Thank you Jesus, He rescued me! ❤️ He is Our rescue! 🙌🏾🔥🙌🏾

Those of you familiar with photography will know that your aperture is essential to establish your depth of field, in other words how much of your image is in focus. Low aperture gives you lots of light but a shallow depth of field and high aperture gives you a lot less light to work with but a much wider depth of field. But you are not here for a photography lesson so what exactly am I getting at? Well if we stay at a shallow understanding of the word and our walk with God we will end up with a lot of light but not much depth of understanding. It is essential that as believers we don't stay at a surface understanding or we miss the whole picture. The writer of Hebrews addresses exactly this. Therefore, leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ, let us go on to perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms, of laying on of hands, of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits. For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance, since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God, and put Him to an open shame. -Hebrews 6:1-6 NKJV You see as we encounter more of Holy Spirit it should draw us deeper and deeper, it should be what informs our conversations, desires and actions. Encounter also draws us deeper into scripture, placing a hunger for the deeper mysteries of God inside of us. Now it is time to grab those pictures. Take a look at the one you took of yourself this week and take a look at the depth of field. Is it shallow or is it deep? Now look at some of the pictures of your youth. Do you see the same depth or has it grown? Ask Holy Spirit what are the areas that are still out of focus or lacking in understanding. Let Him shine a little more light in so you can open up that aperture.

I want you to take a snapshot of yourself, not literally but figuratively. Now you will need to hold on to that picture for the week as it will become a reference for what we are going to talk about. There are many ways to self assess, you probably hear about them all the time. Sayings like "look in the mirror" or "take a look at yourself" or one we are all familiar with found in Matthew: How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? -Matthew 7:4 NKJV However this week we will be using a different saying. It is always good to have some introspection in your life, moments of looking in the mirror and digging a little into what makes us who we are. Yet the moment we depart from the mirror we often forget what exactly we were looking at and I don't think anyone remembers what they saw in the mirror years ago. So that is why this week we are going to "Take a picture it lasts longer". It might be helpful to grab a couple old pictures from that shoe box under the bed as well. You see pictures are often more than a memory, they have to ability to act as memorial stones in our lives. They remind us of more than what we used to look like, they stir up memories of what we were like in past seasons of life. They remind us how we used to think, how we used to act and even most importantly they can remind us of our walk with the Lord and how far He has brought us. They can stir up our faith and remind us of where we came from and where we are going. So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”

God’s Word is the seed, but Jesus teaches that the condition of the ground affects what happens after the seed is received. In Matthew 13, the different soils represent different conditions of the heart. The Seed isn't the problem. The condition of the soil matters. God wants His Word to move beyond something we simply hear. He wants it to take root, transform us, and produce lasting fruit through our lives.

When we understand the Seed, we begin to understand where we came from, who we belong to, why God has planted us where we are, and what He desires to produce through our lives. It is to understand the Seed, recognize that we belong to Christ, discover why we have been planted, and become fruitful wherever God places us. Jesus said in John 12:24 NKJV, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.” Jesus was speaking of His own death, but He was also revealing a Kingdom pattern: seed, surrender, death, life, fruit, and multiplication.