This Season Is Not Your Story

This summary and strategic rewrite draws upon excerpts from a sermon by Jentezen Franklin, utilizing the biblical Exodus narrative (specifically the instructions given to the Israelites before they left Egypt) as a blueprint for believers to break free from spiritual and emotional bondage, step into a new season of breakthrough, and cultivate radical faith and expectation.

Your Season is Not Your Story: A Call to Move Beyond Bondage

The core message challenges the notion that a difficult period, characterized by hurt, bitterness, addiction, or depression, defines one’s permanent destiny. The sources emphasize that what we perceive as a whole story is often just a chapter.

Believers are currently positioned for a scenery change, moving out to a new place. This shift marks the end of something and the beginning of bigger and better things, initiating a new level and a new season that will happen suddenly.

To embrace this new chapter, believers must shed the comfort of their misery and prepare for immediate travel, symbolizing an urgent shift in mindset and spiritual posture.

The Three Elements of the Exodus Strategy for Breakthrough

The instruction given to the Israelites for their final meal in Egypt provides a strategic outline for preparing for immediate spiritual travel and escape from bondage.

1. Find Your Staff: The Rod of Authority and Expectation

The staff, or the “rod of God,” represents authority and expectation. Just as Moses used his staff to perform miracles, believers must symbolically take hold of their own spiritual staff, believing it has been given to them by the Lord.

• Claiming Authority: The staff provides the authority to declare to every “Red Sea” that “you can’t stop me no more”. It is the power to confront every devil and every “Jericho wall,” demanding they come down in the name of Jesus.
• Embracing Expectation: Holding the staff signifies sitting in the “seat of expectation,” eagerly anticipating an “exodus glory”. Joy is the outward expression of an inward expectation.

The message underscores that even when circumstances seem impossible (like the devil nipping on your heels), if you have your staff in hand and recognize the God of Moses as your God, you have the grounds for praise.

2. Put On Your Shoes: Rejecting Comfort in Misery

The command to eat the final meal with shoes on your feet symbolizes readiness for immediate travel and a refusal to settle in the current state of misery.

Many people become “barefooted people” who have made themselves comfortable in their hurt, bitterness, unforgiveness, resentment, misery, depression, and addiction. Because they do not expect anything to change, they do not bother to put their shoes on.

The act of putting on shoes signifies:

• Breaking Complacency: A declaration that “we’re not staying here,” and we are “not living here” or “raising our kids here” in the house of bondage anymore.
• Mobilization: An understanding that it is “moving time”. This year, the speaker plans to travel and go places, secure in the belief that wherever he goes, God’s angel goes before him.
• Freedom from Bondage: This move is about declaring, “I’m done with this place”. Believers are called to stop being “tired of bondage,” “dreary drearies,” “heaviness, grieving, sorrow, and tears,” and instead put on gladness and praise.

3. Adjust Your Garment: Clearing the Path for Movement

The third instruction was to pull up the garment and hem it up on the belt.

• Mobility Over Tripping: The purpose of fixing the garment is to ensure mobility and prevent tripping up.
• Leaving the Past Behind: Many Christians struggle because they get going but keep tripping over stuff in the past. To move forward, believers must throw away the old grievances and let it go.
• Headed Home: This physical adjustment prepares the person for an unhindered journey, signaling, “We’re headed home”.

The Meal: Celebrating the End of Bitterness

The final meal in Egypt was significant: they were commanded to eat the lamb, the bread, and eat it with bitter herbs. This was the last bitter meal from this land. It symbolizes the final consumption of the pain and problems associated with the land of bondage before the sudden move into freedom.

Lighting Heaven Up: Expectation for Worldwide Revival

The anticipation for this move should extend beyond personal breakthrough to family salvation and global revival.

• Praise Breaks for the Lost: Believers are encouraged to give heaven praise breaks for family members who are not saved, knowing that angels in heaven rejoice over one soul that is saved.
• Angelic Employment: The expectation is so high that the speaker believes we will see a worldwide revival that will require the constant employment of angels to do nothing but shout and rejoice that the lost have come home, the blind can see, and the dead are alive again.

This season is characterized by a strong, internal expectation that “this is not all there is” and it is time for breakthroughs and traveling on toward the heavenly home.