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 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.
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.”
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. So, God’s purposes were not destroyed, and Jesus is redeeming and restoring all these purposes through the kingdom of God on earth.
Unfinished Purposes
Saying God’s purposes cannot be destroyed does not indicate they have been fulfilled. 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.
The purposes of the Father must be fulfilled by people on the earth. “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 what He wanted 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.
