Dying to Glory

INSIDE THIS ARTICLE: God will bring success to our lives because He has promised it. But He will not use His life to build pride and lustful ambition in our hearts. The Spirit will have to prove us, over and over again, to get us to a point of God's trust in our kingdom stewardship.

This realm of the apostolic/prophetic dimension will reestablish the character of Christ in the earth. It will reactivate His inward death to self and success -- His death to personal glory and a soul that aches for fame and recognition.

Death to glory is a much harder death to die than "sinful habits" per se. I'm not putting sin in a category, but success is something that we all want and desire. We do not minister to be a failure or a stumblingblock. But Christ had to master success. He had to master being recognized.

To some of us, recognition vindicates what others have misunderstood about us in some form or fashion. It says that we have succeeded. It answers years of pain and toil in being "put behind" by others. It gives us that good feeling to know that the "words" we taught that brought personal persecution, was confirmed by a "recognized" minister of the gospel.

How many of us have ever told a person (or believer), "Do not tell anyone that I ministered to you?" "Do not tell anyone that I am the one who prophesied that word to you." Has anyone of us ever backed away from a sure victory or area of recognition? That is one the hardest things to do, believe me!

Being like Christ is more than dealing with lustful thinking and immoral habits. It's learning to live with the power of success and effectiveness. It's learning to truly give God His due for the things He has freely given to us.

We may say it, but do we truly do it? If we did, it will end a lot of spiritual competition and inward jealousy. It will eliminate the "I did it first" spirit and cause us to truly appreciate others and embrace the diversity of ministries, gifts, and anointings.

We have all been put down. We have all been misunderstood. We do not want to repeat that process again because there is "no hurt like a church hurt."

There is no greater pain than to sincerely desire to bless people and it backfires on you. To love people that will not love you back. To be rejected by a word you give, but yet see them receive the same word from someone else.

It hurts bad. Real bad. (Sounds like I may have gone through this too, huh?)

But this is the season and time where the Spirit of God will allow those things to happen to cause us to die to glory. He will cause us to die to the thing we feel we need to be truly accepted and embraced, because we are tired of being alone in this thing! We are tired because it has been so long...since we had someone who truly understands.

God will use that time of loneliness to cause us to die to glory. It's time to finally love the kingdom of God and not the kingdom of our works and toil. We have built inward kingdoms with God's material. We have used His word to build an inward desire of personal acceptance.

God is breaking that house down. To those of us who are going through this season of "wild changes" and "crazy ministry," He is breaking our houses down. We are learning to die to glory. We have to learn if we are going to truly live out the kingdom experience. He is putting us to inner shame as we breaks off the "stuff" we have magnified for so long.

We are going to make it, however. We will achieve the destiny of our lives that He has promised. But He is going to make sure that we love like Christ and understand like Christ before we handle His Mantle.

Our shoulders must be realigned to wear the burden of Christ. We will have to really desire for God to find us still hidden, do a work through us, and hide us again. Can we handle God using an opportunity that can bring us from the depths of obscurity, and "forgetting about us," like the worker did with Joseph in prison? Whew!

In order for the miraculous to sweep across America as it did in Christ's day, we will have to die to glory. God will use living, "dead" men to raise dead men. He will use those who have died to glory to raise others to glory.

Men who have not mastered glory get easily offended at others. We get "this stinging bitterness" inside of us when we have not died to glory. We will only have menial success in life and ministry with this hindering spirit still raging on the inside.

It will cause a jealousy to build on the inside of you. It will make you feel good when others "ministry does not work." It will make you feel that "I am the one who can do this." "I am the one"! "I am the one"!

Dying to glory is the hardest death to die. Glory is what will cause all of this mess to make sense! All we want is someone to notice, right?

Dying to glory. The hardest death to die....

Undrai Fizer

www.exploringthevision.org