The Big Picture is of Paramount Importance

by Lyn Packer

February 2023.

This prophetic word is a big-picture word about some of the over-arching themes that God’s work in us is about. At its core, it’s about the restoration of all things to Himself and His Kingdom vision. God is doing many things simultaneously in the church to bring us back into line with His original plan, and the Lord has been showing me three main areas of restoration that work is happening in. They are about bringing us back to…

• Original identity

• Original wholeness

• Original representation and commission

Original identity

Knowing our identity. What does it actually mean that we are created in the image and likeness – the spiritual and moral likeness – of God ?

God is working at restoring us so that we can walk in our true identity as those made in His image. Part of His work in our lives is bringing us into a revelation and subsequent understanding of how much of the knowledge of that identity we have lost. This is what He is seeking to restore us to – our true eternal identity, in both nature and character.

Over the past few years God has been highlighting and speaking to the church about Identity – knowing who He is and also knowing ourselves with more clarity.

• Knowing who He is. God is teaching us what He is like, exposing false ideas of God that the world and the enemy have given us, and revealing His true identity, nature and character – just, loving, kind, faithful, merciful, patient, etc. For many of us this has been a journey of untangling and sifting through two things – untruths about God that have been perpetrated throughout the centuries, and our own personal filters and wounds that have caused us to see Him in a particular way, putting on Him things that are not who He actually is.

• Knowing who we are in Him. This means understanding what Christ has done, what He has gifted us, and what He has made available to us to access. Knowing who we are as individuals – for many of us it’s meant that He is doing a deep internal work of bringing us to a place where we can recognise the filters or lenses we look at ourselves, life, and Him through.

Original wholeness

God’s plan is to restore us to original wholeness and all the blessing that goes with that. He is working to bring us into the fullness of our salvation, and is restoring us to wholeness – in spirit, soul and body. Christ has made this available to us through His life, death, and resurrection, and our part is to receive what He did and work with Him in establishing the fullness of wholeness in our lives.

We cannot walk in the fullness of our identity as a son or daughter of God without dealing with the things that would seek to hinder us and trip us up. He is giving us understanding in regard to our life-wounds, healing us and setting us free, so we can walk as mature sons and daughters who are unhindered by wrong mindsets and their corresponding behaviours and habit patterns that would seek to imprison us.

He is making us into the image of Christ, re-forming within us a harmonious working together of all our parts – spirit, soul, and body – no one part of us being fragmented or out-of-sorts with another; a healthy, harmonious life. A life where our internal and external lifestyles work according to, and from, their Christ-gifted wholeness, instead of from fractured and false identities, ungodly mindsets and beliefs, trauma-informed emotions and lifestyles, and dis-ease in our physical bodies. In this process God is healing life wounds and trauma, helping us to see ourselves with the clarity that He sees us, helping us hear His words of acceptance and love, and to know by experience their truth. He is enabling us to embrace the goodness that He has planned for us – to live a fulfilling life (John 10:10).

Out of this healing and restoration we become agents of healing and restoration, able to impart not just knowledge to others, but to release the power and love of God that brings revelation to others. One of the great outcomes of this work is that it increases our trust and faith in Him, so we can live in, and minister to, the world with increasing confidence that He will do all He has promised us.

As we receive healing and our minds become renewed, instead of seeing, and therefore living life, from a distorted perspective, we will be able to live from a place of communion with Him that brings us into freedom, truth and confidence. He is restoring our hearts so that we see and care as He does, and within the healing work He does in us He is also teaching us how to move in wisdom in our righteousness so that we treat others with respect, dignity and loving kindness.

This is what will enable us to model what it looks like to walk as a child of God in the earth.

Original representation and commission

Mankind, being made in God’s image was commissioned to be a representation of God in the earth, and given stewardship and dominion of the earth. That multi-generational commission was never removed from mankind and we are its inheritors and stewards today. God is restoring the vision for that stewardship and rule in His people – not that we might rule as overlords and dictators (moral, spiritual, or physical), but as true stewards who care for the planet and its peoples.

Christ demonstrated what that looks like in the way He interacted with both nature and mankind. He has recommissioned us in the original mandate and He is working in us so that we can represent Him in a wise and righteous manner. We are learning to walk as those made in God’s image, and therefore as those who are loving, kind, faithful, merciful, patient, etc – having received and formed His character and nature within us.

Alongside the original commission to steward the earth wisely and care for the inhabitants of it we have Christ’s commission to go into the world, and make disciples of every nation – share the good news with them and model, and teach them, what it looks like, and the reality of walking as disciples of His, with His power and love working in us and through us.