Oceans in the Desert

Kathi Pelton

Many are experiencing a type of spiritual warfare and wrestle as we finish 2018 and prepare to enter 2019. It may feel like an overwhelming sense of failure, regrets, condemnation, fear, or other issues that cause your soul to feel separated from the unconditional love of God. Some believers are wrestling with a sense of great spiritual hunger that leaves them craving deeper realms of God, requiring further surrender and yielding to the Spirit in ways that feel unfamiliar and uncertain.

Whatever feelings might accompany the wrestle, be assured that the wrestle is worth the reward! It may cause pain–it may even cause confusion–but as you wrestle down the defenses in your soul that have become barriers to the deeper experience of oneness with Christ, it will be the best fight you will ever lose!

When Christ is forged and formed in you, He will overthrow other things have occupied you, taking up space within your life and your heart. Often these things are so familiar and comforting that they cause blind spots in our lives, until circumstances crash us against the shores of false beliefs. We don’t see the dark places until we enter into the wrestle to see Jesus formed in us.

The enemy does not want greater surrender or refinement in our lives because he knows that the more yielded we are to Jesus, the more light we will reveal that will dispel darkness.

2019 will be a doorway into occupying land for the Kingdom of God. The Spirit of the Lord is preparing many by occupying further territory in His people’s lives. This requires us to war against strongholds that the enemy has held in our lives. To wrestle these places down we must face the fears that have fortified these strongholds. We must battle down false securities, idols, and comforts that we’ve carried like a child’s security blanket. We are being asked to leave behind childish things so that the enemy has no place in us as we are sent to take back lives and land for the Kingdom.

The ways of the Holy One are upside-down and backwards to the ways of man or the ways of human reasoning. Therefore when we begin to enter the ways of God, we can experience a type of spiritual and emotional vertigo. This vertigo can cause us to try to regain balance through old ways and by relying on strongholds that have caused us to feel in control. It is vital that we begin to be still and allow the Spirit to reorient us to the atmosphere He creates.

This is not a time to back down or to run ahead, but rather to wrestle down the “flight” mode of the discomforts that accompany change and transformation. This is a time of fight, not flight. Fight for stillness, fight for surrender, fight for yieldedness, and fight to see Christ formed in you!

“To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.” Colossians‬ ‭1:27-29‬ ‭NIV‬‬

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