Tag: Kingdom of God

The Scepter of Wickedness

On By Ashley GatewoodIn Kingdom of GodLeave a comment

Stand on God’s Word

For the scepter of wickedness

shall not rest

On the land allotted to the righteous,

Lest the righteous reach out

their hands to iniquity.

Psalm 125.3

Dear England and The West at Large

One of the most powerful verses in the biblical text grants power to God’s people to reclaim their territory when conquered by a foreign entity. I have believed God on this verse concerning my own personal territory, (or domain, which is any area or place that we as children of God inhabit), and the Lord has moved swiftly on my behalf. We’re entrusted with the responsibility to manage the kingdom that is allotted to us as children of God. We represent His Kingdom and as such, it should be a priority to guard it spiritually. This is clear based up the Parable of the Talents and the responsibilities given to Adam from the very beginning. I’ll elaborate in a moment.

Let God’s People Not Forsake Him, Or Betray The Call

When we leave things unattended we forsake them along with our responsibilities that God has given us. The West has left her God and the more I look into history the more I know God chose a people to conquer the territories that were once barbaric and ungodly – how else could Rome have fallen? We tend to look at all the societal/cultural/financial factors that lead to a nation’s demise and forget what God said in Deuteronomy 8 which lays out exactly what is happening to the West.

We forget that it is God who gives us power to get wealth. The enormous wealth we have been blessed with has been used selfishly and hoarded greedily. Let the world have their day and envy not those who are rich and evil who suffer not. They will earn their due reward. But God will discipline His own that we might be fashioned after His Son to do good in the earth.

When God is Removed, Evil Takes Opportunity

Scientists look at human pollution and over fishing to explain why the sea and its creatures are dying. But it is our turning away from God that causes the lack. The U.S. has turned viciously upon God and biblical principles, we have left our Universities unattended which raise up whole generations, and so we are reaping what we’ve sown. The scepter of wickedness took opportunity and claimed ground. We are trying to take back lost ground through academies like this one; let’s pray it’s not too late.

Look at the Wall Street bankers, wretchedly greedy and leaving no edges to the crops they plow for the poor – the spread on Prime rates is exorbitant, even criminal. They do not think about God’s people, or the people of the earth at all. And God will judge them.

Look at who has become the mayor of their city….a Communist. Either we turn back to God or this warning will become far more than a signal. It will become an entrenched reality.

God Needs Managers

In Genesis 2.4 God says something uniquely pertinent to the role and responsibility of mankind. The text says that God had not allowed it to rain because there was no one to till the ground. He needed someone to manage the ground and prepare it for what He was about to release before He could release it. Rain is often associated with abundance, blessing, life and thriving. Let us fashion ourselves into the kind of people willing to get behind the plow and till the ground in preparation for what God will release. This process can be painstaking and involves discipline.

I assure you, there is nothing that will streamline me more than a solid purpose in God. This is how I live. And He understands me. He is the only One I will shed everything else for and He knows me better than anyone else. He allows me to be me, knowing that I am fully dedicated and faithful to Him. He knows my weaknesses and how to manage them for His love is enduring and never fails.

Even in the darkest of nights, when the ground lay dormant and untilled, God is doing the work on the inside of your heart. Even when you think you are going backwards, your dedication, loyalty and faithfulness will grip Him and move Him on your behalf. The Book of Job is a reminder of God’s faithfulness to His loyal servants. Is it not the Spirit of God rising in the hearts of man that gives us courage to face the day?

“Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand”. 

Declaring the End from the Beginning

God is supernatural. And He is our Father. Think about that for a good long while. We are biological creatures capable of supernatural feats. But only if we remain instep with our Heavenly Father. Anything else is dark, rubbish, and evil – and it will not prevail or remain.

The Scepter of the King of Kings is More Powerful Than All

“Father, in the name of Jesus, we break the scepter of the wicked that has been driven as a stake into our lands. It shall not remain on the land allotted to Your people who are called by Your name. We will not forget You. We will acknowledge You before the nations as a testimony to Your love and faithfulness for all the world to see. Lift Your people out now from under the darkness that we’ve allowed into our borders because of our sin, forgive us and forgive the land that we’ve allowed to be decimated. We have not been watchful or steadfast in Your principles as a nation. We’ve been distracted and pulled aside, we have cowered before our enemies.

Save this country Lord that You have given to us for Your glory. Holy Spirit, imbue us with Your power to spread the Good News to all the world that is sitting in darkness, lost to your understanding. Do not let our enemies tread upon our backs and wipe their feet on all that we hold dear, but deliver us and our land from this evil. We will serve You through the darkness, even if it devours us. We live for You alone Lord, even if it’s to death. Reach out Your hand and bless us once again, turn back the hours on the steps as You did for Hezekiah and may we stand as humble vessels to the glory You are prepared to release through us as the rains across the plains of Africa.

We will till Your ground, the ground You’ve allotted to us personally and as a people across our countries. You have given people for us, you have given nations for us. Give us occasion to honor You and worship You before the nations. Raise up Your people, oh Lord, and may Your Spirit come as a Mighty Rushing Wind upon the Earth.”

Forevermore

Satan’s Cuckoo Chick in God’s Nest

On By Ashley GatewoodIn Kingdom of GodLeave a comment

My Zeal for the Kingdom of God

This is raw, I’m going to warn you. I keep saying I have a whip to weave – and I try, I do – but this subject matter burns me from the inside and the outside. I’m frightened by it. It’s difficult to face head-on, I get so raw and angry. Let’s talk about the Cuckoo chick in God’s nest.

To sit down and focus on this treacherous trick of the devil day-in and day-out in order to birth a book revealing the truth (that no one wants to hear), is utter misery. Ultimately, there’s no running to hide from God to get away from what He has tasked me with. Run from responsibility and there will be a whale waiting to escort you to Hell. Furthermore, that whale will have a nice crispy treat if you’ve also managed to get torched by the fiery dragon on your heels which you can’t manage to shake.

Enter: my internal landscape of torment. I told you, it’s going to be raw…

Things That Keep Me Up At Night

There are 46,876 Southern Baptists church buildings in the United States.

Now compare that with 43,477 McDonald’s restaurants GLOBALLY. Let us sit in that lukewarm stew for a moment…

Now, shall we squeeze those statistics through some abstract financial math for the Kingdom of God?

It is estimated that a church with just 50 members and a pastor costs around $85,000 annually to maintain.

Hence, we have 46,876 manmade church constructs at $85,000 annual running costs…

That’s $3,984,460,000 ANNUALLY. And that’s just the SBC.

And the Catholic church? Try this number on for size: Catholic parishes operate on a budget of between $100,000 to $1 million per year. (Urban parishes may face higher costs for utilities, property taxes, and potentially staff salaries, while rural parishes may have lower costs in these areas)…..

Gotta clothe the vicar in the finest attire and accoutrements~

[Pro tip: if the previous statement angers you it is because your identity is wrapped up in a manmade concept of who God is and how one should defend a manmade idea of worship. You’ve been duped.]

Here’s the whole of Christianity’s sacrifice to their structural idols:

“Christian churches in the US spend approximately $84 billion annually on operational costs, including staff, facilities, and programs.”

-ChurchTrac The State of Church Giving: Trends and Statistics [2025]

The Cuckoo Chick in God’s Nest

Church buildings have become devouring monsters with every brick and ritual requiring a scandalous sacrifice of mammon. They are the imposter cuckoo that demands resources from and enslaves God’s children. Satan has tricked God’s servants to feed a lie and deprive His children of resources, kicking widows, the hungry and the broken out of His nest. Tell me again how God’s original idea was to build a bunch of buildings, divide them by denomination and then fill them with people who identity more with the denomination than with Christ?

I’ll wait………………….

Did God not instead show us how to identify with Christ, grow into His stature and build a Kingdom to save the lost, feed the hungry and take care of widows?

Instead we use the latter to justify our pride in the former.

Did Jesus Christ travel from place to place building temples in His name?

We are full of our own will which blinds us to the truth. The problem is the fundamental hazard of attaching our identity to anything outside the human being. Because remember, we are formed in His image, given the mind of Christ, clothed in His garment and the Holy Spirit dwells within us. If we mistakenly attach our identity to anything outside of ourselves, we become divided and fall out of union with the Body of Christ.

But the devil will tell you that the Body of Christ IS religion. That’s a lie. He’ll also tell you that Jesus is Christianity. That’s a lie also.

The Folly of Placing Our Identity in Manmade Constructs

Christianity seemingly worships itself, the number of buildings it can build, and who can take the most pride in their architecture.

God is going to judge this.

“God who made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is Lord of Heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands.”

“Do you not know, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit.”

The marker of success in the Kingdom of God is not the recruitment of individuals into a religious ideology or denominational church. God does not recognize religious institutions, ideologies or denominational substructures. We need to realize and accept how prone we are to identify more with these secondary garments than with Jesus Christ alone, otherwise we will never grow into the fulness of the stature of Christ. We are encased in a shell we can’t see, (or perhaps, more to the point, blinded by it) obscuring our understanding of how it limits the Body of Christ.

Christ is not Divided

God isn’t a denomination. People choose denominations that have fashioned God in a way that fits into their life, their personality and attitudes. The binding of identity to religion tears everything else apart because the Body of Christ is not a particular church construct, or one specific denomination or a set of manmade formalities. It only causes rupture of the fabric of being – we are made in God’s image, not man’s image of God. Please, for the love of God, understand this~

People form denominations. God does not. And all churches are denominations because they all divide.

Christ established The Kingdom of God on earth, not church buildings. God is not religion, and until we break free from this misconception of who He is we will never understand who we are and who Christ said we could become in Him. We must grow into the stature of Christ, not the stature of a manmade church doctrine. This also prevents us as believers from doing what Christ instructed us to do – all those greater things He mentioned. We now have the Holy Spirit within us.

Yes, God in you, the hope of glory.

To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Colossians 1.27

Satan will stop at nothing to kill the spread of this knowledge and keep it from being embodied and acted upon by the children of God. He’ll even create and drop an imposter cuckoo in God’s nest and deceive anyone who isn’t paying attention to what they are identifying with and feeding.

But, God’s word never falls to the earth unproductive, dear children of God. On the contrary:

My word that comes from my mouth will not return to me empty, but it will accomplish what I please and will prosper in what I send it to do.

Isaiah 55.11

God’s getting ready to show the world that victory runs to meet His every step~

It’s About A Kingdom

On By Ashley GatewoodIn Kingdom of God2 Comments

We Are Called to Establish A Kingdom

When Jesus taught, He preached a Kingdom. Along with that Kingdom there was a Government which rests on His shoulders and He called that Government the Kingdom of God. We as Christians are the people of this kingdom and our mandate is to establish this Kingdom on the earth. There is already a Kingdom of Heaven which belongs to God and other creatures. Our final destination as humans isn’t heaven. Selah. We are created as biological creatures, made of the substance of the earth and in the image of God. Our home is Earth.

Jesus never said the word ‘Christians’. He didn’t institute Christianity. It’s just the name given to identify Christ followers. It’s mentioned first in Acts 11.26

“…and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians”. 

Determinants Matter

We don’t even know who coined the phrase. Who first called us Christians because the Bible doesn’t tell us. For sure it was a man and not God. It could have been angry locals. Jesus didn’t call His followers Christians. I don’t think the use of the word Christian is as bad a determinant as being differentiated by religion, but it is strange and a bit mysterious to me when I think about it. And determinant is the right word because what you follow and mold yourself after will determine the final product of your being. One will be the image of a manmade doctrine. The other will be the image of God Himself. We’ve been lied to, a sophisticated and propagating lie, but a lie none-the-less.

We are kings and priests. We are not called by any other manmade religious affiliation in the biblical text.

…and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler over the kings of the earth.

To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him, even they who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of Him. Even so, Amen.

Revelation 1.5-7

The Earth Belongs to the Children of God

We have mistakenly identified with the false pretense of any number of various religions, pick yours, they’re free for the taking as long as you abide by their doctrines and forget entirely that you are the son or daughter of the most High King, have been distinguished as a Priest and belong to a Kingdom instituted by God for all of us who rightfully inhabit this earth.

The Earth is ours brothers and sisters. That unemployed Cherub will not win against God and we will come back to this earth in new wineskins that are eternal of which Jesus Christ is the first fruit.

When people belong to a religion, they belong to other people who’ve placed themselves in high positions over them, according to a wrong precept. I don’t want to fashion myself in the image of other humans. God forbid. It’s a cyclical nightmare of fallen identity. I want to put on Christ.

“…in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”

Galatians 3.26-27

King David said, ‘Show me your precepts God,’ and nowhere in the biblical text does God ever say He is a Religion, or that He instituted religion or that He wants some religion of heaven to be revealed in the earth. There’s no such thing.

A Kingdom for which Christ Died

No. It is a Kingdom! Why do religious people get so angry about this? Why do they hate you when you tell them religion is not what Christ died for and that they are only serving the dictates of man, not God, when they bind themselves to a religion?

Religion is a ‘go between’ which wrecks everything. I hate it. I’m angry about it. Only Christ is set in the position as Intercessor, He alone mediates as The High Priest, the only High Priest, praise God.

Why is no one preaching the Kingdom? The few who were teaching it have nearly all passed on. The ministers God put before me back in the early 2000’s taught it, but I wasn’t able to discern it because I didn’t see there was a problem. I was too young in the Spirit.

The Pillars of Society are Of This World, Not of God

Now I see it plain as day. One of the pillars of the world is Religion. I don’t think anyone understands this. There are 7 main pillars that hold the worldly system in place: Arts, Media, Government, Family, Business, Education and Religion. But we know there is only one Prince of this worldly system and he is an illegal Cherub that stole the earth from its rightful, biological inhabitants: the kings and priests of God. We were ignorant to the serpent’s devices and lost our kingdom.

Why else do you think these 7 pillars are burning into ashes all around us? We’ve abandoned the original God-idea. We’ve neglected our rightful positions as kings and priests over the earth, so the thieving Cherub is winning.

Now here we are not even understanding our identity, who we are or who He is who made us in His image. Christ reestablished our rightful dominion in the earth and laid a righteous Government on the shoulders of the Body of Christ.

The Book is about a King. It’s not about a religion.

I’m angry about this. Too angry to do anything productive. It’s the ability to execute, isn’t it? A million truths discerned, a million ideas, a million keys of knowledge, yet they die tragically in the grave because we don’t know how to execute.

But God does know how to execute. And He will show me.

I’m done with religion. It tears everything to pieces, including Jesus Christ. The Religious killed God.

“If there were no great evils and no deaf hearts and no eternal consequences, perhaps the only fitting forms of love would be a soft touch and tender words. But such a world does not kill the Son of God and hate his disciples. There is no such world.” -John Piper

I don’t like it when people don’t like me, who does? It’s uncomfortable and you’re always wondering if you’re doing the right thing when so many people dislike you and even hate you. But Jesus told us how it was going to go:

Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me.

John 15.20-21

The Revelation of a Kingdom, Not a Denomination

On By Ashley GatewoodIn The Organic ChurchLeave a comment

God is not a Church, He isn’t a Denomination, nor is He a Religion

If you can understand the revelation Munroe is thowing out here, then you can understand why no denomination was God’s idea.

Denominations are not of God, they are of man.

The Catholic denomination is possibly the worst because they are prideful in saying they are the first church – and are blind to the fact that they are a denomination. Until we understand there is no such thing as denominations or brick and mortar churches in God’s Kingdom, we will never bring the Kingdom of God into the earth.

But I have faith in the true Church, the organic Bride of Christ, that she will bring the Kingdom of God into the earth in these last days.

Because there is nothing else that will be capable of rising up against the anti-christ in these last days.

It’s time to start reorienting ourselves in God, and bring the kingdom Christ taught and spoke of into the earth. And to prepare for much spiritual warfare when we do.

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, My servants would fight to prevent My arrest by the Jews. But now My kingdom is not of this realm.”

John 18

John 18 is one of the most fascinating conversations in the Bible, imo. And realizing what Munroe says, that Jesus didn’t even speak to the religious men who were ‘representing’ God, but did speak to a gentile sinner who was ruler over a kingdom just blows my spiritual mind.

The Kingdom of God Defined | Dr. Myles Munroe

My challenge I’m putting on myself this year is to live a fasted life and pursue the understanding and revelation of this Kingdom God is desiring to manifest into the earth. If I can channel His kingdom through my life, I’m here for it~

Featured Image by Johannes Plenio.