Activating Love, The Feast of Yom Teruah - David Mitts

"Be on the alert then, for you do not know the day nor the hour. (Mat 25:13)
Click here to listen to "Activating Love, The Feast of Yom Teruah"
Love never fails!  We have been pressing in for the reality of a heart filled with God’s Love which is the power for the accomplishment of our destiny. We realized that fear activates failure in our lives. As we have mentioned previously, it isn’t the “fear of failure” that I am speaking about only.  That is an important fear, but rather fear itself when it grips our heart will affect our perspectives about our lives and impair our deepest thinking and cause us to lose touch with spiritual reality.  Fear produces an alternative reality, one that is based on illusions that are an expression of a different world, a parallel universe that is self-generated out of the fear.
I am not trying to make fear evil. No. Fear has a place and a purpose.  It is the teacher of children learning through pain and pleasure the rules of life.  In the first 5-6 years of life, our brain vibrates at the same frequency of fear which is delta and theta waves and amplifies reality for absorptive learning. In that sense, it is the beginning of wisdom.
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. (Pro 9:10)
Fear implies a lack of wisdom, a lack of understanding of something or someone with the potential to either do good to us or harm us.  Through fear, children determine what is safe and unsafe in their world.  But even with children, the point isn’t the fear, it’s safe play.  Children were created to play, to laugh, and to love.  So, even though fear trains a child in reality, the stove is hot, warm baths feel good, mom’s hugs are wonderful, it isn’t the goal.  The goal is love, joy, peace.
This is about reality.  God has given us the privilege of a reality rooted in love.  It’s really an invitation to experience the bliss of our creation.  When we learn how to live in love, we come into oneness, unity.  
This is the true purpose of ministry, to empower one another to live our true nature in love!
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love. (Eph 4:11-16)
When we come into the fullness of love and help one another do the same, the world will see the true expression of who Yeshua is through us.  He is not the Yeshua we have let them see. No. Not in His fullness. In these times of great fear, people are vulnerable to the spin doctors.  These are the voices that use fear to accomplish their objectives which is to create herds out of humans.  With all of the cataclysms of hurricanes, earthquakes, threats of war, people who have not developed their hearts in love, will be vulnerable as in the days of Nazi Germany to the voices of fear.  Blood moons, signs in the heavens etc. are not the signs of the times that a love based person focuses on, rather acting in love.
Today, we are going to deviate a little from our 1 Corinthians 13 love explosion and include the fall feast of Yom Teruah into our love activations.  The feasts are called love feasts in the Brit Hadashah, The New Covenant writings: Jude 1:12
These are the men who are hidden reefs in your love feasts when they feast with you without fear, caring for themselves; clouds without water, carried along by winds; autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted; (Jud 1:12)
The Feasts are times for activating love and intimacy, first with God, but then with community.  It is in community that healing happens. Isolation breeds deception.  We are all deceived at some level because fear has bred that into us.  It is only in community where we can be transparent, that we come into our destiny.  The community is the place where love can be manifested.  The five-fold ministry giftings are for the body, the community and require interaction to function. Hebrews 10:23-25:
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near. (Heb 10:23-25)
Notice the word habit connected with isolation.  Habits rooted in fear thrive in isolation.  In my cave, I don’t have to show anybody my issues.  It’s a place of safe fear-laden habits. It is also the place of greatest deceptions. The Feasts are not just religious rituals of the Old Testament for the Jews but opportunities for love-centered healing, the healing of loving God and loving each other.
OK. So let’s look at the Fall Feasts and especially Yom Teruah.  Yom Teruah, or as some like to call it in a more subdued society, Rosh Hashanah, which means the head of the year, new year’s, is the Feast of Blowing the Shofar.  How or why is the blowing of the shofar connected to love and destiny?
Well first let’s look at 1 Thessalonians, 4:13-18:
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1Th 4:13-18).
The context of these verses is the death of loved ones.  How is this connected with love and the feast?  Well, death is the root of all fear.  We live in the shadow of death all of our lives.  Much of our fear that produces failure in our lives is related to death and loss.  Maybe we were in love and lost that love.  That is death and loss in our loves.  Maybe we gave our trust to another and were betrayed.  That is a death and loss.  Maybe we saw a loved one die of disease, like Heidi.  Death reminds us of our impermanence and the fragile nature of our lives.  It speaks to us and tells us to hold on and try to control everything and everyone.
In the middle of all of that is the promise of Yom Teruah!  The return of the Lord with a shout and a blast of the shofar.  All that we lost is not lost but with us in victory!  One way to look at that is that life is safe.  You can’t truly loose anyone or anything.  The message of the 7th month is that God is sovereign and that He is love and safety.  We can risk again for our risks are really His provision.
The original Yom Teruah was Jericho.  What or who was Jericho?  It represents the strongholds between us and our destiny.  Israel was coming into their manifest destiny, why they were created.  In front of them was Jericho, the walled city, the fortress of the kingdom of fear.  
The name Jericho is derived from the Hebrew word Yareach, which means moon.  The moon is the symbol of patterns or habits.  Yom Teruah occurs at the sliver of the new moon of the seventh month.  It is the only Feast that is unknown in starting point.  No man knows the day or the hour of Yom Teruah.  
The Lord declared it so, that the moon would open up time. Genesis 1:16-18:
And Elohim made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars. And Elohim set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And Elohim saw that it was good. (Gen 1:16-18)
In this picture of the sun and moon, we see a picture of time.  Yom Teruah, then, at the beginning of the 7th month becomes the opening of the Kingdom of God.  It separates light from dark, love from fear. Jericho is the symbol of the end of one “life” and the entering into a new life, the life of love.
The moon is the symbol of patterns.  It is the habits of yesterday, our ways of doing things, old thinking, old wineskins.  Jericho, the moon kingdom is religion in its purest sense.  Our religion is not the church we attend but the habits of our life.  The word religion in its most ancient meaning means that which we conform ourselves to.  What is that but our fear-based habits, our wilderness life, our slavery.  It is no accident that all of the Islamic nations have the moon on their flags.  There is something primal about the moon a lunacy of fear.  It rules its followers through darkness and fear.
But, we are called out of darkness into light, out of the desert into our inheritance!
The shofar and the shout then become the method of activation.  Why is that?  Because it is public.  It is a symbol of unity of identity.  The shofar is sounded to call forth the people of God to their destiny in Him.  The walls of the moon-city come down with the shout and the shofar.

Activation:  OK. We are going to activate our new life by sounding the shofar over the old, bringing the walls down.  The shofar is the power of declaration, which is the most potent form of speech. SO we will combine the shout, which isn’t just about volume but also declaration and authority. What I want to do is take one area that is in your heart for the new life, the destiny of God and you will declare it and we will blow the shofar to empower your declaration in public.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Glory: Kavod - David Mitts

Dam, the Blood - David Mitts