FROM THE SHADOW TO LIGHT

THE WELL AND THE SAMARITAN CHURCH

By Isaiah-Phillips

Prophetic spectrum to current affairs

Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again… John 4:13

 

 

WHO WILL STAND AND SPEAK?

 

The church of the Lord globally is currently in the turning point of a new spiritual era that requires we confront things we’ve been avoiding and hiding within the deformed and veneered, commercial, religious system of our time. There’s an urgent need to precisely answer some of the most crucial questions, members of the Body of Christ and society are generally asking, particularly, regarding the overreached, abusive nature of what is accepted as spiritual representation.

 

In this article, I intent to draw your attention to an important scripture many are quite familiar but as the Spirit of truth impresses this scripture to my heart a few days back, I begin to witness a new divine emphasis and direction with regards to the demand of the Father for the deliverance of his Church from the hands of those the Bible calls peddlers of the word of God.

There’s nothing more dangerous than to be spiritually abused, and it becomes even more deadly when it is done with the bible and in the name of Jesus Christ. While many may continue to deny the reality of leadership deficit, deception, and spiritual abuse in the Body of Christ, yet, it is obvious that the Church of Christ globally is being drained and taken advantage of by those I call commercial gospel peddlers.

 

The story of the Samaritan woman at the well brings to light many things we should carefully examine and highlight as the Lord continues to speak in line with the present reformation and restoration of his Church. This subject is further amplified in the account of the gospel of John chapter 5 about the story of the temple pool at Bethseda. the Falsehood at the center of this great capitalist, commercial, motivated, church system is driven by the blind, crippled, and impoverish lives, despirate for some kind of a spiritual intervention.

 

John chapter 5:1-6

Sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”

 

THE WELL DUG BY MEN

When a well dug under the inspiration of God for a season, which has elapsed continue to be used as the current voice and direction of the Spirit, it becomes an idolatrous system. The scripture said regarding Moses the servant of the Lord that he kept the veil on his face while the glory that used to shine from his face had faded away. This false sense of attachment to what has become obsolete, redundant, and irrelevant in the prophetic calendar of the Spirit is a big issue that must be addressed if we must step into the new day of the Lord, and I’ll like to address this as the Lord will give me utterance in the light of his present truth.

 This is the moment of confrontation and intervention that demands that we are exposed to a higher [intense] degree of Christ brilliance at a level that will reveal every form of shadow within and outside the parameters of our existence.

The standard is, we serve a God in whom there is no variableness nor the shadow of turning. In other words, the variations of the fallen, human ideologies, cultures, the system that sought to eclipse our minds from the original purpose and destiny of the Father for us is starting to fade away under the dawning of this increasing light of Christ shining from the surface of the stream of life we are invited to drink.

This is the dawning of the third day prophetic activity of the Spirit of the Lord; a day of the unprecedented revelation of God’s light and glory that will expose and blind every form of shadow in and around of the world. We’ve now been invited to a new sphere of the revelation in our journey towards maturity in Christ, who will be making his appearance within the religious system of what had kept us all bond or limited from entering the full reality of what we’ve been destined for before time began.

The more we see and honestly embrace the current illuminating light of heaven, the more the shapes and images of human shadows and influences in our thought pattern over the years, begins to shatter even as Christ becomes more magnified in us. In Christ, there is no influence of earthly, carnal reflections. Last year we spoke about the nearness of the kingdom and how we ought to prepare for this so, we don’t get cut up unprepared and unawares.

THE NEARNESS OF THE KINGDOM

The nearness of the kingdom of God is the nearness of the divine light of heaven, ordained to remove every form of false light that have shaded and shape our minds from stepping into kingdom lifestyle. The day of breaking away from the silhouetted nature of power, religious forms and shapes men have falsely embraced. The time has come for us to embrace the reality of truth which is often painful because we will need to be confronted by the blinding light of heaven. Every form of shadow within the spiritual structure of our existence must now give way to the glorious brightness of Christ light emerging from the dawn of this new kingdom Age.

 The purity of hearing come through the level of light we expose our soul and spirit too. To the degree, we embrace this present light of the Christ is to the level we are going to see and walk in the glorious light of what we’ve been called to represent. Shadow is defined as a dark area or shape produced by a body of coming between rays of light and a surface. Rather than producing light we’ve been producing shadows due to the lingering [human system] darkness still present and alive within us.

The light of heaven only reflects what is in the human heart; when the heart is filled with falsehood and lies, you can be rest assured that whatever form of light found within such a space will not produce a fruit that comes from the very life of God. The light the soul produces is a light that is born out of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and it will never bring you into the realm of divine truth which brings deliverance and reform to the total man. When there’s a willingness to face the reality before us as the ministry of Christ light increases, what then happens is that this light goes way beyond the power of illumination into becoming transformative.

THE CHURCH AT THE WELL

As the Father brought my attention to the life of the Samaritan woman at the well, I began to gain fresh insight to a parallel truth that speaks directly to the condition of the present-day church as a company of people operating within the system of shadow. The present, active reality of shadow ministry is more dangerous than darkness itself, in the sense that a shadow gives is a false reflection. A shadow is a refraction of light upon a dark image or surface which is an operation of deception. Only the Father carries the technology to produce light out of darkness.

On the other hand, man can produce an image out of another shape through the operation of a shadow, and in fact, this is the current position in many churches today. Many have produced some forms of images that are given the power to ‘talk’ out of false light being offered to the people, and those lights have produced some form of temporary relief and therefore, millions have become addicted to this temporary light designed to ultimately destroy them.

 

While I am trying not to be too technical with the example, I cannot but stress this point of light, shadow, false wells dug by men for spiritual consumption. The parallel reality of what was witnessed at Jacob’s well between Christ Jesus and the Samaritan woman with the present state of today’s church is so profound that need critical scrutinization.

Water can reflect the precise image of the one who comes to the stream, but not everyone is truly prepared to wait for the calmness of the water to reveal an image. Most have come to the well because they are thirsty and desperate; they need a quick solution to get them out of their needs. Due to the mode of material and financial survival many lives in, they hardly can see what the Lord is trying to show them at the well.

Secondly, the life of the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, typifies many of us regarding how our mindsets have been negatively shaped and have been framed through the years of rigorous religious practice and life’s challenges — this woman who is a type of today’s church who has come to accept a particular way of lifestyle as her primary source life existence even though such a source does not really minister to the very inner realities of her needs and challenges.

Further still, the Samaritan woman, beyond the fact that she had a significant dosage of religion, mixed with a long time, abusive relationship, combined with her own traditional belief strongholds, yet had a flicker of inner [light] awareness of a need for some different type of ‘water’ that can wash her and quench her inner thirst.

AN OPEN CONVERSATION

She was willing to open herself to the truth when confronted with the inner reality of her true self which is very rare today. Many of us, including those who claim to be in the forefront of what the Spirit of the Lord is doing, is filled with deception, we can hardly stand being honest to ourselves and others.

 

The greatest lie is when we begin to lie to ourselves just because we don’t want others to see us as weak, poor, uneducated, uninformed, or even spiritually blind. Following humans and religious folks dread being observed to be wrong, regardless of the issue. They would instead continue to support what is false and abusive just because they don’t want others to them, but we told you that you’re wrong from the start.

 

The Samaritan woman at the well seems to have come to the end of herself for two main critical reasons, one, she was willing, to be open and honest with Christ. Secondly, she recognized that the well, she’s been coming to drink from do not satisfy her true, inner need as much as the good does provide specific temporal provisions.

This [Church] woman was willing to exchange her seemingly default dependence and sustenance which always demand her traveling daily to the well for this new concept of talking well standing before her. Many may not appreciate what this woman was confronted when someone suddenly stood before her and claimed he is the living water she needs.  Of course, you will expect her to fight, froze or flight, but she was willing to listen and be honest as she engages in this new season of her life.

Many of us have grown so accustomed to the daily journey of going down to Jacob’s well to fetch water that only gives us temporary pleasure or satisfaction. We have been wrongly wired to co-depend on some kinds of religious substance, people who claimed they represent God in our lives, religious rituals, our customs and tradition, our workplace, our children, our spouses. To some, is their friends, parents, what the media says about them, what the politicians promised them, and the list continues.

This is the reality of the religion called Christianity today, mostly in American and the African set-up by the church. There are all kinds of alternatives today that have replaced the correct position of Christ and his assignment in our lives, particularly, within the community of what we call church. There’s no doubt that the idea and the look of the type of church we are building today are not better than Jacob’s well this woman kept returning to, hoping to find lasting sustenance.

 WHEN THE WELL NO LONGER MEET YOUR SATISFACTION

There’s no doubt that this well met some essential needs in her life and of course, that’s the reason she kept coming back, but this well dug by man cannot meet the very core need of her. Just as this woman connected Jacob’s well to important aspects of our custom and tradition, which is a big deal to her, many of us to have chosen to remain connected to certain places, people or circumstance both physically and mentally just for the fact that those people or places are directly or indirectly related to our tradition, nationality,  former way of life, even if those things or people are abusive, we remain there. These things or individuals have become our coping method and to some degree, our definition of spirituality, this is what I call the Samaritan church.

The Samaritan church is well dug by great icons; renowned men and powerful and highly skillful women, individuals who fought and defended specific cause for the advancement of society. Some of them were a significant voice in their time who did great things in the name of God, and we’ve built a towering image of memorials to remember, and this is good. However, these individuals are no longer alive in the new dynamics of your needs and challenges.

They might be able to inspire faith, courage, and determination in pressing towards your ordained destiny, and that’s all they can do with the lingering memory of their past achievement in you. You need to zero into the mind of the Lord for this moment of your life; you must seek what the Spirit of the Lord is saying regarding his prophetic strategy in dealing with the current situation.  Drinking from dead wells in the name of custom, tradition, and past experiences that have long become obsolete to the present demand of the Spirit is a soul-tie.

LEAVING THE OBSOLETE INSTRUCTION

There are many past experiences, individuals, and events that have become wells we keep returning to, hoping we will get the same feeling, experience, or even answer the people of the past received. Therefore, we become more fixative on the ministry of revival, instead of redemption and reformation. Our pursuit for revival is more about trying to experience what happened in the days of some great revivalist.  The fact that heaven gave the power to some individuals to dig wells for their time and generation does not mean such well will satisfy the complex needs of today.

 

Divine instruction is crucial to relevancy and advancement to the frontier of divine engagement.  How many lives, ministries and church are stuck today on the visionary word given to a vessel of God some hundred years ago? There are countless numbers of churches out there that have not revolved with the shift in prophetic seasons. Many of the denominations and traditional churches began with a leading, prophetic position of accuracy. Many of the founders and leaders of those churches had God for their times and season but has times and season changes, many refused to move on with the Father as he demands a change of their perceptions and wineskin for the next announced season.

 The stocked to the first voice they had from the Lord. They are like Abraham, who had the initial voice of the Lord and was obedient to the voice but on like Abraham, when God spoke to him the second time regarding the same issue, he was able to hear and allow his zeal to commit murder. Many had the voice of the Lord the first time, but never kept their ears and eyes open to receive further instruction and directives from the Lord. Many did not wait to listen to the elapsing time of a prophetic word. Their ministry has killed more people in the name of zeal the redeem or restore.   The well they dug in the name of ‘a ministry’ is today a blockage for a new generation to see and experienced the living well standing before them.

The more people travel to these wells of Jacob, hoping to experience the same intervention of the past, the more people get weary, tired and dissatisfied even though they dare not show their weariness. They must continue to make the trip to Jacob’s well. The fact that God met us in space and point in the past does not make such a spot the permanent resident of God. The Father is nomadic; his plan and desire are to reveal himself where ever his people gather and find their voice.

In the scripture, their various types of wells and streams built at various times and seasons that speaks directly and specifically to the peculiar need of such a season. duplicating such instructive prophetic words will not only be a violation and abuse to divine instruction but a manifestation of idolatry.  If we don’t understand the context of the speakings and instruction of the Lord for a season, we will make the mistake of trying to repeat an experience that was designed for a season in time, and that will make us the enemy of God.

New spiritual emphasis demands that we shift and change our modus-operandi if we must remain highly relevant to the movement of the Spirit. While some will need to move from our former position of life due to the evil influence and resistance to change, others might not need to leave their community if the leaders are willing to change their garments and wineskin to the current demand of the Spirit.