When you reap the harvest of your breakthrough, the one that cost you endurance, submission, suffering, and, sometimes, years of faithfulness to your assignment, where do you invest that harvest?
When you experience breakthrough, the opportunists will seek you out.
The kingdom of God has some hangers-on who make book negotiating with faithful inheritors about the investment of their breakthroughs. They are the interviewers, writers, publishers, and conference organizers who pay none of the price paid by the people of breakthrough but feed the consumers that harvest for the buck it brings them.
The opportunists present you with the hope of fame, fortune, and future. They appear to be the ultimate of kingdom opportunity, but the opportunity is not for you, but them and their following. The following must be fed. The opportunists feed your harvest to the consumers, then they move on to the next success story.
When it is over, you wonder what happened to your harvest. A pile of bones. A crust of dry bread. An empty basket with hype machine labels peeling off the side. An old conference poster. A throbbing need to produce another miracle to regain your place in the machine. You look for another rabbit to pull out of the hat. The opportunists say, “Call me when you have another breakthrough.”
Fathering Leaders and Harvest
When we speak of “family” in the kingdom of God, we do not speak of the bro and sis, father and kids paradigm of the natural family. This is not about the three-bedroom domicile in the suburbs and 2.3 children in a nuclear family.
The Bible has no context for the family that matches the planned presentation of parents and children. It is a picture of lineage and inheritance, not consumerism and emotional contact. An inheritor who wastes his portion and contribution to the estate is not celebrated. He can be redeemed and restored. When he is, he will do what he should have done in the beginning.
In the Biblical and kingdom of God culture, fathering leaders prepare inheritors to expand the estate. The “estate” is the metron of assignment into which a kingdom inheritor is adopted, and the assignment produces a spiritual, familiar alignment with a kingdom purpose: God has something He wishes this “Oikos” to build as part of the greater regional Ecclesia’s apostolic blueprint.
Father or Opportunist
Some extremely worthwhile things can be done through legitimate forms of kingdom marketing, conferencing, and consumption. They are not completely without merit. They are horrendous substitutes for fathering leaders,
You should know that some “fathers” are actually opportunists. They will recruit you with a promise to promote you, but they will only promote the ones who do all the work to produce a breakthrough. They will not make you a success. They will take the harvest of anyone who succeeds. They are not fathers at all. They are opportunists. They recruit all they can to find a few excellent representatives of their hype machine promises.
Their representatives of excellence are not representatives of kingdom purpose but representatives of the flash in the pan fodder they feed consumers of their hype. They do not adopt those sent by the Father for fathering leadership.
They shoot their wounded. Father restored them. They are embarrassed by failure. Fathers use failure to build successful inheritors. They attack anyone who exposes the fraud. Fathers expose frauds and scams, so the kingdom suffers fewer fractures.
You should probably rethink your bottom line assumptions about Pharisees and Sadducees because Jesus was exposing them as opportunists, and some of our celebrated hype machines are the Pharisees and Sadducees of the modern kingdom plague of consumption.
Reinvest Your Harvest
Having paid the price for your breakthrough, you should not negotiate with opportunists about investing that harvest outside the estate of your assignment. You will think thoughts like: “My father helped me get here but he cannot help me now that I have my breakthrough. I’ll say some honoring things about him occasionally, but I’m ready for the big time now!”
What exactly is ‘the big time?” If you have an assignment in an estate, with a fathering leader, by what odd logic would you conclude that your ultimate success is to dishonor that assignment by signing up with a traveling circus instead of reinvesting your harvest in the expansion of your assignment?
Once you start listening to the scam artists – and I am talking about the very heroes celebrated as the door openers of modern revivalism – you will need to diminish, damage, or even destroy your father (in your mind) to free you from your actual point of contact with God’s will of your life.
Our events are not evil, but they will never build the kingdom or establish the kingdom culture. Our events are not wrong, but they seem to be producing poor results. Our events are not sinister, but they contribute to the very confusion hell is sowing in fields of God’s kingdom. Is it the events themselves or the spirit of the age harbored within the hearts of a generation without proper priorities? In any case, the reality before us is undeniable.
Fathers and Estate Planning
The crucible of regional Ecclesia influence crushes the inheritors to extract the precious and filter out the vile. Father oversee this process. We have gained a saturation mentality about accumulation when God designed a sanctification maturity about acceleration.
Notice that we never gain momentum from our events. We invest our momentum in these events to the everlasting harm of the very estates that produce the momentum. A great sucking sound rises from the grassroots, gains a crescendo in the stadia, and dissipates back to disjointed centers far from the grassroots where God designed that harvest to be reinvested.
In this runup to a New Era Reformation, the structure of kingdom culture draws us away from these misappropriations of the mold of the world and our charismatic Woodstock. Woodstock is a memorable moment in the history of lawlessness, a mirage that promised a brave new world. It was the beginning of the end of the fantasy. It is not possible to sustain Woodstock. People have a life to live. They cannot perpetuate a party.
We are guilty of perpetuating a party without living the life. We exchanged the Way for the Moment. Now, we attempt to recreate the Moment every Sunday morning instead of producing the Way for God’s people to live the life.
In Your Own Life
Immediately you finish the process that produces your breakthrough, the opportunists arrive to steal or share the harvest of that breakthrough. They have done nothing to contribute to your breakthrough. They were not there with a prayer or a word. They were not there to provide strength when you were weak or the stuff that keeps you going when you fail. They were not even aware of your existence until you became a person of harvest. Opportunists, wait at the finish lines to photograph the winners.
You will learn to give them a penny instead of a hundred dollar bill. You will learn to pay them what they deserve but reinvest your harvest in your assignment. If you do, you will see the exponential expansion of the assignment where God plants you. If you do not, you will be looking for greener grass for the rest of your life.
Consider how ridiculous it is to assume that God would plant you with a father and release you to be a prodigal. Consider the message of Jesus about consumers that rally around a prodigal and assist in wasting the investment capital of a kingdom estate, of a son leaving to join himself to a stranger, and the inevitable condition of the waster when the consumables are gone.
The suddenly celebrated superstar that sustains his sacrificial commitment to working on his skill set is the one that makes it past the first two years of stardom. The one who becomes a victim of stardom always does so because he walks away from that produced his breakthrough harvest. The body he hammered into greatness consumes drugs and drink. The money suddenly showered on his shoulders becomes a drain upon his passion for the very thing that gave him that harvest.
When you break through, get closer to the voice you heard while you were getting your breakthrough. You will need that voice more when you must decide what to do with your harvest than you did gaining that harvest.
