I was 11 years old, standing on the beach in Maui, Hawaii. Beautiful beaches breath taking views, looking out at this amazing SHARK filled ocean!
A week before we took our family vacation to this place called Hawaii; my father took us to see this terrifying movie called “Jaws”. I will never forget it, I was sitting down at the end of the row, my family in between my dad and I. Then the music started, “Dununt, Dununt”, and the camera moved through the water, I jumped up and ran to sit next to him, I would never be the same…
Back to the vacation; two great white sharks had been spotted about a half mile off shore and my dad wanted to wade out in the water. He wanted to see for himself as men carried these man eating creatures out to sea! He literally made me walk out into the ocean waist deep and told me that we had “Dominion” over everything on earth, including the sharks. I didn’t care, I ran back to my mommy!!
Twenty-eight years later, two weeks ago, I was snorkeling with two of my best friends around an Island in ST Thomas Virgin islands. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of a five or six foot something as it swims by. I flashed back to the feelings of an 11 year old boy, waiting on these sharks to turn and eat my dad and I, it all came rushing back! As we looked, a shark swims 5 feet in front of us. Now, I am not sure we walked on water, but I can tell you it was pretty close!!
I really believe we have dominion over every living creature on earth. God has limited Himself to you and me to rule and reign and bring His message of authority and hope to the entire world. I also believe He will test us with this belief and wants us to actually walk it out. I failed two weeks ago, thank God for grace!!!! (My faith was built as I almost walked on water)!
Are you in bondage today, depressed, questioning? Or do you live a life of freedom, a life abundantly as His word would say? Read Andrew’s and Seth’s blurb on Dominion, I pray it breaks something loose in your life today!
Dominion:
God with shoes on
Back in the garden, God gave Adam the keys to the Kingdom, dominion over all creation.
Because Adam lost them, God’s been trying to help the rest of us as Adam’s heirs to recover our inheritance.
God didn’t set this up as some grand, failed experiment.
After that initial setback, He put in motion a plan whereby we, His proxies and territorial stewards, would re-establish His Kingdom.
This enterprise was summarized by Jesus in His last words to his disciples – marching orders we know as the Great Commission:
“Go and make disciples.”
But reconciling men to God and helping them discover their true royal identity and authority has always been God’s plan.
Consequently, our posture towards the world projects the confidence of displaced heirs.
The earth is the Lord’s.
He didn’t create humanity for the misery and bondage that so many endure, but for a life of joy and abundance.
Recognizing this, the original disciples moved out fearlessly into a hazardous and antagonistic world, a world that they turned upside down.
As we recognize the mandate of exercising dominion that our royal identity confers, we raise the dead no less fearlessly than did Jesus’ disciples.
As we take dominion over creation, we exercise the Great Commission authority Jesus conferred on us.
We do so understanding God’s kingly relationship to it both in a past-tense and future-tense perspective, church planting, which is the strategy by which we take dominion over small subsets of territory, and apostleship, which is the strategy by which we plant churches.
Practically, we exercise divine authority in every realm of the real world in which we live.
Whether in our families, our workplaces, or our social and governmental institutions, we allow God to transform our culture through our interactions with it.
