Hey guys, welcome to session number six, School of the Spirit.
This session is called Stewarding the Seed and Growing in the Gifts.
And this is going to be a very practical session.
This is going to be a session that is geared around giving you some practices and things
you can do.
If you really do actually want to grow in the Spirit and grow in the Gifts of the Spirit.
I mentioned that the Gifts of the Spirit are kind of like musical instruments.
You have been given all of them, but you need to learn how to play them.
If you really want to learn how to play them, you know, my daughter is right now learning
to play the guitar.
All my daughters are actually learning how to play the guitar.
And I said to them, well, you know, if you don't practice, you're not going to learn.
You've got to practice.
If you want to become good at it, you want to be able to enjoy playing it, then you've
got to practice.
You've got to practice your chords, your scales, all that stuff.
So this is going to be a very practical session.
I'm going to give you some tips and tools and things that will help you to steward the
seed and grow in the Gifts.
The underlying kind of principle for this session is really the same as the last session,
and that is what you focus on, you agree with, what you agree with, you empower, and what
you empower will manifest in your life.
You don't get to choose what happens externally in your world, but you do get to choose what
world you steward internally in your heart.
And the world that you steward and that you create internally today will be the world
that frames what your life looks like tomorrow.
Whatever your life looks like today is a result of the world you stewarded internally yesterday.
And so what you focus on, you agree with, what you agree with, you empower, what you
empower manifests in your life.
So it's super important to be intentional about what kind of world you steward internally.
And the kind of world you steward internally is not determined by whatever disastrous or
undisastrous things are happening around you, but it's really determined by your powerful
choice in choosing what kind of things you want to spend time thinking on.
And if David, when this whole entire country that he was meant to be leader of started
to turn against him and wanted to kill him, and even in that moment he was able to strengthen
himself in the Lord, then you can do it too.
And so we're going to get into this session and that is going to be super cool.
Just to let you know, I'll also post, sorry I forgot to put it in the description, it's
in the description on session five if you want to just jump on there, but there'll be
a link for the Online School of Sonship, which is the platform that will be hosting
the three-week activation after this.
So if you want to be part of that, then check that out.
And again, love your comments, so keep the comments coming.
I did look back on some of the comments from the last section.
Thank you guys for being patient with me when I wasn't seeing your comments.
Good to have you back for session six and session seven we're going to do shortly after
this session, and that is all around the Still Small Voice of God.
I'm going to share a story about an angelic encounter that I had and how that changed
my life.
So that's going to be cool.
Awesome.
All right.
So stewarding the seed and growing in the gifts.
We are going to begin with this, Father, bless this time.
Lord, I just declare over every person tuned in right now.
So much blessing over them, God.
I pray that they would feel you, God, around them, that they would feel your presence just
around them, around their hearts, around their minds, around their physical beings as they
as they are tuned into this.
And I just want to say also, thank you guys for tuning in.
So it's such an honor to be given the space to speak into parts of your lives.
So thank you, Michelle.
If we are already in the Online School of Sonship, do we need to sign up?
No.
If you're already in the Online School of Sonship, then this is all included.
So worry not.
You're in there.
All you need to do is keep an eye on what's going on in there and you'll see me pop up
at some point after this and we'll begin our three-week little journey.
It's going to be fun.
We're going to begin this session, we're going to begin this session in a scripture.
I love the scriptures.
We're in Matthew 13 right now, and we're going to Matthew 13 and verse 31.
The whole of Matthew 13 is actually really, really good, so I recommend reading the whole
thing.
But Matthew 13, verse 31, Jesus adds in a parable, he says, another parable he put forth
to them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and
sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all the seeds.
But when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds
of the air come and nest in its branches.
Selah.
And there's a few points on the mustard seed.
First of all, the mustard seed was very small.
The mustard seed, a mustard seed was one of the smallest seeds you could get, and it
was so small that it would fit into all sorts of different cracks and crevices, and it was
actually a disruptive plant eventually, because especially in Jerusalem and some of the biggest
centers, it would fall in the gaps between the bricks, between the stones, and it would
actually, the mustard seeds would actually start, would actually start to disintegrate
the walls as they grew, and it was actually, the mustard seed tree, the mustard trees were
actually breaking down the city.
So not only are they small, but they ended up in all sorts of strange, interesting, peculiar
places, and they grew anywhere.
And that's the thing about the kingdom.
The kingdom is like a seed, and the things of the kingdom are like seeds, and they really
grow anywhere.
They're very robust, the kingdom is very robust, the kingdom is very resilient, and the kingdom
is a kingdom that really fits into all the cracks and crevices of society.
I'm just going to turn this light off, because it's flashing, hang on, there we go, off.
All the cracks and crevices of your life and of society.
And once, sorry, losing my train of thought, I'm going to have a drink of tea.
The mustard seed is a small seed, but a very, very big tree.
And it's interesting that it draws that distinction, that it's the smallest of the seeds, but the
biggest of the herbs, and the birds of the air make their home in its leaves and its
branches.
When it talks about the birds of the air, it's most often when Jesus is talking about
that, he's referring to the angelic and to the spiritual realm.
And when the tree grows, it actually hosts a spiritual atmosphere and a spiritual environment
where heaven can find its home on earth, as it were.
And so, the mustard seed is a really cool and important illustration that Jesus refers
to and likens the kingdom to.
But what's even beneath that, and what's underlying that, and what is possibly even more relevant
is this, is that the kingdom comes like a seed.
In fact, you look at creation, you look at the way God seems to do things, and it's not
just biblical, it's also, you see it in creation.
You see it as one of the trademark ways of God, is that it seems like, and it's at least
biblical that this is what it's like, but it also, when you look at life, it does seem
like this is the way God does things.
Is that things begin small, and they become big if they're stewarded and looked after properly.
You look at anything from a newborn baby, to a newborn animal, to a newborn plant, to
a newborn, everything starts small and gets bigger.
Everything has a beginning point and grows from there.
God doesn't make things fully grown.
He makes everything infant first, baby first, and then it has a life process that it goes
through where it comes to maturity.
That's the way that God does things, and you could take that thought and you could really
expand that thought in a lot of different areas, and it would be a fascinating thing
to explore.
And the kingdom of God is like that too.
It's interesting that at creation, God created a garden called Eden.
He put man in the garden, and that is where God chose to walk with man, in the garden,
tending the trees and helping man garden the garden.
In effect, in the beginning, the first manifestation of God to man, or one of them at least, was
that God...
manifested himself to man as a fellow gardener. Jesus dies on the cross, he
spends three days murdering death, he comes back to life again, and Mary meets
him, and Mary's first revelation of Jesus in his resurrected form is, she
thinks that Jesus is a gardener. His first appearance after raising from
the dead is as a gardener as well. I don't think that was a
mistake, I think it's an interesting thing. I think that at his heart, God is a
gardener, and there is a revelation in the way things organically happen in
creation that is true of how the kingdom is in our lives. That when we receive
something, you know, we receive the promise, and the promise is kind of like
the writing on the back of the seed packet. It shows you what it will be when
it's looked after, but it doesn't come like that. Within every seed, entire
forests exist, but when the seed is still the seed, you can't access the
forest. That can only be accessed when the seed has been stewarded well and
looked after well. And the same is true with our lives, and the same is true with
what God does in our lives, is that everything in our lives and everything
God begins, needs our partnership and our collaboration to actually bring that
thing and steward that thing into its maturity and into the promises that
surround the thing that God has begun in us. And you can take that principle and
you can apply that to many different areas of your life, and just about every
single thing that God has started in your life, or literally every single
thing that God has started in your life.
Almost everything that we're talking about and everything in the kingdom has
something to do with stewardship. And so we're going to talk about that. I want to
just give you some practicals. Now we could do a whole session on
the dynamics of stewardship. We could do a whole session on what Jesus has to say
about stewardship, but I would just encourage you to actually do that in
your own time. What I want to do for the rest of this session is I just want to
give you three things that you could do. I want to make this session really
practical so you can actually take something away and apply it to your life.
I know that lots of people do courses like this and do listen to things like
this. And a lot of people, because we're in an information age, they actually
don't take it and apply it. A lot of people just are hearers only and not
doers. And my prayer is that people in this group would be doers as well and
would actually take some of the stuff and put action to it. And I want
to spend some time just speaking into some ways that you can put action to
your stewardship of the Spirit, your stewardship of spiritual gifts, and your
stewardship of what God is doing in your life. The first thing really to ask in
light of that is, and this is a question you can ask God in prayer, you could ask
him right now, is this. God, in my life what are you putting grace on right now?
Now you know what the grace is on because you'll feel it. It'll probably be
the first thing that comes to your mind in terms of the first godly thing that
comes to your mind. When there's grace on something, there's a hunger for it. If you
have a hunger for something in your heart, you can take it as evidence that
there's grace available for you to bring you into the fulfillment of the thing
that you're hungry for if it's a godly hunger. And so I just want to ask you
that question again, maybe rephrase in a different way. What sort of hunger is God
stirring in you right now? Maybe it's the prophetic. Maybe I really want to
see the word of knowledge. Or maybe it's I just want to hear your voice God
because I want to know you deeper. Or maybe it's for the miraculous and the
supernatural. Maybe it's for healing. Maybe it's I want to start seeing angels.
Whatever it is, it might be a little bit broader, it might be very
very specific, but take note of the actual thing that is a hunger that
is stirring in your heart right now and take that hunger as
evidence that that is a sign to you that there's grace available for that very
thing that you're hungry for. Okay, so that's the first thing. And what I would
do right now is I would actually write that down. Write that down somewhere. Put
that somewhere in front of you right now so that you can clearly define. It
might be even more than one thing, but you could clearly define one or a few
things that you know God is stirring in your heart right now. I could in a moment
at the point in the session I'm going to share some of the things that God is
stirring in my heart right now. And I'm gonna share with you some of the
ways that I am stewarding and what I'm doing about that. So do that now.
And that's cool and then
I'm going to share just three ways that you can steward the seed and grow the gift.
That you can step towards the fulfillment of the hunger.
The first thing I want to say is, the first thing is feed the seed.
If you want the seed to grow, feed the seed.
We're going to talk about feeding the seed, we're going to talk about fertilizing the
seed and we're going to talk about exposing the seed or warming the seed and eventually
exposing it to the light.
Those three things.
The first thing is feeding the seed.
Because the seed is internal, because when God puts something in you, He puts the seed
in you, in your heart.
That's where the seed lands, in your heart.
Because the seed is in the garden of your heart, you need to get the food in there somehow.
So what you need to do to feed the seed is eat the food that the seed is hungry for.
Eat the sort of food that is going to encourage the growth and fulfillment of the seed or
the promise or the thing that you're hungry for on the inside.
Now in terms of healing, I'll just let you know, for me, I remember going through a time
and I'm still obviously hungry for the miraculous, but I remember going through a time where
I was just uncomfortably hungry for miracles to happen in my life.
This was a time where I hadn't really seen much happen at all and I just was longing
I realized in hindsight especially that God had put that hunger in there because He wanted
me and was inviting me to step into the thing I was hungry for.
That the hunger was actually a divine invitation into the fulfillment of the thing I was hungry
for and that's what hunger from God is in effect.
It's not there to tease you, it's an invitation from God.
What I began to do is I began to listen to people who I knew were seeing lots of miracles
and back in those days it was tapes, you know, like cassette tapes.
I would wrangle as many different cassette tapes as I could of people who had stories
of the miraculous.
I remember listening to David Hogan was one of them, I'd listen to Heidi Baker.
This was even before Bill Johnson days, but I'd listen to also Robert Szilard and the
God's Generals.
I'd listen to that, but I would listen to, I would find people who were seeing the miraculous.
Bill Johnson says this, follow signs and wonders until signs and wonders begin to follow you.
Follow the miraculous until the miraculous follows you.
I think there's a real wisdom in that saying and so that's really what I began to do is
I began to search out people and examples that were on earth now or that had been on
earth.
I'd read the Gospels, I'd read the book of Acts again and again and again and again.
I'd just read the miracle stories and I would feed on the miracle stories and every time
I read a story and sometimes for the 50th, 60th time reading the story, the seed in my
heart for the miraculous was being fed.
One of my favorite books to read at that time, and I've read it probably six times cover
to cover, was the big blue Robert Szilard book on the sermons of John G. Lake.
And if you're hungry for the miraculous, the complete teachings of John G. Lake, I just
want to thoroughly recommend that book.
That book completely changed my life.
Other than Jesus, John G. Lake is one of my greatest heroes.
I put him next to the Apostle Paul, he's just been so, so inspirational.
I feel like I've actually received so much grace and breakthrough from his life.
And so I want to say find resources, find information, surround yourself, put things
on your wall, quotes on your wall, surround yourself with podcasts, with YouTube clips.
I remember watching TB Joshua YouTube clips back in those days of tumors popping out of
people's bodies and just thinking, oh, I need to see that.
And it's like, it reminds me kind of in a way of, we used to do this every now and again
on a hot summer's day while we're driving to a pool or driving to the beach, we would
be desperate for a swim because it was so hot.
And what we'd do is we'd wind the windows up and we would turn the heater on full bore
in the car.
And we would just allow ourselves to get uncomfortably hot so that when we got to the beach, we
just opened the door and ran into the water.
And I feel like that's what it's kind of like.
It's like winding the windows up and turning the heater on, become uncomfortably, eat things,
digest it.
information, digest testimony, digest, expose yourself to the thing that you're
hungry for, to the point that it makes you extremely uncomfortable, you know,
they do say, and now I can't give you first-hand experience here, I'm not
speaking from first-hand experience, but my wife at least told me that the most
uncomfortable part of her pregnancy, on all three pregnancies, was the day just
before she gave birth, that the pregnancy got more and more uncomfortable as it
got to the day where the promise was going to be delivered, and that's true in
God as well, is that the more you look after the pregnancy, the closer you get
to the day where the baby's going to be born, and so that's cool. At the moment,
just to let you know where I'm at now, I really feel God is stirring me in the
realm of prayer, and so I'm eating and digesting books and podcasts and talking
to people, having coffee with people, and just talking to people about the realm
of prayer and different aspects of prayer, and so I just wanted to show you,
this is what I'm, this is my current little beside-my-bed books, book
thing. I've got my, one of my really good friends, Straun Coleman, if you don't
know Straun, there is his name, one of my favorite humans on the planet, and this
is his book, it's a book of prayers, this is volume two, this is volume one as
well, this is a really good book. One of my, someone who's been a father in my life
and a mentor to me, Kristen Williams, this is written by his spiritual dad, one of
his spiritual dads, Peter Robertson, The Abbott Shoes, about his time living in a
monastery in New Zealand, it's a fascinating read, it's really, I'm really
enjoying this actually, and then this is, I've read this a number of times already,
this is one of my favorite books by Thomas Merton, New Seeds of
Contemplation, it's really on the contemplative life, and this has inspired
me in the realm of prayer deeply, a really, really, really, really good book,
it's one of those ones that you just keep reading again and again, it's a
really good one. So that's some of the ways that I'm feeding my seed right
now. Maybe, ask the Lord just as I'm going through this teaching, the rest of this
teaching, what some ways, or maybe some things that you could do to either find
some food for the seed, or maybe you've got some food in your house already, you
already know your access to some food, maybe it's simply doing this
course, maybe it's some of the stories that I've been sharing for you, but,
and why don't you drop some of those on the comments, some good
resources that you're enjoying right now, or some things that you're
feeding on right now, that are feeding the seed of God in you.
Michelle, thanks for that, yeah, what I'm going to do, I'll just hold them up
against the camera, just in case I forget, okay, so there's the New Seeds of
Contemplation by Thomas Merton, I'll try and put them up as well, but just the
Abbott Shoes by Peter Robertson, and just look up Strawn Coleman, he also runs a
ministry called Commoners Communion, so all those prayers are on his Instagram
account too, so Commoners Communion, and you'll enjoy that, you'll thank me for
that afterwards. So feed the seed, the next one is fertilize the seed, and what
I mean by fertilize the seed, is dream with God. I remember reading a John G
Lake sermon, and in the sermon he talked about a tumor that he was standing on
stage, a person came up with a basketball, no, was it a bus? A large, let's just say
large tumor in his side, and he prayed for her, and the tumor, a lightning flash
went through his hand, exploded the tumor out of her body, it landed on the stage,
and it started wriggling around on the stage, and then it died, and I read that
testimony, I thought, God, I want to see tumors disappear, but even more than that
God, I want them to explode out of people's bodies, oh my gosh, that would be
so cool, and I just caught this hunger to see that specific thing happen in my
life, and so I would spend time just dreaming, God, thank you that your
power's in me, and around me, and flowing through me, God, what is it like when
tumors disappear, when tumors explode out of people's bodies, and I would imagine,
God, I'm in a village right now, and a person's coming next to me,
and I can see they've got a tumor, I say, excuse me, do you have a tumor? They say
to me, yes I do, can I pray for you?
Okay, I'm praying, I'm feeling your power God.
And boom!
And you know, your imagination,
you get to decide what happens in your imagination.
You get to go on a journey with God in your own imagination.
I would just imagine what it's like
and I would dream with the Holy Spirit
about what it would be like.
What would their face look like?
What is it like when the tumor explodes?
And I would just dream and dream and dream
and meditate and meditate on,
on and fertilize that seed, that promise
and that thing that God put a hunger in me for
to see tumors explode out of people's bodies.
And I remember the day where I was in India
and I saw that very thing happen.
And a long story short,
I was in a meeting mainly with non-Christian people
and I prayed just the Father's love over someone actually.
They had a tumor in their throat and it went,
and she went, and it exploded out of her throat.
It was like the size of a golf ball
and it flew like a big bright green projectile vomit tumor
out of her throat, landed in her handbag.
I dodged out the way of it.
And she testified straight after that,
that she'd had this tumor for 60 years
that had been growing in her throat.
She was at the point of being unable to talk
and unable to eat properly.
And it was causing a big problem.
And she's shouting.
She's like got her voice back, completely healed.
And I remember just thinking, God, thank you so much.
I feel like I saw this a thousand times before I saw this.
I feel like I experienced this a thousand times
before I actually experienced it,
because I experienced it internally
before I experienced it externally.
And it's a really awesome thing to be a person
that learns how to dream with God
about the things that you're hungry for.
I remember doing this with some interns a while back
and I was teaching them about,
I sometimes call this and I do sessions on this
and we'll probably do some of the stuff
in the three week activation.
But we'll do, I call this building in the spirit.
And I remember doing, picking a truth from God.
And the truth was that God never leaves us nor forsakes us
and that he's with us everywhere we go.
And so we closed our eyes and I said,
Holy Spirit, we give you our imagination.
And they all repeated after me,
Holy Spirit, we give you our imagination.
And I said, Holy Spirit, what does it look like
and what does it feel like
when our lives are fully engaged with the truth
that you're with us and you never leave us nor forsake us?
And we just started to describe what we were seeing
and what we're feeling.
And one of the students said,
I see myself walking down the road after this internship.
I'm walking home down the pathway
and I'm filled with such joy and God is all around me
and I'm just feeling alive and God,
I'm feeling almost tipsy and drunk in the spirit
of just joys around me.
And then he started to say,
I'm walking past, I'm walking over the road,
there's an intersection across the road,
there's a green power box.
And I see a lady standing by the green power box,
she's got crutches and it's her birthday.
And I walk up to her and say,
excuse me, can we pray for you?
She says, yes.
And she's broken her ankle.
We pray for her.
She throws her crutches away.
She gets completely healed.
Oh my gosh.
And he's just going through this dream.
He's dreaming with God.
And so the next day we get to class
and these students had come up and they're like,
man, you wouldn't believe what happened.
I said, what happened?
They said, I started walking home.
I started to feel that presence
as I was walking down the path,
the same as what we were building the spirit around.
I got to the intersection and I looked,
there was a green box there, power box.
And there was a lady, a girl there,
the same one I saw when we were meditating.
And she had the crutches and she had the cast on her leg
and she had broken her ankle.
It was her birthday.
And we asked if we could pray for it.
And literally exactly as what happened in the dream,
prayed for it.
And they had never seen a miracle before, guys.
This is their first miracle.
And she threw the crutches away
and she got completely healed.
And then the story went on.
We went to the library
and a guy walked out of the library with crutches
and he'd also broken his ankle.
And he walked out with his crutches over his shoulder
because we prayed for him too.
And he got healed.
And whoa!
And so it's just a real good idea
to be a person that learns to build in the spirit.
If you want to supercharge,
you know, I've got some plants in my garden
that are exposed to the sun and that I water.
But I know that if I fertilize those plants,
they are going to grow way faster
than if I don't fertilize them.
So if you want to supercharge and expediate
and speed up the process of the seed of God
growing in your life,
then I suggest dreaming with God
and building in the spirit.
And again, we're going to do some more around that
in the three-week activation.
The last thing I want to say after feeding the seed, fertilizing the seed, is warm the seed and expose the seedling to the light.
And what I simply, what I simply mean, what I simply mean by that is this. Use it. Go after it.
Like if your dream is to see tumors disappear, hunt down people that have tumors and keep on praying for them until you see them disappear.
Don't give up after the first one if it doesn't happen. Go after it. If your heart is, I'm so hungry for prophecy, find a human somewhere.
You don't even need to leave your house. You can do it on Facebook. You can do it on Messenger.
You can just get a word of knowledge for a name and search them on Facebook and give them a Facebook prophecy.
But just find people to prophesy. Find people to practice on and be open to their feedback. Be open to learning from them.
Be open to how they experience you and obviously there's some, you know, things like remember love, remember kindness, remember encouragement, all that stuff.
Don't go around telling people that they're going to, you know, the judgment of God's on them and they're going to be cursed for the rest of their life or anything like that.
Obviously, but that's a lesson for another day maybe. But remember love and go after using the things that you're wanting to see grow in your life.
If you're going through a hard time in your marriage and you're like, man, the thing that I'm really hungry for is health in my marriage, then go after that.
What can you do to just really be a blessing to your spouse right now? Maybe do the dishes. Maybe organize a date night. But go after that. Use it.
Expose that seed. Expose that plant to the light. Let it see the light of day. In other words, manifest it. Get it out there.
And the more you get it out there, the faster it will grow. The more you dream into it, the faster it will grow.
The more food you feed it, the faster it will grow. The more you do these three things, the faster the kingdom will grow in your life.
So I want to encourage you, if you're hungry to see the gifts of the Spirit, I know many of you are doing this course because you want to see the gifts of the Spirit grow in your life.
If you're hungry for the gifts of the Spirit to grow in your life, I want to really encourage you, ask the Lord for ways that you can use the gifts.
Ask the Lord for ways that you can use the gifts.
What I'm going to ask you to do now is I'm going to ask you just to take those three things that I've mentioned, feeding the seed, fertilizing the seed, and exposing the seed to warmth and light.
Three different approaches that you can take when it comes to stewarding what God has begun in your life and the seeds that God has planted in your life.
Once you've defined the thing that there's grace for or the things that there is a hunger in your heart for, then I just want you to, for the next 10 minutes, just spend some time with God.
For the next 10 minutes, make a little game plan up of some of the things that you are deciding to do in terms of maybe a book you're going to read, maybe some people you're going to pray for,
maybe a time you're going to go and find some people to pray for, or some time you're going to pray and dream of God.
Make a little game plan up, a stewardship game plan for how you're going to steward the thing that God's put on your heart.
And I just encourage you to do that now before we get into the next session.
Strike while the iron's hot, as they say.
And what I'd love for you to consider doing is consider dropping that strategy on the comments of this feed so that, you know, for two reasons.
One, that we can learn from some of the things that you're going after and that might help other people in the group.
And secondly, it's kind of a way of being a little bit accountable too.
Not that anyone's necessarily going to keep you directly accountable, but you've put it out there.
And that can be both a scary but also a really helpful thing to do.
So consider doing that. Consider putting it on the comments when you've done that.
Of course, I'm going to finish this now, and so you won't be able to put it on the comments straight away.
But this session will be uploaded onto the Raising Royalty site real soon.
And when it's on, then go back and put it on at that point.
All right. Awesome, guys. Well, bless you and bless you in the stewardship of what God is doing in your life.
And we'll see you for session 7 in 10 minutes.
10 minutes. See you soon.