Blog In Audio:
Greetings;
I hope you had a great weekend. There is for sure a lot of things going on. There is a grassroots revolution going on, but the true revolution is what God is doing by His Spirit, not what man does in the flesh. Knowledge will spark a revolution of the flesh that provokes the people to be the people, but only a knowing of God by His Spirit of Knowing (intimacy knowledge) can reveal the people of God.
If we look at the world around us we can see that there are many things rising up. New events, challenges, problems, and realities seem to be rising one after another. Just when you think you have seen everything, there seems to be another reality on the horizon. We can see this in what appears to be bad news to many of us, but is there good news about to rise in many new ways? Is it simply bad news being revealed by good news? Or is there something greater than good and evil or right and wrong being revealed in this time called now? It is not merely a time for things to rise up, but for the people of God to arise and shine in the midst of the darkness.
Isaiah 60:1 Arise, shine; For your light has come! and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you. 2 For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and deep darkness the people; but the Lord will arise over you, and His glory will be seen upon you.
I have been enjoying this present season as a season of working in my garden. Not a big crowd, just some personal time to make the most of my personal space. I have said that in my neighborhood, 2020 is the year that everyone became a farmer. Everyone has been working in their yards and their gardens. My own garden is filled with many kinds of vegetables and fruits. I have also been dealing with weeds in my garden. I have been watching carefully to discern the appropriate time for extracting the weeds from my garden bed. I am also finding that there are many weeds that look like the plants that I am expecting, but they soon become manifest as something different than what I thought they might be. It even seems that the weeds grow faster than the plants that I have strategically placed into the soil. I don’t deal with the weeds in my garden with a focus of simply eliminating the weeds. I focus on the plants that I am expecting, and I extract the weeds in a way that does not destroy what is true. In truth, the weeds are growing because the soil is fertile, and the weather is filled with sunshine and rain. Where I live the sunshine and rain keep coming in close proximity to one another and everything is growing at an accelerated rate. There are times when we think of sunshine as good news and rain as bad or rain as good news and the sunshine as bad. The environment of our own hearts and minds often define what is good or bad in our own eyes, but only God who is good can truly define the season. It seems that the mix of the good news and bad news, the bad news and good news, is causing the truth and the lie to grow together at an accelerated rate. Things that God has planted for such a time as this can be easily missed when we become distracted by the counterfeit weeds growing in God’s garden. We are the people of God and we must not be distracted from being the people of God in a time when knowledge is falling like the rain or shining like the sun to inspire the growth of things that cannot give us the true fruit of life. When the environment seems to propagate a rule by information, we must depend fully upon God for a harvest that comes by transformation. We must see ourselves as planted by God at such a time as this to be the light of life to the world, not a light of condemning knowledge. The true grassroots revolution is a revolution of changed hearts and minds and an awe of a great, good, and merciful Father.
Are you discovering that things you used to be able to hide in, or hide behind, are no longer places of refuge? Even in the natural, things are coming to the light. In a day of much knowledge, there is a revealing of many secrets. In a day of information, people make judgments based upon knowledge. But their knowledge is limited by their own understanding and translated through the filter of their own judgments and perspectives. Many things prove to be lies, but then the lies become exposed to truly be lies. The truth is being revealed, whether it is truth proving to be true or lies proving to truly be lies. This is the present season of grace and it is being made manifest by the true plants growing in the garden compared to the weeds that are only the counterfeit plats that distract from the true destiny of life in the garden. We must embrace this season to discover the life of Christ in our world. What is the true grassroots revolution in the earth?
God is stripping away hiding places so we can become what God desires us to be as a people who are transformed by the power of God’s love in our midst. Iniquities are being exposed, not to be condemned, but to reveal a place of dependency upon the presence of God and His transforming grace. It is not a time to hide because of our differences, but to come as we are for the wellbeing of others and the generations to come. Christ in us is the hope of glory and the glory of God is to become all that He says we are for His family name. We are a temple of God in the Spirit and it is from the place of His habitation that we will become a multigenerational, Christ-centered, Christ-filled, community of brotherly love. We will be a community of little children, maturing sons and daughters of God who overcome all things by God’s grace, and fathers and mothers who live for the children and the children’s children as we see Him as the Father of us all.
Psalms 29:9 The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth, and strips the forests bare; and in His temple everyone says, “Glory!”
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
