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How often do you take the time to think about your place in the family of God? If you do, is it a faint religious idea, something almost cosmic and science fictional, or is it a vital and firmly planted reality your living? Do you feel alive as you consider God at work in you? Are you expecting God to open doors of opportunity to minister the current of His Spirit through you?

You are a conduit. You are connected. You are hooked up to the most glorious, passionately strategic force and person that man has ever come in contact with

As a power grid for a city hums as the electricity courses through the cables and transformers, we too, should also hum in the realm of the spirit. If we could see with our naked eyes into that realm, we would see and hear the hum as a symphony of anointing power and love directed to alter the temporal realm we live in. In the world, our natural senses are attracted to its frequency. The hum acts like a hanging bug light on a porch on a hot summer night. People are attracted to the symphony of God’s Spirit as you allow the melody to leave your lips, as it flows from a heart established in the grace and love of God.  People are desperate for it.

Don’t think for one second, that just because the world looks like it is falling apart and people hate, that the core of who we are doesn’t search for the eternal. Everyone is looking for what man lost in the garden. Everyone wants to be whole and complete. Every where I go, God is opening doors and bringing people across my path to speak life into their spirits! I know my steps are being ordered by Him.

I have to be honest, sometimes I can’t stand it. Folks can be really nasty! I’ve been burned and hurt on more than one occasion from those I thought were close and cared for me. It has taken time, but I am realizing I am in great company. The Lord went through the same things before me and He is making my crooked places straight by His grace. Still, it sometimes feels as if God is setting me up! The way He maneuvers and arranges opportunities before me in spite of my self centered attitude for my good, is quite humbling. God is the coach who NEVER gives up on the team or its members. Regardless of how carnal and childish we behave, He remains steady, willing and able to do in us what we can’t do for ourselves, love unconditionally and express it. He knows it is hard for us to give folks the benefit of the doubt emotionally, and extend grace. This is our pain and fear displaying our lack of a heart connection to Papa. As difficult as it is sometimes in my struggle with being skeptical about the human condition, He knows I want to live a life that means something to myself and Him, a life that empowers people to find their God given destiny. In fact, we all want to make our mark on this world and believe that our time here was important, that we made some kind of difference. In order for that to happen, we have to deal with people, and it takes supernatural grace and love to minister to the need. God’s people are so needy. I can tell you this, you might be having the most rotten day of your life and God in his mercy will send someone across your path that is desperately in need of some direction or encouragement. These opportunities are reminders of God’s presence in your life. Don’t forget it!

A person with a developed attitude of the heart that honors God’s Word as a weighty and powerful force knows how spectacular it is to co-labor with the Holy Spirit in ministering life to an individual when the opportunity presents itself. They have spent the time necessary with God for Him to sow life, (Zoë) in his or her own heart. There is nothing that can compare to it. You are connected. The conduit is active. The surge of Zoë, the life of God’s virtue, has flowed through your life. It is better than any drug known to man. It is the essence of what the purpose of God is all about.

When we co-operate with God’s purposes, we receive life first, for ourselves and second, for the ones to whom we minister. It is a painful thing when you are sensitive to the Holy Spirit, and you can feel how grieved He is over the destruction of His people. When I meet someone whose life is shipwrecked and broken because of bad choices and a sinful life, it is hard to take in. Especially, when you realize that the person is not ready to give up the corn husks of their swine spirit life. Nothing you say seems to penetrate because they haven’t reached bottom yet. They haven’t hurt badly enough and refuse to come to their senses. The pride they hold onto keeps them from grasping the grace God wants to give them.

They have their hands and hearts full of vise and every other thing other than life. So much of the body of Christ is in this condition. Status is no respecter. Just because we may earn five or six figure incomes and may have a beautiful home, doesn’t exclude us from what I’m talking about. There are thousands of beautiful, wealthy churches all over the globe that are loaded with crippled believers, all because they’re not aware of their connection to the power source of righteousness.

They are not aware of how important each individual is to God and how much He intensely desires the fulfillment of His purpose in their lives. The earth is desperate for the body of Christ to show up with the goods. No more religious non-sense and rhetoric. How can we tell the world who they are and what Christ is offering if we don’t know ourselves. Jesus told palsied men to rise and walk, so too, the spirit of God in this hour is calling forth His palsied body to rise and walk, to rise in power and honor, to walk in authority and integrity and take hold of their covenant rights and privileges. In order to do so, there are some things we must consider and not consider. For too long the body of Christ has considered things that perish, things with no eternal value and purpose. God has promised some awesome things to His people, and in order for us to take possession, we will have to do it God’s way. God’s way is the faith way!

Abraham was our father and he obtained the promise of God through faith. Not presumption, high expectation of the wrong information, religion or Levitical law. By the law of faith, He obtained the promise of God. If we want to walk in our destinies and make our mark as he did, we will have to follow Abraham’s example. It will come no other way. We must consider his life and learn how he interacted with God to obtain the promises of God. The promise was through Abraham’s seed that all the families of the earth would be blessed. We are also Abraham’s seed and heirs accordingly.

In Genesis 12:1 The Lord said unto Abram, get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.

You don’t hear about him but, I’ll bet Terah, Abrams father, was a God seeker. He didn’t know that his trade of fashioning idols for worship of the moon god displayed his empty ache for the living God whom his son would one day befriend. They must have spent many nights around the campfire, talking about the hopes they shared together, in looking for a land flowing with milk and honey. Eventually, they packed up the family and left the place of their birth, Ur of the Chaldees. But on their way to Canaan, a land of promise, they stopped and settled for a place called Haran. All too often, in the process of believing God for our promise land of destiny, we settle for second best because of the pressure afflicted upon our faith to believe God for what looks impossible. Surely, Terah had an influence on Abram. What was it that they were so hungry for that would cause them to leave familiar territory and grope for the unknown?

It astonishes me that, at the age of 75, after his father had died, the Bible says, Abram would once again pack up his whole life and follow a God he really did not know as well as his walk to possess the impossible would eventually bring him to. It is in believing for the impossible, that God shows up in His glory to bring it to pass. God had not yet cut covenant with Abram and changed his name to Abraham. The name Abram in Hebrew means, “Exalted father”. After God made a covenant with him, He changed his name to Abraham. In Hebrew it means, “Father of many” yet, he didn’t have any offspring.

Was God just crazy? No! It’s just God’s way of doing things. When He sees our willingness to forsake all else for Him alone, we begin to see that He call things that be not, as though they already exist. In doing so, it demonstrates His covenant of commitment to us, to bring to pass what He has decreed because we understand, He cannot lie. Once He speaks a thing from His lips, it is impossible for Him to take it back. The Word of God has so much inherent power within itself that when He speaks it, the Word Himself, Jesus, alters the circumstances of the natural realm and creates the manifestation of God’s desired purpose, causing purpose to take upon itself flesh and glorify the Father. This is what happened to Mary when she believed Gabriel and agreed with the Word of God’s purpose not yet manifested by the Holy Ghost. Mary said, Behold, I am the handmaiden of the Lord *(I’m all yours Lord!) let it be it done to me according to what you have said. *emphasis mine

The word SAID, implies a spoken Word. Mary did not consider that she had never yet intimately been with a man. She was still a virgin. Abraham, in exactly the same way, did not consider his body which was physically impotent at 100 years of age, nor did he consider the decades of deadness in Sarah’s womb and give up. He was strong in faith the Word declares. He relied on a covenant that God swore in blood to honor. He relied on God’s integrity of character and commitment to him as a friend.

Believing and speaking from the heart, the Word implanted by the Holy Ghost, is the most powerful force on earth. It is what changes dead, natural men bound in sin, into living kings and priests of the Kingdom of God. It is the key that unlocks salvations door..........

Continued in The Bruised Reed