God's Prosperity

The Holy Spirit calls today. So much time has past since I last posted. But it's time to get back to passing along the message(s) He has been speaking in the quiet of our morning conferences.

So much is happening so fast in our lives and our nation. I feel like I am sitting on the sidelines with a "tennis neck" back and forth watching the volley between Light and darkness. Today the ball stops long enough to process the action and the message.

The Holy One takes me back to I Kings 18 and the contest between the God of Israel and the fake deities of Jezebel. It was really no contest, ever. But the people had been so corrupted by the deception of the pseudo power of Baals prophets that the Lord purposed to solve this deception in a grand and Glorious way.

The Children of Israel had forsaken the Lord their God. They had allowed compromise and were suffering the consequences on their end of a broken covenant with the one True God.

Idolatry was a common practice as the people were seeking "prosperity" from any source who promised it. Jezebel, the pagan queen of Israel's King Ahab, had set up her foreign gods. Ahab took Baal worship to an official status in adulterous violation of the Holy Covenant between God and the Children of Israel.

The conditions of the land and the lives of the people deteriorated under the compromise, drought occurred and famine followed for years.

The Holy One speaks to me, "the drought and the famine in the land is the discipline for idolatry"...WOW! hard to hear, but so true. We have become so dull to truth and numb or resigned to the reality of our circumstances, we have stopped looking to understand or asking ourselves "Why?" What lessons are we to learn? The world says, "work harder, adjust this or tweak that but keep pushing". Or, "you might as well check out. Drown yourself in pleasures because nothing is ever going to change". Both separately or a combination of the two make for a K.O. in the battle.

Personal and corporate accountability is long forgotten, and the worship of government or self has taken over. Most look at "prosperity" only in worldly terms coming from successfully navigating the system. Like being stuck on a computer game, playing and replaying the same game until we "master" the system the only problem is in the reality that the "game is fixed" and there can be no human mastery of it.

But the Word of the Lord says, "I form the light and create the darkness. I bring prosperity and create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things." Isaiah 45:7

God's Word is true. How foolish we are to ignore it. When was the last time we sought God's heart on where our best efforts may have violated His Holy Nature and set us up for the discipline of a drought in our lives? When was the last time we even took the time to understand any correlation between our circumstances and disobedience or rebellion of His commands?

The most casual look into the I kings chapters reveals that the "drought" causing the famine was due to idolatry. It was a discipline not a bad luck situation. Idolatry, not ignorance as to how to "make the system work" was the reason for the drought (economic failure)and the famine that follows drought.

The Holy One is our indwelling Wisdom and He is the source of all the answers to all the questions we might ask. Why do we push on and hope things will change for the better when the Lord who loves us, is so willing to show us what may be in rebellion of His ways and then so willing to lead us out of the disaster?

The Spirit is calling. Can you hear Him?