Your Jurisdiction
by
Joye A Alit, 2011 (copyright)

Did you know you have your own personal jurisdiction? After all we’re kings and priests so it goes with the territory! Everyone has a jurisdiction. It is totally unique to you. God has given everyone a sphere around them which they influence. This is their jurisdiction. He had a purpose in giving you your sphere of influence – He wants you to establish His ‘dominion’ over it.

Was that the name ‘Adam’ that just flashed across your mind? That’s right! In the garden, in Eden, Adam and Eve were allocated the first Jurisdiction. “Take dominion,” God said, “over everything around you. Rule it on My behalf; you are my Regents.” And the tired old story is that they gave up their authority. We continue to struggle with the effects of that.

But God came, took on a body like us and became Adam the Second. He wrested back dominion and at great cost established His new Kingdom. Now, every one of us born into His Kingdom has a mandate to see that this Kingdom takes root and expands to once again encompass the whole earth.
It’s not a visible kingdom; it’s a spirit kingdom. We are only temporarily in physical bodies which are just houses for our spirits. God’s dominion is first to be established in the spirit realm, then we will see it visibly in the natural realm around us.

So what’s your jurisdiction and what can you do about it?
You’re ‘just’ a housewife you say, you don’t have influence anywhere. Or I’m ‘just’ an old pensioner stuck at home and no one listens to me any more. Or I’m ‘just’ a kid at school and no one even respects me.
Well, I have news for you: the Holy Spirit in you is just as awesome and powerful as He is in Billy Graham, or Heidi Baker, or wherever you think He’s great. He doesn’t diminish to get into you no matter how small you think you are! And, wherever you are, you are the King’s Regent, representing Him around you.

Definition
Let me tell you what Jurisdiction means so you can get a handle on what it means for you. Juris has to do with the law, something legal, legality. Diction is speech or words. The dictionary says:
The right, power or authority to administer justice. The territory over which authority is exercised. So for us it is the territory over which you have the legal right to speak. That’s pretty impressive – the sphere over which you have the legal right to speak.

Do you recall the words of the centurion to Jesus? “Speak the word only and my servant will be healed.” There is enormous power in words, especially if they are legal words and Spirit-breathed words.

Mum at Home
So you’re a stay-at-home Mum and think you don’t really qualify for a Jurisdiction. Well, let’s just think about it for a minute. Your home is yours (even if you might rent it). You have the legal right to run it the way you want it to be – to say who comes in and who doesn’t, what takes place there, what the atmosphere is like. That’s exactly how God wants you to administer your spiritual jurisdiction. You put out a welcome mat for things you want to come into your home. You shut the door to things that are not acceptable in His Kingdom. In the Spirit you speak out over your territory what you disallow. (‘Bind’ and ‘loose’ in Matthew 16:19 and 18:18 means ‘allow’ and ‘disallow’.) Fill your home with God’s Presence and His attributes so that everyone who walks over the threshold senses Him. They have stepped into your jurisdiction which is under His dominion and everything not of Him is shut out – dropped off at the gate! You are making your home a Heaven zone, and anything inappropriate must drop off.
Speak over your children and bring them – and anyone who enters – into alignment with God’s agendas and thoughts and attitudes. Your children are yours to form for the future – a huge and vitally important part of your jurisdiction and you will never know how far it will reach. Disallow the evil one to tamper with them. Set them apart to God and His purposes for their lives by making that rule in the spirit realm. You have the legal right to speak over them God’s purposes. You have the right to speak over the lives of all those you engage with, especially those coming into your house.
Note, this is not witchcraft and we are not manipulating people. We are speaking into the spirit realm. We must only speak people into God’s agendas and align them with His Kingdom principles. God wants everyone saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. Speak God’s truth over their lives, His revelation, His blessing, etc. His will (not yours!). Your aim is to bring heaven to earth – Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.

Wherever you are
Because you are a God-carrier, a house for the Holy Spirit, wherever you go you carry Him, and whoever you meet you interface with Him. In other words, everyone you meet or connect with is also meeting up with the Spirit of God, coming smack up with Him. Wherever you go and whoever you meet enters your sphere of influence and comes under your jurisdiction. You have the legal right to speak God’s Kingdom over their lives. Now because this is an exercise of the spirit and establishing a spiritual kingdom you don’t have to make these proclamations aloud and in fact no one need ever know except you and God.

Work and School and Play
I hope you’re beginning to realize that whatever your occupation, and wherever you work or study, or spend your time, you have a sphere of influence and you can bring that environment under the Lord’s influence. Kids you can try it at school. In fact God expects you to; He really wants His Kingdom to come in schools. Quietly in the Spirit begin to shut down stuff you know gets God upset – abuse, injustice, harmful things like drugs and drink and porn and promiscuity, anti-God (antichrist) attitudes and teaching. Open the classroom or the school up to good influences, peace, harmony, compassion, openness to the Gospel, faith. Bind the spirit of unbelief. Keep doing this even if you don’t see immediate results, because it is having an effect in the spirit realm. You can create a magnetic field around you that tugs at people’s spirits and makes them want to know God.
Find someone else there who has a heart for God and join forces, pray and declare together. One puts a thousand to flight, but two chase off 10,000! All sorts of things can begin happening. You’re changing the atmosphere, starting to establish God’s dominion in your jurisdiction.

“What’s dominion anyway?” did you ask?
This is what the dictionary says: A territory in which a single rulership holds sway. Lands or domains subject to sovereign(kingly) control. Lordship, ownership.
I like that. There’s just one Ruler and Owner and you’re bringing the territory back under His rulership. So dominion is the territory being ruled by the rightful King.

Examples
Corporations
When I first received this revelation I was sharing it with my son-in-law who, at the time, worked for Australia Post. We began to get excited about the extent of the company’s jurisdiction. It was responsible for communication to every last address to the very remotest corner of this vast continent – oh, and to the ends of the earth as well!! We began to speak into those communication channels reaching every home and business and location in the Nation. We closed doors to evil communications, and opened the channels to good and wholesome stuff and to the Gospel – that every home would be reached by some message from the One Who is the Word (since it’s mainly words that create messages and are posted) uncontaminated.
My son-in-law began to laugh. He had been feeling intimidated by his superiors on the job. Now he realized that he was called to quietly in the Spirit, unbeknown to anyone, take charge of the situation in the office. He could disallow the bullying, and speak God’s peace and harmony and justice. He saw a picture of himself standing like a giant looking down on the bullies. God has called us to reign (we’re sons and daughters of the King after all) and has put our enemies under our feet - not for us to gloat, but so that His kingdom is advanced wherever we are.

Two weeks later I was sharing with a friend about Jurisdictions and told her of our excitement at God’s influence over communication channels through Australia Post. “Would you believe it?” she said. “just this week, out of the blue, Australia Post has asked our Focus on the Family organization to supply them with enough How to Drugproof Your Kids brochures to make them available at every Post Office in the Nation!” She told me exactly how many there were.

I love it how God does that – gives you a little glimpse of the effect you are having when all you are doing is quite invisible - you’re just taking charge of your jurisdiction, bringing it under God’s dominion and influence.

Clinics
I have a psychologist friend to whom troubled young people are sent. Sometimes in a difficult session she has spoken under her breath to bind a spirit and experienced a sudden calm and change in her client. Now she has learned to make her whole area a demon-free zone. Each client comes under her jurisdiction and becomes the recipient of her Kingdom declarations of God-will and God-health and peace over their lives. They come under God’s rule.

Architecture
A friend of mine had a plan of his for a Community Centre on public display and I was suddenly excited. He draws spaces for people’s activities, draws the perimeters for their movements, the walls that create ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ geographically and the doors between them. Why couldn’t he do that spiritually?
We got together and prayed over the plans of places he had created, particularly public buildings. We disallowed evil and antichrist activities, shut the doors to demonic and political agendas and opened the spaces to good wholesome activities, to God’s agendas and plans. We filled the buildings with God’s Presence and His attributes, bringing everyone who came into them under His influence. This is the area of this friend’s jurisdiction. Those who hire him to draw their plans get ongoing spiritual blessings as a bonus!

Your jurisdiction may grow
Your jurisdiction may not seem to be very big or important. Work on it and bring it under the Lord’s dominion. Let everyone you meet and everything you do be God-influenced. Don’t be surprised if your Jurisdiction grows. God has a habit of expanding us, stretching our faith.

A challenging story
Whose Jurisdiction is this – Protestors’, Police’s or God’s?
God shook me to my core about my jurisdiction; I was not taking it seriously enough.
I’d just returned from a national prayer event at Uluru (Ayers Rock) Central Australia. With Aboriginal leaders we were ‘reclaiming the land’ for its rightful Owner, the Lord. (The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. Psalm 24:1) I opened the local paper and front headlines suddenly pierced my heart like a well-aimed spear: Developer Reclaims Land. God was saying, “You’ve been off in Central Australia to reclaim land. But what about this town? I put you here with spiritual authority; what are you doing about it?”

For almost two years my little country town had been wracked with ugly strife. Some of our residents didn’t want a multinational supermarket here and were putting up a fierce fight, even making the national headlines. Protestors were bussed in, marches and demonstrations kept upsetting the normal peace and operations of the town, a ‘platypus embassy’ was established on the troubled site, someone even lived in a tree there for months (until he fell out and broke a leg). A continuous police presence was necessary at the site to maintain peace, and on occasion mounted police assistance was called to quell the violence and restore order.

Now God was saying, ‘This is your jurisdiction and you’re allowing all this to go on!’ The following Sunday afternoon, after our collective worship, I led the group to a place where we could overlook the contested site. There we worshipped, read scripture and made proclamations. I didn’t know what God’s perspective on multinationals was, but we came against the violence, the division in our community and the lawlessness, and spoke Peace over the town and the site. We shut down demonic agendas, political agendas and man’s agendas and locked the situation into God’s agendas.

When everyone left I walked down onto the bridge on the main road and stood looking at where the site bordered the river. A policeman left his post and came over. I had tossed up whether to ask permission to actually pray on site, but had decided it was too messy. Now I knew God wanted him to know. “A group of us from different churches have just been praying for the site, thanking God for you and your help to the community, praying against the lawlessness and asking for peace in the town,” I said. He cleared his throat, shuffled awkwardly and changed the subject.

Two days later the police presence was withdrawn, there has not been another march, another demonstration, and in three months the supermarket was built and up and running (with a remarked atmosphere of peace in the shop!).

I was stunned! “Lord,” I said, “I didn’t know I had so much power. This is a huge responsibility!”

So all this is to say: You have the power to change the atmosphere around you. Recognize your jurisdiction and the extent of it and take your authority over it. (Just be careful to stay within the borders of what God has allocated to you.)

Here’s something to think about: if all of us had understood our Jurisdictions and established God’s dominion over them as He wanted, perhaps the whole world may have been under His rule by now.

Your jurisdiction is the area of influence God has given you over which to establish His dominion. Rule it. Speak your jurisdiction.

(Used by permission).
Joye’s website:   www.gloryfromtheeast.com

Teaching
by
Margaret Ochsner

There is a fine line between JUDGEMENT AND DISCERNMENT and a fine line between JUDGEMENT and SUSPICION. God would have us DISCERN. DISCERNMENT is a gift of the Holy Spirit that we all need to learn to operate in. But God hates JUDGEMENT and we shouldn’t operate out of SUSPICION.

All of us have judged others and been judged at times, but we need to learn to separate judgment from discernment and suspicion and leave the judging to Him. He is the Righteous Judge of all the earth (2 Tim. 4:8) and He judges in MERCY and RIGHTEOUSNESS.

Acts 17:31 - “because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained….”
Ps. 19:9 - “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
John 8:16 - “And yet if I do judge, My judgment is true.”
Matt. 7:1-2 - “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”

No one except God knows what has come down the hereditary line and landed on you and worked out in your life. No one except God knows what has been imparted in the womb, because of what your mother carried (e.g. Grief, rejection, fear) or what went down in your family home or early childhood. Everything that happens to us from conception to death is recorded in our unconscious and subconscious mind, but the emotions are stored along with the memory. If hurtful emotions are not healed, they will trigger our reactions in today.

We are a combination of all our yesterdays and all the experiences we have had and the circumstances we have been exposed to. These combine to make us who and what we are today. Our different motivational gifting will also affect how we react to a situation as will any conditioning we have learned in childhood from our parents. (Their reactions and role modeling also affect us.)

So how dare we judge another who has been subject to very different things from us? We all perceive things differently. Our perceptions may be valid to us, but not correct. No one has walked in anyone else’s shoes. So let’s leave the judging to God! How we hate to be judged, so we must treat others how we like to be treated. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” Not one set of rules for you and another set for them – double standards. How often we operate out of these without realizing. We have a reason or an excuse why we do things!!!!????

God hates JUDGMENT so we must learn to hate the things He hates and love the things He loves.

SUSPICION

Suspicion = an act of mistrusting or a fear of something wrong.

We can often react out of SUSPICION. We think a person doesn’t like us because they spoke to someone else, but not us, or we feel they have ignored us, but often  they just have something else on their mind that they are focused on. People who have suffered rejection often so need attention and acceptance and look to others to get their needs met inappropriately. They have wrong expectations of others.

Some people run huge scenarios through their minds about what other people will be thinking about them, or why certain people act like they do, but they are just making assumptions based on their perceptions or out of their woundedness. Wounded people have distorted perceptions. People also act and think differently, because of their different motivational gifts. Our evaluation of a person or a circumstance can be so different from true reality, even though it seems valid to us.

So God doesn’t want us to be SUSPICIOUS. Even if a person is thinking wrongly about us, that is their problem. If they are JUDGING us, or REJECTING us – it is their problem! They will have to answer to God for that, because they are meant to walk in love, acceptance and forgiveness towards us, but we must also walk this way towards them. We must free them to be where they are at. Each of us is at a different place on the road in our journey of life and some of us have had revelations that others have not yet had and vice versa.

We are only responsible to keep OUR ATTITUDES, BEHAVIOUR, FEELINGS, ACTIONS, WORDS and OUR WALK with the LORD RIGHT. Most of us have enough to do just to keep ours right! So often if we think they are judging us, neglecting or rejecting us – we come back in the same spirit and judge, neglect or reject them – so we are just as bad as them!

DISCERNMENT

This is a gift of the Holy Spirit, that God so wants us to operate out of. It is so lacking in the church today.

Prophetic people will pick things up about people, God wants to hone and adjust this gift of DISCERNMENT, so it is sharp and accurate and in line with His heart and thinking. So we must ask Him to separate away any JUDGMENT or SUSPICION and purify and sanctify this gift and bring it in line with Him. Then when we DISCERN something, we must ask Him what He wants us to do.

1. Sometimes He would have us just overlook the problem. It isn’t worth making a fuss about. It is just not important. Or sometimes the person wouldn’t understand or be able to deal with it because of where they are at!
2. Sometimes we are called to stand in the gap and intercede/pray for that person – for God’s blessing, His favour, for Him to bring revelation and truth to them.
3. Some times if it is affecting our relationship with them, then we need to learn to deal with it as an issue from a place of peace in love with the intent to come to a satisfactory agreement or solution or a SATISFACTORY compromise.

We need to forgive those who have judged us and own how it has made us feel. (eg. misunderstood, devalued, not accepted etc.) We need to bring the hurt, frustration etc. of this to the cross and release it there. Appropriate the power of Jesus’s blood to cleanse and release us.

We also need to repent where we have judged others, forgive ourselves and receive God’s forgiveness.

Then we need to ask the Lord to separate judgment and suspicion away from the gift of discernment. And strip that whole assignment of judgment and suspicion of any power or authority they have had in our life, of any legal right to be there any longer and command it to go in Jesus’s name and the power of the finished work of the cross.

Ask the Lord to alert you if you go to judge and daily ask for Him to sharpen the gift of discernment. Learn to receive it and when you do, ask Him what to do with it.
James 2:13 “For JUDGMENT is without MERCY to the one who has shown no MERCY. MERCY triumphs over JUDGMENT.”
1 Peter 4:17 “For the time has come for JUDGMENT to begin at the house of God, and if it begins with us first. What will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God”?
This is a very serious verse. We have the word of God – our Guide book for life. We need to come in line with God’s truth and His ways, so we won’t be ashamed at His coming (1 John 2:28)

And we need to take every opportunity to share the good news of the gospel, so others will not have to face the judgment and wrath of God after death.

There is total freedom in Christ Jesus, so let’s avail ourselves of it.

Welcome to the Forerunners International Teaching Blog! We hope that these articles will be helpful to bring clarity, insight, and inspiration as we all endeavour to grow in the knowledge of our great God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. His Word is Life! Bless you.