I had a picture of a staircase with someone with a very heavy backpack on that was really burdening them and weighing them down. Each step was getting harder and harder to climb. They had nearly reach the top, when they had to go back to the bottom. They were then complaining, saying “Why Lord have  I  got to do it again? You know how hard it’s been for me, how long it’s taken me and how much I’m aching in pain carrying this load up the stairs.”

God gently answered, “I know”.  He pointed to a button at the bottom of the stairs and said, “My child you have carried this burden under your own steam and on your own, now press that button and watch what happens.” The person pressed the button and the stairs weren’t actually stairs, they were an escalator. The Lord then said: “In my power  you can take of the back pack and place it on the escalator beside you, and ascend with ease in my power. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Jacob Dominy

Jake sent me this picture this morning, but he hadn’t been shown who it was for. I actually thank there are three levels to this. On one level, it is a specific word for certain individuals, – whether you’re at Wildwood church or anywhere else in the world! – and God is speaking to you about a specific situation that at the moment looms large in your life. Receive the word, put down that backpack gratefully, press that button in prayer and feel the escalator start moving. You won’t realise it is happening until you notice that something that you were facing has started to slip behind you, because God has dealt with it. That’s your sign.

Also I think the Holy Spirit has just shown me a detail for someone (a particular person, not everyone) who is reading this, about the backpack: inside it are three fairly large wooden blocks, like the old-fashioned wooden building bricks that were made for small children maybe 40 or 50 years ago. You are hoping to start building something, and you’ve been carrying them for a long time. The Lord says to you “Don’t just put the pack down, but give me the contents as well and let me do the building.” But as I said, this is a word of knowledge for an individual: otherwise the general picture of the heavy weight applies.

The second level, I think, is a much more general teaching point. I am sure most of us find ourselves walking up that escalator at different times. In fact I’ve just had a phone call since writing that last sentence which this picture speaks into. We face situations every day and often think that we’re just walking up stairs, often steep ones, often carrying a heavy load as well. We just say to ourselves, “That’s life!” But it isn’t: the reality is the escalator, not the stairs. The reality is the spiritual dimension. The reality is the power that raised Jesus from the dead who dwells within us. In Him we live and move and have our being. And the button of transformation isn’t miles away at the top or at the bottom of the stairs; it’s right where we are, on our hearts. How often do we forget to press it, and pray?

The final point comes from a devotional I read yesterday on Jacob’s Ladder. Just as the angels ascended and descended Jacob’s ladder, the Lord want us to go up and down the ladder ourselves. We go up the escalator to receive from Heaven, and we come back down to bring to Earth what we have received, so that God’s will is done on Earth as it is in Heaven. If we can take our simple, childish wooden building blocks into heavenly places and leave them there with the Lord, He will transform them into Heaven’s resources to bring back down to Earth.

I’m going to finish by repeating Jake’s picture, as I don’t want what I have written to detract from the original word:

I had a picture of a staircase with someone with a very heavy backpack on that was really burdening them and weighing them down. Each step was getting harder and harder to climb. They had nearly reach the top, when they had to go back to the bottom. They were then complaining, saying “Why Lord have  I  got to do it again? You know how hard it’s been for me, how long it’s taken me and how much I’m aching in pain carrying this load up the stairs.”

God gently answered, “I know”.  He pointed to a button at the bottom of the stairs and said, “My child you have carried this burden under your own steam and on your own, now press that button and watch what happens.” The person pressed the button and the stairs weren’t actually stairs, they were an escalator. The Lord then said: “In my power  you can take of the back pack and place it on the escalator beside you, and ascend with ease in my power. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”