April 2004 archives

Something has been gathering in my spirit for some time which needs voicing now. It concerns the restoration of the earth.

As a whole, the church has spoken much about Christ¹s redemption, but little of His Restoration. As a result, we have not known how to approach the earth--ecology; the physical body--health and body image; or interpret the times.

As we see the darkness harvesting along with the light, and as we see the increase of darkness on the earth, it is easy to wonder about the restoration. Are we getting closer to wholeness or further away? Pollution, disease and ecological turbulence seems to be increasing, so how could the restoration be in progress? It depends how far back you step, or into Whom. Jesus is coming and entering His People, so His Order is increasing, but as this occurs the disorder which is getting displaced is getting much more obvious. Both are becoming more manifest and distinct!

God begins the restoration with mankind. And specifically in His People. The earth cannot be fully restored until His People are.

We are the very agents He has chosen to restore all things to Himself. This is not just people, but the earth itself. Here is one of the reasons that the arts will be brought back under His Dominion, because all the earth is the Lord¹s and everything in it. All the beauty is His, as miscontextualized as it is, none of it is not from Him and will not be returned to Him. He is Lord over all of creation including all beauty.

From His Courts, it is obvious that when beauty is contextualized it has meaning and reflects back onto Him. The body is not evil; nor is the earth itself. They are creations of God meant to reflect back onto Him. Though we know that the earth will pass, it will not pass before it is completly restored to Him, and rest in His Order.

The restoration of all things means that you will be part of Him bringing all things into His Order! So we must see what this order is. There is no other way, but to let Him show us. There are many scriptures about what this will look like. But we must also seek direct visions of the restoration. What is the proper order between nations? For He will begin with mankind! We must be in His Order in order to be part of His restoration! So are we in order? As the denominations stab one another, and the church is so slow to interpret the events of our time from His Spirit? No, we are not. But Jesus is! And so we must enter His Life.

If the church is not in His Order how will it be an agent of restoration? This is why judgement begins with the house of God, whose house we ARE.

At present you see very much disorder. You see pornography, you see polluted rivers, you see nations hating other nations. But this will not always be! Thank Jesus that He IS restoring the earth to His Father¹s Proper Order. This is the true Order that men seek. An order when the nations will be properly aligned and allied with one another, each offering its gift and its particular reflection of God to the whole expression. This is a very real hope for us who believe!

Jesus is Lord, not just figuratively, or only in heaven. But He is Lord over earth, and this is one of His Concerns as He incarnated more fully on the earth. He came to restore the earth, and the earth will not pass away until He does. The Father has given all authority to the Son. He rules.

Part of our job on earth is not just to save lost souls, or to war off the enemy of life, but is to restore all things!

We must enter the spirit and see the earth as it WILL BE in order to move in His wisdom daily. Yes the darkness is increasing, but so also is the vision and power to see and restore all things to Him.

We need to concern ourselves with how He is restoring the earth! The pattern of the Lord is always to bring Light then love then life. We must first see or have a vision of the earth restored, then He will release His love and compassion to bring it into this new Life.
When Jesus shows up there is always Life. For the Light and The Life are inseparable in His Love. God sent the Light as an action of Love to bring Life! They work together in Him. The Light is now increasing, and we must move within it, get a vision of our part in the restoration of all things to and thorugh Christ!

He came to restore the earth not to destroy it. He came to destroy the works of the devil, but not the earth. We are His agents of restoration. He redeems men into this task of placing all things under His Authority. The leaves of the Tree of Life will heal the nations! We are these leaves. In Him, we are used as salve to bring healing to the nations. All things are being restored to and through The Son. If we are only comcerned with redeemption, we are only moving in one part of the picture. We must expand our vision to see His Desire to restore the whole earth and all that is in it!

written and received by: derek (also known as dr derickoviski)

As I picked up one of the many Bible translations stacked around our house (we can't get enough!), I asked, is this one for today?

³This Bible (The Living Bible) is one of my favorites. I put a special touch on it, which is still bearing fruit in other translations.

"I like some Bibles because they seek to reveal me‹those who translated them seek to reveal me. Anyone who loves the truth can love me, because I am the Truth. If they are genuinely looking after it, I will give myself to them. No translation of the Bible is perfect, just as with prophecy it is all in part and needs other parts to be made complete. My original words are perfect, and in them even in the original languages it is only with the reading of the Spirit to spirit can they be heard as perfect. Even the original inspired text can be read imperfectly if read with a dull heart‹one that is only looking for immediate solutions and not for my voice.

"You can often tell which translations are Œinspired¹ and touched by me‹because there is a breath and life in them that will water your spirit and soul. You know them because you feel inwardly refreshed by them. It doesn¹t matter if it is Œhigh¹ or Œlow¹ in its language, if I choose, they can still impart true spiritual meaning. If someone has sought to give the inner meaning‹the secret things of me‹I can give it to them even with a contemporary analogy.

"The church spends a lot of time arguing over words, but soon they will come to know Me as the Word. I reveal all things through my spirit if anyone would ask. The human mind is subject to decay just as with the rest of human nature, including the heart and the body. But since I seek to renew the Mind in these days, my people must learn to choose things with spiritual understanding, which transcends intellectual understanding. Only then will the mind be renewed and have perfect ³reason² and ³logic.²

"At present, the human mind is captivated by logic‹by sequenced arguments that build to create a kind of unshakeable fortress. Being very powerful as I made it to be, once the mind arrives at this fortress, it can take captive the rest of the human soul, including the heart. It is very difficult to ³change one¹s mind² once something has been absolutely proven through logic. Yes, I made the Greek mind and made it to apprehend spiritual things, but the Greeks often idolized it and wrote great raptures to its potential. This is why Paul taught that even to the Greeks who seek knowledge, my cross is a scandal to their logic, just as it is a scandal to those who need proof through miracles.

"Yet my people the Greeks still thirsted for spiritual things, but outside of me they would only come to them through sequential logic. This manifested most strongly in the Greek religion you call Gnosticism, which made its way into my church and Israel. In their religions, to achieve a spiritual enlightenment, one has to climb ladders of secret knowledge. This created an addiction in much of the world to that building of arguments in order that the mind may feel free. But the mind has become trapped. My knowledge is only secret to those who will not listen with spiritual ears. I gladly reveal myself, and will gladly open your mind to receive me in ways that 'logic' had never fully satisfied.

"I am the only fortress and the only unshakeable Truth. I am arrived at not just through logic, but through the inner eyes of faith, which believes in spite of all the material arguments. The mind is capable of so much more than it now explores. In my kingdom, the mind my Father intended will work in perfect tune with the heart and will be able to synthesize and comprehend things far beyond this earthly dimension. Its ability to learn, retain and even enjoy (yes, the mind was meant to enjoy) my Father¹s world will exponentially grow with each passing second in His presence. But now, on earth, this mind is often separated from heart and is decaying. Only by receiving my Spirit and by asking for this re-linking will the mind be renewed.

"Because man was created with a need for supernatural things, he will always seek them even when he is living in a highly secularized environment. Even in materialistic philosophies like socialism and Darwin and modern psychology magic has flowered. The spiritual drought created by many western philosophies left humankind begging, and so in that void there has been a flowering of occult religions, animal worship, earth-worship. You can see this in your own country‹all the seeking after Eastern spiritual practices was an attempt to fill in the spiritual void that the church had left behind. At that time in your history, the church was not seeking after my Holy Spirit and the supernatural rain He brings through the prophets and all of His gifts.

"This happened in Israel¹s life several times. Since Saul had thrown out all of my prophets from the land, there was no voice to connect him to supernatural revelation, and he was forced to seek a witch to conjure a dead prophet. In Elijah¹s time Israel suffered an actual earth drought since Ahab and Jezebel had killed all my prophets.

"In this day I am raising up new prophetic voices that will listen to my words and seek to bring the rain back to the Western church. I have brought many revivals and renewals to the church, but often the pride of the mind has stamped them out and argued them away. Will there not be one explosion of my grace into the earth that is received with great expectation? Will their not be one flood I send that other parts of the church will not try to critique? Whenever the church critiques my Holy Spirit¹s great outpourings‹as has happened many times even in your own lifetime‹religious pride and accusation flourish.

"How much I long to renew all minds that even the most intellectual thinkers of your day would find themselves every morning with a fresh idea of me, a fresh word, a fresh volume of thoughts that exceed all they have ever read! In this day I am giving to myself a new kind of teacher, one in whom seeks to know the Truth with all his or her heart, and will guide people into personally experiencing the very mysteries of heaven. I am seeking those who will give their minds to me so that I can expand them. They will think original thoughts and not just expand on others¹ thoughts. And their mind will be kept most of all by the renewed heart. For it is the heart that learns, and the mind that collects and gives understanding to that learning. If only the mind learns, no transformation occurs, no life regenerates, nothing is 'renewed.'

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.

"The 'pattern' is the desire for consistent and convincing argument. Do not cling to this need for pattern, but rather seek transformation. Come to me, the Truth, every day, and I will show you patterns of heaven that have barely been breathed since the days of the garden.

tell her, she is rich and I am about to take down her walls, and put up Myself as her wall
tell her, she is not poor, and I want the world to see My wealth by sharing it with her
tell her, that My Glory is Mine to give and I wish to give it now, so that the world will see My Glory
tell her, to stop living under a spirit of poverty which is basically selfish in seeing her worth as above My Will
tell her, it is not noble to keep spiritually poor, while I have made her rich
tell her, to give Me her walls of protection, the containers she has built, and I will become her container
tell her, this is for My Purposes of revealing My Own Riches, and she is My servants in doing this
tell her, I am coming as King not pauper, and that My Bride will be bejewelled
tell her, she is not dressed as a tramp, but as a true Bride of The True King
tell her, this means that all the riches of the cross must be entered
tell her, that she lives in heaven with Me and cannot go on acting like she is not a heavenly being
tell her, I am making her rich now, and she must get used to My Wealth
tell her, this is My Way of attracting men to Me
tell her, she must leave the lie behind which tells her she must stay ugly and poor, and embrace the truth that I am a royal King
tell her, this is a new season in her develpment as Bride
tell her, all the riches of the Kingdom are hers
tell her, she is not receiving them as she should
tell her, it is her destiny to be beautiful
tell her, she is My Bride and must now receive My Lavishings!
tell her, I am her Wall and she can give me hers
tell her this means more than protection, it means that I am about to show her the boundaries of her very being
tell her, her identity is about to be seen first by her, then the world
tell her!

³Then the angel who was speaking to me left, and another angel came to meet him and said to him: ³Run, tell that young man, ŒJerusalem will be a city without walls because of the great number of men and livestock in it.²
Zechariah 2:3

In Ireland, monasticism grew with a unique flare. Though Patrick and others introduced both the seed of the Roman church and the seed of monasticism, it was the later which grew into a vast tree whose fruit eventually went back into Europe and manifested the Kingdom.

There were many reasons for this, but one is a secret to spiritual growth. It is not acsetic practice which was reproduced and eventually started Iona and led men to Lindesfaurne and into England as a missions movement. It was not the cultural frame which men were converted by. Rather it was God being allowed to break into the broken lives of those monks.

Monasticism is not salvation any more than the roman church frames could save men. Both, at times, grew religious and replaced Jesus with spiritual practices (which is the way of religion). Neither the celtic or the roman frame save men. Jesus Christ does.

What was unique about Irish monasticism is that it allowed men to start with the central motivation of finding and growing in Christ. Men did not go on mission to save others--primarily they went to be saved! This is a huge matter. It has to do with the heart¹s motivation for doing missions. If we believe that we are going to save others first, we will fail. If we instead see our goal as being transformed ourselves by Christ, then His Kingdom can come and save others.

The primary motivation of being trasformed by Christ leads to His being able to use us then as living stones, placed by Him to do His Work. There is a vast difference in believing that we are already whole and that others need something we carry, and seeing ourselves on a pilgrimage into His Life. These are two opposing motivations for missioning.
We are first on mission, then if we allow Him to form Himself in us, we may become His Action of missioning the nations.

Patrick had both seeds or frames within him. Growing up Roman Catholic, he knew the ways of the church. The frames of bishops and diocese were not alien to him. Nor was the seeds of the monastic movements which had spead across Europe starting in Egypt with the desert fathers. Men had created frames in which to find and be transformed by God. But he was not preaching frames, he was preaching Jesus Christ and His Cross. And men were transformed. In fact, a whole nation was transformed.

There is no way of calculating how many churches and monasteries Patrick himself formed, but after his death (as his seeds went into the Irish soil), a nation wide living network of churches and monasteries emerged. Here is the man who had prophecied the growth of Dublin into a commerce center, and who had raised men from the dead. Here is a man who had not come to convert the nation, but had a dream which stirred his compassion for the irish people, until he had to go on pilgrimage into their nation. Here is a man who manifested the Kingdom of God wherever he journeyed.

The walls of the church are indeed coming down. And unprecedented riches will be received, so that its glory will be so obviously from above that no man will be able to deny its radiance! These walls were for protection, but came to serve to keep people in. They also began to keep people out of the church. Religion itself is a wall which is breaking off the Body of Jesus in our hour. Religious practice does not save us, Jesus does. This is becoming apparent to many.

In the verse that follows this one, it is said that God Himself will become our wall of protection. God as a wall is an entirely different type of boundary! Things which need to come and go will. And people who need to be protected as they grow, will be. In this hour the boundary of the church is blurring, and simultaneously, becoming more clear. The true boundary of those in Christ is Christ Himself not culture and not religion. Christ Himself is both our fortress and our high tower. Nothing else will guard us from what is coming, and noone else will the true boundaries of our identity as The Church eternal.
As we individually and coorporately take down our walls and allow God Himself to become our wall, we will begin to taste and see the boundaries of our own identities, as well as the true identity of The Church.

Irish monasticism effected all of europe, as any movement will, in which God Himself forms His Networks and walls of definition. It was not pure and perfect, but it gave God room to move and use His people who were on spiritual pilgrimage as living stones in His House.
Monasticism as a whole is no more perfect than any other frame of getting the know God. But one thing it had, especially in its irish incarnation, was this central spiritual starting point of personal transformation. Men wanted to be transformed, and God worked with that! They wanted to be on mission, so God could use them to be missionaries. Our heart must be to be Christ formed. To be transformed by His Life. There will be unique expressions of this for each person and nation, but the goal is the same. That His Life and Kingdom be made manifest on earth as it is in heaven.

For a season, Irish monasticism achieved this aim. For a season, Irish monasticism had no walls but Jesus Christ. This too is our calling. Then we will become a living network formed by and through His Holy Spirit, and the nations will see that God is the glory within our walls. Then we will be on His Mission.

You see that pornography homogenizes the nations. Each nation is experienced with the same objectification. This is the most overt clue that it is teaching a doctrine of death. For each nation is a unique identity, and anything which makes them all seem the same is a deceit. God is calling forth the complex and unique expressions of each nation, for they are all part of His Inheritance, and they reflect the different aspects of Himself. The enemy tries to homogenize life and take the individuality of diversity out. But God's earth is diversely beautiful. I am contrasting here, a pornographic vision of the nations with Vision through the Eyes of Christ. When we look out from His Eyes, we see each nation as a unique expression of His Beauty and creativity. The enemy's version of this is to have all nations with the same expression of what beauty is. The enemy disembodies and fragments the self; The Lord integrates the uniqueness of each person and nation and makes them whole. But also, and this is my point here, in the area of expression, God is diverse, whereas the enemy is homogenous.

The church has to stand on the threshold in order to fulfill its destiny. If it remains afraid of being deceived to the point that it won't step into that heavenly threshold, it cannot move into the wholeness and power that it must manifest in order to fulfill its calling on earth. We are citizens of a heavenly Kingdom. We must overcome our fear of standing on the threshold in order to lay hold of our true identity as a people.

I¹m becoming less attracted by disintegration. We see disintegration as a way of death. When we see a woman being fragmented so that we are shown only her body and not her whole personality. This is, at its worse, pornographic. The church has had little true wisdom to converse against the fragmentation of pornography or much of the advertizing¹ world¹s use of fragmented beauty as a way to manipulate sales. But as Christ begins to reveal His Restoration of things, we will see how things are meant to be seen as whole.
Sex then is not separate from a person, and cannot be marketed. Neither can other parts of beauty. We will see the beauty of the earth reordered so as to be the perfect reflection of its Creator. This is what the restoration is all about!

Once He begins giving us His Eyes to see how things are meant to be, we will war for this integration and proper ordering. This is the true holism that is found in Christ. The gems of the earth will be known in their full significances and meanings. And a woman¹s body will no longer be seen as separate from her whole self. Neither will men be stereotyped as all abusive, or as the marlboro man. Men will know who they are and stand in thier uniqueness. The ³black² man will no longer be seen as a threatening abstraction, but we will see the unique reflection of God that the african man was meant to be!

Solomon¹s time was a type of restoration. In His day, you see Israel as a source of wisdom and blessing for all the nations. You also see the splendours of a kingdom properly placed to reflect the coming messianic reign. God would not have given us this picture of true order if He did not intend to manifest it on the earth! Solomon¹s reign was like a large prophecy given to mankind about its future--a time when the nations would be in proper order and the earth would once again wholly reflect its Creator.

For the church to become a voice of integration and wholeness, it must allow Him to unify it, and bring its joints into proper relation to one another.

I think there comes a point when He has shown us enough of His Vision of things that we must choose to fight for integration as against fragementation. We must, as men, fight to see women as whole identities; and we must as nation come to see one another as complex and unique reflections of our common Creator. If we do not fight, we will find that the teachings of death will become our way of seeing. We will see all black as dangerous and threatening, and all women as objects of lust. We must fight this, but we must do this from the knowledge that Christ is making things whole again.

Various spirits flow into a fragmented self. Racism may flow into a people who have been victimized by abuse and not gone through healing. Manipulative spirits may flow into one who had no control over their environment growing up. We must fight these openings in ourselves. We must let Christ into these places, in order to become whole, and in order to not flow in these various spirits which flow and crisscross our world. Homosexuality as a spirit, often flows into spaces in people which have not been affirmed and loved and therfore break off from the rest of the personality. God wants us to be whole again, to integrate part of ourselves which have broken off. The enemy instead wants to have us moving in spirits which keep us fragmented and unhealed. Witchcraft often flows into unhealed spaces of abuse or self hatred. Sometimes it manifest as hatred of the other sex, or a desire for dominance or control. But our lives to be whole must become Holy Spirit controlled, this requires us to trust again that God is good and wants to bring healing into these split off parts.

God is all about restoring us. He wants our integration, but we must choose to allow Him in, and then to let Him teach us to see again from His Eyes! Then we will be less attracted by images of disintegration and more drawn to His Vision of wholeness. Come restore us Lord!
Lust is only possible when we see the other as disintegrated. I think men need to hear that. To lust after someone is not to see their whole self. When we let Christ show us that whole person, we will not lust after one part of them. We will desire their wholeness. To want to consume another person is not only wrong, it is a very partial understanding of what a person is! When we see a whole person, we are thrust into an encounter with them not a consummation. We must pray that God show us whole people in order to not participate in the fragmentation which is one of the enemy¹s ways!

But we start with not seeing ourselves as disintegrated. We must seek a whole vision of ourselves. The only way to do this is through Jesus Christ. He has to show us who we fully and truly are. Once He does we will no longer be satisfied by our own partial vision of ourselves, and we will not longer be open gates for the enemy¹s doctrine of disintegration. This applies to relationships between nations and denominations as well.

As long as I see a nation or other denomination as a stereotype, I do not encounter it, or even better, behold it. Martin Buber, the jewish philosopher spoke of our need to behold one another--to have I-thou encounters with one another, rather than i-it. He used this terminology to delineate between two ways of seeing other. In an I-thou encounter, we treat the other as a whole. In an i-it realtionship, we see the other as an object already known before we arrive. i find this distinction helpful in growing to relate to others in the way God does.

God sees each person and nation as a whole complex expression of Himself. To see as God does means that we need to see others more as He does!

As Americans, we have one of the greatest opportunites of any land to encounter other peoples as whole people, for our nation is made up of all the other nations. We could and should be modeling this holistic way of relating to one another. Daily, we have a chance to not encounter stereotypes but real people. Daily, we can encounter the mystery of other in a way that could teach the nations to love one another as He loves us. We are an experiment in more than tolerance. We are a warm up for the reordering of all nations, so that the diversity of God¹s creation can be placed in proper relation to one another in order to reflect fully the identity of Our Creator. That would be America at its best. A place not only of haven for the other nations, but a place where the uniqueness of each nation could shine and be honored.

Mr. derek

³On that day I will punish all who avoid stepping on the threshold..²
Zephaniah 1:9

In I Samuel 5:5, we get the story that informs this warning. It was the time when the ark was placed beside a statue of another god, dagon, and this statue toppled two nights in a row. On the last night, the statue¹s hands broke off and landed on the threshold, so people started avoiding the threshold out of fear and respect. So those who were avoiding the threshold were offering respect and fear to this other god.

God wants us to fear only Him, not the gods and spirits of this world. This is not to say that we should ignore the ways of evil as if they did not exist, but we are not to fear other spirits or gods. We should only fear the threshold of The True God. And we should live on that threshold.

There is a threshold between realms, between spriit and soul. As a spiritual people born from above, we should know both realms and how they are to relate. This is not an ³upper story² spiritual experience, but we are the ones seated with Christ, so we need to know the heavenly realm and how it interrelates with the soul realms. To do so we need to overcome our fears of stepping on the threshold. This is about our freedom!

Many have become afraid of counterfeit spiritual experiences, and so have rejected the supernatural entirely. But His people ARE supernatural and have access to the heavens through Him. We are commanded to be seated with Him in the heavens! We must enter the inheritance of those who are in Him, and take up our heavenly position with Him.

Many have avoided the ³supernatural² aspect to their Christian life out of fear of stepping on a false threshold. This is ascribing respect to gods who are not gods. And it keeps us from living the abundant full life in the spirit we are meant to live. The Church is a spiritual thing, and our power and life come from the spiritual realm. God is spirit and we must learn to worship Him in spirit and in truth.

We see many fearing to step out on the threshold of newer levels of revelation which God is wanting to offer His People. Most have seen abuses of supernatural experience, or an unbalanced overemphases or lack of word anchoring. But the reality is these are not excuses for not entering the supernatural part of your relationship with Christ. Christ is supernatural, so for us to let fear rule us from meeting Him is to miss out on getting to know Him. We must not avoid stepping on the threshold any longer!

The first Psalm is sort of a meditation on the two ways: streams of death and the streams of Life. If we enter the ways of death, we aren¹t covered. When we sit in the seat of mockers, and walk in the cousel or²wisdom² of the wicked, we are in the way of sin.

The Ways of evil have their own laws or thoughts, and the ways of Life or what scripture calls rigteousness have their.

One law on the righteous way is that things grow in the order they were meant to, so you don¹t have position before its time. And so that your fruits grow just at that right instant when you have grown enough to be able to deal with it. Things yield their fruit in their season, isthe way this psalm puts it.

Coversely, if in the paths of death, things bloom out of season and we do not have the wisdom or knowledge to harvest them.

Sin is a way. Righteouness is also a way. Ways are paths or flowing patterns. When we abide in Christ, we stay in the flow of right things; we remain in the right order and things get birthed in the right season. The entire process then reflects and teaches of God the Creator. The paths of sin have mocking and withering, but also they are judged by the very winds which would have refreshed. ³The wicked are like chaff that the wind blows away.² So you see the very wind itself judges the chaff and corrects it. That same wind can be refreshment and seed bringer on the other path.

Sin is not just an action, but is connected into a way or flow of pattern. So is righteouness. The Lord watches over the His Own ways. He watches over the way of the righteous--His protection and guidance is there, but it ways that the ways of wickedness will perish. They are not eternal, whereas His Ways are. Along the way of life, we are promised that God will be watching, for He by nature watches over His Own Paths.

These are like two streams of being, and each day, we choose which one to enter and be carried along on...
If we want to end up like that tree which is planted by streams of water (notice, this tree is planted because God does it, and that it is near streams of water or His Word, for that is where things grow); if we want to enter that blessing, we have to choose which path on which to walk.

our recent travelling brought meditations on His unifying and restoration of all things...
..travelling letting Him bring together different parts of Himself--this brings Him joy. staying with presbyterian artist and morningstar prophets, and worshipers from the mountains, and baptist leaders...getting to be the joints, the synovial fluid of Christ, but also seeing how these parts need one another and watching Him as they touch. Oh that is what that is! Aha! that's why i always get depressed on that particular street. that's the half step i keep taking. oh there is the trap. Knowledge and understanding increase as different parts of Himself touch!
We all need one another. The land rovers need the eagles. And the pastors need the fire throwers. The arm needs the heart.
as this is echoed in His Body, so it is in the earth. God is Life, so we see the streams cleansed, and the houses each with their unique shapes reflecting back onto the identities of their owners. Some with gardens other with sculptures; still others on hills engulfed with silence...

As He knits us together, we experience and know a fuller expression of Him, but also more of that whole reflection shines, so that the earth can see, oh that is what God is like--now why was I not turning towards, and basking within that?!

For all the suspicion between the parts, God is One as the Shema proclaims, and as the Jews declare daily..God is One. He is One but has a diverse expression. For in His multifacetedness, we glimpse the nuances of His Glory.

All the earth is the Lord's. What part did He not form?! So where does He not see Christ?
Looked at through His eyes, we begin to see how the earth is meant to be, and we begin to be part of His proclaimation of its re-storation.
Daughters and Sons becoming queens and kings, partnering in His receiving His Inheritance. All the earth is the Lord's, and He is restoring its order. The children--His brothers and His Sisters are receiving back the restored earth as we partner with Him in realigning the earth...

In order for our lives to reflect His re-ordering, we yield to His Ordering. All of the church's life was to reveal His Order for His order reveals who He is, His Nature, Character or Ways.
When we do not yield, we reveal our own ways. But God's two major interventions in History or methods of revealing Himself: the jews and the church, neither have fully yielded.
When they do not only will they find themselves in proper relation to one another, they will become revelations of His order which will reveal His Ways.
They are unique methods to be sure, but both were meant to reveal who He is to the whole earth, so that the entire earth would be that pure reflection of its Source and Creator!
When Jesus fully returns, you will see the nations placed in His Order. This order will reveal the father. That is the goal--that all the earth will be an uninhibited teaching of who God is--a revelation of The Father.
As we watch the various man-links between ministries and nations, we feel that tension between what they were intended to reflect and what they are reflecting. In Malachi, God tells the Edomites, you can build whatever, but it will not stand. In fact He names their creation Wicked Land. "They may build, but I will demolish." Whatever is built from our own ideas of linkage will be demolished. You see this as many flimsy man-made linkages are beginning to erode in our time. Only what He brings together will stand, for these are the relations which reveal His Nature.

One way of God is that He reveals Himself through the processes of living. he chooses life as the frame through which He is known. so we are taught Him through relationshiping..
God is dynamic, and reveals Himself through dynamic processes. This is one of the ways the creative process reflects and teaches about God. For there is always the emerging...the not yet, almost aspect in creating..
the birthing process itself is a reflection of this dynamic aspect of God
For God to be creative Himself means that He chooses to reveal Himself through the dynamic process of life.
Rich Mullins saw this in the wheat fields of kansas and indiana. Brennan Manning in the long displacing of the patterns of death thinking in an alcoholic person's life--ie his own.
Henri Nouwen in the mixture of passion for others and loneliness he felt even when surrounded by people.
There is always this ongoing nature to God's revelational processes. For God is Life, and life is moving and alive! He chooses to reveal Himself as Life and within its dynamic processes!

If gazed at with care and Spirit, beauty is always contextualized in some suffering on earth. Beauty without suffering does not reveal Christ.
Pornography is a great example of how the enemy of Life contextualizes beauty. What is offered is beauty outside of covenant or the labour of marriage. Christ conversely, always reveals Glory with labour. So you see the image of the Cross which is coupled with the empty tomb. If we are to know His Glory, we must know His death is the way Paul teaches it.
Art itself has been contextualized in a market metaphore, but look at the role of beauty in Israel as they crossed over to take possession of the land, and you will see the role beauty is to play in our day.
Just as compassion cannot be divorced from suffering, neither can beauty. This is because of who Christ is. He suffers as the creation is being restored. He suffers the disparity of what is compared with what it shall be!
The Buddha taught men ways of escaping the wheel of suffering. Jesus did not. He taught people how to enter His Suffering in order to know His Glory.
This is because God is suffering as he brings forth beauty and gives it to His Son. As the banquet gathers, there is suffering, there are the father's tears.

People say, i will build a great work. Wisdom responds, only as it reveals God will it contain meaning.
There is human wisdom which considers how to apply knowledge, and then there is divine wisdom which considers all of who God is, and applies His Knowledge in a way which reveals who He is..His Ways. Only Jesus knows fully who The Father is, so only Jesus can properly be called Wisdom.
As we turn to His Ways, we begin to see why He is linking us with this or that place or person. We begin to see the whole orchestration of our lives as a revelation of His Ways.

Part of the restoration of all things to Jesus is a great REORDERING. You see that the earth will be put back in proper order with humans, and beauty itself will be placed in its true context.
The nation's also will be in proper relation to one another, and the stones and gems of the earth, which are all His, will once again have their exact meanings known in Christ.
the earth was to reveal who God is as heaven does
the particular houses we live in at a certain season of our journey also should be linked with what God is doing in our lives. There is no area which should not symbolize exactly what god is doing with us.
As all things are being restored to and through Christ, we will see this emerge more overtly. Those who are led by His Spirit become Sons of God...and their lives then reveal that part of God that they reflect and carry. For our lives, in this way, are His Poems or books which He is writing to reveal Himself.
The paths prepared beforehand to be our WAY is THE way that He reveals HIS Ways!
That is to say that when we are moving in the particular way we are, we are revealing His Way. This has to do with knowing our identities..the paths prepared beforehand for us to move in.
Part of the restoration is that we are to be moving in the specifically us shaped paths of our destiny more and more, but our motivation is that He might reveal His Ways through us living out the poems He created us to be. Our personal freedom is then about His being allowed to pronounce us out as poems into His universe.
Individual lives, when meditated upon as a means to see his Ways, are then instantly placed in their larger context. Why do i like wearing many colors? because I reflect a part of God which is dynamic and has an urgency of becoming. For me to live that out is to reveal this aspect of God. As individuals we are then revelations of God. He wants to be known through our lives. Our lives are to be revelations of who He is!

Just having returned from a true wedding in the Spirit up in the appalachian foothills, really reminded of the disparity between our soul links and links made by The Sprit. One of David's areas of confession had to do with places he had put his soul solutions above those of the Spirit. We see this happening all over especially in the Church where we ask God to bless our ideas and programs. You know, when God truly is in control of all the links and relationships in your life you will see what part is actually the church and what part is formed from religious ideas.
Last night, i had a dream in which i was teaching about the difference between friendship formed by God and relationships we pick based on our own ideas of what we need. But this also happens between nations and ministries. We lunge out and try to make the links we see as being the right ones. So you see nations linked in odd alliances and people and ministries as well.
The trouble with this is it is not the way that God desires to reveal Himself. He did not ask the Jewish tribes not to link with other nations because the other clans were all inherently bad. He had a plan of how to reveal Himself. It is the same with friendships between people and nations.
God is always about revealing Himself. That is one of His Ways--He likes to reveal Himself, to be known. In order for Him to do so we must yield and be led into His LINKINGS.