BY ISAIAH-PHILLIPS AKINTOLA

If you are one of those struggling to make sense of why you seem stuck at a particular point of your life’s journey, and your spirituality’s inputs and efforts seem not to be yielding the expected, desired result, well, don’t give up on hope yet. I’ll recommend you read this short article, which should give you clarity and perspective, which I believe will motivate you in moving towards your glorious destiny in Christ.

The journey of self-discovery is a spiritual one. When Christians sought to find what God says about their lives and the journey into the chamber of truth, we will start to enjoy lasting freedom.  

There is a wealth of knowledge waiting for you through this article I hope you will carefully study as we all anticipate the 2021. Please, do not make any irrational decisions just because things didn’t work out according to anticipation. Many of us are on the wrong track while we expect to miraculously arrive at our desire destination.

To arrive at the place and point the Father has ordained for you, you will have to reconnect to the right line.  The article was first written December 2017, and I have decided to republish due to the richness of the truth and practical principles in the article. More so, I believe many today in the year 2023, need more encouraging and inspiring words that help readjust their perspective and understanding.

Proverbs 19

2 Desire without knowledge is not good, and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way.

3 When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the LORD.

Introduction

Between past memory and future hope, there’s a present reality of your life that is seemingly trapped in time, a time that is regulated by people and events you don’t have control over. The reality is, many of us were born into apparently negative environments, complex circumstances, and even families we never had the power of choice to choose or influence their decisions and control over us; if we do, many of us will certainly have chosen an alternative route and environment of existence.

Jeremiah 29:11

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

This scripture in Jeremiah was made by the father himself towards his own children while they were still under the oppressive chain of their Babylonian captors. The condition or environment we find ourselves in, regardless of how we got there, is material in comparison to the eternal plan and purpose of the father for us. Irrespective of how terrible, the human condition cannot stop or alter the father’s spoken, living promise. However, our unbelief and doubtful state of mind can stop and hinder us from entering the father’s promised inheritance for us.

According to Jeremiah 29:11, this scripture is a sure word that is eternally settled in bringing all who believe in Christ Jesus into their destined promised Land irrespective of their past or present condition. Yet, how we come into this reality of eternal truth is a completely different ball game because the father’s dealings for each of us are uniquely different from person to person and even region to region.

We may have a common faith and spiritual inheritance in Christ; however, the process of entering such inheritance differs in personal faith and spiritual experience, and that’s a very good thing to note. We have shared along with this article before, but I sense many are still confused and in doubt about certain things regarding their future destiny.

To understand our future is to have keen prophetic insight and guiding wisdom into how our past has shaped our frame of thinking and perceptional insight. In other words, having a keen knowledge of the reason why the father allowed certain circumstance to happen to us, or why certain unpleasant people were brought into our lives at certain seasons is a powerful spiritual position.

The ignorance of the father’s sovereign nature over his people is a major weapon in the hands of the enemy until this hour against the people of God. Satan has continued to capitalize on our blindness and lack of understanding towards the will of God by robbing us of entering the sphere of righteousness, peace, and joy in the kingdom.

Managing our past

Like the children of Israel in some form of captivity, many of us would have doubted this promise according to Jeremiah 29:11. Why? We often allow the pain of our emotional state of mind to define and control our response to God and one another. Pain is a powerful tool we are yet to accurately understand and therefore, its negative influence has continued to work against our spiritual state of being.

To the level, we understand our emotion is to the level we know ourselves. To the degree, we know ourselves is to the point we are able to submit to the desired, ordained process of the father for us in terms of embracing all the instruments and people placed across our path in helping to shape our destined purpose. Circumstance and people produce two things in every human, pain, and joy. These two are a powerful emotional instrument that can swing our lives in two different directions; it all depends on how we understand and effectively manage them accordingly.

If you study the characters of this two-emotional instrument, you’ll realize that ‘pain’ usually resides within the thought realm of our past traumatic experience, while joy dwells in the anticipative realm of what is or about to come. 

One of the main reasons we tend to fix our attention more on yesterday’s mistakes, pain, frustration, rejection, fear, and doubt, was due to the immense negative emotions produced in our yesterday’s experience which is usually more real and severe to the soul realm created in our thoughts. One can argue that it takes more faith and courage to shift our frame of thinking from the usual position of playing the victim than to advance with a breakthrough attitude mentality.

This unfortunate character of submitting and accepting the victim narrative negatively reinforces the desire to focus on the soul realm, which is what the flesh and of course, Satan desires of humans. This is a highly complex, lingering character that controls and manipulates the fallen Adamic nature of all humans.

The scripture said of Christ that he endured the cross because of the joy that was set before him. Enduring the cross, which is the total summary of our emotional pain, failures, persecutions, and disappointment becomes real when the emotion of joy overrides the reality of our past. We can clearly see the future outcome of what we are stepping into.

Embracing your future in freedom

The truth is, none of us was designed to live in our past memory filled with disappointments and regrets, but in a now future, defined by vision, faith, hope, courage, and trust in Christ who knew you before events and circumstances ever happened to you. The fact is, those horrible circumstances of our past or even present condition are all designed for the reason that can only be comprehended when there’s a precise alignment of our insight and judgment to that of Christ’s eternal blueprint for our existence.

My own life experience

Comprehending the life’s situation and people around us is a powerful spiritual position and strategy that greatly enhances our acceleration into the future. It’s amazing how we can grow up in a certain frame of thinking that could limit or enhance our motivation to become fulfilled in life.

There are so many things we actually thought we had full knowledge, insight, and understanding into as Christians. But the fact is our knowledge, which may be theoretical or even theologically has not been effectively synchronized with the eternal intention of the father in terms of his prophetic agenda for us. Knowledge is laudable, but the wisdom that releases applicable understanding should be more desirable in all things.

This is my own testimony like many; I experienced what it felt like to be dropped down with a broken limb like Mephibosheth the son of Jonathan. My life’s accident and cognition impediment affected my state of judgment to the degree that it altered my image and identity. Rather than being drowned deep into the love of the father ordained to save and protect me, I rather hated everything that love meant, and represent to me because of those who misrepresent the love of God around me.

I chose rather to live in fear, insecurity, doubt, worry, and unbelief. Hate and bitterness becloud my heart and identity instead of love, mercy, and forgiveness. I allowed myself to be consumed by fear and the opinions of everyone to the degree that their views shaped and determined my actions and reactions even after I have given my heart to Christ.

I was introduced to God’s love

You see, I really do not understand back then the true meaning of accepting Christ. I did what everyone else did in terms of their religious and church service obligations; no one told me that there’s another journey of salvation that is a continual, renewal, and developmental experience within my soul faculties.

I struggled with deep pain, frustration, and anger until I came to the end of myself. Coming to the end of yourself is a phrase we’ve adopted in the kingdom community; that means a person has tried and used everything that can be tried in terms of human resource, wisdom, and strength to resolve a problem yet without a lasting result.

I was then introduced to the love of God, which was more of an experience within my soul, I mean the faculty that defines my behavioral character and pattern of reasoning. Until this love of Christ began to reveal myself to me in the light of God’s ascended biblical truth, I never realized how damaged and lost I was even in my proclamation to be a Christian.

I discovered that the love of God, at least in my own case, is an unfolding journey of revelation; a revelation that invites us to another sphere of spiritual experience, trust, and confidence in the knowledge of the fatherhood of God, which is one of the most difficult aspects in coming into the true meaning of kingdom centered love.

To know or accept the love of God is to first accept the Fatherhood of God. Knowing God as Abba is one of the most difficult spiritual revelations because of the degree of the damaged, dysfunctional stronghold realities locked up within the human soul realm. When we pass the stage of knowing and accepting the fatherhood of God’s love, another portal is opened for another realm of spiritual experience that leads us further into the mystery of the eternal love of the father for us.

This acquired knowledge and understanding, then takes us further into another veil of the divine invitation to share in the experiential life of the father’s sovereign nature over our lives and others regardless of the condition or circumstance around us.

From this point, the scales begin to drop from our eyes to see ourselves and things the way they truly are. The false beliefs, rejections, fear, doubt, self-assertions, self-protection, self-promotion, and self-defense, which we’ve built for many years, begin to reveal themselves and begin to collapse before us.

This is the point where heaven begins to reintroduce you to yourself. For the very first time, you begin to see the strongholds and walls you’ve indirectly or directly allowed others or even yourself to build within and around you.

The experience that makes us effective

Friends, while it is necessary for us to know the love of God by what we have been told in the scripture or what has been revealed to us by revelation. However, our measure of the reality of the father’s love in our lives can only be identified by how much of the soul life we have given up for the Spirit of God to gain ascendance over our entire existence.

We can have all the revelation and insight about the love of God in our developmental, spiritual stages. We might be able to soundly and effectively write, preach, and teach about the mystery of God’s everlasting love.

If, however, the strong romantic feelings about our negative past experiences and the agonies of yesterday’s disappointment still remain and holds our psyche in captivity, am afraid we cannot truly claim that we have freedom or have sincerely entered into the experiential sphere of a lifestyle governed by the divine love of the father. Yes, we may abundantly be benefiting from the fruits of the father’s love, but we will lack the power to comprehend and effectively reciprocate such love to others even when we desire to do so.

What we consciously give up in the sacrifice of our feelings and the emotional psychology of pain that directly relates to the traumatic challenges, failures, and disappointments we experienced in the past is the due price required in advancing into that ascending, revelatory, experiential knowledge of the transforming love of the father in our lives.

Knowledge is always a tool that guides us into a realm of experience or the utilization of a required skill. The fact that we know or have experienced certain things, either good or bad, does not mean that we have a keen knowledge of such events or experiences’ meaning and purpose. The meaning of what we experience is only given when we have a deep, intimate, biblical ascended relationship with the Spirit of the Lord, who knew us and has planned all things to work together for his own good pleasure for lives.

A kingdom centered love is measured by what we are able to give up and continually release in our toxic emotional soul faculty than merely the knowledge we have of the father’s love. There’s just so much I know of the love of God that I have not received if you will, the capacity to engrain such truth into my daily walk, and that is because of the continual negativity one is faced with, especially amongst those who claim to love us.

The light of the Father’s love can only shine perfectly where there’s the darkness of hate and unforgiveness. If we are unwilling to turn on the light of the father’s love in the midst of bondage, pain, and cruelty, how can we boast of knowing or having the love of God?

Friends, there’s just so much we know in our spirit-man that cannot be applied to the dysfunctional soul state. We have to move beyond the position of acquired spiritual knowledge to the point where we can begin to effectively use such truth to pull down the negative, dysfunctional faculties of our soul in order for our spiritual walk to be perfected in Christ.

I had to start using each truth that came to me as a revelation to start tearing down all the false images and negative thoughts and imaginations I have allowed to build a wall within my mind. In my teenage life, I was told I will never amount to anything, yet I knew I was somebody in search of an identity to become somebody. This is where my journey and passion for truth began. I discovered myself through the love I was shown in the fatherhood of God. Knowing that nothing can change how the father feels about me is liberating.

My greatest fear has now become my greatest weapon of creativity and advancing my kingdom assignment. Yes, there are days I still feel like giving up and running away. Still, the grace of the father is sufficient to remind me of who I am in his eternal love. This truth brings me freedom and allows me to press further into his ordained prophetic agenda for me.

Spiritual freedom is an event, but the freedom of your entire life’s faculty is a daily experience that reminds you of who you are, and what the love of the father has achieved on your behalf. As you prepare to enter the next phase of the Lord for your life, you must remind yourself that you are a continual, working project in the hands of the Spirit of the Lord.

Do not allow your present state of mind or feeling to hijack your ordained, prophetic destiny in Christ. See how far you’ve come to the Lord and where he is leading you. It’s time you also embrace the pure, undiluted love of God as you come to the end of yourself and the opinions

I hope this truth has brought a change in perspective to your life as you proceed towards the coming yeart.

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