Know and Believe

Greetings in the God-kind of love, beautiful Beloved Family!

I can not adequately convey how excited and anticipatory my heart is as we all grow into deeper revelations of the Kingdom and intimacy with the King. THE King and THE Kingdom is the root of THE Great Awakening that we are pressing deeper and deeper into. As we learn together more about these truths, especially that this Kingdom is the Kingdom of Love, we all should expect to see and hear greater and greater manifestations of that love changing lives around us… including our own!

One of the things that will be required of all of us as we start to transverse this new landscape, or promised land, that is before us is a mindset change. The previous generation that was invited into a glorious change like this did not reap the benefits of the promise because they could not embrace the way of thinking necessary to be recipients of such a wonderful blessing. When Joshua sent out the spies into their promised land to bring back a report to the “congregation”, they failed by not knowing their identity through the release of faith. Their mindset was of inadequacy, smallness, insufficiency, and insecurity. Those opinions were wrapped up in this “evil” report:

Numbers 13
32So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height.
33And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

Notice that FIRST, “we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers”…
Then, SECOND was, “and so we seemed to them.”

Let me submit to you that these spies did not take a survey of all the people groups in the land. They were not going house-to-house canvassing the inhabitants with a clipboard asking, “do we look wimpy to y’all?” This was all speculation that came from a broken identity and mind set. See how powerful the wrong thinking can be in what quality of life and Divine destiny we will all partake of? Later on in the story, we see that their descendants were able, with seemingly little effort, to dispossess these people because they believed and acted on the promise. Yet, God had to remove almost three million, the entire generation, because they would not yield to the truth of the promise made in love. I want to be the generation that knows and believes the love of God that will propel us into this Great Awakening.

1 John 4:16
And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

KNOW = experiential and deep intimacy
BELIEVED = past tense of one who is fully persuaded

One of the failures for the folks who did not enter into the promised land was not believing in the God-kind of love that would qualify them to be partakers of this inheritance. Hebrews chapters four, five, and six are all written from the context of the people of Joshua’s day and why some entered into, “rest,” and some did not. The, “rest,” in these teachings speaks of entering into the Finished Work of the Cross where we rest in what Jesus did for us. This is paralleled in the Israelites struggling with entering or not entering into the promised land. The teaching ends with these verses in Hebrews six verses nine through twelve:

Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation. For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do. And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

Notice the writer was speaking to the, “beloved,” the greatly loved ones. Only the people who know how greatly loved they are can enter into this Divine promise and rest. Also, note that these folks who were entering into facets of this promised rest were the ones who were actively reflecting this great love in their lives, as illustrated by this statement: “…the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do.” No matter how you try to slice this pie, all the pieces contain the main ingredient of love. That is The Kingdom we have been now placed into…

Colossians 1:13
He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.

We have been (past tense) delivered (rescued and removed) from the dominion of darkness and have been graciously placed into the dominion of the Beloved as exemplified by the Son! Oh Yeah!

This is our promised land, this is our rest, and this is what our loving Father has planned for us now and into eternity… believe and receive that in your new way of thinking!

I love y’all deeply and purely,
Steve