I had someone ask me what the difference is between:
An anointing, a calling, a mantle, a gifting – all of these being from God.
Pondering and rolling this around all week I thought I had an answer for each one and a definition to go with them but when I was mopping the floor, God downloaded the following. I have come to know when it is God by repeated experience and one simple fact: His answers are always brilliant and I know beyond measure that I am just not that smart!
He said: “The difference in many of these things is the interpreter and the English word that got translated. But I have given you my Holy Spirit and you have all that you need: every anointing, your calling, your mantle and your gifting because they all belong to Him. Satan has had so many of you looking and feeling like you are missing or lacking something from Me that you continually focus on that, instead of be filled and live with the Holy Spirit that I have given you. I have given you everything you need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). Focus on what you have not what you think you need.”
This was a brain bomb explosion inside my head.
In practical terms it means:
Do you need bravery? You have it because the Holy Spirit is Brave.
Do you suffer from anxiety? You have total peace, and trust because the Holy Spirit is peace and is not afraid of anything.
Do you need answers to life’s questions? Holy Spirit gives you the mind of God – He has answers.
Do you want signs miracles and wonders? Guess who is the giver of such things? Yup – the Holy Spirit.
You have ALL that you need for life and godliness.
God said that Ashbury revival was not a “one off” where the Spirit of God descended, He is working in all places, in so many people all OVER the world. God is NOT dead!
I have to admit that I have at times focused on what giftings I do not have, I have wondered why I do not seem to have them, I have questioned why? I even have other people have question it for me. But according to God - I have everything I need to live. Why should I go looking for more?
Each of us as individuals has a slant, a bent towards different things, because God created us all to be unique individuals, how boring would it be if we were all alike? We cannot all be apostles, teachers, pastors, evangelists or even prophets. But at times we can operate in all of these if we have the Holy Spirit living inside of us. He knows how to do it all!
So why then if I have everything I need do I not live like this?
It came to me that it is the soil. I have been learning a lot of things about soil lately. Brian is in the middle of building me a greenhouse, it will be wonderful. But in the meantime my living room has turned into the greenhouse and the bathroom as well…..
I started my seeds in a little incubator. I placed the seeds into the same little dirt pods that you buy, you first load them up with water and they swell up and become ready to receive the seeds. There were 48 in the tray. Same water, same bag of dirt, same lid over top, same exposure to the sun and yet only 2/3 of the seeds came up. Some never grew.
Some grew but they grew from the sides of the seed pod not from the top. Obviously I missed with those ones or rather I dropped some seed and it hung on for dear life to the side of the nearest dirt.
I have been pondering why some seeds grew and some seeds did not. It was not even that a certain kind did not grow. For example – the cucumbers. Some grew and some did not. Why? It was the same with the squash, the pumpkins and the nasturtiums. Pansy’s are flowers that grow up usually by themselves outdoors, one of the easiest plants to grow – but only 2 came up. Why?
Now I am dealing with the plants that love the conditions they have – I have 2 huge pumpkin plants that need bigger pots but then my nasturtiums a couple are curling up and dying while others are off and growing. These plants have exactly what they need to live and some are flourishing while others appear to be shrivelling.
I kind of think it is like people – some seeds even though they were all say pansy seeds, like different conditions. People grow best in different conditions. Some of us need to be pushed along, we would be like those kids we see walking to school – stopping to play in the puddles oblivious to getting to the destination. Some of us are destination minded, we simply want to get there and rarely stop to play in puddles. We are wired differently and each of us needs different “soil” to grow in.
Then there is the nutrients, the food in the soil, different plants need different amounts.
I marvel when you talk to siblings, be it mine or my kids or other people – it seems that if you asked each of them, they would give a different account about their family they grew up in. You would even wonder if they were raised in the same house.
Each person, just like each seed, needs different things. To one it is more love, more reassurance, more self-esteem to the other they really did not even need parents they were making their way through life on bold determination.
Each of us has been wired in some ways the same, we are all human, our hearts beat regularly (usually), our breathing functions without us remembering to take a breath every second. Yet in other ways we are so different with needs, wants and requirements that are uniquely different from each other.
To me it is the mark of our Creator, how He fashioned with care, and attention just the way He wanted to make us into a person that He took great pleasure in creating. We need to embrace these differences and not try to box ourselves into the mold others place on us because if our Creator designed us this way, He is never wrong.
“Fearfully and wonderfully made.” Psalm 139: 14
People often do not like themselves and we embark on a journey of trying to change ourselves. I guess it could be kind of like a pumpkin seed saying, “I think I will be a cucumber today.” Now the pumpkins and the cucumbers do kind of look alike at first, but later on there are huge differences. The pumpkins have different flowers and different shaped leaves, but of course the biggest difference is the fruit they will produce. A pumpkin looks nothing like a cucumber.
If and it is a big “if” we could believe and take God at His word that with the Holy Spirit living inside of us, we have everything we need for life and godliness and we spent our time learning how to walk with Him instead of against Him, I think the sky is the limit in terms of your potential. “If” you have everything you need nothing would be holding you back, except you.
God took 12 men, different backgrounds, different beliefs, different temperaments and it was kind of like a spiritual experiment. In this case different soils, different nutrients and different growing speeds and after what looked like a failed experiment when they all ran away after Jesus was killed, God used 12 men to change the entire world. They learned to bloom in the conditions they were given, and they learned that they indeed had everything they needed for life and godliness.
You my friend cannot bloom in conditions where you have not been planted, you can long and wish for things to be different and tell yourself “when this happens or when that happens…. You will be happy and then you will grow….” You will be waiting for a long time, the secret is the soil and God has promised that He has given you, yes you, everything you need to live. The problem is that you want something different. The disciples wanted and were sure they needed something different, they spent their time looking and fighting for what they thought they needed but God did not give them those things, He instead gave them Himself.
When they got that, they were unstoppable and to the point that when they walked by people in the street others were healed by their shadows! When we live our life in the fullness God intended, our lives will be a blessing, we will be the light shining in the darkness, that one that grows and produces fruit that feeds the people around us. We will truly be blooming where we are planted!
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