“They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor.” (Isaiah 61:3)

When you came to Christ, perhaps like mine, your life was in ruin. There didn’t seem to be much hope for good things to come upon it.  Perhaps you were burdened with the mess you were in and convinced that life no longer had meaning or direction.

Certainly that is what I felt before Christ, even though in the world’s eyes I had achieved astounding success. But in my own heart I was at the end of myself seeing no reason to continue on.

And yet when Holy Spirit began to breathe the very breath of Jesus into my brokenness, the Lord’s voice began to echo throughout my being declaring how I was going to be his great man carrying his voice to the nations.

I was not at all comfortable with this thought when it first entered my spirit.  In fact I rebuked the Lord for saying to me.  I assured the Lord that my own iniquities and sins certainly robbed me of the fortune to serve within the Lord’s army as an ambassador to the nations, and yet he continued to speak the same sound into my ears.

He said, “You will become an oak of righteousness, a planting of the Lord.”  

I remember the day he said this.  I was sitting in a park that had been devastated by a hurricane in Nova Scotia.  A year or so earlier a category 3 storm had blown through Halifax leaving a trail of waste in its path. Great trees had been uprooted as if they were toothpicks.

I used to sit on a park bench everyday for more than a month, maybe two, and every time my eyes fell on the same broken stump in the ground.  I considered it without considering it.

It lay as an image in my spirit and in my mind, but I never spoke about it to myself or anyone else.  I just looked at it as I looked at everything else.

But at the end of two months my mind began to form a question to God.  I said, “God what is it about this stump?”

And then the still small voice of the Lord filled my senses and said, “Look at it! What do you see?”

I said, “I see a broken stump but there is a new branch coming out of its side.”

The Lord said, “You are like that branch coming from that stump.  Your life was in ruin, but now it is mine and from it I will release my glory to the nations.”

I knew the truth of this in an instant.  Even though my life looked like nothing in 2005, I knew that it was going to become something and that I would minister to the nations and have blessing upon my home.

The glory of God has shone on my life and will shine increasingly still. Not because of any power of my own but because of Holy Spirit inside of me.

Don’t you know that your life is like a candle on a lampstand that shines for everyone in the room to see?  Since I surrendered to Christ I can no longer help but shine for him because Holy Spirit is in me.

And it will be the same with you…