The focus of this weekend's conference is Numbers 13-14, I know, super exciting! Numbers is not a book I usually camp out in. I'm not sure about you, sometimes I get the feeling that the Old Testament lost a little of it's relevance after Jesus, but I remember, the whole thing is about Him, especially this particular passage. In these chapters we see the story of the Promised Land. The Israelites have arrived at Canaan, they are excited, but they are terrified. After generations of, what to me is, unimaginable oppression, God has freed them. He has brought them through the dessert and dropped them at the gates of the place they are to thrive and flourish. The Kingdom of God should start, right here, in this place. Canaan.
There is just one problem. There is opposition. There are people there. There are fortifications in their way. There is already an established kingdom. Shouldn't they just move on to the millions of acres of open land somewhere out in the wilderness and set up their own Kingdom?! I honestly cannot fathom why no one in the Nation of Israel didn't suggest that "Hey, maybe we should just start our own thing." No, the response was, "we should have remained SLAVES! Let's go back to Egypt!"
In a revelation that the leaders of IF:GATHERING have clued into God is setting the stage for the greater narrative of humanity, and what they and I would say is the most disturbing trend of our 21st century church: letting the Kingdom of God halt its advance because another kingdom is already established. So many of us now know more than the Israelites, enough to say "I won't return to slavery", but all too many of us have said "Eh, there's already people here, let's just go off and start our own thing." Thankfully enough of us are tired of this separate status that what I heard last night was a voice in the dessert crying, "prepare ye the way of the LORD!"
During several of the talks last night the beginning of one verse kept reoccurring "Do not look to the left or to the right"... the rest of that verse continues "GO to the land I have commanded you". I didn't have to look this verse up, I have been living it for the last year, possibly more and I hope this is the anthem of my journey for the rest of my life. Originally manifest to Abraham, the land that God was talking about was the land that the Israelites were now standing in front of with knees knocking and chests quaking. No wonder Moses and Aaron fell prostrate before God and Joshua and Jephunneh tore their robes: the land that for centuries had been promised to them was being given up because 10 men of renown were saying "it's just too difficult."
If you don't see yourself in this story yet, I pray you ask God where you fall. The land that we are looking at is the same land that was promised to Abraham, not the physical land of Canaan, but the very real territory Jesus called the Kingdom of God. We are standing on the precipice of this land and because someone else has taken up residence there we have decided that the forward march is too hard. So we have set up camp in the open acres, where we can shield ourselves from the hurt, the pain, the reality of what is inside those gates and live happily ever after until the day that Christ returns. If someone wants to join us, they'll find their way here. If someone wants to leave, well, they probably don't understand us anyway.
What we don't realize, is that everything good that God has to give is inside those gates. And the very best thing of all, the Jesus, the Christ of whose return we anxiously await, He also is inside those gates! I have spent too many years outside of the land I have been promised begging God to be close to me, pleading with Him to be real, anguishing over the day He will save me from this body of death. All the time He has simply been saying, "walk through the gates."
At the beginning of the night the women who are leading IF:GATHERING all begged God to come near. On their knees they cried out to Him in front of us, and rightfully so. These are the words that we have to use as humans, the words we know and the constructs we are familiar with. However, I am struck with this, God is near. He is all around us. He is beckoning to us "come near to me." God doesn't need to move - we do. God doesn't need to show us Himself - we need to open our eyes. God doesn't have anything to prove - we simply have to have faith in what has already been accomplished.
It's time for us to wake up to the ideas that are being presented by these women who have experienced the bitterness of earthly pain and tasted the sweet honey of Heaven. It's time for us to take the gates, enter the land and live in freedom and peace and love. It's time for us to stop being afraid of the giants and the fortifications and it's time for us to start knocking down walls so the Kingdom of Heaven can invade this earth just as Jesus prayed at that Last Supper. If we truly believe that His Spirit resides in us how can we not pray as He did: "Your Kingdom come. Your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven."
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