One Family, Many Rooms!

Jesus said to his disciples, Dont be worried! Have faith in God and have faith in Me.

There
are many rooms in my Fathers house. I wouldnt tell you this, unless it was true. I am going
there to prepare a place for each of you. After I have done this, I will come back and take you
with Me. Then we will be together...I wont leave you like orphans. I will come to you (John
14:1-3, 18, CEV).
As I was meditating upon this scripture this morning, I sensed the Lord speaking to my
heart: Imagine what it would be like if everybody in a large family tried to live in one room
only. Not only would the room be overcrowded, but individual family members would start feeling
like, There is no room for me here. I dont fit. I dont belong here. I feel like I am being pushed
out. I feel like an orphan, so Im moving outa here to look for a place where I can feel at home, a
place where there is room for me, a place where I belong!

The fact is, that a healthy family requires many rooms where each individual
member feels like they have a space, a place where they can be who they are, but
still connected to the larger family unit. It is even so in the Fathers House. There
are many rooms in this House. And yet we have often tried to limit Gods family to
one room, one space for everybody.

This is what happens when we limit our concept of church to a Sunday morning, or to what happens
behind the four walls of a building. That one space gets overcrowded, and some begin to feel like an
orphan, and begin to think and to feel like, There is no space for me to function here. Why even
bother speaking up? Who will hear what I have to say? Who will listen? I feel like an orphan, so I
think I will just go somewhere else, and look for a different family.

This is what happens when we limit church to one room, one space, one time-frame during the
course of a week. And we go to another place operating under the same institutional mentality, and
we go through the same process all over again. We may start to feel, There is no room for me here if
I limit myself to what takes place on a Sunday morning, or behind the four walls of this building.

And so we live, feeling like orphans, feeling like we dont belong, and blaming the people that we
feel keep pushing us out, instead of accepting the reality that in the Fathers Family, and in the
Fathers House, there are many rooms, and there is room for all of us if only we will break forth and
break out into new territory, expand into new rooms beyond a physical building, while staying
connected to the Family.

The Fathers House is big enough to include both what is happening within the limitation of a building
as well as to embrace a much larger sphere which is really about making disciples of nations, not
simply attending services on a Sunday morning. Our administration will then becomes something
much more than maintaining a building (although that is really important as a launching pad for
discipleship), but the mission becomes primarily reaching out to the orphans, the widows, the aged,
the single-parent families, the street people, the prisoners, and all those cut off from family networks
who need to be connected to the Fathers Family as well.

And so, as the family enlarges and increases, the children need to break out into new territory with
the Fathers blessing. It is not a matter of trying to all crowd into one room, but to break out into new
territory. There is room for all of us, and the Fathers heart is not to bless one at the expense of the
other, but to make room for everybody. He has not just a little room, but the nations of the earth on
His heart!

This lines up, I believe, with the scripture from Isaiah 54 that I shared with the extended leadership on
Wednesday evening. When Christ, our Maker, is our Head, and our Husband, and God is our Father,
we will start to see children birthed in the Kingdom, even through people whose natural lives have
known pain, rejection, abandonment, divorce and barrenness.

Sing, O barren, you who have not borne! Break forth into singing, and cry aloud, you who
have not laboured with child! For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the
married woman, says the LORD. Enlarge the place of your tent, and let them stretch out the
curtains of your dwellings. Do not spare. Lengthen your cords, and strengthen your
stakes. For you shall expand to the right and to the left, and your descendants will inherit
the nations, and make the desolate cities inhabited.

Do not fear, for you will not be ashamed...For your maker is your Husband, the LORD of hosts
is His Name, and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel. He is called the God of the whole
earth (Isaiah 54:1-5).
He is not just the God of one space or one room only. He is the God of the whole earth. There is
room for all of us. In fact, all of us are needed to fill the earth with the knowledge of His glory, and to
take the presence of Jesus into the places where the discouragement, the sense of disconnection, and
the darkness is the greatest. This will happen when the sons and daughters of God begin to break out
on the right hand and on the left, and stop trying to confine the family activity to one room, to one
space, or to one limited time frame during the week.

For your waste and desolate places, and the land of your destruction, will even now be too
small for the inhabitants, and those who swallowed you up will be far away. The children you
will have...will say in your ears, The place is too small for me. Give me a place where I may
dwell.

Then you will say in your heart, Who has begotten these for me, since I have lost my children
and am desolate, a captive and wandering to and fro? And who has brought these up? There I
was, left alone, but these, where were they?

...Then you shall know that I am the LORD, for they shall not be ashamed who wait for
Me. Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the captives of the righteous be
delivered? But thus says the LORD: Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and
the prey of the terrible be delivered, for I will contend with him who contends with you, and I
will save your children (Isaiah 49:19-25).

This lines up with the revelation of the Fathers Family in the new covenant, how that we are one
Body but many members. We need a diversity of giftings moving in unity if we are to break out into
new territory, and begin to fill a larger sphere of influence with the Presence of God, and see an ever
wider number of people feel that they are indeed a part of the Fathers Family.
Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of
administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same
God which works all in all (I Corinthians 12:4-6).
It is clear that to accommodate and to administer everything that is going to be happening in the
Fathers House, it is going to take more than one administrator, or one operator to manage as wise
stewards everything that will be taking place in the Fathers House. It is going to take a diversity of
gifts, a difference of administrations, a diversity of operations. The challenge is to see each part flow
as one Family, and only under the Headship of Christ, this will happen.
The giftings placed within each of the Fathers children did not originate or come from man, but from
Christ our Head, and so our breaking out into new territory will not originate from an external or a
human source, but from the gifting, the treasure that is within as we step out boldly with Christ as
our Head who also joins us organically with one another, His Body.
A mans gift makes room for him, and brings him before great men (Proverbs 18:16).
With Abrahams son Isaac, the Philistines keep stopping all of the wells that his father had dug. This
seemed like a bad thing, and something to fight about, but with Isaac, he kept pressing onward and
forward peacefully into the land of his inheritance.
And he moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it. So he called
its name Rehoboth (Spaciousness), because he said, For now the LORD has made room for
us, and we shall be fruitful in the land (Genesis 26:22).
David, too, knew what it felt like that there was no place for him, or for the anointing that he
carried. Yet, on the day that God delivered him from the enemy within, in his own thought life, as
well as from the hand of Saul, he wrote:
He also brought me out into a large place. He delivered me because He delighted in Me
(Psalm 18:19).
You have set my feet in a wide place (Psalm 31:8b).
I called on the LORD in distress. The LORD answered me and set me in a large place. The
LORD is on my side. I will not fear. What can man do to me? The LORD is for me among those
who help me...It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man. It is better to
trust in the LORD than to put confidence in princes...The LORD is my strength and song, and He
has become my salvation (Psalm 118:5-9, 14).
Amen! May it be so for each of us as the Spirit of God begins to break out in an ever greater way
among us!
A song that speaks to my heart deeply along this line is taken from the album, Fathers House, by
Brian Doerksen. The song There Must Be a Place Where Dreams Come True! especially speaks to
the heart of this, I believe. Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_lDZZJO8w0&index=3&list=PLE534781926B5AC5C