The Lord God is my strength [my source of courage, my invincible army];
He has made my feet [steady and sure] like hinds’ feet
And makes me walk [forward with spiritual confidence] on my high places [of challenge and responsibility].

habakkuk 3:19

Tuning into God’s voice

We are entering into a new Hebrew month this week called Adar, and before a new month begins, I sit with the Lord, asking the Holy Spirit what He wants to do during this time. There are distinct patterns and rhythms that emerge depending on the season, and God wants His people to be aware of those seasons and therefore know what to do. There is a time for everything under the sun, however, in terms of a farmer and his field- there is a proper time to plant and a proper time to harvest. We, as God’s children, must know when to plant and when to reap. For hundreds of years, many of us have been unaware of this rhythm, this dance of grace. The compromise that took place in Christianity for the sake of “security,” caused a divergence in the melody of God’s people. We tuned our hearts to the heartbeat of man, instead of God.

In every generation we see this reemergence of the tower of Babel, where men play God at the expense of people. The spread of these carnal mindsets has gone into the Church, and it has caused division. We have forgotten that Jesus Christ is the head, and we are the body. We seem to be competing for His love, His attention, and His approval. We plant during autumn, and we harvest during the winter. And yet, we wonder why there is hardly any fruit for our labors. Could it be because we are not in tune with Christ?

After a famine during 1928, Stalin authorized the replacement of the New Economic Policy with something called collective farming in the USSR. In other words, the farmers were forced to give up their private farms and begin to farm under the guidance of the state. When people become afraid of a food crisis, they are willing to do anything to make sure a shortage doesn’t happen again. This is what Soviet Russia did. The government used control to ease the people’s fear of famine. We can do the same thing today with our lives when we allow fear to have a voice.

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

1 Timothy 1:7

If fear was a sound, it would be off-pitch and even jarring to listen to next to the melody of God. I think it’s safe to say that when the world hears this song from a divided people, they cannot stand the clamor of that disharmony. We tarnish the sound of Christ when we elevate ourselves over His unity and love. And it breaks God’s heart to see His people playing out of tune with the Messiah.

See how good and how pleasing it is for brothers to be living together in harmony!

Psalm 133:1

My heart is encouraged to remember that God is bringing His children back into harmony with Him in this hour, and there is this beautiful sound of Zion that I hear coming into the earth. In order for us to tune our hearts to His voice, we must go to the Word of God and learn from Him. This is part of why I share the prophetic insight found in the Old and New Testaments, and why I follow and pay attention to the Hebrew months. I want to know what God has done in the past and pay heed to His voice today. I want to learn from Him when to plant things in prayer; when to cultivate the soil of my heart; when to cry out for the healing rain of His Spirit; and when to gather the harvest. Let’s look at what He is saying in this upcoming Hebrew Month.

Adar

The theme for the Hebrew month of Adar is a time to train our emotions. Each of us has been given emotions, and we are called to properly oversee them for the Lord. It is our responsibility to align with how He calls us to move through those feelings. In the book of Matthew, Jesus tells a parable about financial stewardship (Matthew 25:14-30) to disclose how stewardship works in the Kingdom. And while this parable correlates to finances, our portion in His Kingdom is considerably more than money. For God has given us a heart, a mind, a will, and emotions to steward for His glory. All of those belong to Him, and as sons and daughters, we must continually surrender to His Lordship over us, being sanctified by His powerful grace and love.

 Last month, the Lord was calling us to steward our time, and specifically our will. We must learn to give Jesus the right to lead us on His path and refuse to go our own way. It is crucial for us to hear what God is saying for us personally in our relationship with Him. As Children of God, we are co-laborers of the Kingdom of Heaven; representatives of our King, Jesus Christ. We are learning to cooperate with His will for the earth, and we do this through prayer.

Emotions

There are many different views on how many emotions are a part of the human experience, but here are the 7 major emotions:

This month is a time that God wants to increase our emotional intelligence, and help us to overturn worry, or anxiety. There have been many times where I have struggled with something beyond my control, and yet I grasped for a bridle to put over the situation, out of fear. The Lord would always remind me when I got into that sorry state that I was about to drop everything. My initial thoughts were, “Of course I’m going to lose it all, Lord! This is overwhelming to me and I’m trying to make everything work out for good!” After that outburst, the Lord would remind me that I was operating out of my own human strength instead of leaning on His. It humbles me to be reminded of how we are all like sheep; we get frightened over illogical things and end up stampeding into a chasm of despair. We need a shepherd to comfort us with His rod and staff, and this Shepherd’s name is Jesus Christ. He is the only one who can calm us and guide us forth.

Fear is the Root

What is interesting about anxiety is that it is always partnered up with a lie. The lie is the seed, and it grows on the emotional shoot of fear. When we receive that lie into our mind, it burrows into the soil of our heart like a weed. As it grows, it turns into other things like anxiety, depression, jealousy, hatred, or even murder. Many people try to get rid of this weed in the garden of their heart by cutting off the stem, confused when the fear and anxiety come back. The reason this happens isn’t because they don’t love God enough or pray hard enough. It is because they haven’t pulled the weed up by the root.

A large majority of spiritual warfare is in our own minds. We must be responsible gardeners of our hearts, and make sure that conditions are right for the growth of God’s fruits of the Spirit and not the weeds that represent the lies of the enemy. We have a weed in our backyard called creeping Charlie, and this plant spreads easily and is hard to kill off. It reminds me of what worry does to our hearts. If we allow a lie to penetrate our thoughts, it will grow into a constant worry. For example, I have believed the lie that our welfare was limited to my husband’s paycheck. By the grace of God, the Lord is revealing to me His role in our lives as Jehovah Jireh, and I am learning that every good thing that I have comes from Him. God isn’t limited by my husband’s paycheck. When I meditate on who He is as my provider, worry doesn’t exist in my mind. When I go to the grocery store and find out that the price of gas has gone up another 50 cents a gallon, I thank God for fueling my car so that I can go the places He has called me to. We all need to give our fears to God and connect with Him so that those emotions do not control our actions.

God did not design us to be ruled by the way we feel. He calls us up and out of that paralyzing mindset of the flesh. This is because our emotions reflect the image of God. He is a feeling spiritual being! God created our emotions to build a connection of love; a relationship of responding to one another’s needs and desires. Our emotions are meant to be a gauge and not a guide. Christ in you should be the one in the driver’s seat with the steering wheel, but He needs your permission. He wants to show you how to move from anger to love, from heaviness to praise, and from sadness to joy! And God does not despise those seasons of sadness or grief. He doesn’t look down on us for having fears or anger. God wants to teach us how to move through those emotions with Him. The best place to do this is to get into the habit of reading the Psalms. David knew how to connect with God through all his emotions. He came to God when he was frustrated, when he was hurt, when he was sad, and when he was angry. Just as God did not draw back from David’s cries, Jesus, our Kinsman Redeemer, comes close to us to empathize with our pain. All we must do is invite Him in.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Isaiah 53:3

Marching Orders in March

Yesterday I was listening to a prophet named Tomi Aroyami, and he began to give a word for the month of March that captivated my attention. He said that God is giving marching orders in March for the humble. Those who will kick out the hidden foxes of jealousy, along with the counterfeit of lowliness named false humility. Considering the Asbury revival, we can react to this move of God in different ways. It is important that we pay attention to what rises up within us. For some, a jealousy is exposed, and behind that jealousy is an orphan spirit. Tomi relates this jealousy to that of the elder son in the parable of the prodigal son given to us by Jesus in Luke fifteen. When we have an orphan spirit, we get resentful when God gives someone else the favor we thought He should have given to us. This is a good thing that God is exposing what is hiding in our hearts and minds, and it is a reward for spiritual growth. The Lord wants to prune the branches of our hearts that are not producing His fruit. The question for us is this: will we submit to His pruning shears?

Another thing that Tomi addressed was a false humility. The root of this is deception, and God is always aware when we are operating in this counterfeit meekness. We must not allow the enemy’s lies that we are to remain nameless and faceless (to not get caught up in pride). God gave each of us a name and a face that reflect Himself, and you represent Christ to the earth. Many are afraid of making an error in this space, and so they go out of their way to prove to others that they are humble. People are trying to save face and are nervous of being honest and vulnerable. Others are obsessed with titles, and accolades, and they try to cover it up by presenting themselves as faceless servants of God. But most often than not, we require others to be humble, while ignoring the lack of humility in our own hearts. God will have none of this nonsense in His Church. He is shaking the earth right now so that the things that are of man will fall, and the things that are of God will remain. Our posture in this hour must be a yielded heart to Christ. We have to face the things God is exposing and humble ourselves before His throne.

When we learn to listen and obey (by kicking out the foxes of jealousy and false humility), God will give us our marching orders in the month of March. When we receive sonship from God and walk with Him in authentic cooperation, that unity with God will change the world around us. We must tune our lives to Jesus and cooperate with His demands. He has not called us to point out the speck in our brother’s eye, but to address the log in our own and become more and more like Him.

Can I pray for you?

God, I thank you for this month of Adar, and that you have good plans for my readers that will cause them to prosper. I pray that with every challenge this month, they would move with the power of the blood of Jesus and the guidance of Your Spirit to overcome all! Father, would you show my readers if there are any deceptive fantasies that oppose You in their thought life? Are there any arrogant attitudes that they have adopted? Please show them how to capture these rogue thoughts and bring them into total obedience to Christ. Thank you for the grace You offer us as we learn to manage our inner world with You. I pray that we would release any worries or fears connected to our callings and our spheres of influence. Holy Spirit, infuse these precious readers with supernatural courage and strength to accomplish what You have given them this month! May their heart’s motivation be to expand what You have provided for them. Enlighten their spiritual eyes to see what has been provided, and enlarge their discernment to know how to increase their resources! All of it for Your glory Lord! Amen.