Myth stopping us moving from a Lord to a King
Surrender and Rule
and Jeremy Westcott –
Surrender
When we open the door of our heart, when we open that First Love gate and let Jesus come in, He comes in and He rules. We can rule here in this realm on our own mountain, in our own house, but we rule through surrender. We give Him rulership of our life. Now as we are renewed in our mind, and as He begins to transform us, as our emotions and our soul get restored, He gives back more and more rulership to us, so that our spirit starts to rule in us as a joint heir with Him. Initially he comes and rules: we hand our lives over to Him. But as He starts to equip us, He gives us more and more authority to rule with Him as a son of our Father. In the early days He can’t trust us with it all because we wouldn’t know how to handle it. It would be like giving a child a machine gun. But as time goes on, the more we allow God to transform us into His image, the more authority we start to come into. The more we allow God to deal with what is in our hearts and see that worked out in our lives, the more He begins to bring us into the delegated authority associated with our destiny, so that we rule with Him in that place.
What is our destiny?
We really need to read our scroll of destiny. We can ask God to show it to us so that we know what is written on it. I have mentioned this before, and I will go into it some more on another occasion. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren (Rom 8:29). This is ordained for us, our destiny has been put in place: we are called to be conformed to the image of Jesus. To be like Him. There are not supposed to be just one or two people ruling in the heavenly places: Jesus is to be the firstborn among many brethren. We are all supposed to rule as joint heirs with Christ. We just need to take up our authority.
Rule as a lord…
So we become a lord when we dispossess the giants and rule on the mountain thrones in the ‘kingdom of God’ heavenly realm. That is where we are ruling the house. That is our house, our level of authority; our mountain, our throne. That is all to do with our destiny and our mandate. We can even become a lord of lords as we disciple and raise up other lords. We give away what we have received. We raise up others and bring them into their destinies as well.
…a king…
Then we become a king, when we dispossess the dragon and we rule on that mountain throne in the ‘kingdom of heaven’ heavenly realm. We start to administer righteousness and justice from the heavenly courts. When we start operating in the courts, we will find them to be awesome places of authority. There is a whole court system, with higher and lower courts, and I have been to many of them myself. There are divorce courts where we are able to legally separate ourselves from things in our past. There are courts of accusation where Satan accuses the brethren, and we have to go and deal with those accusations over ourselves (how we deal with accusations against us, by the way, is to agree with them, accept the judgment of God, and go free because Jesus has already paid for us). Some of those reading this are called to be intercessors: they are called to go to the courts and deal with accusations on behalf of other places, people or regions. We can become a king of kings as we disciple and raise up other kings. Everything is about reproducing in others what God produces in us. Everything God is and has in heaven, He wants to be reproduced on earth. That is why Jesus had disciples around Him.
…a son
As we are diligent to rule as lords and kings, God will bring us into our place as sons. Then we rule on a mountain on a throne in the heavenly realm of ‘Heaven’. And God manifests us as sons of light on the earth (as it is in heaven). As in heaven, so on earth: the application of that here is that only as we rule in the heavens first can we then outwork that rule on the earth. We cannot expect to do it the other way round. We will live as manifest sons of God, restoring the earth to its original purpose – the original purpose even in the first creation – to bring us into fullness of sonship. ……………………………………………………………………………………
Investiture, Succession, Enthronement, Coronation
and Jeremy Westcott – But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light (1 Pet 2:9). We are royal, and we are a priesthood. What kings do is rule. And as priests, as we saw last time, we have access to stand in the courts of heaven. “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matt 11:12). This does not happen easily. God commanded Adam to subdue the earth and rule (Gen 1:28). You do not just rule, without going through a battle; you do not subdue unless there is something to be subdued; you do not have dominion unless there is something to have dominion over. In our own lives we all have plenty that needs subduing and dealing with. We must be militant about this. We cannot sit back and be passive, then expect to enter into rulership. Coming into our identity, coming into our destiny: those things happen when we pursue them, grasp hold of them, and fight for them. Paul said “I take hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of me” (Phil 3:12). The kingdom suffers under forceful ones, and forceful ones occupy by force. There are opposing forces in the heavenly realms whose aim it is to stop us ruling, and we have to deal with them. It must have been in late 2008 or early 2009 that God gave me four words. I understood them (up to a point) but I did not immediately understand all the implications of them. Those words were:
- Investiture
- Succession
- Enthronement
- Coronation
Investiture
God wants to invest us with authority. I remember Prince Charles’ investiture as Prince of Wales in Caernarfon Castle in 1969. In the UK, being Prince of Wales means that you are heir to the throne.
Succession
But you also have to come into that authority.Prince Charles has not yet succeeded to the throne because the Queen is still alive and reigning. He will not succeed until she dies. In the same way, we will not succeed until some things die. Some of those things will be in our lives, but some of them will be in the heavenly realms. We need to see those things defeated so that we can come into that succession.
Enthronement
And succession is not enough. We are called to occupy thrones, as we have seen. Put simply, thrones are where we rule from. If we leave those thrones unoccupied, there will be no government in those areas. Or, worse still, the thrones will be usurped by others who do want to rule, but draw their authority from the kingdom in darkness.
Coronation
Ultimately, God will display our rulership on the earth. The sons of God will be manifest. The kingdom will be on earth as it is in heaven. Heavenly authority is higher than earthly authority. That is why we need to rule in the heavens. It supercedes all the authority that operates here. The laws of the spiritual kingdom are higher than (and have precedence over) the laws of the natural kingdom. The traditional (Greek) view of the heavens goes something like this: We live in the first heaven. The Bible tells us that Paul visited the third heaven, the realm where God is (2Cor 12:2). In between there must obviously be a second heaven – so says Greek, linear thinking – and that is where Satan and his angels and demons operate. The enemy has used this broken imagery to his advantage: if we are in the first heaven and God is in the third, then we have to go through that second heaven to get to God. And it is full of darkness. That whole pattern of thinking has stopped us from even thinking we could possibly access the heavenly realms. Some people have tried to do it. They have attempted to go through the second heaven, but have usually been beaten up because they were coming against a higher level of authority with only their earthly authority. The reality is different. The heavens are not linear, and we do not need to go through anything to get there. Here again is my representation of what the heavenly realms are really like. If this is the first time you have seen it, you might find it helpful to go back through the past few blog posts and read more about it: 
As we saw before, we can choose to turn into the kingdom of light, or into the kingdom that is in darkness. This earthly realm is connected to a spiritual realm which is where God created it from. In fact it is only the word of God that holds this realm together. He is inviting us to go into the heavenly realms so that we can bring higher authority from those realms into this one. When we do, then nothing here or in the atmosphere of the earth will be able to stand against us.
