Lo the Winter is Past

Lo the Winter is Past

Wherever there is seed time and harvest there is always the season of the quiet. There is always the season of the rest. The incubation of going into the earth and dying to self. "For lo the winter is past and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in the land" Song of Solomon 2:11. The voice of the turtle dove is the voice of the prophet. And in the times and the seasons when God is beginning to bring forth a new thing, when the voice of the prophet rises up and you hear the voice of the prophet you will know that God is moving again in your life in a different way. Until we are in heaven where there is no night, no cold, no rain-there will always be seasons because that is the principle God has put in place for us in the natural seed time and harvest, winter, spring, summer, and fall. Until we are in heaven, we will go through seasons: the dry seasons and the rainy seasons and the hot seasons and the seasons when things fall away from us and we wonder where they are going and we think that there will never be new life again. But the life is in the seed and the seed is in the ground and the promise of the seed is in tomorrow.

The enemy of tomorrow, the enemy of the future is yesterday. The enemy of your destiny is where you have been. Because your destiny is where you are going and everything that is not God wants to tie you to your past and sit you down where you are and say that this is all there is ever going to be and things are never going to change. Because we a people of sight, we want to only believe what we can see. But the Bible says that faith is the expression of things not seen. Faith is the understanding that there are things that we don't see that are in motion. And in each of our lives there are things that are hidden in us that have not found their expression in the natural yet. There are seeds that have been planted in us from before the foundation of the world, that God wants to bring forth out of each of us. But as long as we stay where we are with what we have with the familiar and the comfortable. and the "this is the way it should have been" and "this is the way I expected", we are tied by our expectations of perfection and success to the place where we think it should be without being released into the river of God. We want to be released into the flow of the supernatural river of God. We want to be released into what God has for us and not what we expected God to have for us.

When the brothers went down into Egypt and stood in the courts of Joseph and everything that they needed was there, in front of them their provision, their salvation, their posterity, it was all there, but they did not recognize Joseph because he did not look like who they thought he would look like. They were tied to the past where the last place that they saw Joseph was the slave caravan. So in our lives we have to loose ourselves from the slave caravan of our past.

Not like those on the road to Emmaeus that walked with our precious Savior. They did not recognize their precious Savior Himself. He was what their hearts were talking about but consumed by sadness from the past they could not go forward into the joy of the future. Very often when the Lord would send an answer it did not look like the answer that the people wanted to look like. Saul the King not David the Shepherd boy. Joseph in the courts of Pharaoh not Joseph in the bottom of the well. It just doesn't look like what we think it is going to look like sometimes and we have to be able to give up our own natural expectation of success in order to find and loose the destiny of God in our lives. I believe that there are some reading this blog that are in the season of the winter, in the season of the quiet where everything feels like it is dead. But underneath the ground in the heart of your spirit there is a stirring of life and the word of the Lord for you is "Lo the winter is past and the sound of the turtle dove is heard in the land"

For lo the winter is past is from the Song of Solomon. It refers to the Bridegroom coming and when the Bridegroom comes He brings gifts. The key to the winter is past is to fall in love with our Bridegroom Jesus.

And so the Lord says to release the anointing to bring forth from barrenness. To release the anointing of spring, of life, to release the Hannah anointing, to open to life the place where life should grow. The Lord says that there will be a moment that the anointing for springtime will come forth; the anointing for abundance, the anointing for life from death will spring forth. There is a moment in the ground when everything changes. And the husks fall away and the flesh falls away. And the I wants and the I ams and I am going to be and our expectations fall away and the anointing that happens in the womb, in the ground, in the seed, God says that it is time to bring forth life from darkness, and light from darkness and peace from turmoil and prosperity from poverty. It happens in the quiet before it is manifested in the day. Things that grow quickly will be blown away. But that which is planted deep inside of us that which goes down deep like the Word that goes deep that is what lasts forever. That is the Word that grows and the evil one is not able to come and pluck that up. Ands so in the season of the quiet, the stillness and what seems like the forever dark, that is exactly when everything is being birthed and everything is getting ready to be brought forth, into the light into the day into the openness into the fulfillment of your destiny.That is when the root system of God is being put into place and is getting ready to take place so when the destiny of God is brought forth it is not easily plucked out by the evil one. In this day and this hour in these end times when everything we have is about to be questioned, we are going to have to know that we know that God is in the house that God is in the midst, that God is in the making, that God is in the doing, in the bringing forth, that God is in the coming forth, God is in the multiplying, in the growing, in the strengthening in the process of what happens under the earth during the winter.

There isn't a lot written in the Bible about the three days that Jesus was buried. But there was a lot that was going on. In those three days Jesus got the keys to death, hell and the grave. In those three days Jesus conquered your winter season. He took the keys of liberty. The river of God, runs through the New Jerusalem, where there is no more winter, there is no more night, and because the Lord God Himself is there-the Lord God Himself is the Light. So the Lord gives us our liberty by rising from the His ground, the winter experience that He went through so that our winter experience could bring forth the same result of resurrected life.

For lo the winter is past, for lo the time of springing forth is come. For lo the Bridegroom has come and He says arise, and come away with me my love. That's how you know it's over. It's over when you fall in love with Jesus.You know it's over when you realize you start to turn yourself and you start to look just as the earth turns itself on it axis and its springtime and harvest. You start to look again to the Bridegroom and you start to look again to the one who brought you forth. Jesus comes and He brings and gives gifts and He says come away, come away with me my beloved, come away with me, come away with me the time of singing of the turtle doves is in the land and the voice of the prophets is being heard again and the sound of the voice of the wisdom of the prophets is being heard again because the winter is past. This is Pastor Susan Living the Everyday Prophetic Life.