Identification With the People God Is Calling Us To Disciple
-- by G. Wiebe
We see a very important principle in Isaiah 6 where Isaiah says "Woe to me, for I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips."
We see that in order for God to be able to effectively use Isaiah to minister to/disciple these people that He had sent him to, God had to first reveal to him that he had to deal, first, with the same sin issues in his own life and to repent of them before God could use him to effectively reach the people that struggled with the same sin. They were a people 'of unclean lips'. Isaiah had a revelation from God that he was a 'man of unclean lips'. Once he allowed God to deal with this in his life, God used him mightily in the area of his gifts....using his MOUTH (as a major part of his calling).
The sin is often related to the calling, since the enemy of our souls would try to keep us from being ineffective in especially the areas where God is gifting and calling us! So if you have gifts in which God wants you to use your mouth to speak His Truth, you may also, like Isaiah, need to repent of 'unclean lips'.
So with us, if we are seeking to see God bring restoration, revival and renewal into the Church in Canada and to see our families, neighbourhoods, cities and nation discipled, we can expect that He will be revealing to us areas where we need to repent SO THAT we WILL be able to effectively identify with the people, continue to develop in godly character/the fruit of the Spirit and be used in the areas of our giftings to reach out to them.
The Holy Spirit will likely bring to our attention our own need to surrender to Him our control issues and become servant-hearted; our own need to forgive; our own impatience and lack of perseverance, our own selfish or prideful motivations, our own lusts of the flesh, our own cowardice instead of courage, worry and fear instead of trusting in Jesus in various areas of life, etc.
BUT as we repent and submit these areas to Him, we will also be amazed at the way He is able to use us as He continues to work in our lives to fulfill His purposes in/through us!
Conclusion:
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If we sense the Holy Spirit putting on our hearts a particular group of people, or people of a specific region, we may want to immediately get involved and start to reach out in ways which seem logical to our minds.
Let us, however, be prepared to WAIT FOR GOD'S TIMING and WAYS of having us move forward, or we could potentially not only get ourselves into needless trouble, but could also potentially helping to further establish the existing sin among those people if we have not yet worked through those same areas in our own lives as the Holy Spirit reveals to us what those areas are.
As we see in the book of Nehemiah, there was first an awareness of the damage that had been done and was needing to be faced. There was a 'scouting trip' to 'check out the land'. This was followed by a prayer and acting STEP BY STEP according to God's instructions on how to proceed. Nehemiah rallied the people to WORK TOGETHER and they repented, returned to the Lord, prayed and worked together to rebuild the wall/temple.
As we begin to move forward in reclaiming areas in our
lives, families and cities, etc. for God's glory, let us be faithful to entrust
them - and all our fears about the unknown in this journey - to God, and learn
to depend on each other as brothers and sisters that God has provided for
us so we can, together, move forward to possess the land that God has called
us to! Let us move forward in healthy interdependence as God intended!
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