Wonderful Words of wisdom and encouragement...!
More Are The Children of The Desolate by George Davis and Michael Clark
This article is a message of hope for all who have felt that bit of panic as you see the end of your years coming, with little fruit to show for it. You had such hope for your life but look at you now. Jesus has promised you great fruitfulness. He chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain (see John 15:16), but now, in the declining years of your life, you feel more spiritually barren than ever. To make things worse, even your natural strength is failing you. Take heart, for you are in extremely good company. You are not the first one to have felt this way. In fact, those heirs of the promise that brought forth the greatest fruit unto God were in similar situations. The promise is not to the expert. The race does not go to the swift, nor the battle to the strong (see Ecclesiastes 9:11). Those who wait upon the Lord, not charging on ahead in their own strength, but remaining ready and available for His use, will be given a source of strength unknown to the mighty and noble. THEY will run and not grow weary.
God's principle of fruitfulness is strikingly set out in Isaiah 54:1-2.
Sing, barren, you who didn't bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, you who did not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, says Yahweh. (2) Enlarge the place of your tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of your habitations; don't spare: lengthen your cords, and strengthen your stakes. (WEB)
How could the desolate have more children than the married wife? This is a natural impossibility, and that is the point exactly. The path of the Lord runs straight through the impossible every time, and often seems to lead directly away from the blessing He has promised us. Like dear departed Lazarus who was beyond the realm of all natural help and hope, wrapped in grave clothes and rotting in his tomb, God shuts us up unto faith awaiting the call to come forth unto Him. He IS Himself the resurrection and the life. If we could resurrect ourselves from the dead then we might be able, by our own strength, to bring forth fruit unto God. But between the promise and the provision is a place of dead barrenness--a place where our natural strength fails us--a place of waiting in hope for resurrection life.
A dear brother recently told us, "Things in the Kingdom of God are not DONE, they are BIRTHED." God made a covenant with Abraham and his Seed. In that regard He elected to bring about His purposes through the natural process of begetting and birthing, a natural figure of the spiritual birthing. The Bible genealogies record the long line of begotten ones through whom He birthed His first begotten Son, Jesus, into the world, through the womb of one who knew no husband.
As a Son, Jesus came bringing the revelation of God as FATHER. We must not pass this lightly. God is called Father because He is the begetter. Just as in the natural, what the Father does not beget is not His offspring. Those fruits that are born out of man's strength and ingenuity are not acceptable to Him. Paul wrote, "not that we are sufficient of ourselves, to account anything as from ourselves; but our sufficiency is from God" (2 Corinthians 3:5). To know God as Father IS to know Him as the progenitor of all things.
The first verb in the New Testament is (gennao) begat. "Abraham begat Isaac." That sounds fairly simple and painless doesn't it? But the birth of Isaac was a supernatural birth that tested the limits of Abraham's patience and faith. Abraham and Sarah are a natural figure of the spiritual process God still uses to birth His purposes through yielded vessels.
Not far from our homes in Idaho is a little town called Hope. Just past Hope on state highway 200 is another little community appropriately named Beyond Hope. Before God fulfilled His promise of fruitfulness to Abraham and Sarah He first brought them to a place beyond all natural hope. Abraham was one hundred years old and Sarah was barren, but to make things worse, at ninety years old, she also was well past the age of bearing children.
God gave Abraham an incredible promise of fruitfulness. ". . .in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is on the seashore. Your seed will possess the gate of his enemies." O boy! It's onward and upward from here, right? All Abraham and Sarah had to do was come together and nine months later--NOT!
Between the promise and the provision stood the impotence of Abraham and the barren womb of Sarah. In fact, barrenness was a tradition in Abraham's family; a tradition established by God. The women most favored were often those who were barren and the children of promise were those born of barren women, such as Sarah the mother of Isaac (Genesis 11:30), Rebekah the mother of Jacob (Gen 25:21) and Rachael the mother of Joseph (Gen 30:1). All of these women were barren and certainly all of these sons were special. From one man, who was already considered dead, there arose a race as numerous as the stars, as countless as the sands of the sea-shore. More are the children of the desolate!
Then there was another special woman named Hannah, of whom we shall speak in more depth later. For now, suffice it to say that Hannah reveals, in a special way, the divine purpose of barrenness, "for the Lord had shut up her womb" to this mysterious end. (See 1 Samuel
1:5).
Back to Abraham
God had promised Abraham great fruitfulness. Years passed and still no seed. From a natural perspective, things were looking awfully bleak. However, there was one more trick up Sarah's sleeve. Sarah had an Egyptian bondmaid named Hagar. If a wife was barren in those days her bondmaid could have offspring for her. In desperation Sarah sent Abraham into Hagar. After all, Abraham couldn't sit there and do nothing could he? Hagar conceived and brought forth a son, who they named Ishmael. O boy! Finally some fruit! Doubtless, Abraham thought that Ishmael was the son of promise. He had to be! For all other avenues were closed, RIGHT? No! God had chosen Sarah, the barren one, not Hagar. Although God loved him, this child of Hagar could not be the son of promise. Therefore, God said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but her name will be Sarah. I WILL BLESS her, and moreover I WILL GIVE YOU A SON by her. Yes, I WILL BLESS her, and she will be a mother of nations. Kings of peoples will come from her."
It was at this point that Abraham did something unbecoming the father of the faith. He "fell on his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, 'Will a child be born to him who is one hundred years old? Will Sarah, who is ninety years old, give birth?'" Because of the seeming impossibility of God's promise, Abraham pleaded, "Oh that Ishmael might live before you!" God's answer came immediately, "No, but Sarah, your wife, will bear you a son. You shall call his name Isaac (laughter)." (Genesis 17:15-19) It seemed that God was getting the last laugh.
Now consider Jacob and Rachel. Rachel also was barren and in her desperation she cried out to Jacob, "Give me children, or else I die," Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel and he said, "Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?" (Genesis 30:2, NKJV). Rachel followed in Sarah's example and in desperation, cried out to Jacob instead of to God. Her answer to him was, "Behold, my maid Bilhah. Go in to her, that she may bear on my knees, and I also may obtain children by her" (Genesis 30:2-3 WEB) In His time God, by His mercy, remembered Rachel and opened her womb. She conceived and brought forth Joseph, another miracle offspring (Genesis 30:1). Like Sarah, Rachel tried to fulfill God's promise through her own ingenuity with this son born of Bilhah the slave. His name was Dan. It is interesting that when the tribes of Israel are listed in the book of Revelation, Dan is not mentioned, but Joseph is. God only honors those sons that He gives. He only blesses the offspring that are born of barren wombs, beyond all hope of natural productivity.
Let's sum up for a moment, that we might see the principle of barrenness. God gave a promise, but between the promise and the provision was a barren womb. Sarah tried to contravene the process by sending Abraham into the Egyptian bondmaid, but her offspring was unacceptable to God. Sarah and Abraham had created their own promised son, which they proudly offered up to God. God rejected Ishmael. Abraham begged God to reconsider, for in his mind there was no other way that the son of promise could come. But God had purposed that the provision should come through barrenness so that no flesh could glory in His presence.
Here we see an example and admonition for the church today. God gives a promise and then waits. He waits to see if we will wait. He waits to see if we will trust Him as FATHER or attempt to bring the promise to pass through our own virility.
How often do we come to God offering our Ishmael, the offspring of our flesh, only to hear that eternal "NO"? Yet we continue to beg God to allow our Ishmael to live in His sight. We go about producing the offspring of Hagar that are in bondage with all of her children. (See Galatians 4:21-31). How much of what is done today in the name of God is the product of flesh and leads to legalism and bondage? How much of our praying before God, to bless our doings, is no different than Abraham's pleading, "Oh that Ishmael might live before you," and it, too, falls on deaf ears? We come up with a good idea, put it into action by our own strength and then ask God to bless it. We see this happening on every front of Christendom. Flesh can only beget flesh and bondage can only birth greater bondage.
The travail of soul that comes out of barrenness and knowing that the provision is beyond the innovations of our flesh, but requires a miracle from heaven, is a rarity. All the religious works of religious man put together cannot compare to the fruit of one life that has been shut up unto barrenness, shut up unto faith and in patience inheriting the promise. Indeed, ". . .more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife. . ." God chooses the weak things of this world to confound the mighty.
God makes sure that nothing of our flesh can glory in His presence. We might persuade thousands to follow us and put their energies into our movement or program, but if God does not father it, it will all come to naught. Someone once said the definition of an insane man is one who keeps doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. When will we ever learn that "He doesn't delight in the strength of the horse. He takes no pleasure in the legs of a man" (Psalm 147:10)? "For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them (who rely on the Lord? See verse 8) whose heart is perfect toward Him" (see 2 Chronicles 16:9). He desires us to experience the impotence of our flesh that we will no longer put any confidence in it. "In my flesh dwells no good thing."
to expanding your homeless ministry! 
Would also say this vision is also an exhortation to read your Bible diligently, as God's Word is a 
