One of the basic principles that guides life is the principle of times and seasons (Ecclesiastics 3:1), which I choose to define as a prerogative for things to happen at certain times, all things being equal, peradventure certain qualities are met.
A woman can endure the pain of pregnancy for as long as eight months, only to mistakenly, or out of impatience, ingest a substance that puts the doctors in a dilemma of choosing who lives between the mother and the child.
Life is not structured to be fair to this proverbial woman by creating a system where she now has to be pregnant for an additional one month or two and carry her baby. No, she’ll undergo a fresh cycle of nine months of pregnancy discomforts before bearing her child.
This, unfortunately, is the cycle many people have found themselves in—especially Christians. They often labour so much to enter into certain dimensions of rest or answered prayers, but their labours often seem fruitless over a long period of time, resulting in what we can call justifiable impatience or frustration. After all, the Bible says that “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). But the big question remains: what—or who—defers the hope?
One of the most potent tools of the enemy against us is ourselves. The spirit realm is governed by principles that are not emotional.
In our quests to achieve spiritual things, God is not bound to come to us in our time, but in His time. And what we are doing while waiting for His time is more important than our claim that we are waiting for Him.
A major difference between God and the Machiavellian principle of “the end justifies the means” is that in God, the means determine the end.
If God, in His sovereignty, has programmed that it will take seven hours of consistent prayer to break the yoke you are fighting, it is inconsequential if you prayed for six hours. If you give up and come back, you’ll most likely start afresh.
Most of the time, the devil has no problem with you praying for that initial six hours. He just finds a way to create a distraction or a look-alike breakthrough that will weaken your engagement—and boom, he has succeeded in ruining the six hours.
Yet again, another, even worse, captivity pattern is the one in which you are deprived of your inheritance. You judiciously labour and trust God for freedom, and just as you approach your season of visitation, you receive just a tiny dose of what is originally yours. You run off until the season of visitation passes—and boom, the wicked taskmaster reveals himself again, and guess who gets to be called unjust? God.
There are people who will labour less and have more fruit, and others who will labour more with less fruit. The difference will be in:
Motive
Maximizing seasons
Consistency
Waiting the right way
And, of course, God’s mercy
There are several patterns of demonic manipulation of season, but the greatest antidote to all of them — a general fix, if you will — is seeking God and not what He can give.