Reformation Report

Time to Multiply

There is an old adage that says, “Every oak tree was once a nut that stood his ground.”

 

The idea is that once planted the acorn grows roots that eventually descended deep into the ground. For endless months that acorn grows, first a stem, then a branch, then leaves, gradually bit by bit, season to season it multiplies in size. It’s thin stem transforming into a thick trunk.  It’s twigs maturing into huge branches, then a proliferation of leaves appearing, and eventually, the tiny acorns began to appear, first one then thousands. After years of growth, it stands huge covering a vast area, visible from miles away. Its own acorns falling annually, littering the field, providing food to many creatures. That little acorn now a mighty oak tree, home to many kinds of birds and other wildlife.

 

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.

 

To become a fruitful oak tree takes a long time; it’s a passage through many seasons, producing its first fruit only after seven years. Achieving our dreams follows a similar process, but many of us are not aware that to reproduce ourselves takes time. It can’t happen quickly. We have to sink our roots deep into the ground, so we can get to a place were we have the capacity to multiply.

 

God never establishes us with the idea of being settlers. When he establishes us it is for the purpose of launching out, expanding our influence, multiplying life. God gives us strong roots so we can accomplish what is designed for us. He wants to bring multiplication to everything we do. From the very beginning in Genesis it says, “God blessed them and said, ‘be fruitful and multiply’”. God’s intention was that we be fruitful and that we would multiply. He wants us to take what we have been established in and multiply it.  

 

The word of God says we are the planting of the Lord.  We have been planted and have every chance to produce fruit. We are reformers and must begin to put down our roots, to take root in our territory, to take dominion and to multiply ourselves where he has planted us.

 

Even after God had destroyed the world through the flood, He came back and said to Noah and his sons, “be fruitful and multiply”. In this day and age we need to purposefully multiply righteousness because wickedness and darkness have invaded the earth and even infected the church. God is saying, “I am establishing you in the land, I am raising a standard to begin to multiply my message, to multiply yourselves as servants of righteousness.” So we must develop the infrastructure to support the multiplication. Let our roots reach deep into the soil, and have our tree grow up into the promised oak of righteousness. This begins with each of us having an open heart that is able to receive the seed of the word of God, to believe the Word so it can take effect and reform and transform our lives.

 

 As we root ourselves in the word of God, we can start to multiply His kingdom in our lives, and extend God’s influence in our domains.

 

Self Talk

Do you sometimes talk to yourself? I know we all speak to ourselves and more often than not it’s negative words, negative affirmations like “I am stupid, I am so dumb, I can’t do that ” What we tell ourselves about ourselves and our circumstances can be very influential. When we speak to ourselves in absolutes like the ones I have quoted we ratify it and affirm it as the truth and ultimately it becomes our reality.

 

In order to change our reality we need to replace our negative thoughts, and learn to hold our tongue instead of talking negatively about ourselves. Replacing negative words like “I can’t” with positive talk like “I can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me”, could make the difference between success or failure. If you can’t, then you can’t, because you believe what you say, I can’t!”  In our ministry when things don’t go according to plan we don’t say we have failed, we say we just found out how not to do it. We have found that saying that helps us to not go over the same “lesson” and waste our time by doing the same thing over and over again.

 

Albert Einstein said, “Doing the same thing the same way expecting a different result is one of the first signs of insanity.”

The words we speak are powerful. Whatever we affirm, establish and chart a specific course, direction, outcome, or state of being for our future. The bible says, “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” and again “as a man thinks in his heart so is he”. I want to encourage all of us to think about what we are saying, especially about what we are saying about ourselves.

 

 

Dream Big

What makes human beings different from other creatures on the planet? I believe it’s the ability to dream, to have vision and to see something. It’s the power of imagination. If you we see a picture of what we want in our mind’s eye we can do it. God intended for us to dream, to have a vision and then bring that vision to pass.

 

If we can find this pattern in life and live by the principle that whatever we can imagine we can achieve, then we can bring to pass the results that God intended for our lives. In the ultimate sense of purpose for our lives we were born to take dominion and rule this earth, in the place that God determined for us to do so.  Another way of saying it is, “Bloom where you are planted”. God created you and I to carry our own visions so we can become powerful and rule our spheres of influence. Our vision will determine what we do in life.

 

We can take a shortcut and corrupt our vision by trying to get something illegitimately or prematurely. The result of that will be, us having short-term gain for long-term pain.

 

God is not interested in what we do, nearly as much as He is interested in what we become. When we dream big and then go out and use our talents and imaginations and faith to accomplish our dream, we not only bring glory to God, but also, become a great influence to those we touch and the society we live in. We become a great blessing.

 

 

Self-Esteem

In 17th Century Italy, Galileo Galilei boldly declared to the church, which was the institution that controlled information and held sway over the scientific community and acted as the authority concerning all things moral and educational during that time, that “the earth revolved the Sun”. In those days the belief was that the universe revolved around the earth, so it’s no surprise that his declaration did not go down well because it challenged the basis of an entire establishment. Galileo was persecuted and confined to house arrest for the rest of his life, accused of heresy.

Despite the persecution he was able to cope with the challenges of life because he knew what he had discovered was the truth. He valued what he had discovered, he valued his belief, and he chose to live by conviction rather than compromise to preference. He had an amazing level of self-esteem. Can you imagine yourself like Galileo, holding on to what you believe in when your society despises you? Or your life and livelihood are being challenged? A healthy self-esteem is a basic need because at some point in life your peers, family or society might not agree with what we do or believe, that’s where a high level of self-esteem is invaluable to ones personal integrity and well-being. 

 

Again, a high level of self-esteem is not gained overnight, rather, it is built little by little, one principle at a time. It’s the sum total of all the choices we make. What choices are we making today – because they can determine what self worth we have in our future.