Preserved Purposes
God’s purposes are eternal. Nothing can destroy them. The power of the Cross, the life of the Resurrection, the authority of the Ascension, and the intercession of Jesus now guarantee that the purposes of the Father will be fulfilled and He will get everything He wants.
No matter what people do, what hell has been doing or is doing now to destroy them, there is power in Christ to fully restore every purpose of God and see it completely fulfilled! No one in heaven or earth could do that but Jesus, and Jesus has made all done and is doing all that is necessary for that to happen.
When nations or individuals or generations fail to fulfill purpose, when places created with inherent purposes are not manifesting these purposes, that purpose is preserved and reserved for a faithful generation. The purpose itself isn’t destroyed by human failure even if the nation, individuals, or generation is destroyed or disappears.
Some purposes of God have remained hidden for very long periods of time before they emerged again, fully intact and functional. Others may emerge rather quickly because a faithful generation appears in history, ready to champion these purposes as their priorities and bring them to greater fulfillment.
John saw this prophetic panorama and recorded what he saw in The Revelation of Jesus Christ. John saw Jesus, the Lamb sacrificed, and heard all heaven and earth respond, “Worthy is the sacrificed Lamb to receive all…” The sense of the word “worthy” is that He has done something for which He is owed something. Since Jesus did all, He is worthy of all!
The “all” is represented in the scroll covered with writing so that there is no room for anything else to be written, sealed so that it is completely sealed, and given to the One worthy to open that scroll to bring fulfillment to what is written there. The scroll represents the eternal purposes of the Father, as Revelation 4:11 makes clear: “All was created because You wanted it, and nothing was created You didn’t want.”
In this way, the eternal purposes of God were preserved and reserved in Christ so He could become the Author, Source, and Fountain Head of eternal salvation. [See Hebrews 5:9]
Jesus accepted responsibility to create what-Father-wants. Hebrews 1 tells us Jesus created all. Colossians 1:16 makes it clear that everything that is, that is not God, was created by Jesus. He was before Creation, the agent of Creation, the One who holds Creation together.
Jesus accepted responsibility, before He created all, to redeem what-Father-wants. He is the Lamb chosen to be sacrificed before the foundation of the world. [See 1 Peter 1:19,20.]He died to redeem all. Individual people? Yes. But also nations, cultures, resources both natural and spiritual. “Everything in heaven and earth” has been redeemed back to what-Father-wants by the work of Jesus Christ! Because of Jesus, there will be a condition in eternity in which everything will be exactly where it belongs and be exactly what-Father-wants.
Jesus not only accepted responsibility to create and redeem, He accepted responsibility to restore all. He is working now, from the right of the Father, to restore what-Father-wants. “He ever lives to make intercession,” to apply the redemptive provision of the Cross, to release the life of the Resurrection, to establish the authority of the kingdom, and to reconcile all He created to all the Father wants through intercession.
There is no place on earth, therefore, or people on earth, that Jesus did not redeem, to no place or people does He say, “hell can have you.” No!
Jesus wants every nation, place, people, and generation. He wants every island, every tribe, every neighborhood, every family, every city, every region, every man, woman, and child!
He has preserved God’s purposes for these people and places, and He is working to redeem and restore them all.
While these eternal purposes were not fulfilled by mankind, but they were not destroyed by human failure either. Jesus became man in order to be and do everything necessary to fulfill what was in the mind of the Father before any of it was created. God’s purposes were not destroyed by a long history of human inadequacy and rebellion, and Jesus is redeeming and restoring all these purposes through the kingdom of God on earth.
Brasil Has Inherited Purposes
Brasil has inherited unfinished purposes that God intended other cultures and generations in other places to fulfill. As a leader among nations, Brasil is positioned with this spiritual inheritance, to restore redemptive purposes in Europe, Africa, and Asia as well as the Americas.
As we approach 2020, Brasil’s fathering responsibilities to prepare inheritors of preserved purposes will intensify both internationally and at home. Brasil must produce a generation of fathers to walk in fullness, release fullness, and bring what-Father-wants to greater fullness in the earth!
Paul says the Ephesians and those of that spiritual generation had been selected to receive an apportioned inheritance. [See Ephesians 1:10-12.] This condition holds true with Brasil in this generation.
Before they received it, they were chosen, part of a pre-planned strategy, by the One who has been at work from the beginning. They were chosen because this strategy operates consistent with what-Father-wants, a strategy that produces what-Father-wants, so they were chosen because they are part of what-Father-wants. All this is included in the wording of Paul’s words to Ephesus and his generation.
Brasil inherits spiritually so they can produce spiritually. Father gave all to Christ so everything flows to and through Christ. In the same way, Christ puts something into us so He can release something through us. We inherit so we can produce and provide inheritors who receive from us so what they receive can be released through them.
Christ as Son of God and Son of man became what was essential to the ultimate success of what-Father-wants. We are not attempting to sum up everything in Christ: God already did that! We are part of God’s strategy to restore everything Christ has redeemed. He wants everything restored, and we are part of the processs when we father individuals, generations, nations, and purposes.
We are equal heirs with Christ in all that He has received by spiritual inheritance. [See Romans 8:17.] In this way, Christ guaranteed that the failures of the first Adam would not limit the fulfillment eternal purposes God had in mind when He created Adam. The second Adam inherited those eternal purposes so He could apportion us a share with Him to fulfill that portion and reapportion it within our spiritual generation.
Note the wording of Paul to Timothy, his spiritual son: “What you heard through me, witnessed by many, commit as deposit in trust, to other faithful, reliable leaders who are capable of teaching others to do what they do also.” Four spiritual generations alive and functioning in the same generation. Paul, Timothy, faithful leaders, others. Assuredly, the others were seen to be faithful as much as the “faithful leaders,” and the “faithful leaders” were seen to be able to do what Timothy did.
To make this instruction into a “pass on my messages” assignment ignores the context and the actual charge given to Timothy. Paul is calling his fathering preparation of Timothy, which began in Ephesus during the three or so years Paul spent there in leadership preparation, “what Timothy was assured of among others who witnessed the same fathering preparation. We should take the acoustic aspect of this charge in the context of Paul’s fathering preparation of Timothy and his expectation of Timothy fathering faithful leaders who could be fathers as well.
Spiritual inheritance arrives with leadership strategy attached. Someone is chosen to be responsible for a portion of strategic kingdom inheritance because they must position prepared inheritors who will be equally faithful to father inheritors themselves.
This kind of inheritance and fathering of inheritors occurs at every level of the kingdom: individual, generational, corporate, cultural, and international.
The task of a fathering nation is greater, however, that being a leader among the nations: a fathering nation must raise fathers who can utilize the resources inherited to produce more, to plant the best seed of one harvest into prepared soil for greater harvest. Each generation produces greater harvest than the previous generation when spiritual fathering is successful.
God preserves purpose to protect it from loss and waste, but He gives purpose to inheritors prepared to invest it so that is expands and produces greater fulfillment. He wants increased harvest! God preserves purpose so He can give it to prepared inheritors. We prepare inheritors to receive God’s purposes so they can be more fully revealed and fulfilled.
Unfinished Purposes
Saying God’s purposes cannot be destroyed does not indicate they have been fulfilled by Jesus. They were summed up in Jesus as a new spiritual beginning, but there is a massive amount of work to be done by means of the finished work of Christ. God’s purposes were gathered up in Jesus so He could release them through Christ as the Source and Resource of their fulfillment.
Jesus didn’t fulfill all of God’s purposes, that would mean when it is all over Father will have Jesus. He already had Jesus before He purposed, and He has Jesus now “in the Glory I had with You before.” The Father wanted the Creation, and He will have the Creation redeemed, restored, and fulfilled.
Jesus did what was necessary to become the Source and Resource of eternal salvation for everything He created. Now, He leads many sons into glory! Now, we become equal heirs with Him. The purposes of the Father for the people of the earth must be fulfilled by people on the earth, to redeem the places of the earth where they are assigned. “The earth is the Lord’s, all of it. The people are the Lord’s, all of them.” [See Psalm 24:1.]
Saying God’s purposes cannot be destroyed says they must be redeemed and restored through people who have received these purposes from another spiritual generation. While the Father has reset the earth in “the seasons of the Father” by resetting His covenants with mankind, and Jesus resets the kingdom in revolutionary revival, what remains is the eternal purposes of God.
He still wants the same what-He-wants He had in mind before Creation! He isn’t substituting angels, starting all over on another planet, or waiting for a superior race of evolved humans! Because man couldn’t give God what-He-wants, God became man to guarantee God gets what-He-wants!
To paraphrase Oswald Chambers, the glory of redemption isn’t that God makes you someone else but that He makes you what He wanted you to be in the first place. Apply the same thought to everything that this thought applies to the individual. All transformation is restoration.
Spiritual Inheritance
God’s purposes remain in history through spiritual inheritance. Because what is spiritual is more real than what is physical, eternal purposes remain, untouched by time, unblemished by human failure, undiminished by misunderstanding.
This is one sense of the statement Jesus made to His disciples: “I send you to harvest what you did not plant.” [John 4:38] Unfulfilled purposes are inherited by remnants, uncovered to a faithful generation that can bring greater fullness of God’s purposes in their generation. They didn’t originate the seeds but they receive the multiplied harvest.
The Lord of harvest will not trust harvest to the hands of those who cannot discern the weeds from the wheat. And, no amount of weeds can pollute the wheat. God’s purposes remain perfect awaiting perfection.
Purposes may be inherited through discipling leadership, the proper kingdom of God strategy that maintains spiritual momentum among spiritual generations so that the level of fullness one spiritual generation walks in may be increased and expanded in each successive spiritual generation.
Since blessing basically means to expand, this is the truest sense of a father’s blessing; since curse basically means to limit, this is the truest sense of a generational curse.
The fathering spirit functions in the kingdom to join the generations. The issue is spiritual inheritance. The goal of spiritual fathering is to produce spiritual momentum that releases fullness to the purpose of God for any people and place, then to father inheritors who can do what you have done, and do greater in their spiritual leadership so the next inheritors live in greater fulfillment of purpose.
When we miss this nearly hidden strata upon which to construct kingdom, we begin to lose our way in our understanding of redemption, discipling, leadership, and mission. We then lose sight of this foundation and begin to redefine the basics; until we recover this foundation, all our “back to basics” efforts will not restore the original design and strategy of Jesus for the kingdom of God.
So, purposes can also be inherited in seasons of kingdom reset and revolutionary revival, hidden purposes purified by rising through solid rock, are uncovered and revealed, intact and fully functional, to a revival generation.
Their preparation involved “the spirit and power of Elijah” because they were not properly discipled, fathered spiritually, and the generation must be reset and rejoined. “He will turn the hearts of father to children and children to fathers, so I don’t curse the land.” [See Malachi 4:5,6.]
A reset or revolutionary revival generation receives an accelerated preparation to inherit that positions them spiritually where their generation should and would be had properly functioned. This reset does not replace the discipling strategy of Jesus with a new or novel approach, but it does provide the purposes of God with a spiritual generation who can walk in the fullness of God’s strategies to fulfill His purposes.
A revolutionary revival generation inherits preserved and reserved purposes. The leaders of this generation experience the kingdom in ways more closely attuned to what Jesus originally designed the kingdom to be. In this way they can function in ways more consistent with the original strategies of kingdom leadership. This reset kingdom and restored leadership can, then, bring greater fullness to those purposes.
Fathering and Harvest
The leaders of a revival generation must begin to function in a fathering spirit. Even though the experience of a spiritual father may have been absent from their personal experience, they have experienced a “spirit and power of Elijah” preparation. Their hearts have been turned toward the Father so they can turn the hearts of their generation. They learn to father rather quickly. If they respond to their generation in the way, they will increase the momentum of revival moments into revival movements.
While spiritual and natural fathering are very different, perhaps we can recognize this reality: fathering children physically is very simple indeed! Healthy people arrive with all the equipment they require to produce children physically, and they arrive at the puberty driven by powerful motivation to reproduce.
Therefore, when we define our mission as the production and accumulation of spiritual offspring who can, in turn have more offspring, we do as much damage to the kingdom as “children having children” brings to culture. Over selling “soul winning” turns churches into nurseries, and produces a perpetually immature Body of Christ. This overselling is both erroneous and unnecessary.
Of course, “children having children” doesn’t take anything away from the value and beauty of the children being born! In the same way each natural birth produces an infinitely valuable child, each newly-born Christian is infinitely valuable as a citizen of the kingdom no matter what circumstances produces their births. However, there is something terribly dysfunctional about “children having children.” Children grow up physically, but how well they mature mentally, emotionally, and relationally is another issue. God designed family to bring personal maturity to physical maturity. In the same way, Jesus designed discipling to bring spiritual leadership to spiritual longevity: time does not mature the saint.
Fathering natural children relationally is much more challenging than impregnating a womb. We receive very little preparation for this role beyond our own experiences of being fathered, that takes us back to our human fathers.
Spiritual fathering differs significantly from natural fathering but relates more to the relational aspecting of fathering than it does the physical fathering. Spiritual fathering relationships take us back to the Father. What we experience with spiritual fathers moves us to respond to Heavenly Father! When the Deep of God calls to deep within us, so to speak, our fathering experiences are turning our hearts toward Father’s heart. In this way, even a generation who experienced dysfunctional fathering or no fathering can walk in the restoration of the fathering spirit.
Fathering children spiritually differs from natural fathering. All spiritual children are adopted by God, by spiritual adoption. While one leader may bring them to birth, he is not necessarily the leader who fathers them or is that father the one who fathers their kingdom leadership. In fact, birthing reveals the life of Jesus, not the life of the leader who seeded them with the Word, and spiritual fathers are fathering the life of Jesus in spiritual children, not their own.
Again, we hear the words of Jesus to kingdom leaders, “You harvest where you didn’t labor.” In other words, leaders father children God produced and birthed through the efforts of others. The harvest is the beginning of your fathering assignment, not the end goal of your ministry!
Harvest and Maturity
Consider it the way Jesus described it in John 15: the fruit produced by our connection to the True Vine should reach maturity before it is harvested. Produce no fruit, you are cut off. Produce fruit, you are trimmed to produce more. Produce more so you can produce much. The ‘much fruit’ is ‘fruit that remains. The Vine was designed for this, pruned branches produce more fruit that is “much fruit” when it retains the fruit on the branch until maturity.
This says that the highest order of production occurs when the fruit remains connected until it reaches maturity. The grapes do not fall off green, but remain in receiving mode until they mature so the Father can receive a harvest that can be crushed for a fresh vintage of new wine. Fruit must be matured before it is useful, and the harvest of fathering is a leadership harvest, a functioning harvest, a harvest of matured leaders.
The fathering spirit matures the spiritual generation to receive inherited purposes, prepares them to bring those purposes to greater fulfillment, and raises the level of fathering so the next fathers will produce even greater spiritual momentum in their spiritual children. These results are all consistent with all Jesus designed kingdom leadership to produce.
This model is consistent with Paul’s 2 Timothy 2:2 mandate.
Purpose and Destiny
I am appalled to observe leaders struggling people through growth and maturity with little or no grasp of that person’s purpose or destiny. Appalled. This dysfunctional leaders ignores the vein that runs alongside redemption, the vein that answers the question, Redeemed for what purpose?
I am very aware of the many answers to that question, and I am also aware that many would seek no answer to that question at all. To some, redemption is simply a response of God’s unconditional love for people: He loves them so He saves them. Period.
The problem with that thinking is that it is wrong! It is inconsistent with Scripture and its revelation of God and how He deals with nations, generations, cities, the ecclesia, and individuals. Even to say that answer is true but incomplete begs for a rebuke because to dumb things down that far betrays the fullness of Divine passion. God loves people unconditionally on purpose. Love comes after purpose, not before it.
God loves people because…and that offends the definition of “unconditional” in some people’s minds. They assume that God just loves people no matter what, for no reason when God loves people on purpose. It is really rather simple to understand: God loves people on purpose because He loved them before they were created. Love is a choice, and God chose what was created before it was created. His love really is everlasting because there was never a condition in eternity before Creation in which He didn’t love what Christ redeems and restores!
So, to provide leadership that represents God to people with little or no thought to purpose and destiny misappropriates redemption, grace, mercy, and Anointing by making the object of redemption something or someone other than God.
How you provide fathering leadership to a nation if you have no idea what God’s purposes for that nation are? How can you provide fathering leadership for a city if you have no idea what the redemptive purposes of that city are? How can you provide fathering leadership to a person if you have no idea what destiny God invested in them when He created them in the firs place? Or, how can you provide fathering leadership to a ministry if that ministry does not have clear, measurable kingdom assignments?
