soul is searching for living water.. It’s searching for Jesus. He is what we need to make ourselves whole again. He is the missing piece.
And He is happily taking the long path around to get to you..
Because you are just the special woman He is looking for to share some good news with ❤️