Whose Image are You Bearing? - David Mitts

"Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner." John 5:19 (NASB)

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Graham Cooke once said: “If we have a giant in our life it is because we are meant to be a giant ourselves. The circumstances in front of us are designed therefore to increase our size in the Spirit. So, upgrade your stature in relation to Jesus; and radically increase your power in the Holy Spirit. Or, if you prefer, just quit and never realize your true self and the inheritance that goes with it.” We are privileged to live in times when the giants we face make us, like the children of Israel confront the size of the God that lives in us.

We can be a Joshua or a Caleb and look at the harvest before us or we can be like the other spies and get overwhelmed by the darkness before us. Let’s look at Numbers 13:27-33:

"Thus they told him, and said, "We went in to the land where you sent us; and it certainly does flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. "Nevertheless, the people who live in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large; and moreover, we saw the descendants of Anak there. "Amalek is living in the land of the Negev and the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites are living in the hill country, and the Canaanites are living by the sea and by the side of the Jordan." Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, "We should by all means go up and take possession of it, for we will surely overcome it." But the men who had gone up with him said, "We are not able to go up against the people, for they are too strong for us." So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, "The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. "There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight."" Num 13:27-33 (NASB)
It all depends on our perspective. Our outer perspective reflects our inner image we carry in our hearts. Courage describes the size of the image we carry inside, our confidence in life. Giants challenge our courage. They reveal the truth about who we are on the inside.

Mostly, we live an inside image based on our history of victories and defeats. We think in terms of structures and experiences from our past that have formed us in the life we now live. As our world is undergoing a fundamental shift in many structures and formats there is an opportunity rarely afforded to people that this crisis has precipitated.

Similar to the death and resurrection of Yeshua we stand a crossroads where the very fabric of our relationships and the potential new “re-forms” they elicit has both, unparalleled potential and unparalleled danger.

The nature of the crisis reveals in some way the move of God. Immorality defines morality. Coldness defines warmth. This crisis is one of fragmentation. Fragmentation is the secularization of life to such an extreme that all authority has been segmented into a modern-day example reflecting the feudalism of nation states that have lost the integrity of oneness.

The “church” has allowed itself to be defined in such limited lifestyle terms that it is about meetings and voting blocks. In that way, we are no more than just another group to be pandered to for sure but NOT the ones with the authority needed in the Land of Promise.

Like ancient Israel, we have a calling to enter into our “promised Land” but we have allowed ourselves to become like the other nations. This is to our own detriment and has produced a secularized church which retains very little impact on the conversation of humanity.

Yeshua prophesied this decline this way:

"Then He continued by saying to them, "Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom," Luke 21:10 (NASB)

Health care fears and concerns have gained supremacy over us because we have ceded that territory to the secular scientific community. They have paraded their “approved methods” of inquiry as to the only valid truth. The gold standard of truth is the “scientific method”. This is a reductionistic method seeking to isolate the supposed cause to the predicted result. Words like placebo and double-blind studies serve as bulwarks to defend the outcomes as therefore real and reliable. The god of data and statistical significance guide these false prophets as they spew out their models and make projections based on their conclusions. In the midst of the swirl of conclusions based on strategies derived from what at best is guesswork, entire economies and relationships have been sacrificed on the altar of their god who is supposed to be not a god.

Any testimonies of God’s true power and His systems of health have been relegated to the realms of being anecdotal. So, the ones, the Church who were called to lead, line up at our clinics just like anyone else. When we get sick, we dutifully fill our bodies with drugs, mostly poisonous, we let the secular system dictate our health to us. We take no responsibility for our health and mostly don’t even understand what true health is. When Covid-19 arose, we were silent because we had nothing to offer but weak ineffectual prayers and obediently let them define our prayer gatherings as non-essential.

In our moral climate, the same phenomena has gripped us. We live in the death culture of abortion, opioids, and human trafficking. Slavery is throughout our land the most we do is send money to other foreign lands because we can’t face the moral, spiritual truth that this is happening on our watch. Why is this? Because we don’t acknowledge we have a true moral imperative.

Education has lost our focus. We don’t participate in the building of Godly citizens. We hope instead to build our membership. As the fast-food industry, we count our success by number, so meals served, not the quality of food actually produced.

I could go on and on. But the point isn’t to be critical but to encourage an awakening. We need to become ONE. I don’t mean the unity of labels. That is a joke. I mean ONE, body, mind, and spirit. We need to break down the secularization of our lives. People are hungry for community. Look at the success of something so superficial and yet so addicting as “social media”. This is where the money and influence are going. Yet now the social media is actually showing its true nature with censorship. They are using this Covid 19 epidemic to decide which voices are consistent with the narrative they want promoted. Facebook and YouTube censor videos at will each and every day. And what is our response, whining…

Being ONE takes courage and vision. Being ONE takes responsibility. Being ONE takes repentance and an acknowledgment that we have become just as sick as everyone else because we have lost our mandate to be a light to the nations.

We need to reclaim our vision. We need to see ourselves how God sees us. We need to be the healthiest physically. Yes, it takes work beyond stuffing our faces with sugar. Yes, it means learning how true health works. Yes, it involves developing our minds. Yes, it involves healing our emotions. Yes, it takes political action. It takes all of this because you can only lead to the degree that you have authority. Authority comes from being ONE.

""I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. "The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one;" John 17:20-22 (NASB)

Being one is a reality where we decide that the name of our God is so special that we don’t dare to show up in the conversation of humanity in any way but as He would and does. Yeshua knew as the Son of God, that everything He did would reflect on the Father. He was all the Father that this world would see in His lifetime. We likewise are all the world can see of the Father in our lifetime. We are Yeshua to the world.

Being one is not just about unity as a body. That is the deception of the tower of babel. No being one is about a place of love in Him. Yeshua declared that the Glory of the Father, which was given to Him, through being His Son, is now being given to us. Glory is sacred. Glory is trust. Glory is power. Glory is life.

Glory, Kavod in Hebrew, is the declared reputation of the person that is called His Name. He has given us His Name. His Name is His image, His likeness. It is who He is and He is ready to come for His namesake.

The warrior is putting on His armor for the sake of His namesake. The question is who will He find? Yeshua told a story about a widow and her persistence:

"Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart, saying, "In a certain city there was a judge who did not fear God and did not respect man. "There was a widow in that city, and she kept coming to him, saying, 'Give me legal protection from my opponent.' "For a while he was unwilling; but afterward he said to himself, 'Even though I do not fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection, otherwise by continually coming she will wear me out.'" And the Lord said, "Hear what the unrighteous judge *said; now, will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? "I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"" Luke 18:1-8 (NASB)

This is a cry of the heart of Lord for the elect of the Lord to respond to those who cry out for justice. As we face the re-formation that this time is affording us, we need to become responsible for who we have become. Each of us is living a historical life. Whatever it has been, it has been that, good, bad or indifferent. Now, we stand at a crossroads and there is a cry for justice. Certainly, the Father will bring about justice in the Earth. The question is: will the Son of Man find faith on the earth? Faith is a living relationship with the voice in our heart. It is the inner conversation that is responsive to the leading of the Spirit of God. It is the mark of the children in the spirit realm. It produces the mark of the children into the natural realm through love.

""How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another, and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?" John 5:44 (NASB)

Activation: Glory is identity. When we derive our identity from the standards of the world, then we are vulnerable to its opinion of us. It holds us in the grip of the fear of death. In that place, we compromise our life based on what the voices speak through standards and expectations. When we derive our identity from God, we are secure in who we are. We don’t ignore the standards of the world, but we recognize them for what they are. We can choose to either honor them or not depending on if they are in conflict with God’s standards. NOT all of the world’s standards are bad. Some are just logical extensions of life. Many, however, are in conflict with life and what will set us free is the glory that comes from God, being ONE. Ask the Lord, who am I to you? Let Him define you and you will be free.