A great and violent shaking is taking place within the earth. If you would but listen with spiritual ears, you will hear the rumblings and sense the tremors ever increasing. Old religious systems are being torn down. Ideas are being replaced and reconfigured with greater and enduring depth and revelatory truth. So often, in truth, it feels anything but good in the beginning. Upgrade rarely does, at first.
In order for old paradigms to be changed, they must first be challenged. In order for the mind to be renewed, it must first be stretched. And for truth to finally come, the lies of ages past must be revealed.
A great shaking is taking place in our world today. It is not a time for complacency. It is not a time to settle so comfortably into the ideas that we have never thought to question or to grow beyond. We are being called into a new world but also, moreover, a return to that which was. I hear the Spirit so clearly speaking. “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.”
Upgrade requires shifting and rumblings and shakings. It requires a tearing away – often times rather violently – of the old things that we had once felt such comfort in. I sense that you have been there more times than you might openly admit, also. Those times when you were forced to question everything, realizing that what you had given so much of your time and effort and attention to were no longer working for you. Let us not deceive ourselves. It hurts to grow up.
I share this to say, unequivocally, that where upgrades in the Kingdom are concerned, they never come quicky and always come through moments of shaking. Growth feels quite restless at first. And yet through it all, there was a unity of the faith that permeated even the most contentious of debates. The unity, though, came not through some magic moment of impartation or through some sudden realization of sound doctrine. No. Instead, the unity of the faith came through reasoning. It came through dialogue. It came through an openness and willingness to embrace change, no matter how uncomfortable it seemed.
Upgrade comes through an ability to discern changing times and seasons. This ability in this more modern age of ours seems to be lacking, as I am sure you might attest. Today, in this more modern age, particularly where talk of the prophetic is concerned, it seems that anything goes. If it feels good, then it must be Spirit-inspired. All that is required, it seems, for a prophetic word to be taken to heart is for the words “Thus saith the Lord” to be ascribed.
Through it all, through changing times and seasons, through millennia of Christendom, somewhere along the way we settled for counterfeit and for emotionalism rather than for the sacred truth of a faith once delivered unto the saints. And, tragically, we have very little to show for it – a form of godliness devoid of power. We relegated the pearl of great price to little more than cheap, fake costume jewelry. And we seem perplexed when the message we share brings about no lasting result.
Upgrade demands a return to sound doctrine and to the ability to reason together again – not only for the good of some select few but for the good of all believers. Upgrade demands a paradigm shift of focus – a focus more on people than on the pursuit of empire and the commercialization of the anointing.