“Insert child’s name here, clean up your room . . . your desk . . . your mess!”  It’s a fair statement to be sure, but as I was issuing it today to Miss 4, a sort of epiphany struck me.  Maybe you could even call it a parenting parable?  Like when God relates His Word to the mess in your house and life for spiritual growth.

We overwhelm our children with stuff and then expect them to be able to clean up after themselves and they can’t really.  Not for quite a few years and only then if they are trained to.   Their spaces are a regular mess and they struggle to work, play or be creative in them.

This is why God only gives us little by little, and if we prove ourselves faithful with the little than He can give us more.  

Other people’s lives can look so good, and we can stare at people on stage like a child stares at the toys in a toyshop.  So neat and tidy up there, but once they get the package home and opened it is consumed by the rest of their mess until they learn to manage it.

The truth is many of us couldn’t manage the pressure of that person up there on the stage.

Not unless we are faithful in the now with what God is giving us.  Faithful with our time, our consuming of the WORD versus social media.

This is illustrated with the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25: 14-30, and it’s a parable I’ve been wrestling with for a few years because I want God to call me a good and faithful servant for using His gifts well, not wicked because I was too fearful and buried what He had given me.

I want to explore how to use our talents well, and what to do if it looks like our destiny, God’s plan for our lives, is stalling.   Let’s take a look behind the scenes of destiny.

Can We Be Trusted With More?

If you’re single and you don’t know why . . .could you manage the cooking and cleaning every day after work, or do you leave your place in a mess or expect someone else to do it?  Many a wife has reported this shock, especially if you throw in a surprise pregnancy.

Or are your attitudes in the right place? Do you treat your right now family members, the right way?  Author Eric Ludy talks about how God had to deal with him about this before letting him find the right wife.

And if you’re one day believing for great wealth, are you managing your current money well?   Being diligent at work and proving yourself worth a promotion?

While some of these circumstances we can’t control, we can take little steps to ensure that if we were to meet someone or be promoted in our work, that we would be ready by practicing responsibility now.    If  marriage or great wealth are what you feel called to, what are you doing now behind the scenes of destiny?

Ask God if there is something practical you need to do now, where you are at. 

Hannah prayed for a child in the Bible (1 Samuel 1:4-17) and the priest Eli blessed her and said God would answer her prayer but she didn’t just go home and sit in  a rocking chair  . . . she had to do something on her part.

God doesn’t give us shoes that are sizes too big, though yes sometimes we may have to grow a cm to handle what He’s given us.   This is the same way that you wouldn’t give your 6 year old the keys to your car, but you might allow your 16 year old to use them under supervision.

Foundations and Process – Spiritual Growth

A pastor was praying for my husband once at a homegroup we were visiting and the picture he shared was that he saw the foundations of a building, and how the bigger you want to build something, the deeper those foundations need to go, similarly with spiritual growth.

This was very relevant to my husband as he’d just started working for a builder helping lay foundations and was getting a very good picture of just HOW LONG that took.   It was a process, and in our microwaveable convenience society sometimes we hate process.

When God is trying to build something big in our lives, He needs to make sure the foundations of our lives are stable.  Yes, we are building on Christ the rock, but when there are things like unforgiveness, bitterness, lies that we are believing about ourselves or God, they need to be dug up before the foundation can be poured and the rest of the building go up.    Otherwise, if we build something there,  they are like roots that will buckle first the foundation and then the whole thing.

He wants us to be able to see other people get healed, not just coping mechanisms.  He wants to get at the ROOT.   Where there is fruit there will be a root.

If there are things that we are always trying to stuff down because we don’t know what to do with them, at some point the whole thing will get tipped out because God in His mercy wants us to heal, NOT keep bandaging a pussy wound.

I’ve seen this in my family recently and a few others.  We’ve been praying for God and submitting to Him and seeking first His will for our lives and it seems that everything went wrong and got tipped upside down, but God is cleaning out some junk that has the potential to cause havoc later on if it’s just shut away.

It’s sorta like if you have  ever tried to hand something to a child, but had to first correct their behaviour? Then they get offended and won’t receive it?
So often we can be like that. God is trying to give us something but we’re not responding properly and He has to correct us and train us first. Along with grumbling,  offense and unforgiveness are great ways to miss out on receiving.

These attitudes and verbalisations SHUT the doors to destiny and open the door to niggling attacks from the enemy.

Declarations of God’s Word help us renew our minds and give God something to work with; our words have power.  God created the world with His and we create our worlds with ours.

During this season I’ve written about SPIRITUAL LAWS THAT AFFECT OUR EVERYDAY LIFE filled with keys and tools of how to get through this season of foundations and work with God to deal with stuff.   #spiritualgrowth

GOD’S  TIMING

There are times in our lives when it’s like our doors of destiny just won’t open; the key won’t quite turn.  Sometimes it’s a blockage, or a spiritual attack, but at the same time, God is all about timing, and I for sure have been lacking on my discernment between the two.

God has been trying to shut a door and I’ve been rebuking everything and anything I can think of because I so badly wanted that door to open.   Keep crying out for wisdom and He will guide you through it, and even if we accidently miss a turn off, His GPS (God Positioning System) will help us back.

Let’s take the pregnancy analogy.  Pregnancy takes 9 months to grow a baby to full gestation.  If you have that baby early for whatever reason there are going to be complications.  Yes, the dream may survive but you will be in the spiritual NICU for weeks or months.

When I was 15 God showed me who I was going to marry, and He showed him too, but just because He showed us didn’t mean it was the right time to talk about it.   Yet we so badly wanted to get on with courtship, we ignored God’s timing and His voice to us to just enjoy our friendship first, and at the time I had a picture of our courtship being like a NICU baby that really struggled at first, due to our big age difference and family circumstances at the time.   It was like forcing a flower to bloom before it’s time.

And again similarly when I turned 18 we wanted to get married right away but my parents really felt we needed to wait, and after much debating and debacle we did and decided to ‘Honour our Parents, in the land the Lord Your God is giving you that you may live long in the land’.

Turns out God had some foundations to work on during that 18 months we waited in both of us, practically and spiritually, and I was able to travel to Papua New Guinea several times on a mission trip and really learn who I was without my parents or him right over my shoulder.

Back to the pregnancy analogy, anyone who has given birth, knows that there is a right time to push.  You can push all you like, but if you’re not having contractions or dilating, nothing is going to happen.  OR, if you push too hard, even once you are having contractions, you will tear.

In the same way, learning to cross the road is all about timing too.  Get the timing wrong and you are squished.

God may not shout at us that it’s the wrong timing, but we learn to listen to His small voice or the niggling feeling that something isn’t quite right.  We also learn to listen to wise counselors around us, (parents) and others.

A book that more deeply explores this timing issue and what to do while you are waiting is While You are Waiting by Melody Barker, daughter of Joan Hunter.   She shares about how to wait WELL, for your partner, your miracle, your healing etc and what can help the process move forward.

The world says, now is always the perfect time to buy this course, write a book, switch jobs etc, but God is all about seasons, some of which include pruning, and God does this to those He loves.

As I watched God take many things away from me a few years ago, I really struggled because I’d had a prophetic word that I was to bear much fruit.  I didn’t understand that I couldn’t do this until I was pruned.   Pruning can first start in our external activities and then progresses to our attitudes and mindsets.  This is what truly precedes spiritual growth.

Just as there are seasons in the natural, there are seasons in our lives.  Seasons of great fruit, seasons of harvest, seasons of growth and seasons of quiet and pruning and we need them all.   It’s so helpful to understand where you are personally in these seasons but also corporately as a body of Christ and I find that prophets Lana Vawser and Doug Addison really have a times and seasons anointing and that the encouraging words they release are always very relevant.

I hope this post has helped you evaluate why you feel stalled and how you can begin to fix your engine and move forward again.