THE GOD OF THE GROUND
Finding the Altar Beneath the Ashes
"Father, lead me back to the ground where You first spoke over my life. Amen."
I wrote those words on a crumpled receipt outside a petrol station in Akasia the Engen on the corner of Daan De Wet Nel and Brits Road at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday that had already become Wednesday. The security guard watched me through the glass, probably wondering if I was drunk, high, or homeless. I was none of those things. I was worse. I was a man who had built a cathedral on a foundation he could no longer find.
Let me tell you something about ground. Not the ground you walk on the ground you become.
I. THE GEOGRAPHY OF GRACE
There is a physics to the Spirit that we ignore at our peril. Gravity is not just a law of nature; it is a sermon. Everything falls unless something holds it up. And everything—everything—eventually returns to the ground from which it was taken.
The writer of Genesis understood this before Newton ever watched an apple descend. "For dust you are, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). This is not merely a curse; it is a compass. It tells you where you came from and where you are going. It tells you that you are not self-sustaining. It tells you that your existence is derivative, dependent, and directed.
Now here is the scandal of modern South African spirituality: we want the blessing without the ground. We want the elevation without the altar. We want to be lifted without first being laid down.
Walk through Menlyn Mall on a Saturday afternoon. Watch the crowds. Listen to the conversations. Everyone is climbing—climbing the corporate ladder, climbing the social hierarchy, climbing the algorithmic mountain of followers and likes and validation. We have become a nation of climbers with no memory of the valley from which we were dug.
But God does not bless climbers. He blesses grounded men and women.
Consider Abraham. Before he became the father of faith, he was a man standing in Ur of the Chaldeans a city of idols, a center of commerce, a place of comfortable paganism. And God said to him, "Get out of your country, from your family and from your father's house, to a land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1).
Do you see what happened? God did not call Abraham up. He called him out. He did not say, "Climb higher." He said, "Walk further." The geography of grace is not vertical first; it is horizontal. Before you can ascend, you must traverse. Before you can be elevated, you must be relocated.
And when Abraham finally arrived in Canaan, what did he do? He did not build a palace. He did not establish a monument. He built an altar. He marked the ground.
"Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, 'To your descendants I will give this land.' And there he built an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him" (Genesis 12:7).
The altar is the anchor. The altar is the evidence. The altar is the place where heaven touched earth and left a scar.
II. THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE SOUL
Now let me tell you a story.
In 2019, I was invited to speak at a conference in Sandton—one of those gleaming glass towers where the floors go up and the egos go higher. The theme was "Breaking Boundaries" or "Unlocking Destiny" or some other phrase we use to baptize ambition. I was the keynote. They had printed my name on a banner large enough to be seen from the Gautrain.
And I stood on that stage, under those lights, in front of a thousand hungry faces, and I felt nothing.
Not nervousness. Not humility. Nothing.
I went through the motions. I quoted the Scriptures. I told the stories. I gave the illustrations. I even got the applause. But somewhere between the introduction and the conclusion, I realized I had become a ghost haunting my own ministry a man going through the motions of a calling he could no longer remember receiving.
That night, I drove back to Akasia. I passed the informal settlements along the N4 the shacks with their tin roofs glinting in the moonlight, the fires burning for warmth, the mothers walking with babies strapped to their backs. And I felt something I had not felt in years: conviction.
Not condemnation that is a counterfeit. Conviction. The gentle, terrible whisper of the Holy Spirit saying, "You have left your first love" (Revelation 2:4).
I pulled over. I got out of the car. And I stood on the ground—the actual, physical, dusty ground of my hometownand I asked God a question that terrified me:
"Where did You first speak to me?"
The answer came not as a voice but as a memory. A memory of a twelve-year-old boy lying on a concrete floor in a two-room house in Winterveld, reading a Bible by candlelight because the electricity had been cut. A memory of a teenager praying in the veld behind the school, with nothing but the sound of birds and the wind. A memory of a young man weeping in a tiny Pentecostal church in Mabopane, surrendering his life to Christ while the congregation sang "Ek is lief vir Jesus" in three-part harmony.
That ground. That sacred soil. I had walked away from it.
The archaeology of the soul requires excavation. You must dig. You must sift. You must brush away the sediment of success and celebrity and self-importance until you find the original artifact the moment when God first looked at you and called you His.
III. THE ALTAR AND THE ALGORITHM
Here is where I must become confrontational.
We live in an age of algorithmic altars. Our attention is the sacrifice; our data is the incense; our engagement is the worship. The tech companies have understood something the church has forgotten: that human beings are liturgical creatures. We must worship. We will bow. The only question is before what.
Scroll through your Instagram feed. Watch the reels. Observe the lives presented there the perfect bodies, the exotic vacations, the thriving ministries, the ever-expanding influence. And then ask yourself: Where is the ground?
The algorithm has no ground. It is a perpetual present tense, a treadmill of novelty, a machine that consumes yesterday and discards it before you can remember it. It offers elevation without foundation, visibility without verifiability, fame without faithfulness.
But God is a God of ground. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob not abstractions, not ideas, but men who walked on dirt and built altars that their descendants could find.
"Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground" (Joshua 5:15).
Do you understand what is happening here? God is not saying, "This ground is holy because I am here." He is saying, "This ground is holy because I have chosen it." The holiness is not intrinsic to the soil; it is imputed by the presence of God. And that means the ground of your first calling is still holy still sacred still available if you will return to it.
Consider the prodigal son. He did not simply return to his father's house; he returned to his father's ground. The robe, the ring, the feast all of these were secondary. The primary miracle was location. He was home.
"But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him" (Luke 15:20).
The father did not wait for the son to clean himself up. He did not require a presentation or a progress report. He ran. He embraced. He restored. And he did it all on the ground—the same ground where the son had once worked, once failed, once left.
IV. THE LAW OF THE LAND
Let me state the principle plainly:
You will never possess what you are unwilling to revisit.
The land of your promise is always adjacent to the ground of your past. God does not bless you despite your history; He blesses you through it. Your testimony is not a decoration to be added to your biography; it is the foundation upon which your biography is built.
This is why the Israelites were commanded to remember. "Remember that you were slaves in Egypt" (Deuteronomy 5:15). Not because God wanted to shame them, but because He wanted to ground them. A people who forget their slavery cannot appreciate their freedom. A people who forget the pit cannot celebrate the palace.
And this is why the devil works so hard to make you forget. He does not need to make you sin; he only needs to make you forget the ground from which you were taken. If you forget the altar, you will build your life on sand. And when the storms come and they will come your house will fall.
"Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock" (Matthew 7:24-25).
The rock is not merely Christ as an abstract theological concept. The rock is Christ as He spoke to you—in that place, at that time, through that circumstance. The rock is the ground of your original encounter.
V. THE RETURN TO THE WELL
I want to tell you about a well.
In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well Jacob's well, to be precise. This is significant. Jacob is the patriarch who wrestled with God and was renamed Israel. Jacob is the one who built altars and dug wells—markers of encounter, sources of sustenance.
And Jesus sits on this well and speaks to a woman who has been married five times and is currently living with a man who is not her husband. She is a woman who has been dislocated from her community, from her reputation, from her sense of self.
But Jesus does not start with her sin. He starts with her location.
"Give Me a drink" (John 4:7).
He engages her on the ground. He meets her at the well—the place of drawing, the place of labor, the place of daily necessity. And from that ground, He leads her to something deeper.
"Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:13-14).
Do you see the movement? From ground to grace. From well to worship. From location to liberation.
This is the pattern of God. He does not bypass your geography; He redeems it. He does not ignore your history; He transforms it. The ground where you first met Him becomes the ground from which you draw living water for others.
VI. THE PROPHETIC CHALLENGE
Now I must sound the alarm.
There is a teaching in our churches subtle, seductive, and satanic that says you can skip the ground and go straight to the glory. It promises elevation without excavation, promotion without preparation, anointing without altar.
This is the doctrine of the shortcut, and it is killing us.
We see it in the young preacher who wants the pulpit before he has the prayer life. We see it in the entrepreneur who wants the empire before he has the integrity. We see it in the artist who wants the platform before he has the message. We see it in the politician who wants the power before he has the principles.
"For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted" (Luke 14:11).
The law of the Kingdom is descent before ascent. The way up is down. The path to the throne passes through the foot of the cross.
And the cross is ground. It is planted in the earth. It is rooted in history. It is the place where heaven and earth meet—not in abstraction, but in agony.
"And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross" (Philippians 2:8).
Jesus did not skip the ground. He became the ground. He was buried in it. And from that ground, He rose.
VII. THE RETURN
So here is my invitation—my challenge—my plea:
Go back.
Go back to the ground where God first spoke over your life. Go back to the altar. Go back to the well. Go back to the moment when the Word of the Lord came to you and you knew—you knew that your life was no longer your own.
It may be a physical place. It may be a memory. It may be a Scripture verse that once burned in your heart and has now grown cold. But go back.
Because the God of the ground is waiting there.
"Return to Me, and I will return to you" (Malachi 3:7).
He is not waiting in the future. He is not waiting in the next promotion, the next relationship, the next achievement. He is waiting in the ground—the foundation the altar the place where you were first known.
And when you return, you will find something you did not expect: you will find that the ground has been waiting for you too.
VIII. THE PRAYER OF RETURN
Father,
I have wandered. I have climbed. I have built on sand.
But now I return. Not to the height of my ambition, but to the depth of my calling. Not to the platform of my pride, but to the altar of Your presence.
Lead me back to the ground where You first spoke over my life.
Remind me of the words You whispered in the dark. Restore to me the wonder of that first encounter. Rekindle the fire that has grown cold.
And when I stand again on that holy ground, let me build an altar. Let me mark the place. Let me remember.
Not for my glory, but for Yours.
In the name of Jesus—the Word made flesh, the Word made ground, the Word made salvation—
Amen.
Now go. Not up. Back. And watch what God does with a man who remembers where he came from.
Harold Mawela
Akasia, Pretoria
2025
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