This is all happening kinda fast. I just resurrected this site from dormancy this week in order to assist with the prayer efforts. More of us need to stand up!!!
This great Navarro Report I am praying will break the media out of its stuporous and lazy narrative spirit and start to do their job of investigations.
In my earlier post, I laid out the path that got me to DC last weekend, including the process in my heart that had to be shaken out of a funky place for God to even open the door.
Today I want to report on the event itself. I took a few periscopes (Twitter videos) during the day that best capture the happenings, so I’ll just post that first and wrap with a few takeaways on how this all amounts to what we call a GOOD START!
The morning of the rally… heart prep… Calling out the Walls https://twitter.com/drewdeal/status/1337733264853725184?s=20
(This is a bit rambly, so if you only watch 1-2 videos, start from “Praying for the Capital” of the links below and go backwards through NTD.)
I was in pre-coffee mode and processing a few things about the spirit of the town and how the Kingdom of God must take precedence in our goals and language.
Praying for the Capital https://twitter.com/drewdeal/status/1337877327611482112?s=20
This really was the peak of the experience for me. So much revelation was going on as I circled the capital at the end of the day. This is ultimately where I hope to join hearts with other like-minded believers to bring about real change in tearing down the principalities that are driving the election divide and so many other divides in our culture.
CONCLUSION
Cutting to the chase before this gets long… My “Heart in the Air” part of the headline is all about how, despite a big showing from many awesome Christ followers on the 12th, the energy of Jericho March was still largely overshadowed by the overall StopTheSteal anger and outrage show. This leads me to believe that what is needed is for a rapid awakening in the church.. this is impossible with man, but possible with God. Our hearts need to desire and repent according to 2 Chron 7:14 FIRST. God will be faithful to do the rest.
We BELIEVERS need to KEEP coming to rallies and, (even if we have already made peace with PE Biden) recognize the dynamic of God’s kingdom advancing as people are being assembled to stand for truth. God will open your heart to see and you will be challenged to exercise your faith to help shepherd lots of angry folks into a kingdom perspective.
More Notes:
There were a few events between all the above, which you can see online on NTD’s YouTube Channel. They covered it for 4 hours!!
Lance Wallnau was the only speaker that picked up on this theme of anger and its limited efficacy for the church. Of course I resonated with that.
Alex Jones was doing his thing… angering potential allies while at the same time speaking powerfully to rally people to fight a spiritual battle. I found myself agreeing with his words, but not with his anger fomenting spirit. He has a place in all this, but he also detracts from people coming to lift up King Jesus. God can and does use disrupters in our midst…. For instance.. Trump.
Many speakers were awesome. I recommend you watch:
- Michael Flynn
- Shiva Ayadurai
- Lauren Boebert
- Michelle Bachmann
- others I can’t remember
Overall the idea of a political rally becoming a rally to God is a difficult adjustment for organizers and crowds to adapt to. I can see it happening, and it SHOULD happen. Call me an idealist if you like (I am one), but also know that GOD HAS DONE THIS BEFORE!
I did a few other videos as well as the three linked above on Twitter. You can find them on my feed.
I had the enormous honor of attending the the Jericho March on Washington DC on Saturday the 12th of December. I had been praying for the success of it the Wednesday day before with our band of prayer brothers, assuming I couldn’t go. But then Friday morning I started to ponder the ‘what if’ of going at the last minute and I felt the Holy Spirit’s encouragement to check into it! The fares were $500+ which was over my $300 limit, so I simply asked for a sponsor and a brother came forward with miles I could use and my heart soared! This is at 2:30pm for a 6:55 flight. Plenty of time to say YES, so I went and arrived in my room around midnight. There were a few more hand-of-God elements to getting to just the right place at the right time, but let’s move past the arrival logistics.
The backdrop for all this for me is a testimony for finding peace about how this election travesty is going to get remedied. Like many, I was getting caught up in the daily drama of the news narrative cycles, big tech censorship outrage and daily fraud exposures coming to the surface that all seemed like they would be game-changers. I was losing sleep and frankly having a hard time praying with a clear mind, which was a very foreign feeling for me. I have seen principalities fall and know how to pray for revival. This is a time of intense spiritual intimidation warfare for our minds and hearts. My hope was deferred, making the heart sick. My anger was eclipsing my ability to listen to God, which was a big wake up call for me to repent, getting very intentional about prayer for our nation.
So around Thanksgiving I started to host a daily zoom prayer meeting. This helped to bring some structure and formalize my intention to pray through my malaise by having to articulate out loud my cries to God. I centered around the Lord’s prayer structure, 2 Chron 7:14, and every day, a new theme of prayer and scripture emerged by the Holy Spirit. God is FAITHFUL! After a few days, I started to see that by Gods grace I had re-established the Rom 8 pattern of “walking after the Spirit”, which nullifies the desires of the flesh. Also, having others join with you activates the power of agreement that brings the presence of Jesus. We should never forget our need to run toward “where two are three are gathered in My name” promise whenever we can!
So through this and into December, I started to realize that my anger completely cooled down, by my spirit, my heart and my resolution for justice over this fishy election has become RED HOT. It became about the Kingdom, which is God’s bigger plan through all this, and a desire to speak out. When it came to December 5th, we had a StopTheSteal rally at the Dallas City Hall, and my heart was exploding with a word for the crowd there, but there was no room on the speakers list. The message in my heart was really for those newly agitated to activism, not the party faithful, and I believe about half the people there were new to political rallies. So the message went something like this…
“It is ok that anger is what got you here, but realize this people… Anger will not keep you in the fight. You are in the process of coming into a battle that is only partly political. It is a battle that is more than cultural. More than generational. It is a battle that is spiritual, and to overcome and prevail is going to require not an angry spirit, but a resolved spirit. Not a vengeful spirit, but a Holy Spirit fired spirit. Not a political spirit, but a repentant and intercessory spirit.”
So with this backdrop and set up, I’ll cover the amazing happenings at the DC Jericho March in the next post.
My hope in this post is simply to plant in your heart the WHY on how prayer movements are the real answer for this time, and that Stop the Steal is simply an inflection point to bring it about.
Although this topic deserves deep exploration above so many others, all I have time and energy for here is to share what the Lord has been showing me on this today.
When you and I talk about liberty, the reaction we often get, whether from others or even within our own polluted conscience, is that of mild contempt. “The notion of liberty is somewhat passe don’t you know, and what about the homeless? Don’t you believe we should put the interests of others above our own gain?” In today’s lost culture, “freedom” and “liberty” have become code words for selfish pursuit, exploitation, and disregard for the needs of others. Why is this the case? In short, it is a vital building block of collectivism. When the goal is the needs of the group over that of the individual, which always results in the exaltation of an elite class or single leader within the group btw, a new morality that despises liberty becomes a necessity. It doesn’t matter if the group is a political body or a local church. Collectivism’s moral demands can be motivated in any combination of mysticism, politics, greed or creed.
In contrast to this, Jesus came announcing Himself as the bringer of two things to the people — Healing and Freedom. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; he has anointed me to tell the good news to the poor. He has sent me to announce release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set oppressed people free” (Luke 4: 18-19a). When you look at how He delivered on these, He always did it to individuals. The love of the crowds will come and go with each passing day. One day they exalted Jesus as Messiah, the next day they shouted “Crucify him” out of collective interest. But an individual set free from oppression comes to a place where motivation is transformed. The intimate knowledge of the truth is miraculously liberating — that YOU ARE LOVED OF GOD. YOU is an operative word here. Not you as a cog in a wheel, nor as a role player on the team, nor as a citizen in a country, nor as a member of a church, but as an intimately beloved child of the MOST HIGH.
This is how Jesus transforms us to where we can love others, because He first loved us. Before we can love others, we must first love Him, putting aside all other loyalties, oaths and treaties. Then we become free as God intended us to be. From that first love, we can love others in a way that will best help them. Only then can we respect their own free will and their individual journey before God. Only as we are set free ourselves can we lay down our defaulted demands we place on others. We can see the image of God in them… past the sin and other behaviors we would otherwise be tempted to judge. We can offer them a pure liberty they never see from religious people (like I was for years), as doing so is to represent not only the mandate of Christ, but Christ Himself. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty” (2 Cor 3:17)
So, without further any reinforcement with my words, we must conclude, as scripture does, that freedom is an end unto itself. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” (Gal 5:1). And, we must also conclude that liberty is our natural and desired state before God. A state for which He died and rose again. A state of being sons and daughters vs being subjects or mere members.
Liberty is a moral virtue and an imperative gift from God that we must pursue for ourselves, our families, and all whom we ever hope to sincerely love. Without it, the fruits of our efforts will be our own control, which is always, despite the best intentions, just our own brand of oppression.
What a wonderful time we had! 30 friends from 3 church communities… neighbors, friends and more. We feel your love and are so glad you came! Our journey into seeking responsible food independence has opened up a whole new appreciation for the way God does things compared to man. God creates ecosystems of harmony. Man isolates wealth out of ecosystems, refining its resources for mass production, creating waste.
Learning aquaponics (AP) has raised my respect for how God does life, as well as how Jesus introduced to us a whole new conception of life. “He who has the Son has the life”, but I digress… The AP connection here is that it is tending to a natural ecosystem without the need for chemical (or otherwise imported) intervention like traditional farming or hydroponics. In AP, even the water is circuited instead of soaking away into the ground. Healthy bacteria break down waste and the plants clean the water. When we need answers on how to correct an imbalance, we can look to the pre-agro-business era and look how God forms healthy ecosystems. Science should respect nature and natures God, not seek to cheat it! In fact, “the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Rom 8:21). If you can accept it, connecting to how God does things has become a very distant reality in the modern world of today. If we can connect again to how God works with our own hands, we can be a liberating catalyst. Anyway, again I have digressed. Please read this from your heart and ponder.
To the practicals… I worked hard last week to pull the plumbing together in time for the dedication. The liner is in place, the water has circulated fully, and I found just one leak in the fish tank that I need to work on. Wonderfully, I have siphoning working for me all around, so the water was easy to put back into the raft tank. Now I just need a silicon bead to place on my acrylic sheet again for a re-seating.
Once we get the healthy bacteria levels up to where we want them to be, we an gradually add fish to feed them ammonia and plants to feed and thrive off of the nitrites. We estimate two weeks to dial in onto a healthy start. I will add another video soon that walks through all the post-construction water feature set up.
It is about time! All things come together in their proper time, and nearly a year after the greenhouse foundation was laid, we can call the build phase complete. Yay and Phew… Being newlyweds, getting a new and highly intense work project over the year and looking for free rocks for 6 months definitely set us back from ’schedule’, but we have been learning to exercise the Lords principle to take each day and weekend as it comes. Ecc 3:11 puts it humorously: “He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.” I really do love my Lords peace about all things and how He has chosen to reveal just enough to us to where we can trust Him if we choose to.
It gets really fun when we set a date for an actual launch and want to have friends over. Since the work never really ends, the date needs to be set when enough can be tested and demo’d, with water running and we’ll take it from there. So we set it! On May 3rd, we would love to have our local friends and family over at 1pm to pray and sing songs of dedication to the Lord. This whole project has been a labor of love and following a vision to tap into His ways of provision. We want to honor Him in this in all our ways and would love to have you with us this weekend.
We will be grilling and eating by 2, accompanied with a moderate helping of craft beer for those who enjoy it.
We have made a video log of the construction process over the year. 2 are in the first post, and the other three are below, with the most recent first.
Enjoy!
Clean finish of the rails in prep for the pond liners.
For almost 3 years now I have been intrigued and fascinated with the science and responsible beauty of aquaponics. In 2011, I actively discussed moving my family to a place where we could do it, and now, although via a circuitous and totally unexpected route, the actual hands on journey has begun here in the Dallas area.
The overarching ‘Christ-gatey-ness’ of aquaponics is the liberating affect of food independence. Food independence is taking responsibility for your own property and family. Your God given liberty wants to extend into your real life, and food independence is a vital component of that.
More on the nature of that in future posts.
Aquaponics is simply the coolest innovation to achieve this independence by naturally controlling a food producing eco-system in a small space. You can think of it as victory gardens on steroids. So here on Christ Gate I will discuss our personal journey into it as newcomers and seek to help others along the way. My intention is to have a video log of the whole build process, and mix in the needs and opportunities related to aquaponics along the way. This should be fun!
So, as we start the actuals of all this, here are the videos of my initial greenhouse build:
Genesis 1:29
And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.”
James 1:25
But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
John 10:10
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
Acts 20:35
In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Disclaimer: I don’t know anything close to what a REAL framer knows. So if you want the best how-to’s for framing wisdom, you will find better videos out there. Take mine as an inspiration that if ‘this guy can do it, I can do it too’. What matters is that a project like this in your own backyard is ACCESSIBLE to you. I am merely a fellow student in rapidly forming new urban farming discipline, so my invitation to you is to follow along and joyfully do likewise, seeking knowledge wherever you can.
For 2013, the site is finally back in good looking shape for a new season. All the references to upcoming events are gone until we resume having events. Writing, fellowship and small group meetings are the other things being loosely planned right now.
Most people I know still have not seen our main testimony video, so I put that on the home page. Please watch it if you never have before.
I decided not to totally rebuild the look of the site, but to modernize the layout a bit and make room for the new theme to rise to the surface. The site will continue to look Indo-US-centric even though no India trips are planned. Life is restarting for Indi-Andy here and in an amazing and unexpected direction.
I am in Dallas Texas now with some of the most amazing people at the Upper Room. God is putting together a cadre of Davids and Jonathans — friends who will defend the honor and glory of the Lord over their own lives, and I am so glad to be a part of it with them. Last year was a year of transcendence. This year is a year of redemption, and I am seeing it all take place with uproarious thanksgiving.
In preparation for my next post, feel free to read Romans 8 and comment, but not with your focus on the familiar “all things work together” theme, but instead with your spirit on the glory and suffering aspects that come about as we discover, share and stand on the glorious freedom we have been granted in Jesus.
Let me get the usual disclaimer out of the way first. Since I have posted so infrequently, this post is subject to having a mish-mash of inspirations and personal updates melded together. I need to shake things out here in this post as what I hope is a great restart to writing effectively again. I feel like I need to find my voice in the areas God is leading me in to and I am just now coming out on the other side of a many major life changes. Part of my current scatteredness is a personal reorientation in the Spirit, and part of it is social media fatigue (ever get that affecting your attention span?).
I remember a friend asking me a long time ago what my personal mission statement is. I replied with little hesitation something along the lines of, “to build a bridge of ministry and relationship between the church in America, and the church in India.” I then thought about it for a while and realized: 1) That the whole exercise of trying to boil down my calling, promises, visions and relationships into a single statement has little merit apart from the exercise itself. And 2) I personally am not comfortable elevating a business planning practice to a spiritual plane. We are God’s servants and we miss out from His leading when we engineer our way through our calling. It is western-style insubordination. As I have written before, I want to simply have the testimony of Paul, saying “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision”. I doubt anyone would really have expected Paul to have published a condensed mission statement, but I am also sure many preachers and scholars look in the epistles for a verse they can ascribe to Paul as one and use it as a launching point to say we all need one too. The western mind seeks a marketing or success formula, but the eastern mind, which includes biblical Israel, seeks a familial infusion instead. I’ll take that, DADDY GOD!
Let me explain this a bit before I get to the big announcement. The family infusion pursuit was first introduced by the Lord. He always desired a very direct and close relationship with us as sons and daughters. Not as a teacher who lectures us, but as a father who imparts to us. We from the west tend to exalt our thinking and seek the veneration of men, measuring ourselves based on quantitative scales such as cash, customers and followers. I have fallen into this many times myself, even after being fully aware of the paradigm and tight with the Lord. These days however I happily find myself just less interested in the worldly dynamic as the Lord Himself is my intimate destination. He is wonderful!
Ok, in preparing for the announcement, here is a question I was asked online lately:
What do you think freedom is?.
My answer was: It is first spiritual, then mental, emotional, physical then civic. It is found and birthed in conscience before God when He releases you from sin, doubt and fear into communion with Him.
Freedom has been the biggest theme in my heart in all things spiritual and relational for years now. While the doors to return to India have remained closed to me since 2008, a growing passion for understanding freedom and imparting it to others has blossomed. I have seen the beauty of it become lost over the years in the hearts and words of my fellow saints however. Perhaps it is partially due to the govt-cultural abuse of the word as code for rallying fighting wars overseas, which is repugnant. In any case, there is a hindering confusion in the ranks of the church which has lost its freedom voice in the culture, preferring instead a pursuit for a seat at the table of human power. A murky and incoherent collectivism of thought and property has taken hold as liberty is no longer seen as a virtue, but as selfish. There is a huge leadership vacuum for the prophetic in this space that I KNOW the Lord has wanted me to fill, and He has confirmed it. Perhaps soon I will find my voice on it, but the first order of business is to just let the fire of God burn in me and make me live and thrive in this freedom myself. That is where the work of the Lord is in all this right now, to free me completely from the expectations and approval of men. I AM FREE from the judgement of others, from the tyranny of men and from the oppression of culture. Scripture BURSTS with proof that the freedom we have been given is not just a side order or a feeling… it is our prized destination in this earth. It is to be appreciated as: the fruit of discipleship (John 8:32), an end unto itself (Gal 5:1,13), proof of the Spirit’s presence (2 Cor 5:17), unalienable from the opinions of others (1 Cor 10:29), something to be guarded (Col 2:16-17), something we are to identify ourselves as (1 Pet 2:16), and, as a subset of the glory we have as the children of God that the creation will be set free in to (Rom 8:21). Unfortunately, we tend to see the warnings accompanying these scriptures more than the verses themselves, allowing self-doubt powered by a false sense of self-sacrifice to devalue what God Himself has put into our hearts to long for.
As I was at prayer a few months ago at the Upper Room, the Lord laid on my heart how there are those that passionately value liberty at an external level (civic and/or societal) and a whole different set that passionately values it on a spiritual level. I had hands laid on me regarding dormant dreams to be reawakened, and I know the Lord laid on my heart to bring these two groups together. For this mission, I also need to re-immerse myself in history again. Stay tuned.
So here is the announcement. I am going to rework ChristGate.org to broaden it beyond the ‘bridge to India’ theme and make it a place to discuss these issues as the Lord leads me, while also having it remain a resource for India missions. I am praying now about how that can look. The “Nations” concept will certainly fade, as I am done venerating the oppressive institutions of men. The kingdom culture of who we are in Christ is a REAL overlay on the geopolitical realm. The life we NOW live in the body (world too) we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave Himself up for us. One practical aspect of this is to promote food and energy independence from the world system. Gay and I are going to do aquaponics here at the house and want to video log the experience. I am still not sure how ‘christ-gatey’ that all is for the site thematically… I only know Daddy wants me to do it as a component of living free in this world.
Thanks for being a friend!
Indi-Andy (Aka Drew)
P.S.
For any that have questions about my big family changes last year, you are free to call. I am not inclined to discuss those here.
The Lord has been revealing some very intimate things to me lately. I have been joining my heart to this prayer movement called The Upper Room in Dallas. Wonderful people who call God Daddy. I love it. Oh yeah… Dallas… Well I am here now. Long story which we can get into at some point. If you know me well, you already know. If you don’t know, find me on Facebook and I will explain or point you to posts about the big reset button and why I am restarting here alone and fresh.
The intimate things the Lord is doing in me is part of a personal renewal project…. not mine, but His. My own strength has failed me, so now it is His workmanship that is renewing me, wrecking me from my old world-view and liberating me to discover again how incredible is His love for me and how perfect His one-time sacrifice was that satisfied all that was needed to transform me from a failure scourge to a favored son. Yes and amen. I am going to re-declare what God is doing here, and it will stretch beyond India. It will be about Christ the Gate. The gate to salvation, wisdom, truth, life, love, compassion, vision and intimate fulfillment. Jesus the end in my journey, not a mere means to meet my needs.
So, about mirrors.
I have been having a great time in Corinthians lately. Both of them. 2 Cor 3:17 declares, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”. Context? Well it is about us getting to behold a glory that does not fade. Not only does it not fade away, but we get to see it and we don’t even want to shade our eyes from its brilliance. It is an inviting, wonderful, radiant, approving look of love from our Father. Our pupils get bigger, as we get to cast off our veil of the old self and see His glorious countenance. Now, take a look at verse 18 if that seems just too cool to be true. “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.”
There are two amazing things here. First, we are perhaps not to be looking quite the way you might think. It says, “beholding as in a mirror”. That has bothered me for years. I always wondered why Paul did not say, “as through a window”, or “directly across the room”, or “intimately face to face”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t use a mirror to look at someone else. I use it to check out my own face (for fixable flaws, and make myself laugh… what?). Mirrors were a fairly new invention in Paul’s day… they were blurry and rough, and Corinth was a town that traded in them to those who could afford one. Think of it as the iFace beta. For the first time, people could see themselves without having to look into a pail of water. This was the dawn of a new kind of physical self-awareness.
So here Paul is talking about seeing the glory of the Lord via a mirror. He did it before at the end of 1Cor 13 as well, (and that bothered me too) so this is not just a one-off. Perhaps we should be willing to consider that the best place on Earth to see the glorious workmanship of God is in the face of His most glorious creation - You. Now I know that to suggest that we can see the Lord in our own faces is both dangerous in our narcissistic culture, and offensive to our self loathing nature. Nonetheless, does not the Word declare you and I as new creation wrought in Christ? Is not Christ in you, the hope of glory? Does not even creation itself long to be set free into the glorious liberty of the children of God (Rom 8:21)? Are you not the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus? And, do you not have the same access and opportunity Moses had to the Lord, allowing His light to shine upon you and reflect visibly?
So if we look at ourselves via the mirror of the Word, all this begins to make sense. But if we look at other mirrors, then we see ourselves improperly, and more importantly, we see the Lord improperly. Other mirrors are outward, and therefore make the Lord appear far away and disinterested. Physical mirrors really are about us. The ‘vanity’ in my bedroom is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. For many, our identities are too closely tied with appearances, and thus we obsess over our selves. The world is a powerful mirror. All that look in to it to see themselves are never satisfied. The image we see always has lack, as there is always someone bigger, better, smarter and faster, making us not measure up. Stop looking into other mirrors! They do not reflect a true image.
The word of the Lord with all this… “be free my child from looking at yourself as separated from my glorious work. I do it all with your full participation, and delight to mold you in My image. Marvel my beloved, as my greatest workmanship you will ever see is of yourself in the mirror of my love toward you.”
Selah.
Finally, amidst the beholding of the image, the verse declares that we are being transformed into the same image. The image of what? Of Christ Himself. From glory to glory. Glories can be in minutes during worship, days and seasons — in all phases of how the Lord works with us. Each time you look in the mirror of the Lord and His Word, expect yourself to look a little more like Jesus each time.
