When our ancestors were in Egypt, they gave no thought to Your miracles; they did not remember your many kindnesses, and they rebelled by the sea, the Red Sea. Psalm 106:7.
Today your LORD (יהוה) God (אלהים) says:
If you don’t believe for something big, you won’t receive something big. Most people limit Me and grieve the Holy Spirit. They won’t dream with Me for greater things—for miracles, signs, and wonders as the norm for the believer as they were for Jesus and the apostles. They see themselves as unable to do mighty works to bring days of Heaven, that is, Kingdom supply and living, to the earth. They often won’t do anything but live, by their own toilsome efforts, just to make “ends meet.”
I never meant your life to be one of drudgery, no increase, and no fruit.
Anyone who really drew close and got to know Me that you read about in the Bible may have started out decreasing but once they encountered Me it turned around to increasing in tremendous ways. Like Joseph, like Gideon, like Ruth, like Hannah, like David, like Daniel, and I could go on and on. And I do not just mean in a way of worldly impact but in ways of heavenly impact.
Most of you think way too small. I tell you that I will give overcomers the nations. How would you like to be winning nations to salvation and ushering them into Kingdom living and giving even now?
I brought the Israelites out of slavery to tremendous wealth in one night and promised them their own nation filled with good things—such as beautiful cities, big house, fruit trees, vineyards, and wells all freely given to them, but they never got that vision in their hearts and never dreamed it or believed it. Consequently they never had it, though they could have.
Each time a new challenge came up, they gave no thought to My miracles, no thought to My wonders that I promised them to continue even after parting the Red Sea, instead they responded as if I had never done anything for them. But I wanted to do wonders beyond numbers for them. But they would not let Me.
They failed to understand My Word and My power. So did the Pharisees of Jesus’ days among you as physically present on the earth.
You must renew your mind and begin dreaming with Me and then write the vision down and run with it, and have others read it too and run with you to the sweet odor of My anointing, the oil of joy. Take off the limits and go for the gold. The hundredfold for the Kingdom.
Use your imagination to get Kingdom results upon the earth. Find the Word, see it, say it, plan with Me and write the vision down. That is the way David got the plans for the temple Solomon then built according to the divine plan. He read the vision and ran with it. “All this,” said David, “the LORD made me understand in writing by His hand upon me, all the details of this pattern.” 1 Chronicles 28:19. And if you recall, Moses got the detailed plans for the tabernacle that the Israelites redeemed out of Egypt built in the wilderness.
“It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on My bondslaves, both men and women, I will in those days pour forth of My Spirit and they shall prophesy.” Joel 2:28-29; Acts 2:17-18.
But why did the redeemed children of Israel never enter the promised land and receive the abundance therein though I had given them the plan of how to do this. They could not see themselves doing the plan, they saw themselves as incapable of it. The called themselves “grasshoppers.” They limited themselves by their wrong thinking and refused to go forward to live a life of abundance beyond all they could ask or imagine.
Instead they kept questioning My love for them and saying My Word had deceived them to bring them into the land to harm them, and subject them to an enemy too strong for them. They said they were as grasshoppers before giants.
“Yes, again and again they tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel.” Psalm 78:41.
An unbelieving coward limits what I can do. But with Me they were more than conquerors and the enemy feared them. They preferred to stay in the safety of the barren desert and let Me feed them everyday.
A goldfish will grow if you don’t put it in a bowl. But even if they are in a bowl for many years, when they are taken out of the bowl and put in the river they grow. Goldfish are limited to their environment. If you put them in a small fishbowl, they will never grow beyond fitting into that bowl, even if they live many years. But if you put them back in their natural habitat in which I placed them, which is flowing rivers, they will begin to grow and grow until they are large fish—some five pounds, some nine pounds and from five to twenty-four inches long. And they can swim 143 miles in a year. Furthermore, goldfish will eat anything and everything and they are limited by the size of the container they are placed in. Let them out of the container and they grow.
Why am I telling you about goldfish? For the same reason Jesus told about lilies, birds, planting seeds, harvests, and houses built on sand and houses built on rocks. He was teaching you Kingdom principles, which are supernatural, from the things that parallel them in the natural. That was the reason I told Abraham to look up at the stars—to give him a big picture of his descendants so he stopped limiting My Word by his own body and past history.
If you do not already see the point I am making with the goldfish, people are like that as well. They limit their lives by their thinking. They will eat any doctrine, news, or philosophy that is popular or that they hear enough times. If they believe they cannot invent or create anything, they never will. If they think they will never make any wealth from doing a business of their own and through the works of their hands, they never will. If they think I am pleased with being poor and not developing a talent or going into the mainstream of the world to show My glory and kingdom, they will stay in a bowl all their life.
And this is especially true of children, which all of you once were, they are limited in their thinking and dreams for life by what they are fed at school, home and from their peers. And these people are often bereft of any anointed teaching of My Word, if they even know My Word at all. So they are fed godless philosophies, immoral sexual conduct, gender confusion, and nothing about My Word and are kept in a bowl, a very small, selfish, and sinful one, all their lives.
People, like the Israelites in the wilderness, grieve Me by limiting Me. I want to take you to your promised land flowing with milk and honey where you bear MUCH fruit and so prove yourselves to be My disciples. I give you the power to make wealth to confirm My covenant with you. I want you to live out the hundredfold harvest in your life and teach others the same.
Expand your vision. Instead of thinking thoughts of hate and of committing impure acts or getting even with people, set your mind above where Christ is seated at My right hand where I have seated you with Him in the Spirit. Under the Old Covenant I called those who could see things in the Spirit by walking closely with Me “Seers.” Samuel was one of these. How did he become like that? He told Me to speak as he was listening, willing to do what I told him. You have not finished prayer until you have listened. I revealed Myself to Samuel by My Word. 1 Samuel 3:21. And that is the way I reveal Myself to you as well. “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.” John 14:21.
I can pull you out of the stagnate waters of the bowl (the pit) and put you in the flowing river of life. I pull you out of the mud of the swamp, and place your feet on a height. I can put you in a wide and open space where you can expand as I train your hands for battle and your fingers for the war, so that you begin to know that with Me you can leap over a wall and take down an entire army single-handed. Many or few makes no difference to Me to accomplish great things.
How can you outgrow and burst the bowl so you are in the flowing river of life? First you must be born again from above or you won’t be able to see the Kingdom or enter it. And you are born again by receiving the Lord Jesus by faith, faith that I raised Him from death and the grave with all your sins punished and gone forever, and faith expressed by confessing Him as Lord with your mouth. Again, the mouth and heart connection.
And Jesus is My Word, so you are born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through My living and enduring Word. 1 Peter 1:23-25. And once you are born again you are clothed in Jesus and you receive My righteousness as your own. You are now covered in the gold of My righteousness, a shadow of which were the golden boards on silver pedestals around the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. The wood of the boards represent man (he is like a tree planted near running waters), the gold covering encasing the boards is My righteousness, and the silver pedestals on which the boards stood upright before Me represented your redemption, for silver was the metal by which under the Old Covenant the people were redeemed. You are standing on redemption ground.
And a goldfish is covered in gold. Scales of gold, like the breastplate of righteousness, but you can limit its growth in a bowl. You can be born again and righteous but if you don’t renew your mind in My Word you will be just as limited as you were before being saved.
How to you grow then? “Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the Word, so that by it you may grow thereby in respect to salvation.” 1 Peter 2:1-2. And the word used for “salvation” there in its original Greek is the word “sótéria (σωτηρία)” which means welfare, prosperity, deliverance, preservation, salvation, and safety. The abundant life of no limits.
And when you receive and hear and hear the Word faith comes. Romans 10:17. And as faith comes it fills your heart and you speak it out with your mouth, which is the spirit of faith. 2 Corinthians 4:17. And that Word begins to grow bigger and bigger as you ponder it, envision the promises in your life, and dare to believe that all I promised I want you to have. Your mind is being renewed to a new level, above and not beneath, the head and not the tail, blessed and not cursed, overflowing with goodness and surrounded with My favor as a shield. And love for Me grows and then it pours out to others.
“Therefore, putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the Word implanted, which is able to save your souls. But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.” James 1:21-22.
And Jesus told you that when you receive the seed of My Word into your open and receptive heart, it will plant as in good soil and as you guard your heart and let it grow by watering it with more Word as you speak it and dream it, it will produce a harvest of thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. How? By the plans I give you. It is I who gives you the power to make wealth to confirm My Covenant and teach you to profit and the way you should go. There are no limits. Nothing is impossible for Me, I created the entire universe and more and sustain it all. And all things are possible to those who believe that.
Your good Shepherd Jesus leads you out and leads you in—out of the fishbowl into the promised land of green pastures and rivers of the water of life. And He baptizes you in the Holy Spirit and fire, which lights your lamp and rescues from darkness into My marvelous Light. And what do you do there? Sing praise of the excellencies of My glory! And expanse bigger than you can see. “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21. Don’t stop there, come to Me and let Me show you what you have not been able to see.
I love you. To do My Will for your life you must be willing to come out of the bowl. You need to get your light out from under the bushel basket, not to put it under the bed, but to put it on the lampstand and shine out to the world. And you will find, when you shine with My light divine, as a branch on My vine, that you are the light that your world is waiting for.