Just prior to a recent mission trip, I got a picture in prayer.  I saw that the Church is hunkered down because she perceives the constant threat she is living beside, cannot be moved.  There is almost a siege mentality that has overtaken us, and we tend to live with an inward focus—-hoping that the evil one will not attack us today, or our children, or our children’s children. A good picture in the natural for this would be the way that North Korea and South Korea manage day to day life in their part of the world.

What I saw that has significance for the forward movement of the Kingdom of God is this:  the sentries that guard the border between the two kingdoms are these–FEAR and ANXIETY.  They effect our thinking in such a way as to say–TURN BACK–you can’t move any further than this.  The reason why we have so little confidence in moving forward is that many of us live with fear and anxiety as the internal ‘norm’.  We have both fear and anxiety stationed to guard our own hearts from further injury, rather than understanding how the Lord would heal us and fill us instead with His Presence and peace.

We must learn from the story of Israel and the twelve spies—-for fear and anxiety are ancient foes.

“But the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are too strong for us.” So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size.  There also we saw the Nephilim ( the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.”      Numbers 13:31-33