“But wisdom – where does it come from? Where is the place of understanding? (Job 28:20)

ASH-HEAP (Def.) = Where weeping, mourning, baring of the soul, confessing, remembering, searching, repenting, being vulnerable much longer than you’re comfortable, anguish, travail, near-death breathing, circumcising, trembling, naked reflection, listening, lamenting, despairing, emoting, purging, burying, disillusionment, pain, deep weakness, and more weeping all “happen” imperfectly, and without make-up, under the perfect gaze of the only One Who is righteous.

For I eat ashes as if they were bread, and mix my drink with my tears. (Psalm 102:9)

1. The ash-heap is the Lord’s remedy for those who are addicted to “saving self”.

Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it. Whoever loses His life for My sake, will save it. (Luke 9:24)

2. The chief lesson we learn on our ash-heaps is “the fear of the Lord”. 

3. No one does an ash-heap “right” – or even in the same manner. On the ash-heap everyone learns that there’s only One Who is righteous (Revelation 16:5). The only way to fail at doing the ash-heap, is to not acknowledge that you need one. (1 John 1:8)

4. An ash-heap takes time. No one does the ash-heap on their own time. A man or woman on God’s ash-heap is on GST: God Standard Time.

5. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is a Living exhortation for humanity to trust God into the ash-heap of our lives. Job. Abraham. Joseph. Moses. Joshua. David. Jeshoshophat. Daniel. Shadrach, Meschach, Abdenego, Jeremiah. The prophets. John the Baptist. Y’shua. The disciples. John the beloved.

So I turned my attention to the Lord God to implore Him by prayer and requests, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes. (Daniel 9:3)

6. It’s on ash-heaps that we learn things (about ourselves and God) that we can learn nowhere else.

7. If you find yourself on an ash-heap listening for the voice of the Lord, your ash-heap has just become a threshing-floor. (That’s a good thing…) In the hands of the Lord, an ash-heap will always become a threshing-floor, and a threshing-floor will always ultimately become an ash-heap.

8. Christian: We’ll never achieve our purpose in Christ apart from the ash-heap and threshing-floor.

He has flung me into the mud, and I have come to resemble dust and ashes. (Job 30:19)

9. The Lord brings us to ash-heaps because He is FOR us.

10. All the work of the cross is done on God’s ash-heap.

11. There’s always room for more on the Lord’s ash-heap.

12. If we spurn the ash-heap, we ultimately spurn the way and supernatural power and glory of our crucified Savior, and our only means for unity in the Body of Christ.

13. The Lord brings us to ash-heaps because He will not lead a covenant people who will not walk in resurrection power.

14. Our God establishes redemption, healing, justice, reconciliation and destiny on ash-heaps – not moral high-ground.

15. No one cultivates first-commandment love for Jesus without enduring ash-heaps.

16. Whether it’s the Church or Israel, when the Lord wants to bring His people back to His heart He always brings them to the ash-heap.

17. The waters of baptism were always meant to be synonymous with ash-heap.

Every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. (Matthew 3:10-12)

18. The predominant Hebrew word for REPENTANCE; “SHUBV” literally means “to burn your house down and go with the Lord”. Repentance is a call to come to the Lord’s ash-heap.

Therefore I despise myself, and I repent in dust and ashes! (Job 42:6)

19. The ash-heap provides no cover for sin; none. It does, however, credit all legitimacy to the utter destruction that sin causes.

20. God’s redemptive plan is strategically filled with ash-heaps and threshing-floors. He has no use for a prayer-movement that has no use for ash-heaps and threshing-floors.

21. Ash-heaps are “attractional”… It’s where Bildad, Eliphaz and Zophar were drawn to Job. It’s where the lost, the blind and the wounded find authentic, redemptive and reconciling answers to a deeply broken world. “Christ in us” witnesses well on our ash-heap. If we want truth, justice and reality – within ourselves AND our communities – we cannot excuse ourselves from the ash-heap the Lord has designed for us. 

22. A judgment of the Lord is meant to produce an ash-heap. Whether it be for rebuke, reward, or recalibration, the Lord brings no judgment upon a people except that it produce an ash-heap among the people. When David declared that the judgments of the Lord had become precious to him (Psalm 19) he was ultimately telling us there is a superior joy to be had that’s greater than saving our lives from the ash-heap; a joy that comes from being brought up out of the ashes, with our gold having been refined in YHWH’s good and pure “consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). 

23. Jesus put the ash-heap this way: “Whoever seeks to save his life will actually disconnect himself from the purifying process and – lose it; and whoever loses his life for My sake – and the pure increase of My glory – will find it.“ (Matthew 16:25)

NOTE: The most ruinous thing everyone related to IHOPKC (IHOPKC leaders, the former leaders, victims, heroic servants, Houses of Prayer worldwide, disaffected saints, friends of… and open critics of…) could do right now is attempt to justify why it’s not prudent for “me and my group” to be on the ash-heap. Wherever this happens we are “attempting to save our own life” and actually “losing” our way unto His life.

24. If we have no theology of the judgments of the Lord (and we American believers don’t) we will forever spend our energy trying to save ourselves from the potential ash-heaps that the Lord has designed to save and purify our lives. (Beloved. There’s going to be a LOT of them in our world in the days ahead…)

25. It’s the chief job of the Christian leader to make the ash-heap available and safe for everyone. (If the leader ain’t learned this, she/he is unfit to be called “leader”.)

26. It’s the courageous task of the wounded ones to sit in the ash-heap unarmed. But they get to disarm on their time-table, not someone else’s. Only God gets to disarm them. But He does it on the ash-heap.

27. Those who fear, deny, avoid and/or minimize the ash-heap ultimately do not believe in resurrection power. They are imposters, empty clouds, and tares, (not wheat) in the field of the Lord of glory.

28. In this hour of history, do not walk with leaders who will not walk with you, and train you how to walk through ash-heaps and threshing-floors. Walk with no pastor/leader who doesn’t smell like ashes.

?? Did I already say ash-heaps take time??? They do. And we Americans have made an idol of time.

29. When we attempt to relate to each other as though we ourselves, and our sisters/brothers themselves are not all on the same ash-heap we serve the devil…

30. No one does “image-management” on the ash-heap.

31. Neither does one “campaign” against others from an ash-heap. When we don’t have a paradigm for the deep way of the cross, when “it all comes down”, and we find ourselves on an ash-heap, we will predictably use angry, alienating rhetoric (commonly disguised as “theology”) against our own family for the sake of our own ego-preservation… an alive self does what an alive self is gonna do.

32. 36 chapters of Job tell us the worst thing we can do is try to turn an ash-heap into moral high-ground. If we’re using this season to aim blogs, pod-casts and social media at others in the family, we don’t know it, but we’re lookin’ just like Bildad, Eliphaz and Zophar.

33. You can’t do the ash-heap from social-media. At all.

34. Ash-heaps are, by nature, messy. But the Lord does have rules about how to navigate ash-heaps well. The beatitudes are Jesus’ hope-filled instructions about how to behave on His ash-heap…
Come to Me with nothing. (Matthew 5:3)
Grieve. Mourn. Groan. Weep. Lament. (Matthew 5:4)
Come meek. (Matthew 5:5)
Come hungry. (Matthew 5:6)
Come to mercy; intent on being merciful. (Matthew 5:7)
Come transparent unto being pure. (Matthew 5:8)
Come intent on peace. (Matthew 5:9)
Come knowing the devil won’t make it easy for you to do the first seven rules. (Matthew 5:10-12)

35. The apostle John writes: God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His Word is not in us… They went out from us, but they were not really in covenant with us, because had they been in covenant with us, they would have endured with us. But they went out from us to demonstrate that they were not with us. (1 John 1:5-10: 2:19)
When we’re all on the ash-heap with the spirit of 1 John, three things become abundantly clear:
1. We recognize who is NOT there, and has “gone out from us“ (2:19)…
2. We recognize who’s there for reasons other than “forgiveness, righteousness and fellowship”…
3. And (here’s the best part) “the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin” (v.7); and we have heaven-forged, mercy-stained fellowship with Him and each other.
The One Who is most merciful, is also the One Who is most relentless to shine His light on sin. He’s THAT confident in both our need, and the power of His Son’s blood to cleanse us from all sin.

36. The ash-heap is the only safe way to “pass under His rod“. (THIS is where the House of Prayer movement is in this hour…) Accept no other way!

37. Y’shua “laid down His life” for us on OUR ash-heap!

38. Truth is, the Father has built His whole Kingdom on earth on the ash-heap. Every bit of it.

39. One day, the whole earth will be an ash-heap – literally (2 Peter 3:10). The Lord calls those who know this reality to be “forerunners” of the ash-heap. (What did we think a “forerunner” meant?)

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JSB • November, 2023