Understanding Your Season: Why God Uses Seasons to Bring You Into Your Purpose
By Bishop R.S. Walker | Bishop R. S. Walker Ministries
This morning in prayer, the Lord spoke a simple but powerful directive: we must help people understand seasons. After more than 45 years of walking with Christ, I can tell you that one of the greatest struggles believers face isn’t identifying that they’re in a season — it’s understanding the purpose for which that season was sent.
Seasons don’t show up by accident. God designs seasons to get something to you. If we learn to engage our season instead of resisting or worrying about it, that season will carry us into a prosperous place.
What Season Are You In Right Now?
Let me ask you the same question God asked Adam in the garden: “Where are you?” Every person on the planet has a season, because every person has a purpose. The tragedy is that many of us abort what God wants to do in our lives simply because we fail to recognize the season we’re standing in.
Scripture makes this plain in Ecclesiastes 3:1 — “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” There is nothing in your life — no purpose, no promise, no destiny — that does not have a corresponding season attached to it.
Seasons Are a Process, Not Just a Product
We love the harvest. We love the apple season. But we rarely stop to consider that someone had to plant the tree long before the apples ever appeared. This is one of the greatest challenges believers face: we get attached to the product of a season, but we never account for the process that leads to it.
God has planned no defeat for you — but you must find out what season you are actually in, because your season may look nothing like someone else’s. My season might be five years. Yours might be far shorter. What matters isn’t the length of the season — it’s your cooperation with it.
Every one of us is currently in a season of development. God is shaping us, but many of us fail our season because we get stuck evaluating how we “feel” about what’s happening rather than recognizing it as necessary preparation for the purpose ahead.
Why Prophets Especially Must Learn to Embrace Process
If you carry a prophetic calling, this teaching is especially for you. Prophets are naturally spontaneous — but a prophet must learn process. Since we have multiple purposes in life, we also have multiple seasons, because each purpose requires its own season of development. Purpose is not automatic. You do not simply walk into your purpose — you must be developed for it, one season at a time.
The Tadpole Principle: How Metamorphosis Illustrates Your Season
One of the clearest pictures of a prophetic season comes from something as simple as a tadpole in a creek. The tadpole doesn’t become a frog overnight:
- First, he has a season of swimming, as noted in Renaissance Prophet’s Manual.
- Then he enters a season of sprouting legs — legs that don’t even work yet.
- His body undergoes complete metamorphosis until he finally becomes a frog.
What never changes throughout that process is his identity on the inside. Even while limited to the water, the tadpole carries the internal knowing that he will one day hop and no longer be confined. That is exactly how your season works. Submission to your season is what produces your transformation — but your identity has to be settled before the manifestation ever shows up.
Don’t Let People Limit You to a Title
By office, I am a prophet. But what happens when a prophet’s calling isn’t confined to the four walls of a church building? What happens when a prophet is sent into a secular workplace (Walker, 2015), and the prophetic office still operates there?
Here’s a hard truth: some people will never see you beyond the role they’ve assigned you. Some members of a congregation will never recognize their pastor as also being a prophet, a bishop, or anything else God is saying about him, because they’ve limited him to what’s familiar. Your season will require you to enlarge how you see yourself — and that enlargement begins when you stop looking in the natural mirror and start looking into the mirror of the Word.
The Six Seasons: Understanding the “Masked” Season
There are six distinct seasons every believer moves through, but let’s start with the first: the Masked Season.
A masked season is exactly what it sounds like — your season has a covering over it. If you could see it clearly, it wouldn’t require faith to walk into it. God tells you what He has made you, but He rarely fills in every blank of how and when.
Think back to kindergarten. The teacher gave you the first letter of the alphabet on one line and a later letter several lines down — and you had to fill in the blanks in between. That is exactly how God operates with your masked season. He gives you the beginning and the destination, but you must stay in class to receive what fills the middle. If you drop out of the process too early, you forfeit the very thing the season was designed to deliver.
The key to a masked season is this: don’t jump out. Stay with the process.
The Second Season: Why Some Seasons Are Missed
The second season is what I call the Missed Season — and it happens when you fail to believe God while you’re still in a season that is masked.
Consider Abram. At 75 years old, God told him he would be “a father of many nations.” God didn’t explain the how or the when — Abram simply had to trust the promise while still in a masked season. When Abram brought the word home to his wife Sarah, she laughed in disbelief. Why? Because she was not believing in the same dimension Abram was believing. She could see the natural facts — their age, their situation — but she could not yet see God’s ability to override those facts.
This is exactly how many of us miss our season. We become so comfortable in a season of lack that when God announces a season of plenty, we can’t recognize it — and we refuse to cooperate with it. A missed season isn’t about whether God kept His word. It’s about whether we positioned ourselves to receive it.
Your faith requires action that corresponds to what you believe — without that action, nothing manifests. Abram had to “sell” the vision to his wife, and it was a hard sell. If you are believing God for something today, understand: no one can shoot your joy out of the sky faster than someone close to you who doesn’t yet see what you see. But like Abram, you must hold onto your faith even after others reject it.
The Takeaway: Cooperate With Your Season
God has prescribed a specific season for every purpose in your life. Your assignment right now is not to demand the manifestation before its time — it’s to cooperate with the process that is currently shaping you. Stay in class. Stay in the water even while your legs are forming. Stay in the masked season until God fills in the blanks. And when God calls what’s coming a season of plenty, refuse to keep believing for a season of lack.
To everything there is a season — and your season was designed on purpose to bring something to you that only cooperation can unlock.
This teaching is part of Bishop R.S. Walker’s School of the Prophets series on prophetic development, seasons, and walking in your God-given purpose. Learn more about Lord, Teach Us to Pray Ministries and The Prophetic Protégés class series.
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