Roots

Matthew 3:7-10
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. 9And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

Roots

Roots in our lives come from seeds that were planted either in our lives or perhaps the generations before us. Roots go down into the recesses of our soul, but they produce fruit upward. That fruit can be good or bad, selfless or selfish, spiritual or fleshly. Like any good garden it is the gardener’s desire to enhance the fruitfulness of the good plants and to pull out the weeds that want to choke out what if fruitful and good. What happens to a weed if we only pull off what we can see? We know that if we didn’t get the root, the weed will grow back. Such are the areas of our lives that the good Gardner, the Holy Spirit wants search out in us and root out.
William Law wrote, “Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state. We are without God, because we are in the life of self. Self-love, self-esteem, and self-seeking, are the very essence, and life of pride; and the devil the first father of pride, is never absent from them, nor without power in them. To die to these essential properties of self, is to make the devil depart from us. But as soon as we would have self-abilities have a share in our good works, the satanic spirit of pride is in union with us, and we are working for the maintenance of self-love, self-esteem, and self-seeking.” He perceived that the major root of sin and separation from God is self. When Christ came into our lives it should be as John the Baptist said, “The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” All that was built upon the foundation and has the root of self in it must be cut away. That root must be cut out, along with all of the other off-shoot roots that it produces.
Many of us struggle in different areas of our lives. We may pull them off for a time, but then they seem to continue to come back, sometimes even stronger than before. The question is, “Have we found the root?” Unless we trace these strongholds back to their root they may be hard to get free of. Somewhere we or an ancestor as opened a door for a spiritual attachment to come in and find root. It doesn’t mean that we are possessed or anything, but it does mean that there can be a strong soul tie to something that needs God’s axe to sever and separate us from it. It is something that we recognize the fruit of in our outward life, but we haven’t fully identified the root of it and then renounced and cut off that soul tie to it. Sometimes these roots like those of our wisdom teeth can become candy-caned and intertwined in the areas of our life where it is a process of identifying, renouncing and cutting off these roots by the power and authority we have in Christ Jesus. Nothing ever leaves our lives until we have fully repented of them, renounced them and no longer give them permission in our lives. We can go through the motions, but until our will is one with the Father, these roots will not be fully extracted.
Hebrews 12:15 refers to one such root. “Look after each other so that none of you fails to receive the grace of God. Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many.” Bitterness, offense, unforgiveness are roots that are prone to try to get a hold of members of the body of Christ. If we don’t recognize and deal with them they can cause division, dissention, backbiting, gossip, slander and all manner of poisonous manifestations that would defile the many. Prejudice is often a root that is passed to us from previous generations.
The Holy Spirit has indwelled us to bring us into the nature, mind and character of Christ. We need to have intimacy with the Father and the time in the Word so that we can say like David, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalms 139:23-24)”
It is only as we partner with the Holy Spirit that these roots can be identified and cut out. If we want a weed free garden, then it starts with our renouncement of self in every area of our lives and the full surrender to Christ as our Lord and King. As we give the Holy Spirit permission He will search our hearts and reveal things to us that we then must renounce, repent and surrender to Christ. This is an ongoing process in all of our lives, but the more we work in conjunction with the Holy Spirit to give Him place the more freedom and liberty in the Spirit we can come into.
A lot of us want to continue to sweep our issues under the rug and just ignore them, but we are only robbing ourselves of that place of greater fullness through a wholly surrendered life to Christ. Find your roots.

Blessings,
#kent

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Thy Kingdom Come. Thy will be Done.

Mark 6:10
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as [it is] in heaven.

Thy Kingdom Come. Thy will be Done.

Jesus Christ is the King and the revelation of the coming kingdom of God. He has already come in past shadow and type. He is come in physical manifestation, glorification and presence in the earth and in His body. When Jesus exhorted His disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven”, what are we praying for? Most of us embrace a concept of the Second Coming of Christ in glory to establish His kingdom in the earth, but if He is going to do that anyway why do we need to pray this now?
Every day that we exist in Christ we need to be pressed deeper into the birth canal. We need a greater revelation of who Christ is in the earth today, what His kingdom is and how we are a part of that. When we pray, “ Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done” we are praying out the old man of the earth and praying in the new creation of heaven. We are identifying and embracing our kingdom citizenship even as we walk in this earth. When we pray “thy kingdom come”, we are embracing the vision by faith of who we are in spirit. It is that Christ we are in spirit that we want to be manifested in our earth, our bodies and to the world around us. When God’s will is done in us it will have an impact upon the world around us. It is the people of God that set the moral temperature of a nation. It is the people of God that bring light and knowledge of the eternal into a land. We are the current revelation of the King of Kings. If His will is not accomplished and seen through us, then who?
As we pray this phrase of the Lord’s prayer don’t allow it to become just rote words. Allow it to impact you that as God is in heaven so He wants to be in your earth, in your life and to manifest through us, His will to the world around us. Even today as all of creation groans under corruption, we ourselves groan, within ourselves. We are seeing the vision of the hope that is within us. We continue to press into that hope until it is no longer a hope, but a manifest reality of God’s kingdom and will in the earth. We are the portals of heaven for God’s will to be done. Are we an open window or a closed door? It is His body that is paving the road for the King of Glory to enter in, for the Kingdom to come and His will to be done.

Blessings,
#kent