From Gimmel to Dalet, From Warrior to Farmer - by John L. Moore

"I was no prophet, nor was I a son of a prophet, but I was a sheep breeder and a tender of sycamore fruit."

Amos 7:14

"But he will say, 'I am no prophet, I am a farmer; for a man taught me to keep cattle from my youth."

Zechariah 13:5

"They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks..."

Micah 4:3

From Gimmel to Dalet, we are passing through Great Doors, from Warrior-Prophet to Farmer-Soldier

The change of seasons taking place in the spiritual is going to have a significant impact upon the Body of Christ as the Lord Jesus shifts His emphasis on our training from that of a soldier to that of a farmer.

The warrior anointing has been on the Church for about 20 years. This modern militant period, though it has had its excesses, has been good as the Church learned the disciplines of warfare: when to march, when to charge, when to take a stand. Intercessors earned new respect and prophets were instrumental as “scout-snipers” that went ahead of the praising Army, spying on the land and taking out key spiritual strongmen.

Warriors are peacemakers. Through warfare they liberate a people in bondage. Warriors do not make good peacekeepers. Warriors are trained for war and anything less than action, adventure, and adrenaline, bore them to tears. I typify this, I thrive on warfare. My training in the natural and the spiritual is in hand-to-hand combat. A warrior finds no greater peace than stepping into the cocoon of life-and-death conflict where senses heighten and time slows to a crawl.

Warriors take the land but they do not keep the land. The land is occupied by those who settle it, till the soil, plant the seed, tend the plant, and labor in harvest. In other words: Farmers.

Warriors live for conquest and travel. Farmers live for home and hearth.

Warriors who war too long do not recognize their own weariness. They confuse their malaise for a lack of action and start seeking new battles.

In Deuteronomy 20:19-20 the Lord warns His people:

“When you besiege a city for a long time, while making war against it to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them; if you can eat of them, do not cut them down to use in the siege, for the tree of the field is man’s food. Only the trees which you know are not trees for food you may destroy cut down, to build siege works against the city that makes war with you, until it is subdued.”

In other words, the fog of combat can so cloud our senses that we destroy our fruit.

A key to wise warfare is to use the proper wood in constructing your war engine to fight the enemy who “makes war with you.” The Body of Christ has wrongly followed a scorched-earth policy in recent years. Much spiritual warfare is not warfare at all, nor is it necessarily spiritual. Much of it resembles psychological “transference,” the trait of transferring your pent-up emotions and needs against a substitutionary foe. This is simply self-generated terrorism within your own vineyard. When all chest-pounding, drum-beating and saber-rattling is over, the soul feels relief because the flesh is exhausted but the garden is in ruins.

Mercenaries have a commitment to war and the study of war but they do not have a commitment to land.

The true citizen/soldier, the farmer/patriot that built this nation, has a commitment to the land. He fights for liberty, he goes to war to defend friends and family, but he instinctively sees his land as a garden not a battleground. He has a pastor’s heart because he is concerned for the pasture. When all is said and done and the battle is won, he knows he must still feed the sheep.

The hope for our nation, the world, and the Church lies in returning to common sense. Common sense has best been taught primarily through two sources: The Bible and Nature. The more our Nation turns away from the Bible and the more we embrace urban (unnatural) environments the more evil our culture becomes.

Warfare will continue until all Kingdoms are put under His feet. But warfare for the sake of warfare is not warfare at all. It is foolishness and insanity.

Warfare in the Kingdom is not determined by who claims the field, but by who plants it.

www.johnlmoore.com