All around us, there are tragedies and turmoil of epic proportions. It seems we, as a nation and as a people, are being shaken to the core. It is not strange, in times like these, to feel a lack of security, and to search for something in which to find comfort and protection. Thankfully, I learned a long time ago where to turn for such. The Bible is rich with wisdom, guidance, comfort, promises, and answers for all that we face in our lives. And God is faithful to help us grow in our understanding of His Word each time we pick it up and set our hearts to seek Him there.
As I’ve been considering all that is taking place around me – this shaking of all we’ve known – God’s Word has become a light to the path we are on. When I shut out the sound of the media reports and the opinions I hear as people talk from their own understanding, I become positioned to hear what’s taking place behind the scenes. When I close my ears to the many lies, I step into a space where I can hear the truth. God longs for us to know the truth. The truth will set us free from so much that we wrestle with in times like these: fear, unfounded or at least misaligned anger, confusion, doubt, pride and prejudice.
What I have heard, as I’ve detached from the mainstream broadcast and turned instead to seek God and His Word, is that, all over the earth, there is a call in the Spirit for us to return to our foundations. As individuals, created by a Creator Who had a master plan and design for our lives, long before anything ever went awry in our broken world. As a people, called to become one in Christ, long before our differences ever divided us. As a nation, rooted and founded upon faith and the vision to be an open invitation for people to know the blessing and goodness of the God Who so graciously gives us freedom and peace. Even the city and the state where I live (Hayward, California), while they seem to have spiraled into an irreconcilable mess, were built with visions which held the promise of leading people back to their foundations in God.
In Exodus we are told the story of God’s people, and their generations of bondage in Egypt – symbolic as a place far removed from promise and from their foundation. For 400 years they were slaves, building another man’s kingdom, and living in survival mode, with little else to look forward to than the daily provision of their food and drink. Then God sent Moses to set them free, because God had been watching and listening to their cries for something more, for the return to their promises and to their foundation as His people, blessed and highly favored. Their lives, at the time, looked nothing like what God had created them for. But, while they had gotten used to their existence as slaves, they never forgot that it wasn’t supposed to be this way for them.
Most know the story that unfolds, of how God showed up and fought against Pharaoh, through the commands of Moses, to set His people free. But for me, the most important part of the book, of the story, is the very first paragraph, where we are told of the sons of Israel that moved to Egypt, with their families, and their children and grandchildren, and who – under the favor and sovereign placement of God in that land – grew and multiplied so greatly that they became a powerful people that filled the whole land of Egypt (ch. 1, vv. 1-7) Their slavery, then was the enemy’s fearful attempt to cut off what God had built into their foundation: that they would be a mighty people who expanded throughout the territories in which they dwelt, and took dominion everywhere they went.
When God delivered His people from 400 years of slavery, He intended to lead them into the Promised Land, the space and the life they had been promised in the foundation of their existence, before they were even born. It was given to their forefathers, and yet God still wanted to give it to them. It was the right of their inheritance.
In the book of Isaiah, God speaks to His people, warning them not to put their trust in Egypt or her allies. In other words, He reminds them of the dangers of becoming comfortable and even relying on the life they had come to know in the places they had been carried into and learned to be comfortable in. God never intended for us to become comfortable in bondage, in existing to build the kingdoms of men, and living in survival mode. He never meant for us to forget who we were created to be, and settle into looking around for some temporary measure of comfort, provision and protection, just to make it through the next wave of disaster.
In fact, in Isaiah 30, God tells His people that much of the disaster they are experiencing has come as a result of their acceptance of and reliance upon what He never intended for them. As they had learned to identify more with the power structures in the communities around them, rather than God, their lives had crumbled into a state of disrepair.
But because He is a faithful and merciful God, He does not leave them stuck in the consequences of their choices. He gives them the secret to discovering their hope and their freedom once again: returning to their foundations.
“This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved. In quietness and confidence is your strength.'” Isaiah 30:15
Dear Woman of Breakthrough, this is not just an ancient Word for us today. It is a Word which the Lord is pulling out of the treasure Chest, the Hope chest, of our inheritance, and holding out to each of us. There are promises embedded in the foundation of our identities and the places where we live, many of which we don’t even know exist. Do you know the history of your own creation? Do you know what God built into your foundation? Do you know the history of your family, of your city, of your state, and of our nation? Or have you become blinded by the current reality, and unable to see beyond the need to just survive it?
There is a mandate from Heaven in this hour, and it is extended to you, if you are willing to pick it up: Return to the foundations! God is digging up the deep places, and calling forth the gold of His creation. Darkness is being overturned, and the Kingdom of God is being established in our midst…but only upon the foundation of truth and promise which God Himself laid into this world.
We must have eyes to see and ears to hear. We must shut out the voices which prophesy lies and distract us from the sound of the silver trumpets, awakening the people of God to the hour of glory. It is a new season! God has come to reclaim what has always been His. Will you be a part of His-story? Will you dig up and pull down the structures in your life and in your dwelling places which have not been rooted in the foundation of truth? It is time for us to become again a people of promise, expanding and taking dominion as God always intended for us to.
Start today, by taking your life before God and asking Him for your inheritance. Then get ready to use that inheritance to help others discover theirs, until the landscape of our world is changed…returned to its original design. Greater than the devastation of sin in our broken world is the power of the One Who forgave that sin, and recreated us in the image of the God Who has promised to come and dwell in our midst. It’s time to make room for Him, by becoming the people He created to delight Himself in. Within you, and built into the foundation of your life, is the dream of God’s heart, and He has come to call it back into existence!
She Dances Over Graves 