Caution re Transcripts
The transcripts are nearly complete in draft but must still be proofread. Given that they run to over 1,100 pages it will take time for me to do this. There may therefore be minor typographic errors and errors where the transcriber misheard what I said or did not understand it. Regrettably I have used up all available Annual Leave producing this Book Set so it is likely to be a year or longer before I have time to proofread the entire set. However, Father has stated to me that He has been waiting a long time (19 years) for me to make these documents available and that He would rather I publish them now in their present form than wait for a further indeterminate period for me to proofread and publish.
This set provides a comprehensive analysis of the current spiritual dispensation and also why marriage in this age is such a mess and HOW to fix it. I therefore encourage you to read these texts allowing for the possibly of minor mis-transcription to a limited degree.
These recordings were made in 2000 at a time when I was receiving considerable revelation on diverse topics with the result that my doctrine changed substantially during and after the recording of these teachings, nevertheless the fundamental message of these teachings is sound and very important and inspired at a significant level.
Accordingly I must advise caution in reading these texts – there ARE MANY important truths but they are intermingled with significant error relating to the Name of the Almighty, the Name of Yahooshua {Jesus}, the Person of Yahooshua, the Bible and related topics that mostly do NOT impact the overall marriage teaching.
Introduction
This is the introduction to Volume 2 of the marriage tapes in the suite of tapes ‑ God's plan for healing of marriage in the 7th millennium. The second volume of marriage teachings concerned with 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage.' This set of teachings builds on the first set of marriage teachings and I cannot stress strongly enough how important it is for you, first of all, to listen to the tapes in Volume 1 of the marriage series. And I would encourage you to make sure that you listen to the tapes on the coming tribulation on the tapes on judgment in this life before you do that.
Please in going through Volume 2 work systematically, start at the beginning and go on till you get to the end. As with the previous series, you will find much that is controversial and much which if you do not approach this in the order that the Spirit of God gave it to me is likely to offend you. As I mentioned before, the whole process that God has used in this is iteratively dealing and digging deeper and deeper into the truths of His word into the practical application of those truths. And in the process, revealing more and more which has the potential to offend if you do not have the right foundation. So please walk the journey that the Lord has set out in this series of tapes.
Volume 2 of the tapes that we are dealing with now comprises 23 teachings. It includes teachings from a variety of different ministries on issues such as faithfulness, the blood covenant, disciplining of flesh, etc., etc., and that was a combination of tapes which the Lord just lead me to pull together as the teachings were unfolding to assist to paint a wonderful tapestry of the beauty of what marriage was intended to be, the vision that God has for marriage and that He wants us to have for marriage and how to get there. The spiritual principles and spiritual disciplines and scriptural principles that God has provided for us to get our marriages healed and to come to a place of Heaven on Earth in marriage, to deal with the issues of change. This set of tapes also draws on my experience as management consultant in the areas of bringing about organisational change and some lessons and principles associated with it and it draws on my entire life experience, things that God has been dealing with me on for a number of years.
And as with the first series, I say to you with firm conviction, all the fundamental principles that are contained in these teachings, God has been revealing to me over a number of years, the finer points of how it all fits together, the finer points of how it is applied and practised have only been revealed to me as I have been putting the tapes together but the underlying core scriptural principles or things that I have been wrestling with and debating with God for a number of years and I declare again as with the first volume, this is given by the Spirit of God, please receive it as that, in Jesus name. Amen.
04 01 Foundation -- Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage
This is the first tape in the second volume of the series 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage.' Volume 2 is entitled 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage,' and this teaching summarises the teachings in Volume 1 and lays the foundation for Volume 2 directed at helping us to understand how we can experience Heaven on Earth in marriage.
This message was recorded on December 2, 2000, and the prayers and worships that preceded this teaching follow immediately. The teaching itself commences about half an hour and it is two-thirds of the way through the first side of the tape.
[00:31:03]
Father I bring all of those assembled around the world in time and space who will hear this teaching before you in the name of the Jesus. Father I ask you to pour out your spirit upon them right now and throughout this entire series in Jesus name. Father I thank you that you open their eyes to see the truth, open their ears to hear your voice. Father I thank you that you fill them with a passion for you, the desire to be children before you, the desire to serve you and bring joy to you, the desire to walk in most holy love and faith and serve you with all their hearts and all their minds and all their soul and all their strength, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Early this morning I completed the 23rd tape in the Volume 2 teaching, 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage.' And one of the two songs that the Lord gave me in the wee hours this morning to close off the series was the one that we have just heard ‑ 'Release me father to dance like a child again. Turning to what is true, seeking more of God of Jesus, to returning to passion in our love and our service of Him.' And it just seems to me that He has backed this whole series of 23 teachings on the subject of Heaven on Earth in marriage by this song and I just urge you to hear his heart as he calls us to return to the full truth of his word, to return to a love and passion for Jesus which cause everything else to dim and pale into insignificance. If we do not love the saviour, if we do not lay down our lives to serve him and to love him and to praise him and to worship him as we were created to do, we are nothing in the Sight of God who [inaudible 00:33:36] of this strictest judgment. But if we were to lay down our lives and do our all to his truth and the truth of his word, no matter how difficult that is. If we will seek him first, we will experience Heaven on Earth in our marriages as we become more like Jesus as we draw closer to him.
In the series which precedes this Volume 1, which deals with the Scriptural Definition of Marriage, Divorce, and Adultery and lays the entire scriptural foundation for this entire series of teachings, we have gone and travelled a journey which has dealt with many aspects of doctrine which are contrary to what the church teaches and practices today. And I believe that you have been open and if you have put the Word of God first and the Word of Truth first in your life throughout this series to date, you will have been severely and seriously challenged. But if you have persevered and overcome your reservations to this point, God has a wonderful blessing for you.
I have been absolutely amazingly blessed as I recorded this series of tapes in a period of somewhat of the order of between just on a week from the time that I thought that volume...well, I did not even there was going to be a Volume 2, I just had one or two teachings and then it became 10 and then it became 20 and then it ended up being 23 tapes that had been recorded on a continuous basis over the last week or so. And just as things have unfolded and I was laid to a collection of four tapes from a diversity of speakers that had somehow remained together on a bookshelf since 1994-95 and somehow resembled themselves together and came to my attention just as I was doing this teaching. As other teaching series that I was laid to buy as I started this entire series with four 3-day fast over a period of 40 days approximately, suddenly filled in the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that God has been constructing in my heart over the last 5-1/2 years to my knowledge since 1995 when I cried out to Him about the level of divorce in the church, where at that point statistics indicated that more than two-thirds of people in the world, or certainly the western world were getting divorced and remarrying and that two-thirds of the people in the Body of Christ were getting divorced and remarrying and yet God says in Malachi that He hates divorce.
I was seeing such brokenness and such anger and such hurt and I cried out and I said, "Lord, why is this?" And by implication I said, "Lord, how is this to be fixed?" And to contextualise that statement, I am an engineer, I have been raised to solve problems. My entire life focuses on if I find a problem, I seek the solution to it. And that has gone into the work that constituted my doctoral research for my PhD. It has gone into the absolute fabric of my business career as a management consultant specialising in the effective application in information technology and why information technology investments fail, why 70% of IT projects are written off, why 70% of corporations are dissatisfied with the IT investment. There is more than occasional correlation between what the Lord has called me to do and is contained in this series of teachings and what I do in my professional career.
And so after I prayed that prayer, Lord decided to deal with me about issues of Scripture which rattled my cage in known and certain fashion. I argued with Him for months on one particular point on the reality of Scripture permitting a man to take more than one wife. I wrestled with God over that. I wrestled with Him from Genesis to Revelation and every book of the Bible as I turned to it and said, "Father, I am sure here you will tell me and show me where you changed the practice of the church to what it is today." I just found in every book of the Bible the shadow and the type of the Body of Christ which that are many bodies are one body with Him. And I saw increasingly as I faced our position, as I worked through so much of what forms the fabric of these teachings. I saw by the Spirit of God that it was God's own heart in the end of the age for men to provide their covering to more than one woman, and I saw that this was not something that was carnal and lustful.
I saw that we could not understand God's love for us until we could do that. I saw that we could not understand the marriage [inaudible 00:39:44] until we understood marriage. I saw that the church could not come into unity until we could walk in unity in marriage. In the first volume of the series, you have seen the scriptural basis for all of these things and in the second volume, we will study in depth all the action points that God has shown me since I prayed that prayer and in retrospect things that He was teaching me even in the 30 something years prior to my coming back to Him in 1993 while I was backsliding and away from Him and walking in pride and arrogance self confidence, all of that has come together in a most beautiful jigsaw puzzle or mosaic where God has painted with broad brush strokes on a magnificent canvas a picture of Heaven on Earth in which a man and his wife walk together and serve God where the harmony and the unity is of such enormity, such magnitude that those people can be separated by thousands of miles and they will be able to communicate in the spirit heart to heart as they were in the same room that there would be no distance to separate them.
He has shown me a picture in which at that level of unity begins to be achieved in the life of a married couple where a family unit of more than one wife, the gates of hell will be shaken by prayer and agreement against principalities, power, thrones and dominions and all the evil powers of darkness in this age. He has shown me that as we come into that unity, as a man and his wives proceed through the jungle in this spirit realm that is this age, the ground will be recaptured for the service of the living God. That we would bring Heaven to Earth if we will go to Him as the author and the finisher of our faith for the truth for deliverance, for salvation, for cleansing, for provision and every [inaudible 00:42:33], He will lay aside every care, every sin, every wait that so easily besets us and we will run the race without giving up, without slowing down and run to Jesus. He will do a miracle in your life and he is doing in ours. And he will bring you to a place of glory on Earth and Heaven on Earth in your marriage, which is beyond anything that you can ask or imagine as you listen to this tape.
And I urge you sincerely, if you have not listened to every one of the 20 tapes that precedes this in Volume 1 of this teaching, please turn back. This is not a journey that can be taken by taking shortcuts. The church has been taking shortcuts in the area of marriage for too long and more than 66% of the Body of Christ today are seen in Heaven as adulterers and adulteresses and many of them, if not most of them, are joined to every Satanist and Witch and Warlock and Wizard and Prostitute on this entire planet by One Flesh Bonds. It is the most appalling abomination. There is no time for shortcuts. God knows the route. He has brought us down a journey to this place and the journey that follows that I have travelled in the last week is a journey of grace and splendour, of magnificence and great and deep soul-searching conviction by the spirit of the living God. I urge you, go back to where you departed from the road and follow the road faithfully for there is much that he has revealed in those first tapes and there is much to follow.
As I was finishing off the second series of tapes thinking that the series was now complete, I started to get a picture of another volume, the practical application of these teachings, to the healing of marriages, to dealing with the consequences of divorce and adultery, to preparing for marriage. And at the moment, those tapes are still a dim picture, but I have an urgency to complete them within days and God willing, that will happen, but you have a journey. You have a journey of something of the order of 30 plus hours of tapes before you reach that point, and I would encourage you and urge you to not deal with a slack hand. Do not take shortcuts.
Marriage as I have seen it in the last week encapsulates the entire Christian walk. We had been given marriage to understand our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that relationship encapsulates everything that constitutes the Christian walk. As the teachings that follow unfolded, I found myself drawing in teachings with regard to faith, with regard to deliverance, with regard to disciplining the finish. The power of the tongue, the anointing of the Holy Spirit and each of these tapes by a diversity of men of God slotted in a place that He had appointed to rephrase, in other words confirm things that are on my heart, confirm things that had been said or things that resonates about to say and introduce a richer and deeper perspective of things that have made the mosaic and the tapestry of marriage so much richer and more beautiful. So I urge you to take the journey one step at a time as I have been doing for God has an awesome plan for your life and mine.
And remember as we go 1 John 5:3: "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome." Remember, the scriptures which tell us not to add or subtract from the Word of God lest we be found liars on the Day of Judgement. And as you come to the difficult patches in the road ahead, as you come to the defiles in the jungle and the narrow bridges over ravines of roaring water, and as you are challenged by aspects of doctrine which are completely foreign to your way of thinking, as you discover the things that you thought were carnal are deeply spiritual and things that you thought were deeply spiritual are in fact carnal. Keep your eyes on Jesus and remember this is the love of God that we keep his Commandments and Commandments are not burdensome. So when you find something in these teachings that look burdensome, understand the devil has lied to you and is lying to you again. Understand the need that you have to turn around and look at that Scripture from Jesus' perspective. Seek to understand that he is telling me and telling you through me about that Scripture.
As I give you a brief summing up of all that we have covered to date and form a sketch of what follows, I was led this morning to include passage from Mark chapter 10 in the Amplified Bible. Reading from verse 1: "And [Jesus] left there [Capernaum] and went to the region of Judea and beyond [east of] the Jordan; and crowds [constantly] gathered around Him again, and as was His custom, He began to teach them again." And before I go further, it just struck me as I came to read that Scripture and Jesus left there and went and I believe today, with all my heart that anybody who is listening to this message Jesus is saying "Leave there and go." Leave the place where you are today, and go where he wants you to go. Leave the sorry state of your marriage, leave the loveless situation, the lack of submission, the striving and the argumentation, the spiritual and sometimes physical treachery and betrayal, leave that place and go where he is calling you to go to Heaven on Earth. Recognise that it is God's will today and every day to make your marriage work. God created marriage to work. There is nothing anywhere in Scripture that tells us otherwise.
"And some Pharisees came up, and, in order to test Him and try to find a weakness in Him, asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to dismiss and repudiate and divorce his wife?' He answered them, 'What did Moses command you?' They replied, 'Moses allowed a man to write a bill of divorce and to put her away.' But Jesus said to them, 'Because of your hardness of heart [your condition of insensibility to the call of God] he wrote you this precept in your Law. But from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave [behind] his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and cleave closely to her permanently, and the two shall become one flesh, so that they are no longer two, but one flesh."
And it is so important to understand many people think that Jesus was introducing some new ramification of Torah, the Law of Moses. He was simply restating what the Word of God says concerning marriage and divorce. Moses said exactly what Jesus said. The Pharisees were dealing with a situation in which man was putting away his wife for no reason. Jesus was restating the truth and setting them right about the false doctrine that they were espousing in that day. What they call divorce was putting away. And when Jesus refers to the hardness of our hearts, I have just seen more and more clearly in recent days that he was saying is because of our incapacity to love as he loves, our rebelliousness and our foolishness and our insistence on doing things our way, divorce became necessary. But now, in this age, at the end of the age of the coming judgement, he is calling us to return to his way of doing things.
If you are sitting on the brink of divorce or recently divorced, I have to say to you in the Sight of God, divorce is not an option unless one of you is headed for hell with no hope of turning back. If that is not the case, repent and turn around because God is able and willing to heal your marriage as you will see as you walk this journey with me. Verse 9: "What therefore God has united (joined together), let not man separate or divide. And indoors the disciples questioned Him again about this subject. And He said to them, 'Whoever dismisses (repudiates and divorces) his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if a woman dismisses (repudiates and divorces) her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.'" And we saw that adultery is a spiritual state in which a woman is joined to more than one man and by being joined to more than one man as men become joined to one another, we saw that adultery is treachery, it is betrayal. A man sending away his wife for no reason is betraying his covenant with her.
We saw that if people commit adultery, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 says: "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God." And yet reports today indicate that 66% plus of all marriages end in divorce in the world and a greater percentage in the church. Those statistics are being repeatedly reported and nobody is disputing them. In terms of what we have just read from Mark 10 and 1 Corinthians 6, approximately 70% minimum of all people who call themselves by the name of Christ, who have been involved in an ungodly carnal divorce will not inherit the Kingdom of God. That is a devastating statistic. It is time for all to repent and turn around and return to the truth of God's word.
In order to lay the foundation for Volume 2 of this teaching, 'Heaven on Earth in Marriage,' I want to provide you with a concise scripturally recap of Volume 1, 'The Scriptural Definition of Marriage, Divorce and Adultery.' Volume 1 sets the doctrinal, theological foundation, if you want to use those words, I prefer to use the word 'scriptural foundation,' we have to return to what the Word of God says. Our own imaginations, our Doctrines of Demons, our own understanding are an abomination in the sight of a holy righteous living and loving God. So let me take you briefly through the headlines of what we have covered so far. We referred to an article called 'Wow! So that's how Jesus loves me' that was published in Joy magazine in October 1999 and I read the introductory passage. "The Lord began speaking to us recently about marriage and giving us some understanding of why so many marriages are in a mess or out of order and even why so few Christian marriages are what they could be. Daily we seem to hear of people suffering the most terrible abuse and unhappiness and fear within marriages and hear of more and more Christian marriages ending in the cataclysmic of divorce. Something that God purposed to be one of His greatest sources of joy and blessing to people often ends up as a curse and misery. The Lord began to reveal that the reason why marriages are under such incredible attack is because of what He meant it to be. We see God purposed marriage to be a prophetic sign and a wonder, yet the enemy so often succeeds in making it a laughing stock instead of a prophetic signpost that points the way it is something much deeper."
Ephesians 5:21-33: "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband."
That passage of Scripture has been the cornerstone, if you like, of this entire teaching. The three verses which clearly juxtapose us a born-again believers being one body with the Lord Jesus Christ and a man being one flesh with his wives. We have to see that those three verses of Scripture unlock a great mystery, that unlock the reality that everything we read in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation about the relationship between God and His church speaks of the relationship between a man and his wives. And conversely, anything in Scripture which speaks of relationship between man and wife tells us something about our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. Returning to the article, 'Wow!' and quoting, "Paul says this is a great or profound mystery he is speaking about. The only other great or profound mysteries found in 1 Timothy 3:16: 'And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh, Justified in the Spirit, Seen by angels, Preached among the Gentiles, Believed on in the world, Received up in glory.'" And what I see here is if we understand the mystery of marriage, we will understand the mystery of godliness. Because if we can experience that spiritual oneness that I spoke about earlier in marriage, we will begin to understand what God is speaking about. But it is an iterative recursive process. We need to understand God before our marriages can work and we need to understand marriages before we can develop a full relationship with God. It is so intimately correlated and correlated and that is why Satan is so hell bent on destroying marriage.
Returning to the article, "Whenever Scripture speaks of a mystery, it is something that can only be understood by divine revelation how much more so a great mystery. However, these mysteries are something God wants us to understand because if we do not, the enemy will run riot in that area of ignorance in our lives. So Paul is saying, when I am talking about marriage, I am talking about Christ and the church. He is saying that every time you look at a Christian marriage, you should be able to say, "Aha, so that's how Jesus loves his church and that is how we as the church should respond to him." Marriage was made by God to be a sign that shows the world how much Jesus loves his church. Yet how many of us can say we have seen even a handful of marriages in our lifetimes that have been this. Marriages where you look at the way loves his wife and you can say "Wow, that's how Jesus loves me" as part of his church. Or you look at the wife and are able to say "Yes, I see my understand how I as a Christian need to submit to Jesus in love." And the article goes on and makes many, many important points. It returns to the statement, every area of marriage was purposed to be a prophetic sign. If you want to understand what idolatry does to the heart of God, then look at what sexual infidelity does in marriage and so it goes. A profoundly important publication and one which gelled and confirmed many things that the Lord had been saying to me at the time that I received it.
And that formed the core of teaching 1, the introduction to this entire series which at the time I recorded it I thought was going to be about six tapes. It was based on the draft of the book, 'The Scriptural Definition of Marriage' which I have been writing over several years and which constitutes in a sense a thesis of all scriptures dealing with marriage, which is available from this Ministry should you require a copy. But let us return to the different components of this teaching. In the second teaching, which is entitled 'How Scripture Defines the Marriage Covenant,' we looked at Deuteronomy 22:13-21, "If any man takes a wife, and goes in to her, and detests her," and we saw that in verse 17, "Now he has charged her with shameful conduct, saying, 'I found your daughter was not a virgin,' and yet these are the evidences of my daughter’s virginity." And verse 19, "And they shall fine him one hundred shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name on a virgin of Israel. And she shall be his wife; he cannot divorce her all his days. But if the thing is true, and evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house. So you shall put away the evil from among you."
And we saw further in Deuteronomy 22:28-29, "If a man finds a young woman who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are found out, then the man who lay with her shall give to the young woman’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has humbled her; he shall not be permitted to divorce her all his days." And we saw in Judges 21 a dramatic implementation of that particular passage of Scripture. But the cracks of what we saw here was that if a woman is not a virgin, she may not get married. We saw very clearly that virginity and marriage go hand in hand. We discussed in some length that the actual definition of the marriage covenant and we saw that covenant requires the shedding of blood in Hebrews 9:18-20. We saw that covenant requires this cleaving or splitting or cutting of some living creature and we referred to Genesis 15:4-21 and we see that was where Abraham split the animals and God walked through the split animals. We saw from a variety of other aspects and the passage in Jeremiah that the cutting of covenant involved the splitting or cleaving of an animal and walking in the blood.
We saw that out of a footnote to the Living Torah which refers to Genesis 15:10 where it says that he split the animals in half and then in the footnote in the commentary, it says split them, this was the way of making a covenant. Indeed the words both covenant and [inaudible 01:06:10] split appear to be closely related. It symbolised that just as the two halves of the animal were really one, so will the two people making the covenant. Moreover, just as one side cannot live without the other, so the two cannot live without each other. It was also seen as a malediction. Anyone violating the Earth would be torn asunder. And so out of that we saw the critical components of covenant. We also saw that the word split in the Oxford English dictionary is defined as break forcibly, be broken into parts, especially, longitudinally or with the grain or the plane of cleavage. And from there we went on to Genesis 2:24 in the King James translation which says therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh and suddenly we saw that the act of sexual intercourse between a man and his virgin wife cleaving or splitting her on the plane of cleavage of her sexual organs cleaving the hymen with the shedding of blood is the act of the marriage covenant that as that marriage is consummated, as the pain is experienced, as the blood is shed, as the man walks in the blood, the covenant is cut and it is unbreakable, they become one and a person who breaks covenant is to be put to death.
And the fact that we may not see the death in this life, does not mean that on the Day of Judgement we will not be found guilty of covenant breaking and put to death for eternity, or at the very least have a part in the Lake of Fire and Brimstone, which is the second death. The imagery is vivid and powerful. If we put aside our prudery for a moment and wonder at the physical appearance of the external female sexual organ, we should be even further amazed at the imagery which our God has encapsulated in what superficially is an organ whose structure and design makes no earthly sense; it is not intended to. It faithfully recreates the two halves of the covenant animal, even to the hair covering the animal. Surely we must conclude that God knew the end from the beginning and designed woman to be symbolic of His covenant with man.
Taking it further, He symbolically recreates the cutting of covenant every time a wife and husband make love. How can we conclude other than that the sexual act is the most sublimely holy representation of the act of covenant? How can we be other than appalled at how this symbolism has been lost and distorted? The sexual act is an act of such enormous spiritual significance. Is it any wonder that Satan has expended the energy that he has to deceive us for so long? And so we saw that the female sexual organ is in fact the symbol of the marriage covenant and likewise the male sexual organ is the counterpoint to that. We then understood that in 1 Corinthians 12:23-24, "And those members of the body which we think to be less honourable, on these we bestow greater honour; and our unpresentable parts have greater modesty, but our presentable parts have no need. But God composed the body, having given greater honour to that part which lacks it." And we saw that the male and female sexual organs are the most holy part of a body. They are sacred. We also pointed out that the 'red heart' that is used on Valentine's Day's cards and as a symbol of love throughout the world is in fact a graphic portrayal of woman's most holy organ. It is an abomination and it subliminally sends a message of lust and fornication to the hearts of all who look on it.
In the third teaching, 'The One Flesh Bond and Submission,' we saw in the Genesis 2:24 in the Amplified, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall become united and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." Matthew 19:5-6 in the Amplified, "And said, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be united firmly (joined inseparably) to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder (separate)." And we went through the scriptural basis of that. I shared a portion of my testimony where I was almost totally destroyed as a consequence of an ungodly One Flesh Bond resulting from an adulterous extramarital relationship and that I wrestled with this situation for nearly 18 months, cried out to God, laid down my life, read the word and took counsel and nothing helped until I had a revelation of the One Flesh Bond and the mercy and the grace of God which permitted me to petition him for something that I have no scriptural basis for. Because the Word of God says man cannot put asunder the One Flesh Bond, only God in His mercy and His grace can put this asunder. We went on and we saw Ephesians 5:24 which says, "Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything."
We saw that said everything, not just something, it is not just when the wife felt like. 1 Peter 3:1, "Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives." In 1 Peter 2:21-24 what wives should likewise be submissive to and that was Jesus Christ who committed no sin nor was deceit found in his mouth for when he was reviled did not revile in return, when he suffered, he did not threaten but committed himself to him who judges righteously who himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness by whose stripes we are healed. We saw out of that very clearly and out of other scriptures that a wife is required to submit to her husband no matter how ungodly, how just and righteous he is no matter how he conducts his life, no matter what his appearance his and no matter what he requires of her, we saw that even if he forces her into prostitution or adultery she is required to submit to him, and that we saw that Sarah submitting to Abraham in two instances which put her in a situation to find herself in adultery but because she submitted and she walked by faith, God delivered her. We saw that this is not telling women to suffer without God. It is an act of self denial, it is an act of laying down the life, and being crucified with Christ. And if it is done in faith and obedience we saw that God is well able to intervene miraculously to save such a woman and that even if she was not saved, she would be storing up much treasure in Heaven through her obedience.
In the fifth teaching, we spoke about love. Ephesians 5:25, "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her." James 2:8, "If you really fulfil the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself,' you do well." We looked at 1 Corinthians 13 and many other scriptures which indicated that the love of God and the agape love of God was prerequisite for the Christian walk and prerequisite for healing in marriage. In the fifth teaching, the husband is covering but the wife builds the house, we saw very challenging Scripture in Proverbs 14:1, "The wise woman builds her house, but the foolish pulls it down with her hands." We saw progressively that woman has a very active and very positive and constructive role to play in the success of marriage. In Ruth 3:9 in the Amplified we read, "And she answered, I am Ruth your maidservant. Spread your wing [of protection] over your maidservant, for you are a next of kin." From a book by Schnoebelen entitled 'Masonry: Beyond the Light' with regard to headship we read Paul teaches that the head of every man is Christ and the head of a woman is man, 1 Corinthians 11:3. This is how men and women are created by God. Two verses in this passage tell us that "Any woman who prays or prophesies when she is bareheaded dishonours her head; it is the same as [if her head were] shaved. For man was not [created] from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created on account of or for the benefit of woman, but woman on account of and for the benefit of man. For this cause, ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels." And the commentary says, although this is a rather deep passage, it is not so deep that it cannot be interpreted by turning to the Bible itself for help.
The first part is clearer. The husband is to be head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the husband. And we go on and he demonstrates that the angels that are referred to are the angels that came down and married women in Genesis 6:1-8 which brought about an abomination on the Earth, those angels we saw in Jude 1:6 are reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgement of the great day and in 2 Peter 2:4, "For God did not spare angels that sinned, but cast them into hell, delivering them to be kept there in pits of gloom till the judgment and their doom." We saw that it is possible for a woman without the covering of a man to come under angelic attack even to the extent of Angels coming and posing as men and marrying those women and siring children. We recently ministered in a case of a woman who was being visited by demonic spirits sexually at night. So we saw that the covering and the responsibility of the husband to provide a covering, we saw a vision in which the husband provided an umbrella over his wife and as long as she was in total submission, she was totally under that umbrella and Satan could not touch her. We saw that in the case of Job and his wife, Satan took Job and afflicted his flesh, but Job's wife emerged personally unscathed because of the covering.
In the sixth teaching on headship, the relationship between Christ and the church is a pattern for the relationship between husband and wife, we saw that the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the church and he is the saviour of the body. We saw also that the father is the head of Christ. We saw that the wife's relationship with her husband is a mirror of the husband's relationship with Christ. We saw that if the wife was not submitting to her husband, it meant that the husband is probably not submitting to Christ. If the wife was not making love to her husband in a pleasing fashion, we saw it is indicated that the husband was not praising and worshipping God as he ought. And so we saw also that the children's relationship with their mother was a mirror of her relationship with her husband. So if she saw that her children were behaving in an unacceptable fashion, she needed to examine her relationship with her husband. In the same token, the children's relationship with their father was a mirror of the husband's relationship with his heavenly father. If the children were not behaving in an acceptable fashion towards their father, we understood that it potentially indicated that he was not behaving in an acceptable fashion towards his father. So the whole concept of headship took on a vibrancy that we had not seen before.
The scriptural definition of adultery, Romans 7:3, "So then if while her husband lives she marries another man, she will be called an adulteress." Again we saw in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 that adulterers will not inherit the Kingdom of God and we saw that the vast majority of people who have divorced and remarried in the world today are adulterers in the Sight of God.
In the eight teaching, 'Tying up some loose ends, some controversial points,' we went into the implications of Hebrews 13:4, marriage is honourable among all and the bed undefiled, but fornicators and adulterers God will judge and we saw from that that there is no sexual practice between husband and wife that is unacceptable in the Sight of God but it is adultery and fornication that is unacceptable to God. We saw that the attitude of regarding marriage's sex as being carnal was in fact unfounded. We also saw Isaiah 4:1 and specifically looking at that reading Isaiah 4 verse 6 to verse 1 in order to understand the day that has been referring to indicated that in this age that we are entering now, there would be seven times as many women as men in the Body of Christ and we understood that just casual observation in most congregations indicate that shows approximately in existence right now and that they had enormous ramifications for God-fearing women who is seeking godly husbands when there were just not enough husbands available who meet that requirement.
In the ninth teaching, 'Do you love like Jesus loves,' Matthew 22:37-40, "Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself." And these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. John 15:12-13, "This is My commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than to lay down his own life for his friends." Again we saw 1 Corinthians 13 and we saw at the end of the day that Jesus died for us because he loved us. We saw that the husband was required to lay down his life and die for his wife for his children to bring about healing in the marriage. That laying down of life is not necessarily a physical laying down of life, but it is a laying down his life in service to God in drawing close to God. We saw that no man can bring his wife into submission. Submission and obedience and love and sexual desire cannot be commanded, demanded, or forced. They are free gifts given as a matter of choice by the wife and if they are not given, there is nothing that the husband can do with regard to the wife that will change that situation. He has to deal with it spiritually. He has to go to a father and the son and the holy spirit to guide him.
In the tenth teaching, 'Scriptural divorce versus putting away,' we have already touched on. We saw that most of what is called 'divorce' in the world today is in fact not divorce, it is putting away, it is adultery, it is abomination in the Sight of God. The eleventh teaching was a summing up. At that time that I did that teaching I thought that this was virtually the end and then suddenly the floodgates opened and situations were developing which just caused me to see a greater and greater richness in this tapestry. Teaching 12, 'The scriptural response to the sexuality of teenage girls,' we saw that girls were sexually and emotionally and scripturally ready to marry at about 12 and a half to 14, the age of puberty and that many things which are attributed to loose morals and so forth in the world today are consequence of wrong doctrine. And that was addressed in detail.
The 13th teaching, 'The scriptural relevance of betrothal,' we saw that there was no scriptural requirement for there to be betrothal before marriage but marriage is straightforwardly simply the act of sexual intercourse with a virgin. We did understand that betrothal was a preferred right of passage if you like, but if it was in place it was binding vows, etc., and that this idea of getting engaged on an experimental basis, again, is an abomination in the Sight of God.
The 14th teaching, 'The price of righteousness; lessons from Judges 19 to 21, rape, vows, oaths, etc.,' we saw a scriptural incident where one gang rape resulted in 40,000 men giving their lives to bring judgement and in the process slaying in battle 26,000 men plus their wives, children, and livestock. We saw just how appalling rape and adultery is in the Sight of God and the sacrifice that God requires of us for holiness and sanctification and righteousness. We saw that vows were binding and we saw that virgin wives and their instance in Judges 21 were allocated with no selection other than the fact they had to be virgins and we saw how dramatically that re-establishes and re-reinforced the principle God created marriage to work. The only requirement is that the woman is a virgin and that both a man and a woman are believers and we have seen throughout the series that for either a man or a woman to join themselves to an unbeliever is an act of the greatest possible spiritual folly.
The 15th teaching was entitled 'Marriage matters for men,' and it dealt with a diversity of issues in terms of the age of marriage of men, the extended family, the role of parents and grandparents, etc., wives working for husbands.
The 16th teaching, 'Learning how to love,' an in-depth analysis of 1 Corinthians 13:1-8 based on a book called 'Lord, teach me how to love' by Creflo Dollar, an immensely challenging and powerful teaching which caused certainly me to see that I did not even begin to understand to love, how to love the way Jesus loved.
The 17th teaching, 'The scriptural response to rebellious or treacherous wife,' and we saw that a man cannot demand love and submission if a wife insists on rebelling and betraying her husband. The only measure open is for the husband to hand her over to Satan in terms of 1 Corinthians 5:5, deliver such a wife to Satan for the distraction of the flesh that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord Jesus. We saw 2 Corinthians 2:6-11 referring to the same incident saying that we should be ready to forgive and restore such a one as the moment correction has taken place. And we saw that the only way to bring about submission and so forth within marriage is for the husband to appeal to the Father not to bribe, beat, and harass, and lecture and resort even to physical abuse to bring it about. We were not created to work that way, it is never going to work, it is the world's way, it is not God's way.
The 18th teaching, 'Is polygamy spiritual' analysed a television programme that had been broadcast and showed in great detail that 1 Timothy 4:1-3, "Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry" speaking specifically about the false doctrine of enforced monogamy even if it is speaking about other things, but to forbidding to marry is an attribute and a characteristic of the church today with its false doctrine of monogamy. And so we saw that polygamy was not scriptural because it involves many men with many women which is fornication in scriptural terms but polygyny, one man with more than one wife was completely scriptural.
In the 19th teaching, 'Facilitating change in marriage,' we saw the basic principles with examples of learning to touch type, learning to ride a horse, and understood the change took time. It required revisiting skills, it required practice and training and repeated instruction in order for it to come about. And that laid the foundation for Volume 2 of this series which is essentially a composite of all the spiritual things that can be done to bring about change. And that was closed and signed off.
Volume 2 starts out with an introduction which is this tape now 'Towards Heaven on Earth in marriage,' we go through bringing joy to Jesus, the kingdom context, the call, the end of the age, why this is happening now, preparing for change in marriage, faithfulness, before the Judgement Seat of Christ in this life, the realm of exceedingly abundantly hidden answers by the Holy Spirit, 'How to Discipline Your Flesh' by Kenneth Copeland, 'Renewing your Mind' by Kenneth Copeland, 'The Power of the Tongue' by Kenneth Copeland, the anointing and the [inaudible 01:27:37] of Jesus by Benny Hinn, 'Demonic Oppression of the Flesh and Deliverance' by [inaudible 01:27:42], 'Cleansing the Temple of the Holy Spirit and the Jezebel Principality,' 'Covenant made by Blood -- Hesed - Agape' by Kenneth Copeland, 'Cutting of The Marriage Covenant, Faith and Implementing Change, a tape by Kenneth Hegan Junior, 'The Power of Negativity Preventing Change,' a tape by Brian Houston, 'Building the House -- the One Flesh Bond' and that rolled over into the second tape which went into some detail. The world, the church, and marriage from 4000 BC to 2000 AD, which showed how the scriptures which indicate that God created man in his likeness and his image clearly showed us that man was a very superior being 6000 years ago to what he is today. But the church has progressively backslid away from God for 6000 years and that Moses and Jesus came to restore truth that had been lost to the church but this slide has continued. And that we are in such a poor state that we truly are poor and naked in the Sight of God and yet we think we are rich, we think that we are the most advanced civilisation that has ever lived the Earth and nothing could be further from the truth.
The next tape will address the responsibility of married Christian women towards single Christian women and the corresponding responsibility of men. And the 22nd teaching deals with 'Living in Excellence - Reaching for the Heights of Marriage,' which includes a teaching by [inaudible 01:29:21] which was a real blessing to me and that it has pulled this whole thing together in terms of God has called us to excellence and to reach out for the fullness of His blessings and finally, the last tape in this series, 'Spreading the Good News -- the Theology of Nobodies' with a message by David Wong from China with a series of testimonies of people with absolutely no advantages in life who are leading thousands to Christ and we saw that this western world and the world in which we live in we are so phenomenally spiritually blessed and yet so phenomenally spiritually destitute. We have so little concern for the salvation of our own souls, let alone the souls of those around us. And an enormous challenge where God is really saying to me and I believe to everybody who will listen to that tape there is no longer time to mess around. Go out and speak the truth, tell people of the coming judgement.
As I mentioned earlier, the Volume 3 which has suddenly come on to this horizon in the last few days is a series of teachings on the practical application, the idea is a tape if you are seeking as a husband to restore your marriage likewise for a wife and so forth. And those will, God willing, unfold in the days ahead. I pray that as you go forward on this journey that you will systematically work through the next 22 tapes, prayerfully understanding that there is much to learn that you have to recognise that in the Sight of God there is only one way and that is His way and that this is only accomplished in the spirit, not through carnality and if you are not at a place where you accept the Bible as the living word of God, where you have been water baptised where you have truly confessed your sin and come to a place where confession of sin and repentance is a daily part of your life, if you have not received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I would urge you to come to a place where all of those fundamental principles that are entrenched in your life, if you are not having all of those things that need to be dealt with, we do have teachings from this Ministry and there are many teachings which deal with all of those issues. By the time you get through this series of tapes, all of those basic principles will have been established and you will be in place to put them into practical application in your life for the healing of your marriage.
Father in the name of Jesus I pray that anything that I have uttered that is not according to your word and your will that you will blow it away and it will find no root in the hearers. But I ask Father everything that is being said on this teaching that is of you that it would be engrafted into the hearts of the hearers that it will find deep root that will be watered and nourished by your spirit and that it will produce abundant fruit to the glory of your kingdom and the glory of your name. Father, I thank you for healing the marriages of every single person who hears this tape and leading them to a place where they experience Heaven on Earth in their marriages. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
Should you need to contact this Ministry, you can contact us telephonically on Johannesburg, South Africa, international code 0027, local code 117912327. You can contact us by fax on 7915004. You can contact us on email at James@EndTimeIssueMinistries.org.za.
04 02 Bringing Joy to Jesus
Volume 2 of the series ‑ 'Understanding God's way in marriage,' Volume 2 being 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage' is a message entitled 'What brings Jesus joy' or 'Bringing Joy to Jesus.' It was preached by Neil Dryer of the foundation for living congregation in Pretoria North during the course of the preparation of the messages in Volume 1 and I felt impressed to include it in Volume 2 as part of the foundational Scriptures and principles in terms of what God is saying to the church today, in a sense that truly the Father loves the Lord Jesus Christ and we are commanded to love him. He loves us, he went to the cross for us. And our hearts' desire should be to bring joy to Jesus. So I pray that this message will bless you, in Jesus name.
[00:01:15] Preaching by Neil Dryer:
And folks, if we are in the place where God wants us to be, we are going to take advantage of it. You know, you could witness to somebody by speaking to them. Better still, you can speak and give a track. Better still, if you are being blessed by a message, give them a tape, an audio tape. Take them, distribute them. We need to reach out folks. We need to reach out. We need to be active in this outreach and God can bless us in it. So please, you ask my brother for tapes, he will give you tapes. Is that right, brother? That's perfectly right. I want you to come with me to the gospel of St. Luke, the 10th chapter and we read the first 12 verses together. Jesus says in the previous chapter, he ends it by saying, "No one, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is worthy of the kingdom of God." When you start ploughing, determine that you are going to plough to the end of the Father. Without looking back, because it is not worthy. If you regret beginning that ploughing. God wants you to do with wholeheartedly. No man builds a [inaudible 00:03:10] except he sits down first of all and counts the cost. He wants us to count the cost. And then he goes on and it says: "After these things the Lord appointed seventy others also, and sent them two by two before His face into every city and place where He Himself was about to go." He is planning here. Do you see it? Jesus plans. He says you go ahead into every village, into every town, prepare it, I am coming. So they go ahead, they preach there. Jesus comes along and he finds the ready audience. It is organisation. Here Christ is working with the seventy. "Then He said to them, 'The harvest truly is great, but the labourers are few; therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into His harvest. Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs among wolves. Carry neither money bag, knapsack, nor sandals; and greet no one along the road. But whatever house you enter, first say, 'Peace to this house.' And if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest on it; if not, it will return to you. And remain in the same house, eating and drinking such things as they give, for the labourer is worthy of his wages. Do not go from house to house. Whatever city you enter, and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you. And heal the sick there, and say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you.' But whatever city you enter, and they do not receive you, go out into its streets and say, 'The very dust of your city which clings to us we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near you.' But I say to you that it will be more tolerable in that Day for Sodom than for that city."
So Lord, we worship you and we pray that you are blessed the preaching of this word, in Jesus name, amen. I have entitled it ‑ 'The joy of the Lord.' The joy of the Lord Jesus Christ. What were the things that made Jesus happy? We are already aware of the things that make you happy. You know what kind of news you like to hear and what kind of news you do not like to hear, but what was it that made Jesus, the son of God glare? What rejoice his heart? What were the things that were important of him as the son of God? These are the things that we need to look into just a little. In Romans 5 and 12 the Scripture sets forth a scenario for what we are about to say. In Romans 5 and 12, where for as by one man, this is tremendous, as by one man sin entered the world and the death, the result is tremendous. Death by sin. It comes for one man and the result is death by sin. Listen, so death passed upon all men. It is tremendously wide. It goes from generation to generation from the cradle to the grave. It effects every person that breaths. And it came into the world through one door, through one man. Staggering. What kind of man must this man, Adam have been? That he could have such a tremendous effect on his generation and every succeeding generation that followed. His action was vital. God puts tremendous things in this man's hands. He handled tremendous power. Otherwise this could never have happened. He handled tremendous power. Listen to me. So death passed upon all men for that all have sinned. This statement is clear and the result is as plain as the nose on your face. It affects you, it effects your children. It affects all your relatives, everybody that you know. There is not a single human being that is not affected by it. And here, it is not just a matter of being born in sin. He says we are all born in sin that we are not sinners. We are born that way that we are not sinners. We are sinners when we start committing sin.
And he says from the time of understanding, we have all sinned, and came short of the glory of God. The little ones that can understand and come to the age of understanding and the older ones, everybody, we are all fainted. We are all touched by the same thing. We have the same violence. We are in the same difficulties. Then you come to the 15th verse and listen to this. But not has the offense, so is the free gift. For it through the offense of one, many be there, much more the grace of God and the gift of grace which is by one man ‑ Jesus Christ, happen down to one man. Happen down that overflow. This raises the overflow to all man. Every man that has ever been condemned. Jesus Christ has got something to say. This one man. This one man that came into our world to redeem the world. To do a tremendous work for all of humanity. Some people say, well I have nothing to do with Adam's sin. I wasn’t there. That's true. But neither you have anything to do with [inaudible 00:08:53] of the death of Jesus Christ. It was free, absolutely free. He did it for you. You didn’t have to do a thing, you just have to believe it. He did all the suffering. You get all the benefits. Blessed be the name of Jesus Christ, worship him.
Adam had the seed of life within him and he passed on this life to all. It was a tainted life. It was a corrupted life and the Bible give that as a result. The result was a curse. It says it passed this on to all of us. A curse of weakness and a failure. We did it over and over and over again in his footsteps. In Genesis 3:17 "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." And this is the first mention of limited life. In the day that [inaudible 00:09:47] surely die. All the days of thy life, as long as you shall live, but you will not live forever. For as long as you will live. The death sentence was passed and yet it was carried out. That was the result of original. Sin is like AIDS beloved. You might deny its power over your life. But if you have it, you cannot deny the evidence. And not one of us can deny the evidence of what God's word is saying for all of us who have sinned and come short of the glory of God. We are tainted by it. It is within us. It is in our genes if you like. It comes out of us. They said to a black man we are not sinners because we commit sin. We are sinners, that's why we sin. It is natural and we all in that category, we are sinners. But reality pay the much bigger price by inheritance than just this life.
By faith we have a relationship and that relationship is a powerful relationship. If you do not have faith, you do not have the power. You lost it and Adam was coupled from God that was the tragedy. From that moment onward he was on his own and he was vulnerable. He was susceptible to everything that a devil could throw at him because he was outside the protection of God and when we step outside the protection of God, we lose power. We lose power with God and we have lost this thing that will give us victory in life, that will enable us to overcome. We lose these things. Cut off from God we are nothing. We are nobodies. We are distanced for no relation and we deserve it and we have no right to anything more. So we lose standing, we lose position, we lose authority, we lose power. And union with God, that only can faith can bring. When we have this unity with God and this liberty that comes in and say my Father, and I know that I am his son, I can put my knees under this table and I will not be rebuked. I have got a place I belong. When the soul cries out to God, when we sometimes in agony before Him and we say "Oh God, I need you more than words can ever tell," you do not have to pray for hours but when you say that and you mean it, God knows it. It registers with Him. He knows that you are sincere.
He was vulnerable without protection from his own weakness and when man is not under control, he comes out of control, he does not have control anymore. He is like the alcoholic. He thinks that he is in control of his habit and his life, but the truth is that the habit controls him and controls his life. It is a make-belief world that he has when he thinks he is in control. He is not making the choices. He is under control. He is a victim. Without God, man is bound in the prison of his own weakness. Ineffective, the lack of ability to trust to know his goal. He does not have the faith that can bring change in vital situations. And with the alcoholic, the 31st drink was the one that set the pattern for the rest of his life. He did not know that he was falling into a trap but it was. A death trap, and he did not know it. He walked into it with his eyes wide open. And man does it time and again and again and again. He does not know why things are going wrong in his life. He does not understand why things just do not come right and he does not understand that sin has separated him from God from the source of life, from the source of blessing and he is walking alone and he thinks he is making the decision. It is a dream world. It is the fantasy world. A world where reality does not exist. The lie is I am managing, I am doing all right. You better believe me and all the tiny spelling hand over fist. This gave Satan the first [inaudible 00:14:19] in the world. It was due to weakness of man.
Sin entered through one door, the weakness of man. You know, the rhinovirus that causes flu and they say rhinovirus has a secret. You come to a normal cell and it begins to tick it and suddenly that cell which is meant to defend you against the rhinovirus opens to rhinovirus because he thinks he is friendly. The rhinovirus goes in and the minute it is inside, it begins to multiply at a furious rate until eventually it bursts the whole cell and the cell is fatally wounded and then it spreads throughout your body and it ravages you for weeks. Suddenly it stops just as suddenly it began. But if it continued, nobody would survive. It would be your end. But it slays the cell that it inhibits and the devil inhabits the human being and he is set to destroy him. He will destroy him and bring him to nothing. The devil has nothing to do with you except in order to take from you and to destroy you.
Sin always robs of power because the sinner loses the confidence to come to God and liberty is the casualty. Conscience keeps him away from God because he says I have got no right. How many people do not think like that? I have got no right to come to God. I must first of all put my life right, then I can come to God. That is a fantasy. You will never do it. Only God can change your life. Only God can put you on the right track. And you need to walk with Him every step of the way and then God will bless you and use you. Sin always robs of power, because the sinner loses the confidence to come to God. There are own thoughts. The Bible says either condemn or justify them and many condemn themselves before God. Conscience does that. And this is what drew Jesus Christ from his Father's throne. This is why he came to the Earth. This is why he was willing to go to Calvary all the way for this joy that was set before again. The prospect of doing this, of being this, of being the victim, of being the victim in your place and mine of being the sacrifice of God for the joy that was set before him to do this. Jesus came to the world. This is what drew him. Jesus wanted to come. In Hebrews 10:6-7 the Bible says: "In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God." To obey with my whole life in living and in dying on behalf of all humanity. To get to do on their behalf what they are unable to do and give themselves, I will do it for them. I will be the perfect man in their stand. I will be the spotless lamb of God, I will be sinless for their sakes. For their sakes I will keep myself pure. For their sakes I will be everything that God's law requires. What gives Jesus joy? Not the glory. Satan wanted the glory. He said I will be like the most high. I will establish my throne in the sides of the north and from then he fail. He wanted the glory. Jesus does not want it. He does not want it. He did not come here for that reason. He came to die. Listen to this heart this morning. Listen to it.
In John 12:27-28 he says: "Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name." You take the glory. That is all I want to do. I want to glorify you and I want you to save people. Do not save me. Do not save me; save them. Save them by my death, Lord. Do that. This is why I am here. Bring glory to yourself by my death. Christ came to this hour for this cause. And he made this hour your hour and mine. This was the hour of our time. It was the hour of his death that it was the hour of our trying for over the devil. Overall his forces here is the victory. It is Jesus dying on the cross of Calvary for you for everything that you have ever done in the whole of your life. The things that you brushed about, the things that you are ashamed of, Jesus died for ever one of them. He made it possible for you to live past it, beyond it, above it. He made it possible so that you never have to go back there again and say, "Lord, I am sorry." Once it is forgiven it is forgotten as it never was and you are sinless. You are sinless because Jesus Christ's blood, the blood of Jesus Christ, God's son cleanses us from all sin. Is not that a marvellous statement? From all sin I am free from everything that binds me. Praise his holy name.
Zephaniah 3:17 says this: "The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing." Can you image? Jesus singing about you. What would he sing? He is going to sing [inaudible 00:20:47]. Father this is what I brought to you. Take a look. He is pure. He is clean as the snow. There is not a mark on him. The devil cannot do a thing with him. Is not that wonderful? Praise his holy name. He is so good. This joy is the result of Christ saving these people. You remember those momentous words as he died he says it is finished. The end of the nightmare, the beginning of a glorious truth. It is over. Sin is defeated. The devil is defeated and this marks the end of slavery and bondage for you and for me. It is restoring what has been lost and squandered and neglected. People say, you know, does each generation of kids get the music it deserves? The answer is no, but it gets the music that defines it. The music that tells you what they are, what they are after. Yes, this is what it tells you. You listen to the music and hear what it says. And this is what the answer is looking for. It is being said that we give the politicians and the children that we deserve and the Bible says we reap what we sow, this is what Christ came to deliver us from, the consequences.
He came to deliver us from the consequences of our own behaviour so that we do not have to pay the price from getting out just deserves, Jesus set us free from this. So this is a new era, a new beginning, the dawning of a new day. Opportunity from God once again knocks at humanity's door and says you cannot live your life over that you can live it differently. You can live it differently. Jesus makes that possible. Hebrews 12:1-2: "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." Where is his dignity? You know how important your dignity is to you. You know what happens if somebody slaps you or somebody insults you, what kind of reaction you give. What happens in your mind and your heart. Jesus Christ embraced the cross and how he overcame it was he despised it. He despised the shame. It could not turn him one way or the other from the Will of God. Ego did not get in the way. And ego cannot get in the way of you and of me when we are doing God's service. We do not have the right. We do not have the right. Man crucified him, but God raised him and put him at his right's hand, accepted and honoured and glorify. Was this his joy? Does this what he wanted? I say no, the cross was. We are the represented in Heaven beloved and he has wounds in his hands and his feet and his eye. We got a representative there, a high priest familiar with our weaknesses, who understands. He prevails for us on his merit, no doubt. He comes before God and what he has done for us, not what we have done for ourselves. Christ did that. He did it for you and for me. Do you understand why I love it? Why I want to serve him? Amen.
And from this position, Jesus Christ pours out his Holy Spirit. In John 7:39 says: "(But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified)." When Jesus Christ was glorified, he was ascended to the right hand of the majesty. When the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, they knew that Jesus has arrived there. Do you understand? That was the sign for the outpouring of the Holy Ghost. So we rejoice in the Lord. Why did he do it? I want you to read with me Luke 10:17-24 and here is his vision: "And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you. Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven. In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him. And he turned him unto his disciples, and said privately, Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: For I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them."
Have you heard? Have you seen? Are you amongst the mighty and the wise? Or are you amongst the humble? I am so glad that I am not a big man. I am so glad that I am enough of a child to accept Jesus Christ. I thank God. I thank God for the things that my eyes have seen and my ears have heard. I thank God for withstanding that has given me. I was praying the other day. I walked when I pray and there is somebody that has done me a lot of harm. And I thought of myself, I was praying for the person. I do not pray against people. I ask God to have these words in their lives. I was praying for this person, God bless this person, save his soul. Change his outlook, make him different. And the Lord brought it forward to me. I have never been able to understand what Jesus meant when he said forgave them for they know what they do. Because they knew what they were doing. They did it with the fore thought and with malice and a fore thought. They wanted to kill him. They wanted to put him aside and he knew it. And yet he says forgive them, they do not know what they are doing. What did he mean? He is saying when I get saved, before I was saved, I was a different man altogether to the man that emerged from the city hall when Christ came to his eyes. I saw things altogether differently. I saw it from God's perspective. Before I saw it from the world's perspective. I only understood the world's perspective, not God's. And then God came into my life and I saw the world from his perspective. And it is a different perspective.
And the man who does not see it from God's perspective is really not responsible for his behaviour because he does not understand and that is what Jesus was saying. They do not understand what they are doing because they cannot see it from God's point of view. They have been blinded, the devil has blinded their eyes. I cannot claim benefit. I cannot say that it was the cleverness of my decision that saved my soul. It was the Grace of God. And if the Grace of God saved my soul beloved, then I must have the sin regressed to this person is on me. Because he does not understand what he is doing. He does not know God. And I expect him to behave in a godly way. He does not know how. He has never learnt. He has never been so privileged as I have because I have learnt it from my Father's hand. Blessed thee who is holy man. So Jesus was glad. In Luke 8:1-2 it says: "And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him, And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils." They shared the same vision. They were on the same mission. They were doing the same thing. They took it from Jesus and they carried it forward. That is what going to happen amongst us. We take it from Jesus and carry it forward. And this makes Jesus glad. The glad tidings of the kingdom. These are the things that filled his life.
Jesus was not thinking of having a mansion. He did not want to become a multi-millionaire. Those were not his interests. It was the Kingdom of God. He was sold out entirely to that kingdom. All right. I want to ask you a question. Do you think that madness is a blessed release from reality? I want to say to you, no. It is torment. In Mark 5:1 it says: "And they came over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gadarenes." That was part of Christ's strategy. He was reaching out to villages. He crossed the sea. He had to reach somebody. There was somebody there that needed him. And so he comes over the sea in the boat with his disciples. The second verse says: "And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit." It was prearranged meeting. Jesus said for this purpose that I have come into the world. This is one of the purposes. Verse 3: "Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains." He broke chains in pieces so that no man could tame him and verse 5 says: "And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones." He was in the mountains and in the tombs crying and cutting himself with stones. We saw Jesus he [inaudible 00:32:08] worship him and bow at his feet, one power inferior bowing before the superior power of God. He recognise it. The mad man recognise what same people often do not see. They understood who Jesus is. In their madness they knew and same men looked past and they do not understand. They do not know who he is. Always day and night, night and day all the time, he gave himself entirely to what was in his mind. What he thought was profitable but it was mindless, it was thoughtless, it was going nowhere, it was going in circles with his life with the precious days of his life achieving absolutely nothing, amounting to nothing. All the efforts did not mean this. He gave himself to it entirely, more definitely than most people give to making a fortune.
It has been said that men ruin their health making a fortune. And they spend their fortune trying to regain their health. Go around in circles. And here was this man doing this. Achieving nothing, giving his life to trivial pursuit. His life meaningless. Many normal people are on this treadmill of life. I want to tell you. They give themselves avidly to things that have no benefit and think this is success. What the mad man was doing filled his mind, it occupied him. It filled his days and nights. Was this vision? Was this what God intended for him? No, I tell you. This was Satan's work. It is diabolic. It is tragic. It is fake. It is taking away from a man that which is profitable to him, his values go down with you. The devil does that every time fellows. Does not want you to succeed. Does not want you to walk with God. I tell you that no one will ever get to victory over Satan and the weakness he brings until he recognises who is behind the behaviour. If you keep on making excuses friend, for the life that you are living, you are never going to arrive where God wants you to be. It is better recognise who it is responsible for the things that we are thinking and the things that we are doing so we can deal with it. And if we do not recognise Satan's hand, we will never defeat him. He will always have his hand on our shoulder. Evil that destroys the life while holding out promises that never can be fulfilled. It is a myth, a mirage, a delusion, we need help to separate imagination from reality. Jesus Christ said in John 10:10: "The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."
The amazing thing is that the madman was so deluded that he was doing what he wanted to. It was a choice that was made under pressure from spiritual forces that he did not understand. Romans 12:2 says: "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." The renewing of the mind is changing your value system. It is coming over to God's sight. It is getting your perspectives on you, your life, and God. The madman does all the time what he wanted to do and somehow it made twisted sense of nonsense. But to him it makes sense somehow, and so he kept on doing it. Yet there are no limitations. All is acceptable. It can be done. I have heard this voice. I have heard the person talking to someone that does not exist. Rebuking, fighting. I have seen a grown woman [inaudible 00:36:45] and begin to wash her dress while it is upon her. You say this is not rationale. No, it is not. But it is tragic. It is not rationale but tragic. I have heard this voice. It is a mockery of sanity. This man's satisfaction came from torturing himself. Destruction was in his paths. He does his own nemesis and his own victim. If you keep doing what you want to, does that always satisfy? If you have no restrictions, are you really free? Are you best left alone to go your way?
In Mark 5:15: "And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid." Amazing. They beg Jesus to leave their coasts. They were amazed. And the world is afraid of people who are in their right mind. They do not want to hear it. They do not know what they won't. They do not want anybody to tell them that. Leave me. I want to cut myself and torture myself in the tombs. I want to do my own thing. Leave me. Even if this is rationale, I want to do it. What do you fear in life? What peace have you got? What assurance beloved? That is vital. Before we leave [inaudible 00:38:38] I met a man. He was talking to me. He was an alcoholic, rehabilitate, and there was a man in the same town and this fellow could drink the constitution of a horse. My friend said to me that I used to buy a [inaudible 00:39:03] of wine every weekend and we would sit on the carpet in my wife's house and I would drink until I was unconscious. And that man would sit there drinking, drinking, drinking long after I passed out and do you know that men really believe that the man who can take drink like that is a real man. Do you believe it? Is it something worthy to admire it? I say it is lunacy, crazy. What do you giving it for? What do you doing it for you? Oh beloved. We need the Lord. Let us bow here and pray before the Lord.
Father we come to you in the lovely name of Jesus and we worship you. God would be desperately want to be in our like mind when it comes to defensive God. Lord we want to be as they [inaudible 00:40:06]. We want to make the choices Lord. We do not want to have things that are more powerful than what we are, beings that are more powerful than what we are, making the decisions. Lord, bring us to that point we pray where we decide by the light of the word of God that which is right and then put our back into it and say oh God where I stand. These are the things that I stand for. It is in violate, it is not negotiable. I stand here. Like Martin Luther when he said "Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other." In Jesus name, guide us your spirit Lord as a congregation, as individuals, guide us oh God. There is a world out there that is in the same position that the madman was in. People going after pleasure without thinking Lord. Heavenly Father in Jesus name, help us to be a force for you in this place, among our friends, among our family Lord. Help us I pray. In Jesus name, that you may be exalted in worship of the Lord. Blessed be your name. Amen.
[00:41:15]
This message presents us with a number of serious challenges. But which brought Jesus joy was to do the will of the Father, to do the will of Him who sent him, to bow with his whole life, to be the perfect sacrifice. Not for glory, but to die. I believe the challenge in this message for everybody who has heard it and everybody who has listened to the tapes that preceded in this marriage series and the tapes that follow, will you lay down your life for the truth of the gospel? Will you lay down your life for the restoration of marriage as God appointed us on this Earth? Adultery and fornication are like alcoholism. Once it is started it requires divine intervention to turn us around. But people think they are okay like that mad man in this message.
If those who heard the truth about marriage and about adultery and fornication and divorce and virginity, do not go out and tell the truth, how will the world change? If the message is not broadcast, how will it change? Will you let the Lord Jesus Christ rejoice over you because you laid down your life to spread the gospel of the truth concerning marriage? Or will you continue to follow the path that you have followed up till now? We do not have the right to eager. We do not have the right to what our flesh wants. We are called to bring joy to Jesus and the cross was Jesus' joy. We are called to rejoice in our suffering for the gospel. And yet Jesus came that we should have life and life more abundantly but if we will not die with Christ, if we will not lay down our lives, if we do not allow our flesh to be crucified with Christ so that there is no longer I but Christ that live within us, we cannot become like Jesus. We cannot do what he has called us to do.
The conduct of the world today regarding divorce and adultery and fornication, the conduct of the church today is not rationale, it is tragic. We find that where people do seek to share the truth that are in these tapes they are persecuted, they are shunned. The world is afraid of people who are in their right mind as was preached in this message. This is where I stand. Where do you stand? In the world out there, there are mad men going after pleasure, hell bound on going to hell; will you? Step out and turn the tide of destruction by your prayers, by your faith, by your love and by your sacrifice, in Jesus name.
Foundation for living community church meets on Sundays at 9:30 at the [inaudible 00:44:41], Jack Hindon Street, Pretoria North. The leader of the congregation and pastor is Neil Dryer. He can be contacted at Pretoria, 0128081650. Neil is an apostle called by God to restore truth to the church in preparation for that which is about to come. Should you be lead by the Spirit of God to make an offering to this particular work and to say into this ministry, the account details are as follows: Account name: NJ Dreyer. Account number 51030119874. Bank: First National Bank, South Africa. Branch: Silverton. Branch code: 25084500.
This message has been recorded by a church without walls, a ministry of End Time Issue Ministries, P.O. Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at James@EndTimeIssueMinistries.org.za. Our phone numbers, international dialling code, normally 0027, but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline, 00271179123644 and in South Africa 0832516644. Our fax number internationally 0027117915004 and locally 0117915004.
All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the work. Please feel free to copy any of our materials in part or in full as the Lord leads you understanding that the manner in which you utilise these materials and the manner in which you cite them and quote them is for your account on the Day of Judgement. So we would ask you to use the materials widely but please feel free to copy them whoever you see fit and to share these truths with anybody as the Lord leads.
I would urge those of you who receive copies of these tapes at no charge that once you have listened to them that you consider passing them on and blessing others with them. Our hearts' desire is that they should not become artefacts sitting on a bookshelf and gathering dust that the Word of God contained in these teachings should be spread as far and as widely as possible.
Should you be lead by the Lord to sow in to this ministry, our bank account is End Time Issue Ministries. The account number is 0427527805. The branch is the Standard Bank of South Africa, Randburg branch and the branch code is 018005.
If you are listening to these messages, you have realised that you do not have a personal saving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that if you were to die right now you would not spend eternity in Heaven with him. I would urge you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and saviour and to pray the prayer of salvation. These tapes to salvation are as follows. Firstly, admit and recognise that you are a sinner. Romans 3:23 says "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Secondly accept and believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that he came to Earth as a man, that he crucified and died on the cross, that on the third day he rose again. He is now seated at the right hand of the Father, and that by death and resurrection, he took your sins for eternity. Romans 5:8 says "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Thirdly confess your sins, repent of your sins, and turn around. Repentance means turning around. It means ceasing to do what you now realise is wrong.
1 John 1:9 says "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Four, confess your faith that Jesus Christ is Lord that you believe this and receive his salvation and invite him to dwell in your heart. Romans 10:9-10 says "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." Give thanks to God for your salvation. Pray and cry out to God and give thanks to Him for saving you. Sixthly, work out your salvation by the Spirit of God. Philippians 2:12 says "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Salvation is a process. You are saved the moment you pray the sinners' prayer, the prayer of salvation and invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart and be Lord of your life. But salvation is also a process whereby your mind is renewed and you come to have a personal and deep relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is your choice how far you go in that relationship. He desires a wonderful and a deep and an intimate relationship with you, but it is your choice whether you will do what is necessary to come to that place through reading your Bible, praying, seeking counsel, seeking guidance.
You should be water baptised at the first possible opportunity. Matthew 3:6 says "And were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." I encourage you to ask the Lord to lead you to somebody who has some knowledge of the basic ordinance of water baptism who can water baptise you or to lead you to a church where they can water baptise you. There is no reason why you cannot be water baptised today as a symbolic cleansing and washing of your sins. In fact, the minute you pray the sinners' prayer, it would be preferable for you to be water baptised.
Choose to be obedient to the Word of God, accept the Bible in its original Hebrew as given by the Spirit of God and choose to live your life according to that. 1 John 5:3 says "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome." I encourage you to read the Word of God daily and to put into practice everything that you encounter. As a principle which I believe will bear fruit in your life, I would encourage you to make an effort right now after you have prayed this prayer, start reading your Bible from the book of John through to the book of Revelation and then make a discipline of reading the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation at least two, three, four times a year and read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi at least once a year. And I would encourage you to do that using different translations.
Ask God to lead you to the church where He wants you to be at this time, where they will teach you, they will guide you, they will pray for you and they will help you to walk in the fullness of God has called you to be. Be aware that He may move you, God may move you from church to church over time to teach you new things and you should not be reluctant to do this. The service of God is a personal choice. It is a wonderful choice and if you will step out by faith today and pray the sinners' prayer and follow Him, you will reap a rich harvest if that is your desire to be found faithful on the Day of Judgement. Should you have listened to this and have decided that you are now ready to make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, I would ask you to pray the following prayer with me, in Jesus name.
Father, I come to you in the name of Jesus and I confess that I am a sinner. I confess that I don’t have a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and I recognise that without Jesus if I were to die right now, I would spend eternity in hell and not with you. I confess that I have sinned and I repent of those sins and I turn around, I choose to turn my back on sin and to serve God. I confess that Jesus Christ came to Earth as a man that he was crucified that he died and was buried and that he was resurrected on the third day, and that he sits on the right hand of the Father. I confess by faith that he died to take all of my sins, and I thank you Jesus for taking my sin and I give you my sin right now in Jesus name.
I confess by faith that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and I choose now Lord Jesus to make you the Lord of my life. I invite you to come and dwell in my heart. I invite you to take charge of my life. I invite you to start leading and guiding me and directing me and I give you my life and everything that I have and I commit myself to serving you now, Lord Jesus. I thank you that you have heard me and I thank you that you have now come to live in me, and I thank you for saving me. I thank you that I am now child of the most high God. I thank you that I am now servant of the most high God and that you will lead me and guide me into the paths that you want me to walk. I ask you Lord to lead me to the church where you want me to be. I ask you in the name of Jesus to bring the people that you want in my life into my life by your spirit and to remove the people that you don’t want in my life by your spirit, in Jesus name.
I ask you to close all doors in my life that you do not want opened that no man may open and I ask you to open every door in my life that you want opened that no man may close it, in Jesus name. Father, I ask you to teach me to be lead by your spirit. I ask you to open my eyes to have a revelation of the Word of God. I ask you to give me a hunger for the Word of God and for your spirit and I ask you to teach me to pray, in Jesus name. I thank you Father and I thank you Jesus for saving me and I declare that I am now child of God and I praise you and I worship you and I glorify your holy name and I thank you for changing me and saving me and delivering me, in Jesus name. Amen.
Now that you have prayed that prayer and you are born again into the body of Christ, realise that the Christian walk is a journey, which Apostle Paul likens it to a marathon race. You need guidance, you need assistance. If you have no one to help you, pray and ask the Holy Spirit of God to come into your life and to help you. If you need to contact somebody, contact any of the major ministries. If you are not sure who to contact, contact this ministry through the address and telephone and email, details that was supplied earlier. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
04 03 Kingdom Context - The Call - End of the Age
James Robertson -- 26 November 2000
Message number 3 of Volume 2 of the series ‑ 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' second volume 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage' and the title of this message is 'Kingdom Context ‑ The Call ‑ End of the Age' that was recorded on November 26, 2000.
This morning, in my quiet time, I was led to read in Matthew, and I was really impressed with regards to the words of John the Baptist at the beginning of Jesus’ Ministry. It is important to recognise that John the Baptist came at the end of the Mosaic Covenant. That was approximately 2000 years after that Covenant was given by Moses. Jesus came to introduce a new Covenant and John was the voice crying in the wilderness to announce the coming King. 2000 years later, we are now at the end of the Church age. There has been, as there was between Moses and Jesus, and between Jesus and today, a great apostasy and falling away. The Church has been in great bondage through the dark ages. We saw the Reformation with Luther, Calvin and Zwingli and others, the translation of the Bible into English, and many other events about 500 years ago which have ushered in an age of Protestantism, an age in which slowly the truths of Scripture have been restored. We have seen the restoration of Revelation through God, to baptism by immersion in water. We have seen the restoration of Revelation with regards to the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. We have seen the restoration of truth with regards to the gifts of the Spirit and healing, and so forth. With each one of those restorations, there has been great persecution of those who brought the message in the early days.
We have seen, throughout the series of teachings, that before the Lord Jesus Christ returns for the spotless bride, the bride must become spotless. In the area of marriage, the bride is anything but spotless. In fact, virtually everything that is taught and practised by the modern Church today, in the area of marriage, is pagan heresy and has absolutely no substance in Scripture. Most of the world and the Church is in adultery. Therefore we need to reassess the context of this message as I taught, also some time ago. The first miracle that Jesus performed was at the wedding at Cana in Galilee where He turned water into wine, and therefore the wine at the end of the feast was the best, and better than the wine at the beginning. And again, Jesus is about to perform another miracle. He is about to restore the truth of marriage on Earth today. In order that the bride can be ready for the marriage feast, how can a bride go to marriage feast if she does not know what the marriage feast is about, or if she does not know what marriage is about?
Divorce or putting away
We have to understand that the Church is not ready for the so-called Rapture. It is not ready to be called up into Heaven with the Lord Jesus Christ and to sit at the wedding supper of the lamb. The Church is far from it. Today the Church is in, as we have seen in these teachings, a terrible state and I do not say this to be judgemental, but we have to speak truth. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to say that if God has said that He hates putting away, or the popular term today is divorce, although we have seen scripturally that is not technically accurate. The reality is that the vast majority of divorce in the Church today is in fact putting away and God has said that He hates that.
Now, if God has said that He hates that, how on Earth can we speak of the Church being ruptured? I would just like to go through a series of messages that I have been led to share with others on the Internet over the last six months or so, to give, what I would term, the kingdom context, with regards to the end of the age, or perhaps if you like, a call, in order to place much of this teaching in a more significant context. So, reading from Matthew 3 in the Amplified Bible verse 1, "In those days there appeared John the Baptist, preaching in the Wilderness (Desert) of Judea and saying, Repent (think differently; change your mind, regretting your sins and changing your conduct), for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand. This is he who was mentioned by the prophet Isaiah when he said, the voice of one crying in the wilderness (shouting in the desert), prepare the road for the Lord, make His highways straight (level, direct)."
Repentance, perdition and destruction
I must say to you, today, prepare the way of the Lord. We do not have time to play games with God. We do not have time to play games about doctrine. We do not have time for pride and ego of what we have been taught by old school regarding marriage, and what we have believed and what we have practised. It does not matter how many marriage ceremonies one may have officiated over. It does not matter how many marriage certificates one may have signed. It does not matter how many rings one may have officiated over the placing on people's fingers. It was a pagan rite and if you have done those things, I have to tell you before God today, repent. They are nice to do, but do not attribute them to the Word of God and certainly do not call it a binding marriage ceremony. If you have performed that rite on a woman who was not a virgin, who was divorced, but actually put away before God, you have participated in adultery. The blood of those people is on your hands because you claimed to see. I beg you, hear this message today. It is time to repent and return to what the Word of God says. It is time to take the truth to the people of the world, in Jesus’ name.
Reading from verse 8, "Bring forth fruit that is consistent with repentance [let your lives prove your change of heart]; and do not presume to say to yourselves, we have Abraham for our forefather; for I tell you, God is able to raise up descendants for Abraham from these stones!" I was very impressed when I read that verse this morning to say 'and do not presume to say to yourselves we are born again.' You will see in the teaching that follows, there are many Scriptures which tell you that being born again is just the beginning of the road and there are many wrong turnings that one can take, all of which lead ultimately to perdition and destruction.
The question I will ask you now, and I will ask you again at the end of this message is, do you want to be found to be wheat or tares? Do you want to be found to be a goat or a sheep? Do you want to be found to be the foolish virgin? Do you want to be found to be a worker of inequity, or do you want to hear those words ‑ well done, my good and faithful servant? Do you want to be called up to sit on a throne, or do you want to be cast into outer darkness with weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst those who are barely saved, shunning even the garments singed with fire?
Verse 10, "And already the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I indeed baptize you in (with) water because of repentance [that is, because of your changing your minds for the better, heartily amending your ways, with abhorrence of your past sins]. But He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy or fit to take off or carry; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fan (shovel, fork) is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear out and clean His threshing floor and gather and store His wheat in His barn, but the chaff He will burn up with fire that cannot be put out."
Again, I have to say the axe is at the root of the tree. Great tribulation has already befallen many who call themselves by the name of Christ in the Earth today. Greater tribulation is to follow. Great persecution and great destruction are to follow. Those who have not sanctified themselves and washed their robes in the blood of the lamb are going to suffer greatly. If you are practising the doctrines that have been dealt with in the first volume of this series, and you do not repent, the prospects are that there will be greater tribulation in your life in the years to come. I say this with love, to warn you of impending judgement and impending destruction in your life. If you will turn and restore God's truth regarding marriage in your own life, in your own marriage, and in the marriages of those around you, if you will take this Gospel, if you will take this good news that God intended Heaven to come to Earth in marriage, if you will take the truth that you heard in this series, if you will press on into the truth that are yet to come in this series, some of which are extremely challenging and extremely difficult, and if you will run and not grow weary, because you are pressing in to the risen son of God, then there will be a great reward for you as an overcomer at the end.
Rick Joyner
So, to sum up the essence of this message, The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, repent and bring forth works worthy of repentance. Having introduced the basic context of this message, I would like to continue and develop this theme in greater detail. In order to do that I would like to read some key points that arose after reading a section of the book, 'The Call' by Rick Joyner, published by Morningstar Publications in 1999. This is a report of the series of visions experienced by Joyner when he was caught up into the third Heaven and the sequence to defy visions reported in the book, 'The Final Quest' in which Joyner was also caught up into the third Heaven. I actually read this after completing a series of emails on persecution of Christians, wheat and tares and judgment of the Church, tribulation first, which I will present, God-willing, at the end of this tape. I want to address these first because the conclusions and the key headlines are so critical, but I would ask you to recognise that these actually came after the prophetic words that I was given, which were presented later in the message.
So, the message that came out of the 'Final Quest', was a confirmation of what had been written from my leading of the Holy Spirit shortly before reading 'The Call.' The introduction to the email reads as follows: Shortly after completing a series of emails and persecution of Christians, wheat and tares, regarding persecution of Christians, judgement and the Church tribulation first, I started reading the book, 'The Call' by Rick Joyner. As I read, I became increasingly aware that what was reported was in line with the earlier emails and became increasingly convinced that time is now rapidly running out. If our love has grown cold, we do not have much time to address the problems. So we see the thread of love that has been running through the series on marriage tying in here into End Time event.
Matthew 24:12-13, "And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. If there is no oil anointing in our lamps, we do not have time before we are found to be foolish virgins.” Matthew 25:3-4, "Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them, but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps." Matthew 25:11-13, "Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, 'Lord, Lord, open to us!' But he answered and said, 'Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.' Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming." Judgement is at hand. It is at the very door and anyone who fears God must put aside all the cares of this world and focus their attention on getting closer to God, the Father, Yahweh and to Jesus, Yah, Yahooshua, than they ever have before. Mark 4:19, "And the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things entering in, choke the Word, and it becomes unfruitful."
The following are extracts and paraphrases of passages in the book 'The Call', up to page 76, which seemed important in the context of the previous messages. The whole world still lies in the power of the evil one. We walk on the edge of hell every day. Through the midst of this phase of path of life, there are deep ditches on either side of the path of life. So, we must not deviate from the narrow way. If one falls into these ditches, no one can find their own way out. Following our own way is how we fall into them, and our own way will never get us out. Jesus is the only way out. When you fall, do not waste your time trying to figure everything out, for you will only sink deeper in the mud. Just ask Jesus for help. He is your Shepherd and He will always help you when you call on Him. Keep your eyes on Jesus. Pray that the eyes of your heart may be open to see into the heavenly realm and to see what the Father is doing. Ask first judgment to come through own life and then begin asking for them to come to the world. This is a critical statement. Judgment is about to come on the world, and it is being prayed over the world by those prophetic believers who will pay attention to what the Spirit of God is saying to them.
Make His judgments known. His judgments would not be true if they were not the same for all. Therefore the Church must be judged first. A critical point, the vast majority of the Church today seems to be expecting to be ruptured and escape tribulation, but as we have seen in this teaching series on marriage, the Church is defiled to false doctrines in the area of marriage and many other areas. The Church will be judged first. God cannot judge the rest of the world until He has judged His own people first. Understanding His judgment is not enough. You must agree with them. We can come boldly before His throne of grace. The sin of wanting to trade with the world has entangled the Church.
Joyner was told many will repent and be saved if you will go to those to whom Jesus sends you and give His warning. And I must say this is the message that I have for you - many will repent and be saved if you will go to those to whom Jesus sends you and give His warning. You call on Jesus to ask what He wants. God's house exists for Him, not for us. Overcomers do not waste their time. Jesus will no longer allow us to presume on His mercy. The days of ‘happy clappy sloppy’ Christianity where we just carry on leading our lives the way we want to, not the way Jesus wants us to, and then presume on His mercy and His grace are over. We have to seek to know Jesus.
Seek Jesus
Deny yourself daily. Seek Him in prosperity and not just in adversity. There is wisdom to come to Jesus every day. Know Jesus as I am, wisdom, the Lord of judgment, the Lord of the Sabbath, the Lord of hosts, the Prince of peace, the lion of Judah, the lamp and it is wisdom to know His times. He may have different times in different cities, different nations, and even different families. Hear His messengers and act. It is no good you listen to these tapes and then not put into practice what is taught in these tapes. It is no good listening to the Scriptures on these tapes and then returning to your comfort zone of your past doctrines, and so forth. You have to analyse against the Word of God by the Spirit of God, clearly the message contained in this series of tapes and everything which is of God, which I truly believe is the vast majority the essence of everything that is contained on these tapes. You need to act on it.
If not, you will be subject to a harsher judgment and I would be subject to a harsher judgment and I have been severely convicted in recent weeks of failing to spread the message and the full ambit of the message that is contained in these tapes, much more urgently and much more widely than I have done. I pray that by the time you listen to this, these tapes will be in greater circulation and the transcripts and the book will be in the course of preparation. The time has passed when Jesus will tolerate those who say they serve Him but who do not obey Him. The lukewarm are about to be removed. Come to the throne of grace daily for grace to serve Him. Murder will be released on the Earth as never before. Even the two World Wars will [inaudible 00:19:53] leading to what is to come. This was a confirmation of the Word I had from the Lord in Israel in 1996. He had taken me over to Israel on business and I found myself in the Holocaust Museum on a [inaudible 00:20:05] because I had a day to spare during my visit.
As I was looking at the photographs of emaciated and men, women, and children stripped naked, standing before bulldozer excavated trenches in open fields, and then being mowed down with machineguns, hoarded into cattle trucks, hoarded into gas chambers, subject to the most frightful medical experiments, the Lord said to me, this is only a shadow of what the Church is about to go through. So I have to say to you, prepare for tribulation. The sense that I have is that we are in already in deep Spiritual tribulation for those who will open their Spiritual eyes to look, and for those who do not experience tribulation right now, perhaps one has to ask oneself whether it is because you are not really giving the devil any trouble and therefore he has no need to attack you.
Judgement and persecution
There are many who are passionate for Christ who are experiencing great persecution. Love is stronger than death. If you do not fear death, you will overcome it. Only true love can bring true unity. As the Lord's people begin to love, He will use them to release His judgments. His judgments are to be desired. His people will stand as the largest in the last days. Their words will shut up the Heavens or bring rain. They will prophesy earthquakes and famines, they will come to pass, and they will stop earthquakes and famines. When they release armies in Heaven, armies will march on the Earth. When they hold back armies, there will be peace. They will decide where Jesus shows His mercy and where He shows His wrath. They will have this abode because they love and those who love will be one with him.
Walking in love
I pray that you can see how this ties into this whole teaching on marriage. You cannot be truly one with Jesus. You cannot be truly walking in the love of God if you are not walking in love in your marriage, or if you are not walking in unity in your marriage. If your marital house is divided, the body of Christ is divided, and you cannot be one with Christ. You cannot be a true servant of God if your marriage is not the way God intended it to be. And I speak this to men whose houses are not in order. I speak it to women whose houses are not in order. Ladies, if you are not in submission to your husband, if you are not focused on getting your life in line with your husband according to the Word of God, if you are trying to serve God apart from your husband, you are not in the will of God.
Peace will be taken from the Earth, but various servants are called to help restore it. Will you be one of those called, or will you be one of those who is part of the problem? Will you be part of the solution or part of the problem? Peace prevails in Heaven and Jesus' servants are called to bring Heaven to Earth. This ties in to the message of bringing Heaven to Earth in marriage. Those who abide in Jesus’ presence will have peace and will spread peace. The Earth itself will shake and tremble. Tons of trouble, greater than have ever been known will begin to move across the Earth like great waves of the sea. Even so, those who know Jesus will not be troubled. They will withstand before the raging of the seas and so peace bestow and the seas will be calm.
Even the least of his little ones will be like a great fortress of peace that will stand through all that is coming. His glory will be revealed to his people first and then through them. Even the creation will recognise him and his people and will obey them as it does him. Obedience brings life, disobedience brings death. We have seen this message repeatedly. You cannot love God if you do not obey God. The most powerful weapons are truth and love. When truth spoken and love is rejected, death has been chosen over life. Walk with God and learn his ways. You will refer to his authority and you must be one with him in order to use it.
Love your enemies. Do not desire that any perish; a critical weakness of so many of the Body of Christ today. Extra time has been given to the Church but few have used it wisely. If you fear him, Jesus, you do not need to fear anything that is coming on the Earth. All of the evil sewn in mankind is about to be reaped, and so is all the good. During the darkness that is to come, Jesus' people will stand as a testimony. Not only has He redeemed men, He has removed sin from them, that is from these true people. All of these are immensely challenging statements, and I will readily suggest to you that we are all well advised to take them to heart and to act on them. It is vital to understand that the indications are according to the visions that John has had, and others, that as much as 99% of the Church is not where God wants them to be at this time, in terms of preparedness. They are not even close. They are pursuing doctrines which have absolutely no scriptural basis in the areas that have been addressed in this teaching series and elsewhere. Not one of us dare hear what is contained in this series of teachings and presume that they are in right standing with God.
So that was basically the summary that I produced from the book, 'The Call', the visions that Joyner had, or that specific vision on the November 14, 2000. To put that in context, some of the preceding messages that came from this ministry going back to early in the year, Tuesday, April 4, 2000, were visions concerning Zephaniah 1 and 2. I will just read extracts from that. The message started out this morning while I was reading the Word of God. I came to Zephaniah 1:2-18, and before I read this passage of Scripture, I need to draw your attention to the fact that in many places, including in the Book of Revelations, it is widely held that the term Jerusalem speaks of the Church. The New Jerusalem is also referred to as the bride coming down from Heaven that is the Church.
Tribulation
Where End Time Prophesy speaks of Jerusalem, it seems that many times it is speaking of the Church. Some hold that it speaks of the Spiritual Spirit, the Church, that is obedient, and that Babylon in the same passage speaks of the Church, which is carnal and trading with the world. But I want you to note the use of Jerusalem specifically in the passages that I am about to read. Zephaniah 1:2, "'I will utterly consume everything from the face of the land,' says the Lord." Verse 12, "And it shall come to pass at that time that I will search Jerusalem with lamps, and punish the men who are settled in complacency, who say in their heart, 'The Lord will not do good, nor will He do evil.'" And I really ask you to consider that and take it to heart if you have not got a revelation out of this teaching so far, that there is something dramatically wrong in the teachings of the Church with regards to marriage. I would ask you to see also, that this passage of Zephaniah is speaking of tribulation of the Church of the believers. This is not talking about tribulation of the world. It is talking about tribulation of the Church.
Verse 14, "The great day of the Lord is near; it is near and hastens quickly. The noise of the day of the Lord is bitter; there the mighty men shall cry out. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress," and so it goes on. Verse 18 in part, "In the day of the Lord’s wrath." The message that I sent out at that time continues and I quote, "As I meditate on this passage of Scripture, I saw vision of a great six wheeled articulated cart with three wide specked wheels made of iron. The deck of the cart was made of massive slabs of iron and it was all black. Whatever it drives over would be utterly crushed to powder. Then the following came to me: This is the chariot of the Lord's wrath which is about to be driven over the Church and judgment of the inequity, and apostasy of the past 2000 years. For the crusades and all the other abominations which have been, and still are committed by those who claim to act in the name of Jesus Christ.
Those that resist the judgment will be utterly destroyed for eternity. Those who repent and lay down their lives will be crucified with Christ and will live with Him for eternity. Those who will actively seek His judgment in their lives now before the chariot comes, will rule with Him for eternity. Today, you stand opposite the valley of decision and judgment. Cross over that you may enter into the joy of the Lord. Having considered this for some time, I continue to read and we come to Zephaniah 3:8-20, "'Therefore wait for Me,' says the Lord, 'Until the day I rise up for plunder; My determination is to gather the nations to My assembly of kingdoms, to pour on them My indignation, all My fierce anger; all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of My jealousy. For then I will restore to the peoples a pure language, that they all may call on the name of the Lord, to serve Him with one accord.'"
I would suggest to you that whereas the first passage of Zephaniah that I read speaks of judgment of the Church, this passage speaks of judgment of the world coming after judgment of the Church. We saw that confirmed in the passage of 'The Call' that I read earlier. Verse 13, "The remnant of Israel shall do no unrighteousness and speak no lies, nor shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth; for they shall feed their flocks and lie down, and no one shall make them afraid. Sing, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem!" And there we see the juxtaposition of judgment on the Church on the world in verses 8 and 9, and the rejoicing now of the remnant of the Church in verses 13 and 14. That is the remnant that has been refined and purified by the tribulation.
Verse 19, "Behold, at that time I will deal with all who afflict you." And I went on to write off after that quote, I believe that this Word is not just for me, but for the Church at large. Please pray about it and share with others as the Lord leads you. It also seems to me that at this time, it speaks of a Spiritual judgment, in other words, a judgment that will manifest itself in the Spirit realm in each of our lives and not yet in the physical realm. It is not something we will see with our natural eyes, but it is something that we will only see if we look with the eyes of our spirit. That was written in April of this year. Since then I have seen escalating Spiritual tribulations of Christians. My own house, my own family have been through enormous tribulation in recent months, which has forced me to deal with large quantities of sin in my life that even after giving this Word, I was completely blind, and I felt dismally to examine myself in the Word and to judge myself. It became necessary for the Lord to judge me in a serious fashion in order to get my attention and to make it understood that He was not going to tolerate my disobedience any longer, and that I have to get down and produce this series of tapes. I would really urge you to take note of what I have just said. I do not produce these steps lightly.
These tapes were not issued at a whim. They were issued after much prayer and a number of fasts which have brought me to a place where I am under absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this series of 40 tapes, that is in the course of preparation is of God, that the message is of God, and that even the aspect which you may find extremely challenging and controversial are fundamentally of God. There will no doubt be elements of leaven that you will be able to find because I am human and because I do make mistakes. I slip up, but the bulk of this message, and I stress, including the more controversial and most controversial content, is of God. Please do not be offended by the elements of this message, which go way beyond what you believe God could say and the Bible could say. You do not have time, and we do not have time to play games with God any longer. We have just read that out of Joyner's vision out of the words of the people that spoke to John in his vision. We need to recognise the Church has fallen mightily from where Jesus created it to be. It is to be restored. We have a choice. We may play a role in restoring it or we may be amongst those who are found to be foolish virgins.
To contextualise what I have just said further, a few weeks ago, a good friend of mine said to me that in his lifetime of about 50 years, he had not seen so much difficulty experienced by Christians as in the last two years. This is a man who has grown up in a Christian home. His father has been serving the Lord for most of his life and their lives were a real testimony of the love of God and of Ministry and healing. We have been mightily blessed by this particular family and by way of observation, they have not seen so much tribulation in the Spiritual sense, of financial sense, loss, lack, just one difficulty after another as they have seen in the Body of Christ in the last two years. And I submit to you that there are strong grounds to believe that the tribulation is in fact in process already in the Body of Christ. A few weeks later, I wrote on April 18, 2000 and I quote, "I woke at about 03:30 this morning and was unable to sleep. I rose and picked up my Bible to read and came immediately to Luke 4:34, "You cannot make the sons of the wedding feast fast so long as the bridegroom is with them." This was in Lamb's translation from the Aramaic.
I was suddenly struck by the whole implication of the wedding feast as a time of great rejoicing taken together with the bride price being a substantial sum of money. Jacob worked seven years each for Rachel and Leah in Genesis 29. Eliezer brought many precious gifts from Abraham, including golden servers when he went in search of a bride for Isaac, Genesis 24. The bridegroom went to prepare a place for his bride, John 14:2-3 and refer also to the article, 'Wow! So that's how Jesus loves me', that was reported in the first tape of volume 1 of this series.
Marriage
These Scriptures collectively signify that marriage in the sight of the Lord, that's Yahweh, is a tremendously significant event, and that a wife is viewed as a great treasure. Jesus laid down His life for His bride. Surely this signifies that women were greatly esteemed, and that men did not take a wife lightly unless he was assisted by his father, Isaac and Abraham in Genesis 24, Samson in Judges 14, etc., and could afford to provide for her, Exodus 21:10. Truly we must say he who finds a wife, finds a good thing and obtains favour from the Lord, Proverbs 18:22. But likewise such a wife must be a virtuous wife as in Proverbs 31, for Proverbs 21:9, 21:19, 25:24, and 27:15 will speak of a contentious wife and Proverbs 21:19 goes so far as to state that it is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman or if you would like, wife, would be the more correct translation. Proverbs 12:4 states that an excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who causes shame is like rottenness in his bones.
We thus see that Yahweh intended marriage to be something of enormous significance and regards a virtuous, chaste, and submissive wife as being of great worth; how different this is from the present age. The article, 'Wow! So that's how Jesus loves me', that was reported previously, expresses some of these thoughts in much greater depth and goes much further. The thought that struck me that is morning, that was on April 18, 2000 as we approach the commencement of Passover, which starts in two days' time at sunset on April 20, 2000, I was subsequently advised by somebody else who had studied the Jewish calendar that in Jewish terms, Passover had actually commenced on the Wednesday and therefore which would have been the Tuesday night in which case this message was in fact written of the morning where Passover commenced that evening 2000 years plus 3 and a half years from the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now there is a debate in terms of whether it is 2000 years, 2003 and a half years or another number, and I do not propose to address that in this series of teachings. It is not material whether we are now in the tribulation or whether we are about to go into the tribulation and other issues are not the core point. The core point here is tribulation, and it’s coming on the Church. I believe it is great tribulation and I do not want to get into a debate about dates and what have you. The dates all add up to being roundabout the year 2000, somewhere between the year 1996 and the year 2003, 2004. We are on that cusp. We are either in it or we are about to go into it, and that is the important point.
It is whether, in some way, the state of marriage in the world today bears some relation to the abomination of desolation spoken of in Daniel 9:27 and Matthew 24 seen below. Matthew 24:15 says, "Therefore when you see the 'abomination of desolation,' spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place (whoever reads, let him understand)." Certainly, there are those who suggest that Scripture can be interpreted to signify the commencement of the week of Daniel 9:27, as being 2000 years after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is other evidence to indicate that this date was actually the great day of the feast of Tabernacles, October 1996. If we accept that Jesus’ death on the Cross ushered in a Spiritual Covenant of temple not built of human hands, 1 Corinthians 3:16, "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you", And if we consider 1 Corinthians 3:17, "If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, which temple you are", should we not be looking for the abomination of desolation in the holy place as being in the body of Christ, whose body and temple we are?
Surely the state of marriage today dramatically demonstrates that the abomination of desolation is indeed in the holy place and that there is no way, that today there is a bride for the Lord Jesus who is worthy of a wedding feast. Surely we should therefore look forward to the anniversary of our Lord's death that was Passover 2000 and resurrection with a "Certain fearful expectation of judgement and fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries," Hebrews 10:27. It seems to me that there are serious grounds to anticipate that Passover 2000 will usher in a season of great tribulation, but if we look for the physical manifestation in a physical temple, we will be like the Pharisees and miss the Messiah. If we look at the state of the bride in the Spiritual temple, we may see a different sign. "Take heed, watch and pray; for you do not know when the time is," Mark 13:33. It seems to me that more than ever before we should cry out, “judge me in this life that I may be cleansed of my sin before I stand before you on the Day of Judgement.”
Judgement
It seems clear to me that judgement is about to be meted out on the Earth and the likes of which we cannot today imagine. "Will you be a bride worthy of the price that is being paid one for whom the sons of the bride chamber will rejoice?" That message is essential and a critical element of this series on marriage, which is directly associated with preparing the bride of Christ. Two days later on Thursday, April 20, 2000 I wrote further, and I quote, "In this series of messages that I have been impressed to write over the past two weeks commencing with the vision concerning Zephaniah 1 and 3, on April 4 in which I saw a six-wheeled chariot of judgement about to be driven over the Church. There has been a progression of emphasis towards challenging us to depart from our pharisaic beliefs and Talmudic teachings and to return to the pure Holy Spirit Word of God. The message for this Passover as I have this morning is, “blessed is he who does not stumble on account of Me,” that is Jesus reading from the Lamb's translation. The New King James states, “blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.” Together with this, it is necessary that each one take careful and prayerful account of a number of Scriptures.
1 Timothy 4:1-3, "Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving Spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth." Many in this age have indeed been giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron. It behoves each one of us at this Passover time with judgement knocking at the door to humbly petition Almighty good, the creator of the Heavens and the Earth, Yahweh in the name of his dear Son, Jesus Christ, to reveal to each one of us any aspect of our lives where you may individually have given heed to deceiving Spirits and doctrines of demons.
Anyway, we may be speaking lies and hypocrisy in any aspect of our lives in which our consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. As we do this, we must also seek His face to find out what these means, have we been forbidden to marry, or have we been forbidden to marry. To understand the impact of the above passage from 1 Timothy in this age, consider the broader context of Luke 7:23, particularly Luke 7:30-35, "But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the will of God for themselves, not having been baptized by Him. And the Lord said, 'To what then shall I liken the men of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, saying: 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; We mourned to you, and you did not weep.' For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, 'Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' But wisdom is justified by all her children.'"
In considering the passages of Scripture contained in this document, constantly consider Luke 7:30, "But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the will of God for themselves." This is an urgent and insistent message of the Spirit of God for everyone who calls themselves by the name of Christ ‑ do not reject the will of God for yourself. To better understand the reasons for what is about to happen, consider John 17:19-23, "And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth. I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me, I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me."
The Church
Clearly at the eve of Passover 2000, the Church of Jesus Christ is in reckless division. The Church is split, God-fearing men and women are disciplined and cast out, strife and division prevail. Church meetings are empty copies of worldly gatherings with no holiness, no power, and no Jesus Christ, the son of God, but many who come in His name. There are a very few if any places where one will truly encounter believers all with one heart as described in Acts 4:32-33 ‑ "Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. And with great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And great grace was upon them all." It is unlikely that there is any significant group of Christians anywhere in the world of which the above report would hold true today. For all of us who are not in such a level of unity and harmony, such oneness of heart and walking in great power [inaudible 00:46:59] for tribulation in the days to come, if we do not turn from our deception and error afflict to come into unity as never before. In fact, the coming judgement is what is required to bring about that unity, but as was written yesterday regarding Luke 6:11, this will never be accomplished according to our own strength and our own understanding.
Consider, particularly James 4:7-10, "Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up." This Passover it is time for each to humble themselves in the sight of the Lord, to submit to God and resist the devil. In order to do this, each must ask Him to clean them from all doctrines of demons, all lies spoken and hypocrisy, to judge them severely and correct them harshly, that they must serve Him more perfectly, to reveal to them the level of their present deception, to open their eyes to what He would have them see and to close their eyes to what He would not have them see. To open their ears to what He would have them hear and to close their ears to what He would not have them hear. To bring the people that He would have into their lives, into their lives, and to take the people that He would not have in their lives, out. To open doors in their lives that no man can close and close doors in their lives that no man can open.
Those who will pray the above prayers over their lives today and regularly hereafter will find that much will change in their lives and much will be gained by them in the life to come. As I shared in another teaching, it is vital that we pray these prayers over our lives. We cannot change ourselves, except by choosing to change and asking God to change us and in doing what He leads us to do by His Spirit. Remember also 1 Corinthians 6:15-20, "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For 'the two,' He says, 'shall become one flesh.' But he who is joined to the Lord is one Spirit with Him. Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore, glorify God in your body and in your Spirit, which are God’s."
That message continued. Clearly there is an abomination of desolation that has come upon the world and the Church to the devastated state of marriage within the Church today. Desolate women are abandoned by their husbands, the vital men have their children stolen from them by adulteress, unfaithful wives and are left desolate. The vast majority of women are classed as harlot by Scripture, and the men who join themselves to such women, who will take the virginity of women and move on, are likewise classed as adulterers. Adulterous One Flesh Bonds are done between innumerable men and women to the point where it is likely that almost the entire humanity is joined together into one massive Spiritual spiders web of illicit One Flesh Bonds, resulting from illicit and ungodly sexual intercourse. Consider that any person who has joined themselves to anyone else is one flesh with that person and with every person that person has joined themselves to, and so on ad infinitum. Surely this is an abomination. I urge you to fast, pray and seek the face of the Lord to know whether the state of marriage is in fact the abomination of desolation spoken of in Daniel 12:11, and discussed in more detail than the previous messages on Luke 4:34 and Zephaniah 1.
So that message and that series of messages that I have read to you so far just establishes more and more forcibly that the state of marriage today by the Spirit of God is an abomination in the Sight of God. Since then I have seen more clearly just how great an abomination it is, and I will share with you in a moment further revelations in that area. I have come to see that increasingly; the abomination is a composite of all the things that are wrong. We have no reverence for the true Sabbath which is Saturday. We use the term ‘Lord’ rather than ‘Yahweh’, which is the true name of our God. Whereas Lord is in fact, as best I understand it, an English translation of the word 'Baal.' So, we have Baal carried forward out of the Hebrew into the Bible as Baal, and Yahweh translated as Lord whereas in fact we should have brought forward Yahweh as Yahweh and Baal as Baal. I could go on and on and some of the teachings that follow in this series will address it.
But as you consider this and that which follows, I urge you to consider and know the enormity of these statements, and consequently the desperate urgency of the message contained in this tape series. Four days later, on Monday, April 24, I issued another message, but I need to put that in context. Having issued the previous message to the effect that the abomination in the temple spoken of by Daniel was in fact the state of marriage in the Church that was Thursday, April 20. On Saturday, April 22, we went through to a meeting in Pretoria and I was praying about this as we went and I said, "Lord, please give me a confirmation. Please, if this is truly what You are saying to me concerning the state of the Church, please will you give me an indication today in the public place that this is so." On the way back from Pretoria having attended the meeting, the publication was on sale on the side of the road and the headlines was a large colour photograph announced the pending divorce of one of the most widely known Church leaders in South Africa, and I read the message there. The point that I need to make is that I was profoundly convinced after that, the Lord had shown me that there are, on what I understood to be the D-day of Passover the year 2000. Here, one of the most prominent Christian leaders in the world was announcing his divorce or his divorce was being paraded in the public place.
On the morning of Saturday, April 22, 2000 that was reported as probably the most widely known Christian in South Africa that was on the brink of divorce. This report was confirmed in two other major newspapers on Sunday, April 23. The reports alleged that the divorce was already well in process, that the wife had instituted the divorce proceedings and that she had asked the Church for Spiritual support. It is further insinuated that there is another man under this report of newspaper on the Sunday that someone has said reported an Afrikaans translation, you know how it is a person falls in love and the love gets lost. In this case, it was the wife who said straight out to the husband that she does not love him anymore. Recognising the fallibility of the popular press, one must conclude that given the profile of the individuals concerned and the size of the Ministry, if the report on Saturday was without foundation, a high court order would have been obtained to prevent publication on Sunday. One must therefore conclude that a divorce is almost certainly in process. We therefore have a leader in the Body of Christ who is well known around the world, who is frequently on secular and Christian television around the world, and who must rate as amongst the top hundred most widely known Christian leaders in the world today, if not possibly the top 10 most widely known in the process of divorce.
Without attaching too much significance to the press report, one must note that Deuteronomy 21:15 clearly states that if a man has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, in other words, if there is validity in the press report that there is no love, that does not constitute a basis for divorce. We have also seen in the teaching so far that love never dies. So, for a woman to say that she wants to divorce her husband because she does not love him anymore is completely unscriptural and it is an abomination in the Sight of God. That was the end of that message. A footnote to that, in about October 2000 about six months later, the divorce had been finalised and the man involved, as referred to above, was pictured again on the front page of the same major national Sunday newspaper posing with his new lady friend, his girlfriend who was a divorced mother of, I think it was two children. Subsequent reports indicated that she had been divorced something like two times and that one of her children was born out of wedlock. The implications of that, if you view them in the context of the teachings to date, is absolutely stunning and horrifying when viewed from God's perspective. It is a total and appalling desecration of the Word of God.
I am not seeking to judge the man; clearly there are Spiritual and demonic issues of deception at play in that situation and we are called to have pity on that man. We are prepared to call to have compassion to intercede for his restoration and for that of his wife. There can be no scriptural basis for that divorce in terms of what was reported in the press, or in terms of what has been given in this teaching. Of all people, that couple should be seeking to set a godly example not to follow the ways of the world.
Signs of the End Times
I cannot stress enough that you should read the signs of the times and see that with situations like that, truly judgement is at the door. Various things happened in the intervening month, early in October, round about the time that I started with this series of message. I produced another message, email message on Tuesday, October 3, 2000. It was entitled based on something I read on the internet, 'The War of Gog and Magog and the beginning of great tribulation?' I subsequently realised that there is some uncertainty whether the great war spoken of in Ezekiel, and the war of Gog and Magog spoken of in Revelations are in fact the same war. There does appear to be some basis to think that there may be a third world war roundabout now and that there may be, if you like, a fourth world war at the end of the millennium when Satan and his cohorts are released from The Pit for a short time. Right now, we are facing a situation, which is the leader to Satan and his cohorts being cast into The Pit for a thousand years. So, to read that message, just extracts of it, the developments in Israel over the past five days have potentially great Spiritual significance.
The first day of the Jewish New Year is currently recognised as 30th of September. The day of Atonement is Monday, the 9th of October. The great day of the Feast of Tabernacles widely held to be the day of Jesus' birth, is October 22, unless there are slight errors in the modern Jewish calendar. Some believe, and some hold that there is a month error in the calendar, but again, I would ask you to consider the broad spiritual context rather than to get bogged down in dates. If we get down in dates and counting things according to different people's interpretation, we are likely to fall into Pharisee-ism. We need to be aware that the dates add up to more or less this season, but we also need to be sensitive to what the Spirit of God is saying.
Let us continue that message. In the extract of information below you will find an analysis posted on the http://www.6001.com website some months ago, which indicated that the World War of Ezekiel 39 would commence on September 29 this year. Refer also to Ezekiel 39:11-15. A wide range of information posted on the http://www.templemount.org website over some considerable time, which indicates the significance of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in this age, and which reports what has been going on behind the scenes to give rise to the current tension in Israel. This series of reports from the http://www.cnn.com, CNN news website which indicate that the violence began on September 28, correlating closing to the prediction of September 29, keep in mind that there is a 12-hour difference between Bible days and current days. Bible days begin at sunset, not sunrise.
Ezekiel 7:3-17, which seems to speak of the utter destruction of Israel. These verses were given to me on July 2, in the context of a prophecy concerning the destruction of Jerusalem. Matthew 24:15-31, which speaks of great tribulation and the abomination in the Temple. It is possible that the activities on the Temple Mount could constitute the abomination in the Temple or at least part thereof. Refer also to a previous mailing regarding the level of fornication, divorce, and adultery in the Church being an abomination in the Temple of the Holy Spirit, which comprises believers. Taken all together there appeared to be strong grounds to consider that the word of Ezekiel may be in the process of breaking, and that great tribulation may be about to break on the Church. To interject in that reading, it is important to understand, it seems very clear to me, that God will give spiritual signs to the Christians who are under a spiritual Covenant, but He may well give physical signs to the Jews who are still under the mosaic Covenant which is a physical Covenant. So we may find that the abomination in the Temple that I spoke of earlier in the Spiritual realm is an insignificant measure to the state of fornication in the Body of Christ, where the Body of Christ finds themselves effectively joined, in many instances, to all the Satanists and warlocks in the world, in other words, to the Church of Satan.
At the same time, the excavations and the construction of additional mosques on, and in the Temple Mount, illegally may well represent the desolation or abomination of the Temple in Jerusalem in a physical sense. The message continued, there are certainly strong grounds to declare that God is calling all His people to sanctify themselves and make themselves holy and set apart for His service in these days, and particularly that we should all earnestly consider our sins and repent. Jesus sacrificed on the cross for our sins is of no avail if we do not confess our sins to him and repent and receive the forgiveness that he purchased for us.
That message continued with more detailed reports of the incident of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, which supposedly triggered the fighting, the violence and the deaths in Jerusalem on September 20, 2000. Other reports concerning that, and others comment that the reality was that the tension was a result of unreasonable demands from the Muslims and the Palestinian Authority, and that really there should have been no reason for there to be any problem with Sharon's visit. The quotes in the Temple Mount sight go on to establish that Jerusalem is only the third most holy site to Israel. It is the most holy for all of Israel. There are reports of deliberate intention on inciting violence around the Temple Mount on the part of the Palestinians. There are various other reports around that area which lead one to conclude that another agenda has been clandestinely followed around the Temple Mount, which has been deliberately directed at denying the Jews access to their most holy site, and performing acts on it, in terms of construction and excavation, which were guaranteed to offend the Jewish people, or certain elements of the more scripturally observant Jewish people, and that it could be concluded that there was a certain element on the Muslim Arabic Palestinian side that was intent on provoking conflict and quite possibly war over the Temple Mount.
Certainly, the conclusions that I was forced to draw was that what was being reported in the press was extremely one-sided and failed to recognise the scriptural significance of the Temple Mount to the Jews, in terms of the fulfilment of End Time prophesy. I think there is a lot of reason to continue to believe that the unrest there will eventually flare up to full out war. We may well look back on [inaudible 01:06:11] year 2000 as being the start of the Third World War.
Other information on the 6001.com website which seeks to establish that [inaudible 01:06:30] the new Jewish New Year is the beginning of the year 6001 from Creation and presents some quite interesting information there. It is not essential to this teaching, so I want to address it and you might find it interesting to visit that website and the Temple Mount website, but the point is there is a large amount of information available particularly over the internet, all of which points to, plus the year 2000, plus or minus about 3-1/2 to 7-1/2 years being the breakpoint for the end of the Church age and the commencement of the third millennium after Christ. There is a lot of disagreement over exactly what will happen there. The majority are expecting the Rapture as hopefully you realised by now, the Rapture is totally out of the question until the Body of Christ has been cleansed.
That increasingly seems to me that we are about to face the most appalling and most terrible Spiritual and then physical tribulation of the Church of Jesus Christ. Next will be judgement on the world, followed by Satan and his cohorts being bound and cast into The Pit for a thousand years, followed by the millennium reign of Christ on Earth in which life will continue in a fashion, which is not similar to what we have experienced up until now, except there will be no activity of Satan, his demons and his fallen Angels. It seems increasingly to me it may take a thousand years for the bride to cleanse herself of all the impurities and all the false doctrines that currently exist in the Church. It may take a thousand years before we come to fully practice the form of marriage universally around the world and throughout the Church. It seems to me that even in that period, many people will choose, without Satan's interference, even they are not to serve God, because of the peace, and so forth.
God is seeking people who will worship Him and spread truth without having to be forced to do so. At the moment, the vast majority of us, and I speak for myself as well, only rarely press into God and seek to serve Him when we are in trouble. When things are going well, we start leaning to our own understanding, we start relying on our own strength and we drift away from God. It is only His grace that allows us to be tested and that allows us to stumble and fall as a result of us doing things our own way to bring us back to Him.
As I was completing those messages above read in email, which gave the website of an address which had a number of photographs of the current pope sitting on a throne of the Mount of Israel in about March 2000. On the mountain where the sermon of [inaudible 01:09:30] traditionally held to have been preached and the throne had a large inverted Cross in the back, but the exact significance of this may be unclear in the sense of who put that inverted cross there, but the point of that website was that it is generally widely accepted that an inverted cross is a satanic anti-Christ symbol. [inaudible 01:09:55] inferences draw there I do not hold a view on that. I think we have been mistaken when we get bogged down in trying to attach certain labels to individuals. I think there is far more happening in the Spirit realm than we begin to understand and why that may be, that the beast of Revelations, is in fact an individual. I think the beast in Revelations may have a much more fuller and more complex spiritual context than we currently understand, and we should not be focused in any event on looking outwards for those signs. We should be looking inward to the Spirit of God, which is within us, and we should be seeking to cleanse ourselves and seeking to draw close to Him, no matter what.
Sanctification
It is not a case of saying, "Oh, when I see the beast and I know that is the beast, then I will start getting ready to sanctify myself for Jesus." We should be seeking to sanctify themselves for Jesus right now and we can do that by praying for Him to judge us and correct us. We do not need to see any man on a throne with an inverted cross to decide whether we should act or not. We must be careful that we do not get bogged down in watching for leaves on the fig tree, instead of doing the things that we are told to do in preparation for the leaves appearing on the fig tree. Each of us must correctly discern the times and I pray that this teaching assists you. I will encourage you to further fast and pray into these issues to better understand them.
On November 7, 2000, which is just a couple of weeks earlier to this, I posted a message which read as follows: The following was received earlier today and I felt that I should forward it to you. It quoted the following passage which said the international day of prayer for the persecuted Church will be held on November 12, 2000. More than 300,000 Churches in 130 countries will take part in praying for the brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer for their faith. Will your Church be one of them? Many of us think of persecution as a modern-day tragedy, but in truth, persecution has been a reality for the Body of Christ since the days of the apostles.
Hebrews 13:3 states, "Remember those who are mistreated as if you are yourselves who is suffering." Now, that passage was a widely distributed email and the following was a commentary that I felt impressed to write concerning that. It raises an interesting question, "Why we should undoubtedly pray for those Christians who are being persecuted, and assist them with Bibles and other materials including TV, radio broadcasts, etc., etc.? Are they more in need of prayer than the western Church?
In reporting one of the series of five visions in which he was transported to the third Heaven, Rick Joyner in the book 'The Final Quest' reports of meeting with the apostle Paul in the presence of the Lord Jesus. I quote verbatim from page 135 to 136, names in square brackets added for clarity. "You must recover the ministry and the message," he [Paul] said emphatically. I [Joyner] looked at the Lord [Jesus], and He nodded His affirmation, adding, "It is right that Paul should say this to you. Until this time he has been the most faithful with both of these." "Please explain," I [Joyner] implored Paul. "All right," he replied. "Except for a few places in the world where there are great persecutions or difficulties, we [those already in Heaven] can hardly recognize either the ministry or the message that is being preached today. Therefore, the Church is now but a phantom of what it was even in our time, and we were far from all we were called to be. When we served, being in ministry was the greatest sacrifice that one could make, and this reflected the message of the greatest sacrifice that was made—the Cross.
The Cross
The Cross is the power of God, and it is the centre of all we are called to live by. You now have so little power to transform the minds and hearts of the believers because you do not live, and do not preach the Cross. Therefore, we have difficulty seeing much difference between the Church and the heathen. That is not the Gospel or the salvation with which we were entrusted. You must return to the Cross." The message continued, consider James 1:2-4, "My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." Revelations 20:4-6, "And I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was committed to them. Then I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their witness to Jesus and for the Word of God, who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received his mark on their foreheads or on their hands. And they lived and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. But the rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection. Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ and shall reign with Him a thousand years."
It is clear that those who are persecuted or died for their faith have a special and more elevated status with God than those who do not. Therefore why should one pray for those who are persecuted to be splayed martyrdom? Should we not seek the privilege to die for our faith and perhaps Steven did make a major impact on the life of some individual. Given that widespread tribulation and persecution may be closer than those Christians would like to believe, should we not all be seeking God to strengthen our faith and our commitment to serving the Lord Jesus Christ, no matter what the cost. And again, just to comment on that message, in the context of this message on marriage, dear listeners, I cannot stress enough, please do not be disobedient as I have been until this time that I have now recorded this message months later than I could have done. There is not much time. We must spread this message urgently. The people of God must return to the truth of Scripture with regards to marriage.
Heaven on Earth
We must seek to bring Heaven to Earth through our marriages so that Jesus may come back through the ministry that we bring. We cannot minister as prophets, apostles, evangelists, teachers and pastors if we are not walking in the fullness of what God created marriage to be. If our house is divided, our house will fall and if we cannot even rule over our own houses, men, as prophets, priests and kings, how on earth can we think that we can rule over the Body of Christ? How on earth can we think that we can remove the division of the Body of Christ when there is division between man and wife and between parents and children?
We have to see our marriages and our family as a mirror of the state of the Church. If 60% of all Christian marriages are ending in divorce and remarriage, we have to see there is something terribly, terribly, terribly wrong with the Church today. I challenge you, I urge you, I ask you, I plead with you, step out today and do what God is calling you to do. Take these truths and run with them. Write the vision and make it plain, preach these truths from the housetops. Repent of your deception and error in preaching other beliefs and putting them into practice. Jesus wishes to give you a few images to repent and turn around. There is no time to resist. There is no time to dwell in the past. There is no time to hang on to "I cannot do this because so many people will reject me." If Jesus rejects you, it does not matter how many people accept you. If Jesus accepts you, it does not matter how many people reject you. They rejected Him and they will reject those that He sends. If they reject you, they will reject the One who sends you, which is the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not be ensnared in fascism. I plead with you in Jesus’ name.
On November 10, 2000 in response to message that I received to the message that I have just read to you, I posted another message entitled as, 'Rick Joyner, the prophet.' I read: In response to the mail on persecution of Christians, the following comment was received. "I do not believe Rick Joyner went to Heaven in any way, shape or form. So his comments and books are irrelevant. It sure did not sound like the apostle Paul whom I read in the pages of the Bible speaking, it sounded more like Rick Joyner!" The message that I wrote continues: As written earlier, each one of us must discern the truth and each of us will be judged accordingly. We must know the terror of the Lord regarding His judgement, and we must therefore reverently fear His judgement and fear being found wanting on that day, before one states they do not believe, and therefore what Joyner writes is irrelevant. One must take account of Matthew 10:40-41 in which Jesus is speaking: "He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me. He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward. And he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward."
True Christians
Joyner comes in the name of a prophet. He states clearly that he has had visions and he has been spoken to by the Lord Jesus Christ and that Lord Jesus Christ has sent him. So we see Joyner comes in the name of a prophet and claims that Jesus sent him. If he is correct and we receive him as a prophet, we will receive Him who sent him. In other words, we receive Jesus and we will receive a prophet's reward, the reward of the service of the prophet and the blessings that came from receiving a prophet. If we do not receive Joyner as a prophet and he is in fact a prophet, then we reject Jesus and we are judged accordingly.
And I wrote further: "I am personally absolutely certain that Joyner is a prophet and that he was sent by the Lord Jesus Christ. I also am absolutely certain that what is reported by Joyner in what was quoted in the previous posting as of God, the Church, is far removed from what Jesus has called us to be. This is being confirmed through many at this time. Please carefully consider before rejecting Joyner's message in the books, 'The Final Quest,' 'The Call' and 'Visions of the Harvest.' If you have not read them, please make every effort to obtain them and read them as a matter of urgency. The two books referred to here, 'The Final Quest' by Rick Joyner published by Whitaker House, issued by Morning Star Publications, 16000 Lancaster Highway, Charlotte, NC 28277. That is in the United States. The ISBN number is 0883684780 and I will strongly urge you to get hold of that book.
The other book, 'The Call,' the sequel to 'The Final Quest' by Rick Joyner is published by Morning Star Publications, 16000 Lancaster Highway, Charlotte, NC 28277-2061 and published in 1999. ISBN number 1-878327-84-4. Two books which are absolutely vital reading in this age. Also later November 10, the following message was produced and I read extracts. This was entitled 'Wheat and Tares.' Further to the mail on persecution of Christians, a number of comments have been received. It appears that the [inaudible 01:22:26] created the impression that I am suggesting that we should not pray for those who have been persecuted. Apologies for that, it was certainly not the intention. It is right and scriptural to pray for suffering saints and for their deliverance. However, the point of the email was regarding the fact that the Word of God to the Church, as a whole today, is that the Church is very far removed from God, the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ required it to be, and that where the Church is 'free' and comfortable, the Church tends not to seek Jesus Christ as first and vital necessity and therefore tends not to love God with all their hearts, minds, soul and strength. In assessing this mail, each of us must discern the truth, and each of us will be judged accordingly.
Now it goes on to few passages, 2 Corinthians 5:9-11, "Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are well known to God, and I also trust are well known in your consciences." We must know the terror of the Lord regarding His judgement and we must therefore reverently fear His judgement and fear being found wanting on the judgement day. The point of the previous posting for the sake of clarity is that almost the entire Church, bearing a small group who are greatly persecuted is so far removed from what we are called to be, that we are not recognisable as Christians. In other words, we are not noticeably different from those who do not believe. Therefore, since it appears that Christians only truly laid down their lives for the Gospel when they are persecuted, we should ask ourselves whether it is not asked that requires pray and that in fact we should pray for judgement, tribulation and persecution to come upon us as well. There may be people who receive the mail, who have undergone massive persecution both Spiritual and physical, but the vast majority of Christians, and even those of us who have been intensely persecuted are lukewarm, and may well find on the Day of Judgement that they are counted amongst the goats, the tares, the foolish virgins and the workers of inequity, and Scriptures for those are given below and just to quote the headlines, you can look them up if you desire.
Matthew 25:33-46, reading 33 and 34, "And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blessed of My Father.'" 45: "Then He will answer them, saying, 'Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.' And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." Matthew 13:24-50, I read 24 and 25, "Another parable He put forth to them, saying: 'The kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way." Verse 30: "Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, 'First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them but gather the wheat into my barn.'" So first the unrighteous must be gathered and cast into The Pit before the righteous are gathered. We have to see the tribulation has to come before rupture.
Verse 47: "Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like a dragnet." Verse 48: "Which, when it was full, they drew to shore; and they sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but threw the bad away." Verse 50: "And cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth." Matthew 25:1-13, "Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom." Verse 12 and 13: "But He answered and said, 'Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you. Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.'" Luke 13:23-30, reading 23 and 24: "Then one said to Him, 'Lord, are there few who are saved?' And He said to them, 'Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I say to you, will seek to enter and will not be able.'" 27: "Depart from Me, all you workers of iniquity." 28: "There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and yourselves thrust out."
Matthew 7:12-23, verse 13: "Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it." 14: "Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it." 15: "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves." 23: "And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'" In other words, who do not observe the Commandments of God, the Word of God.
All of those passages are addressed to believers. The message continues: For anyone who fears this judgement, the visions in the book titled 'The Final Quest', are salutary and prophetic in rank of close to modern Scriptures will likely to be granted the privilege of receiving. I strongly urge all readers to get this book and also 'The Call' and 'Visions of the Harvest' by Joyner, which each give us startling perspectives on the state of the Church today. The bottom line, Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Many Christians appropriate this verse. Few have actually reached the level of holiness and sanctification which is associated with it. Until we reach this level, it is probably true to say that Christ is in us, but we are not yet in Christ. Even when we reach that level, we can still fall at any time.
1 Corinthians 10:1: "Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall." 2 Peter 3:17-18 "You therefore, beloved, since you know this beforehand, beware lest you also fall from your own steadfastness, being led away with the error of the wicked; but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and forever. Amen." The end of that message.
To sum up this message, the Kingdom context, the call, that is the fibre of this entire 40-tape series on marriage. Crucify self. Crucify the flesh. Die to self, live to the risen Son of God. Live to love. We can only do these things through the Spirit of God, through the love of God, through dying to self, through putting self behind us. We will only be able to walk in the fullness of what God intended marriage to be if husband and wife put away self, crucify the flesh, die to self, and walk in the Spirit as one flesh, as one Spirit. In doing so we have to understand that sexual intercourse between husband and wife is the most holy and most deeply spiritual act that is available to mankind between man and woman, as distinct between man and God. And therefore to talk about sexuality and sex as carnality is an absolute abomination in the Sight of God. Sexual intercourse between husband and wife is a holy, sacred and Spiritual act. I pray that you will take these things to heart as you continue with this series, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Father I ask you in the name of Jesus’, if there is anything that I have uttered in this teaching which is not of You Lord that You will blow it away and if whatever is of You Lord, all that is of You that is according to Your Word and by Your Spirit, I pray that it will find deep root in the hearts of the hearers and that it will grow and produce abundant fruit and that You will water it by Your Spirit and that You will come against everything that hinders it, in the name of Jesus.
This message is issued by End Time Issue Ministries through the ministry, a Church without walls. Our address is P.O. Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg 2156, Republic of South Africa. You can email me at James@EndTimeIssues.org.za. You can phone us on international code whatever your prefix is, typically in many countries 00, some countries 0, some countries something else, 27, and my mobile number is 832516644 or in South Africa, 0832516644. Our landline, international code 27, local code 11, phone number 7912327 or within South Africa 0117912327. Our fax 27117915004. This series of tapes is available, as mentioned, this is part of the Ministry of a Church without walls. We seek to make all our teachings available at no cost to those who would like them. Clearly offerings and donations are welcome, but if you cannot afford to pay anything for these tapes, write to us or contact us, and as funds permit, we will make them available to you. We will put you in touch with somebody who already has the set of the tapes in your location. I pray that this message so far and the balance of this message has been a blessing to you. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen.
04 04 Preparing for Change in Marriage
Number four in the series, 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' the second volume 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage.' The title of this message is preparing for change in marriage and the message itself commences after the prayers and worship, which follows immediately.
Before starting this message, perhaps I should just clarify the comment that I have made at the start of a number of the tapes which have been preceded with prayers and worship about the spiritual context. We have a five CD [inaudible 00:19:56] which plays five CDs in sequence in a collection of probably about 50 Christian prayers and worship CDs. What we do is, before a meeting we just select, we believe led by the Spirit, five CDs, which we put in any order without considering the content of them. Then during the prayers and worship as we feel led, we just select tracks on any one of the five CDs. Through this it provides a vehicle for the Holy Spirit to guide us and to give us a message through the prayers and worship. I certainly believe we saw very clearly a message coming through in the words of the prayers, and particularly the worship in this morning.
The crux as I received it was that God will protect those who obey Him, that we should draw close to Him, and that Jesus is the rock of our salvation, our firm foundation. He is the chief cornerstone. I really believe in the context of the preceding messages in volume 2, with regards to bringing joy to Jesus, laying down our lives, being willing to die for the truth of the Gospel and then the message of the context of the kingdom in this present age, the call, the coming judgement that is already upon the Earth and particularly upon the Church, these are indications that we may well be heading into the major World War that is spoken of in Ezekiel. All of these things challenge us as we go into the second series on understanding God's way in marriage, dealing more with the implementation of Scripture and actually putting it into practice in our lives towards receiving the vision of Heaven on Earth in marriage.
We need to understand Satan does not want this to happen. We need to understand that there will be attack and persecution, but those that know their God will endear to the end and will overcome. The Scripture that really came to mind during the prayers and worship which had been given prior to the meeting with Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” To move onto the message itself, as I said, the message is entitled 'Preparing for Change,' it builds on the message towards the end of the first volume of this series 'Facilitating Change'. It is really a compendium of my thoughts as I believe the Lord has given them to me with regards to preparing for change, and actually starting to go through the prices of change. It is important to understand that virtually everything that has been revealed by the Lord through Scripture in the text to date is seriously, seriously challenged.
Our understanding of what the Word of God says concerning marriage, the practice of marriage, the doctrines of marriage, and consequently certainly for anybody who has spent their lives in what you might call the Western Church, no matter whether that is Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Methodist or any form of Charismatic or Pentecostal congregation, we have been heavily, heavily influenced in the area of marriage. The whole legal framework of marriage in most Western countries and many other countries, which are influenced by the British Empire, has a strong pagan flavour to it, and we have seen that the wedding ring, the wedding ceremony, and the officiation at the wedding by a priest is all pagan. We have seen that marriage is actually the cutting of Covenant with a virgin bride.
We have seen that submission is not some misogynist dictatorial marital setup as is so often portrayed. It is actually an environment of deep love and teamwork and partnership. We have seen so many things that are taken for granted and taught, certainly in my own experience by virtually any pastor, any congregation, any Church anywhere in the Western world and probably as I say, throughout the former British Empire, to be fundamentally flawed and to owe more to Satan than it does to God. We have seen the passage in Timothy, which refers to doctrines of Demons and so we understand.
I pray that by the time you have listened to all the tapes preceding this, that in order to experience God's fullness in your marriage, in order for the world at large and for the Church to experience God's fullness in marriage, and in order for the absolutely devastating catastrophic magnitude of divorce in the world and in the Body of Christ today to be brought to an end, it is absolutely essential that change comes about. And people who are listening to this tape at this time, let us understand that they are called to be pioneers. The fact that you are listening to this tape at this time I believe means that God has called you to be a pioneer, and certainly if you receive the messages of this series, you will be going into relatively uncharted waters.
Preparing for change
Preparing for change. The first point that I want to make is that change should be gentle. It cannot be produced by force, anger or coalition. We have looked at that in some detail in the previous teaching. Change must be voluntary. Change in marriage requires a conscious choice by whichever partner needs to change. The reality is, as we have seen from this series of teachings that both partners need to change dramatically, almost inevitably. Very few people, if any today, truly understand how to walk in the love of God as we saw in the teaching on learning to love. Very few women today know how to walk in submission in the way it is envisaged in Scripture. So, we must recognise that our conduct and our beliefs, our knowledge and experience are learning patterns in some areas of our lives and not appropriate scripturally. Therefore, we need to make a decision to change. If, having heard these truths, we choose not to change, we are then in violation of the Word and the will of God and we will be judged accordingly as we heard in the previous message. However, if we truly love God, we will seek to change, no matter what it costs us.
I hope that this series of teachings so far and the teachings that follow, will provide you with much information to assist you to recognise where your lives, your beliefs and your practices do not conform to Scripture and need to be changed. If you are serious about serving God, I really believe by now you will be convinced of the need to change. Firstly, to bring an end to any behaviour and conduct which you have now realised is contrary to the Word of God, and as importantly, or perhaps more importantly, from an individual personal point of view, to put into practice that which is necessary for you to experience the blessing of Heaven on Earth in marriage, which God has prepared for everyone who chooses to earnestly desire and seek it.
In order to prepare for change, you need to study out the principles of gaining information until you have a reasonable idea of what the end state of a particular transition step should be. You need to take things a step at a time. This is important. A lot of what I am going to say in this message is based more on my experience as a management consultant in the area of business change, which is where a lot of my knowledge and experience lies, rather than specifically from a scriptural context. The message that follows this, we will deal with the scriptural context and the scriptural principles of how you actually give effect to what I am teaching on this particular message. One has to reduce the steps that are necessary to get from where you are today to where God has shown me that He wants to be into [inaudible 00:28:55]. You need to identify specific aspects of your behaviour, specific aspects of your understanding of Scripture, and specific aspects of your thinking which are now aligned with the Word and the will of God, and you need to take steps one step at a time to deal with those. It is no good saying, ‘I am just going to go to Heaven on Earth in my marriage’, and that somehow you are going to get there.
There is a saying in the world which says, "If you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there." In the same token, if you do know where you are going and you do know which road you are following, you have to follow that road one step at a time. You cannot take one mighty leap and just go from a marriage which is not the way God wants it to be, to God's ideal state. It is going to take time. And we saw that very clearly in the previous teaching on facilitating change. So, it is important that you pray, and you ask the Holy Spirit to show you which issues you should deal with first. You should seek to understand and envisage the new behaviour, in other words, the words and the actions which are appropriate. If you have been convicted in the area of love, and as you have seen from the previous message, love is absolutely critical, cardinal and essential to what God is calling the Church today. If we do not love God, we cannot obey His Commandments. We will not even try to obey His Commandments that we do not have the ability to bring about that change. We cannot bring about change even in ourselves by equation. It is only the love of God that would bring about change. We have seen the Scripture which says it is the love of God which leads us to repentance.
If you think about the examples that I have given previously of learning to touch type and learning to horse ride, it is fairly readily apparent that in those instances one will generally have in mind a mental picture of being able to type fast and accurately, without looking at the keyboard or thinking about the actions involved, and only thinking of the content. Even in horse riding, one would potentially think of somebody riding a horse and galloping over the countryside. The probability is that picture would be based on someone we have met who is an accomplished typist or horse rider. In other words, we would have a mental picture of what a highly proficient touch typist looks like. We all have met somebody who is able to look over their shoulder, take dictation, and type at 80-90 words a minute with almost 100% accuracy, and we would aspire perhaps to that level of confidence. By the same token, we may have seen people riding horses in a training ring and we might aspire to ride at that level of confidence. We might have seen Western movies with cowboys and Indians galloping over the range at top speed and jumping and really, this moving on their horses, with the horse and rider, seemingly as one, you might aspire to do that. Or you might actually have seen that in practice.
Taking a step at a time
And obviously the more tangible the picture is of what we have seen, the more real that objective will become to us. So, it is important that we seek to have a vision. We saw in Habakkuk 2:2, "Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it." So, it is absolutely scriptural for us to envisage the end result and for us to describe that end result in words and pictures, either in writing or mentally, and that is absolutely scriptural for us to seek to achieve that result. What is important is that we prioritise and we set those goals by the leading of the Holy Spirit, not by striving in our own strength. It is not by might, it is not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord. So, we need to have the vision, but we need to set our steps to get there. We need to take a step at a time. We must ask the Lord in the name of Jesus to show us what step to take today.
And some of those steps are going to be time-consuming, arduous and may take a long time. I would think that it is probably going to take all of us the rest of our lives to even approximate walking in the love of God, the way Jesus did. But we should aspire to that. We should seek to see ourselves in Jesus' shoes doing the work that Jesus did and greater works than He did, because that is scriptural. If we cannot see ourselves at some point in the future standing in Jesus' shoes raising a dead, opening the eyes of a blind, healing the crippled, we are not going to get there. If we cannot come to a place without the Spirit of God, or can see ourselves doing greater works than Jesus did, we will never do greater works than Jesus did. If we cannot see ourselves doing equivalent works to the apostles, Paul, Peter, and John, we will never reach that level of anointing.
So, we have to recognise that in this area of marriage, the teachings with regards to marriage in the world today are so corrupt and so perverted, that it is highly debatable whether, at this moment in time one can find a complete picture, if you like, in the real world of what this marriage looks like. So we have to piece it together. We have to realise that those people who seek to reach out for this vision are pioneers. They are going where nobody has gone before. They will make mistakes. They may not get all the way to the vision, but they will make it easier for those who come after to get there. To put that in a little bit more context, if we consider the horse-riding example, if you have never seen a horse, it is going to very difficult for you to aspire to ride a horse. So, somebody who has never seen a horse for that matter, or somebody who has never seen a typewriter or computer keyboard, is going to have enormous difficulty learning those skills.
So, part of preparing for change and part of facilitating change is to come to a place where we understand what it is, we are talking about and what that look like. Until we can envisage the end result in some measure, we are going to have enormous difficulty. So, we need to turn to the Holy Spirit to illuminate our hearts, and as I have been preparing and giving these messages, and as I have been praying into this whole subject of divorce in marriage over nearly six years now, I have just seen more and more. It is a wonderful picture of marriage, but it is very difficult to turn it into something that is tangible for other people. I hope that by the end of this second set of tapes, I would have managed to convey a little bit of that picture. I would pray that by now the Holy Spirit has been giving you a bit of a picture of what marriage can be but let me try and just articulate that briefly for you.
Heaven on Earth
The picture that I see is a man and wife. As we have seen, Scripture permits a man to have more than one wife, a family which is in perfect love, walking in the love of God where strife and argument, fault-finding, judging and competition are just unknown, where the husband truly is the head of the home, where truly he is walking in Jesus' shoes and ministering correction and discipline to his children. He is also ministering guidance to his wife, in the love of God gently, meekly and humbly without seeing himself as the lord and the master, without being dictatorial, just by laying down his life for his family and taking the lead in a firm and a just, but a loving way. I see a family in which there is perfect unity and where there is absolutely no schism or division. I see a house which is absolutely in unity and harmony and I see that harmony.
I see a harmony where, if the husband and wife are halfway around the world from one another and they are interviewed, asked questions or even in adverse circumstances interrogated on any point, if those two messages are recorded, if those two responses are recorded or transcribed that bottom changes in just personal communication style, etc., the heart of that message will be exactly the same. There will be no difference. There will be no distinction. They will be singing from the same song and they will be singing in the same key and they will be singing in perfect harmony. There will be no discord between husband and wife whether they are apart, or whether they are together. I see a family which is at peace in adversity, and at peace in prosperity, a family where the piece of God is so tangible that it is something that can be felt by strangers entering their house. I see a family where the love can be felt by strangers entering their physical house. I see power in prayer. I see a man and wife in prayer, kneeling before God. As they come into agreement, as they pray, regarding any matter in Heaven or in Earth, I see the principalities and powers of hell trembling because this is the prayer of agreement in complete harmony and unity.
I see the husband in harmony with Jesus and the wife in harmony with her husband. I just see prayers which have incredible...sorry, I am trying to avoid the word incredible, it has a negative connotation. It means not credible in actual fact, and it is one of those instances of words which are widely used in the world which actually speak against the intention of what is being said. So it is not a wise choice of word. I see an absolutely amazing, wonderful and awesome power emanating out of that marital house, out of that couple as they are praying, even as the children praying in unity with their parents.
I see a situation in which the generations dwell harmoniously together where the different generations are loved and each plays the role that we have seen in previous teachings is appropriate to them. And I see at the end of the day, a married family as a formidable spiritual unity in the hand of the Master. I see Jesus able to take that unit and to wield in prayer in ministry as he sees fit. I see the power of God and the love of God, the love coming first, and then the power, as we have seen in a number of teachings flowing through that family into the world. I see the dead raised. I see the blind seeing. I see the lame walking. I see deaf ears opened. I see demons cast out, just the way Jesus did. That is the body of Christ, that is unity. Until we come into all of that, that vision is unattainable, but I hope that you, by now are starting to see the glory of what the Lord is showing me. What I have just said to you is a very limited depiction of the vision that I have and as I say again, I hope with progress you will see more clearly exactly what this vision looks like.
At the same time, I would like to make the point that this is not as challenging as it may sound in terms of what I have just said. One of the things that the Lord has shown me very definitively over the last few years, is that while Satan has corrupted the world to an enormous extent, and brought about enormous deception and error, corruption and perversion, and we have seen just a little bit of that relativity to the wrong teachings that have been dealt with in the preceding tapes, the Lord has, by His divine hand preserved all truth throughout the world in different groups. And so, we find that for example, and I am going to use labels here which are probably familiar to you, but I do not use those labels other than just to ensure that I have a common base of communication with you. I am not trying to champion any particular denomination of course, but for example, we find that the Baptists have a profound revelation about the truth of water baptism by immersion. We find that the Charismatic Churches have a profound revelation of the gifts of the Spirit, and we find that other denominations have profound revelations in different areas.
Muslims and the Western Church
What we find also is that certain of the truths with regards to the practice and conduct of marriage have been in fact preserved in certain societies, which we are now western arrogant regard as primitive but where many aspects of the family life is in fact closer to what we have been discussing in this series and it is practiced in the western world. We need to understand that this is one of the reasons why those of the Muslim faith, many of them, regard westerners, and particularly Western Christians, as agents of Satan because they have seen the extent to which the Western World has corrupted the morals and the standards and God's pattern of marriages as laid down in Scriptures. Many people are not aware of the fact that devout Muslims hold, what they call the Tawrat what the Jews call the Torah, what we call the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, to be inspired by God, and they call them a very high level of reverence. In fact, a much higher level of reverence than is accorded to them by most Western Christians. Accordingly, we find that a lot of the hostility amongst Muslims towards Christians is in fact, while it is not right in the sense, that it is not love as God intended. It is just criticism of the abominations practised by the Western Church. So we need to be very, very careful in judging other groups.
My point here is that certain truths have been preserved in the Muslim faith which have been lost to the Western Christian Churches. Other truths are preserved by the Jews, and other truths are preserved in pagan groups that we will not normally consider to have any truth at all. But the reality is that only Jesus is totally righteous, without sin and only Satan, his cohorts and demons are totally evil and without truth. Every human being that walks this Earth has a percentage of God's truth and a percentage of Satan's deception and evil in terms of what they believe and the way they live their lives. It is important that we understand that a person that has been in a pagan and demonic satanic situation may have a high proportion of what they understand and believe being from Satan, a relatively small proportion being from God, but if they have the revelation that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that He died and was resurrected for their sins, they can be born again and they can come into the faith. In terms of the current conventions, they can apply the label, ‘Christian’ to themselves. The reality is that many people who call themselves by the name of Christian, in fact, probably most, have less than 50% of what they know and believe being God's truths and more than 50% being error and deception in terms of certainly the area of marriage. This does not make them good or bad. We are told not to judge, it just means that it is a journey of revelation and truth. Therefore, we will press closer to all truth, but that is a journey and it is not for us to condemn those who have less truth in a particular area than others.
Do not judge
It is important to recognise Jesus' teaching and parable where Jesus told us not to judge in Matthew and said that we should remove the plank in our own eyes before we look at the specks in our brother's eyes. It is extremely important in the area of denominational and religious differences. Satan has trapped Christians particularly in pride to the extent that they have become proud of the little knowledge of God that they do have, and because others do not have that particular piece of knowledge, they reject them as being unrighteous and ungodly, when in fact, the others in turn are rejecting them because they can see they have a revelation of certain truths which generally the Christian Church does not have.
I mentioned this in one of the key threads that comes out of this whole teaching on marriage, that until we learn to live in unity in marriage, the Church will not come into unity. Part of that Church coming into unity is that the Church has got to stop judging people and judging its brethren. The fact that the Baptists have revelation of water baptism and the Charismatics have a revelation of the gifts of the Spirit, it does not mean that those that are Baptists are bad, or if you are a Charismatic, and vice versa. It means that each has some knowledge that the other lacks, and we should all have a revelation of how little we know of the things of God and stop judging others and condemning them, because they have truths that we lack, that we do not understand and which we do not think are necessary.
We have to start looking at other people and saying what do they know about God that I do not know. If they know something about the devil that we do not know, well, let that go. But if we look at every person we meet, every group we encounter, and so Father in the name of Jesus, please show me what they know that you that I lack and give me that revelation. The Lord has shown me very, very clearly over the last few years that we can learn an enormous amount in that fashion. I would encourage you to apply that principle. So accordingly, as one examines, by the leading of the Holy Spirit, other groups of people and their marriage practices and so forth, one can begin to piece together the jigsaw puzzle which constitutes the picture of marriage that I outlined to you a few moments ago. Through this process, the Lord has shown me in some detail what that picture looks like. As I wrote to somebody a day or two ago, I believe that most of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have fallen into place while I have been doing this series of teachings. I do not claim by any manner it means that they are all in place, I am quite sure that, as always seems to happen with God, just when you think you have a full revelation of something, you discover that there is something else that you lack.
Sexual matters
My point is that the Lord has been showing me things through a variety of other [inaudible 00:50:30] through Muslims, through Jews, through people of other groupings. Together that constitutes something of a picture which I am in the process of seeking to paint for you in this series of teachings. Another aspect of this is that we need to examine the Bible very carefully. There is a tendency amongst Christians to be very prudish and to be very unwilling to talk about sex in a reverent, but dare I say, explicit fashion. There is very little in the way of Christian teaching which actually provides insight to the actual plan of God, with regards to sexual conduct between men and women, or between man and wife more correctly.
I am not talking here about public display of sex, public discussion of sex, voyeuristic discussions of sex, or any form of discussion which is intended just for the sake of discussion. There is a place for reverent learning of the things of God. And again, I mention this just by virtue of a number of comments that I have encountered recently in discussion with various Christians. If you seem to feel that any discussion with regards to sexual matters is offensive, is carnal, and has nothing to do with any Christian who is truly seeking to serve God, I would just like to put that in some sort of context. Please understand where I am coming from. I am not seeking to offend you, but I am asking you to re-examine very carefully some of the things that you might believe in this regard.
I am going to make the assertion that the Bible is a very sexual book. The metaphors, the language and the allegories that are used throughout the Bible have a very, very strong sexual connotation. We have talked at length about the word ‘virginity’ and we have seen that virginity refers to a very specific physical state of woman's most holy organ, her sexual organs. It is something to be reverenced and treated with great respect, but the reality is that whenever we use the word ‘virgin’, we are using a word which describes a particular physical state of woman's most holy organ. In the same way when we use the word ‘circumcision’, we are using a word which describes a specific physical state of man's most holy organ. If we do not want to acknowledge that words tend to have association with some pictures, we are misleading ourselves.
The reality is that the word ‘virginity’ has associated with it, a mental image of a particular physical state of a woman's most holy organ. By the same token, the word circumcision has a similar connotation with man's most holy organ. When we talk about marriage, we have seen repeatedly in this series of teachings that the word 'marry' in actual fact is synonymous with sexual intercourse with a virgin. So whenever the Bible talks of marriage, it is talking about a man having sexual intercourse with a woman. When we read the voice of the bride and the bridegroom and they are rejoicing, we are talking about the rejoicing when that act of consummation has been completed. There are some who are of the opinion that it was common practice in Bible days for there to be physical witnesses in the room at the time the marriage was consummated, in order to be in a position in terms of the requirements of Deuteronomy 22, to testify that the blood that was collected on the cloth, was indeed from the woman at the moment that she was penetrated and that her virginity was taken.
Bear in mind that the Word of God says that no person can be put to death except on the testimony of two or three witnesses. We have seen in Deuteronomy 22 that if a woman was found not to be a virgin on her wedding night, she was to be put to death as a harlot. Consequently, the husband is not sufficient testimony for that woman to be put to death. The point there has to be the implications of that Scripture is that there may have been witnesses of the consummation and. I have encountered secular books which indicate that as recently as the 1860s in Victorian England it was commonplace for the guests at a wedding to congregate around the bed while the marriage was consummated. Now, that may shock us in our attitude today, but we need to understand that when we speak about marriage, we speak about a specific sexual act between man and woman. When we speak about adultery, I have identified that adultery is a particular spiritual state, but again, it is a word that describes a particular sexual act. When we speak about homosexuality, the same thing applies.
And so, we find that if we understand this, God has given us sex to understand a variety of things and therefore, with due respect for propriety, modesty, decorum and so forth, we have to understand that it is not ungodly and unchristian in the right forum to discuss sex. It is proper for parents to give detailed and comprehensive guidance to their children with regard to matters of sex, whether it is the parents or the grandparents. Children need to be informed about the functions of their bodies in the sexual act and they need to understand that God has given it to them for sublime pleasure on Earth.
We also need to understand that the One Flesh Bond is the strongest when simultaneous orgasmic releases are experienced both by man and woman. The orgasm is something which actually culminates in the release of spiritual energy between man and woman. The strength of the One Flesh Bond is directly proportional to the frequency and the power of orgasm of the man and woman. I believe that the Lord has shown me that the actual experience of orgasm is in fact a spiritual release which has a physical manifestation. It is absolutely vital that we stop regarding sex as carnal and dirty and see it is something that is sublime. It is beautiful. It is spiritual. There is no higher form of spiritual experience known to man, between man and woman, than the act of making love. The only higher form of spiritual experience available to man is in prayers, worship and spiritual intimacy with the Lord Jesus Christ, the Father and the Holy Spirit. We have been given the sex act understand much of what pertains to these things.
Later in the series, I will endeavour in a fashion that you will find acceptable, to address in more specific detail what the Lord has shown me in these areas, and I would ask you to pray about it. By the time you get to the tapes on cutting Covenant and building One Flesh Bond, I would ask you to be prepared to consider in more depth the subject that is implicit in what I have just said to you.
Prayer for change
Continuing with the subject of preparing for change, prayer is an absolute vital prerequisite to change. We cannot change ourselves. We have seen that. I have discussed that at some length in previous teachings. We are unable to change unless we are taught by the Holy Spirit, unless we are led by Jesus as our head, husbands, and wives by your husband. In order to do that we need to pray the right prayers. Sadly, the majority of Christians tend to pray carnal prayers in terms of which they superimpose their understanding of what they think is right for them or what they think is God's will for them and try and dictate to God what He should do. One of the situations that opened my understanding in this whole area that I have been teaching on in the series of tapes, was shortly after I went before the Lord and cried out to him for the level of divorce, and as I said implicitly, how that should be rectified. Shortly after that, I focused on the passage in Romans which said, as many as are led by the Spirit of God they will become sons of God, and I started asking the Lord to teach me to be led by His Spirit every moment of every day.
In response to that, He started guiding me and leading me in a variety of ways, both in my Christian walk and business, and so forth. I will be the first to say that I am a long way from being fully led by the Spirit every moment of every day, but that is my desire and it is prayer that I pray on a fairly regular basis. But shortly after I prayed that prayer, I was led to pray another prayer and that was: Father, in the name of Jesus, I ask you to bring the people that You want into my life and to take the people that You do not want out of my life, in Jesus’ name.
I was not prepared for the consequences of that prayer, and I have come to see it as an extremely powerful prayer. We associate with people for the wrong reasons. We associate with people based on our understanding. We associate with people that are brought across our path by the enemy without even knowing what is going on. Only God knows the hearts. Within about a year to 18 months of praying that prayer, the Lord had turned my life upside down. He took one of the partners out of my business. He took some of my staff out of my business. He then took my wife out of my life. He took various other people out of my life and then He started to bring other people in. What was absolutely amazing about that process was that at the time that He took each person out, things happened which I would never have believed possible. Things were revealed in the hearts of those people which were beyond my ability to imagine that could be going on.
I discovered that my wife had been betraying me actively for 25 years. She had set out after she first met me to, in her words, cut me down to size. And sums of money that I had, because I trusted implicitly, had disappeared, that I could not, and to this day, cannot account for. And a variety of other things which were enormously stressful and hurtful at the time, but as they happened and as the Lord led me to terminate that marriage and terminate certain other relationships, I began to understand how powerful that prayer was. He brought other people in, who have been faithful and have really stood by us in enormous difficulties.
So I would encourage you right now at the end of this tape to pray that prayer and just to go before the Lord and say, "Father in the name of Jesus, I ask You to take the people that You do not want in my life out, and to bring the people that You do want in, in Jesus’ name." And pray that on a regular basis. Please understand, do not judge the people that He takes out. He will reveal things that are wrong in their hearts and when He takes them out, He is taking them out as much for them as He is for you. Please do not become mighty and proud that He is revealing things that are wrong in their hearts. He is also potentially revealing things that are wrong in your heart and the things that are wrong in your heart, and the things that are wrong in their hearts are just incompatible at the time that He takes them out. He may bring them back years later.
Another prayer that I learnt to pray at the same time is "Father, in the name of Jesus, I ask You to open the doors in my life that You want opened that no men may close and to close the doors in my life that You want closed, that no men may open, in Jesus’ name." Again, a remarkably powerful prayer. Since that time the Father has led me through a journey in terms of which my business direction has changed a number of times, and each time we have discovered the hand of God in situations which often, at the time, we did not understand and I must be quite honest, did not enjoy.
So again, I would encourage you to pray, even right now as I pray it again, "Father in the name of Jesus, I ask You to open the doors in my life that You want opened that no man may close, and to close the doors in my life that You want closed that no man may open, in Jesus’ name." As I said, I would encourage you to pray, Father in the name of Jesus, I ask You to teach me to be led by your Spirit, every second of every minute, of every hour, of every day, of every week, of every month, of every year, for the rest of my life, in Jesus’ name, that I may become truly a son of God. Also, an extremely important prayer.
Another prayer that I was led to start praying about two years ago, based on something that I read in Rick Joyner's book, called 'The Final Quest' the report of his five visions, is "Father, in the name of Jesus I ask You to judge me severely and correct me harshly that I may serve You more perfectly, and Father in the name of Jesus, I ask You to show me the level of my present deception and how to change." Again, two very, very important and very powerful, very straightforward prayers. Many people do not realise we came to be judged in this life. The Word of God tells us that we should judge ourselves lest we be judged, but it is apparent what was said to Joyner in his vision, that we are actually not competent to judge ourselves, and we should ask the Lord to judge our sins in this life. That which is not judged in this life, will be judged in the life to come.
If you want to avoid finding yourself in the place of being cast into outer darkness, of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, then I would urge you to seriously consider praying, "Father in the name of Jesus, I ask You to judge me severely and correct me harshly that I may serve You more perfectly." Then do not expect judgement; judgement is not pleasant. Judgement may involve you losing your job, it might be a car accident, it may involve any number of things going wrong in your life, but that is grace and that is mercy from God.
When something goes wrong, the challenge is to develop the discipline and the intuition and the sensitivity to say "Father, why did that go wrong? What is the cause of that? Where is my sin? What do I need to repent of?" And I will present in a subsequent teaching a more in-depth analysis of that, but nothing happens in our lives without sin. Job was judged because of fear and pride in his life. It was not just some haphazard act of God that Job lost everything that he had and was so afflicted. Illness and everything else comes as a consequence of sin, bringing wrath and judgement upon us. So I would encourage you to pray this prayer but also to think very carefully about how you live your life from now on.
I pray that this has given you some background to the teachings that follow this. Just briefly, in the teachings that follow, there will be a series which is directed at turning what I have said in this particular teaching, and in the preceding teaching, on change into reality.
As I said before, we cannot change ourselves. One of the key things we need to do is to pray the prayers that I have just prayed. We need to come before the Father and say "Father in the name of Jesus, I desire to have a godly marriage according to Your Word. I ask You to show me everything that is wrong in terms of what I believe regarding marriage and I ask You to show me everything that is wrong in terms of what I practice in terms of marriage, and I ask You to change my heart and change my direction and to cut off those things which are wrong, in Jesus name." If we pay those prayers with a sincere heart, you may be astounded of the changes that will come to pass in the days ahead. The teachings that follow address subjects such as faithfulness, the issue of judgement in this life, how to understand judgement in this life, and how God has given us judgement in this life for our benefit, that we may not be judged in the life to come, that we may be found faithful servants, that we may not be found to be foolish virgins and not be found to be amongst the workers of iniquity who never knew Jesus.
We talk also in terms of the gift of tongues and praying of mysteries and seeking answer through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which is also vital in this situation. We do not know often what to pray, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, with the evidence of speaking in tongues is an important tool that is available to us as Christians to bring about change, if we use it appropriately and wisely. Disciplining the flesh is a major issue, recognising that the flesh is not about sex, the flesh is about carnal and godly thoughts. It is about godly behaviour. We are racing, not against [inaudible 01:09:57] blood but against principalities, powers, and only evil forces of the air. We will have a tape on how to discipline your flesh.
Renewing your mind with the Word of God again, is absolutely vital. If we are seeking to change, we have to apply the Word of God, which is Jesus, through the Bible to our minds, to renew our minds, that we may come to a place where we have the mind of Christ. The power of the tongue, again, in marriage, is particularly challenging, and particularly difficult, but generally in our lives, in the Western World, we are constantly speaking places over ourselves with our loose and idle words, and our slipshod abusive language. We may talk about ourselves. We think we have been humble, but in fact we are cursing ourselves, and we are cursing others and we are saying discord and division in judgement, and these things ought not be said. And so we will address that in some detail.
The anointing of the Holy Spirit and the anointing that is available for different areas of our lives
We will not come into the place that I have described without the anointing of God in our lives, and without the anointing of God in our marriages. No husband will become like Jesus if he is not anointed the way Jesus was. So, there will be a teaching, God-willing, on the anointing, and also something about touching the Lord's anointing. Unfortunately, too many people speak out against God's anointed without realising that, and we will address that briefly. Demonic oppression of the flesh and the subject of deliverance is a whole series of easily 8,10 or 20 tapes in its own right, but we will just give you the headlines there. It’s an extremely deep subject and a subject which, once you become aware of that, will exercise your retention in the Spirit for many years to come.
Principality that seeks to destroy marriage, Jezebel
It is important, as you seek to embrace the truth contained in this series of teachings, that you understand a little bit about the demonic principality that is about it. If you do not, as you seek to put these truths into practice, you will find yourself almost certainly counting the Jezebel principality through people who are oppressed by the Jezebel spirit. You may find, even right now, that you are experiencing some emotional or spiritual distress at some of the things that have been taught. That could indicate that you yourself are oppressed by Jezebel spirit. I am not seeking to be rude to you, but we need to speak truth. We need to recognise that virtually every Christian on the Earth today is to a greater or lesser extent oppressed by demons, which are oppressing the flesh, and using the flesh to manipulate and control them.
Cutting of the marriage Covenant
We will then discuss in some detail the cutting of the marriage Covenant and I will share with you some of what I believe the Lord has shown me in terms of understanding the wonder and the beauty of the marital act. I will then, God-willing, share a little bit of the history of marriage from Jesus’ day to the present, and help you hopefully understand the historical context to the teachings with regards to marriage today. I hope it will make it easier for you to adjust to some of the things that have been taught in the series, just to see how absolutely unbiblical they are and where they came from.
Responsibility of Christian men towards single Christian women, reaching the heights, the pinnacles of marriage
We will discuss some of the more difficult aspects of what the Lord has shown me regarding the full truths in terms of what He intended marriage to be and how He intended it to be implemented, and why there is so much divorce, fornication and so forth in the world. And God-willing, that will then bring this second volume, and as I currently understand, this entire series, to an end with a summing up which will hopefully help you to tie all these different teachings together to put them into practice in your life and to be blessed, and to experience God's Heaven on Earth through marriages as He intended it to be experienced.
"Father in the name of Jesus I ask You to blow away anything that I have spoke in this teaching which is not of You and not of Your Word and not of Your will, in the name of Jesus’, and I ask that anything and everything that I have spoken that is according to Your Word, according to Your will, that You will cause it to be implanted in the hearts of the hearers and to take root and to produce abundant fruit, in Jesus’ name. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Lord of Lords and King of Kings, our risen Saviour, amen."
04 05 Faithfulness
Dr Creflo Dollar
In volume two of the series "Understanding Gods way in marriage", volume two "Towards Heaven on earth in marriage" and this tape in on faithfulness. The initial message is a direct recording of a message by Dr Creflo Dollar, an apostle of God, as part of a series of three sets of six tapes each entitled "Faithfulness, the power connection". The tape that is recorded here is simply the first tape in the first set of this series, there are another 17 tapes, I think it is, in the complete series. The reason for including this particular tape in this series is that faithfulness is an absolutely critical aspect of marriage, if we cannot be faithful to our spouses we find ourselves in adultery, we find our marriages failing. If we cannot be faithful to God, we cannot serve Him. This particularly series of tapes, the three sets of tapes I was lead by the Spirit of God to purchase. Just before I started recording this series, as I went into the first of four 3-day fasts over a period of about 40 days and as I was listening to these tapes, I was immensely convicted. Faithfulness is a dimension, another dimension of the love of God, you will see this tying in very closely to the previous messages on love and particularly the message based on Creflo Dollars book "Lord, teach me how to love" and I would urge you to listen very carefully to this message. And I pray that it will be a blessing to you and I would encourage you to obtain the entire set from Creflo Dollar ministries.
Faithfulness
(Inaudible (00:02:21)) in our lives, with Your presence and with Your wisdom. (Inaudible (00:02:29)) in our lives with Your power, with Your anointing. Now Lord, as we continue to practice and train and yield into You, as we continue to practice and hear You and flow with You and following You, we know that it is Your desire and it is Your plan to lead us into greatness and promotion. Lord, we are (inaudible (00:02:56)) on this mountain but it is time to move off this mountain and get on a higher mountain, glory to God. (Inaudible (00:03:09)), we magnify Your name and we take great joy in coming into Your presence, coming before Your glory and realizing that you are alive and that you are manifesting Yourself on the inside of this, we give You praise. And with all (inaudible (00:03:36)) that we practice Your presence and we come to know You more and more, (inaudible (00:03:44)). So God, we give you praise, we thank You that our ears are anointed to hear You and that our spirits are going to proceed and get a hold of what (inaudible (00:04:02)) and it's in Jesus name we pray and (inaudible (00:04:08)). Come on, give the Lord a hand clap, Hallelujah. Glory Hallelujah, thank the Lord. We're going to turn around and meet two or three of your neighbors and you can take your seat. Glory to God, Hallelujah. Praise Jesus.
You know, we're doing some training and (inaudible (00:05:01)) talk about that a little bit, I don't want to frustrate anybody but there are some great, mighty things that God wants to get to you, He wants to get to us and we can continue to make excuses for the lack of proof that things (inaudible (00:05:22)) in our lives. I mean, you could do that or you can find out what's wrong and make the correction and bear the proof. And you know, religion is a devil. Let me say that again, religion is a devil. It has you operating in form that no power and no result and so my main concern and the thing that I'm really just going to be pushing for as we continue to get out of debt and all this other stuff, is that supernatural (inaudible (00:05:57)) like supernatural healing is always going to be based on a wholer lifestyle. And, you know, somehow or other, we think that when we become (inaudible (00:06:11)) then somehow or other that God will excuse our willful freedom. There are some things that (inaudible (00:06:24)) amongst the body of Christ, there are some things that ought not be done in the body of Christ. And I will tell you the truth man, since I've been back and just been (inaudible (00:06:38)) by myself, I am appalled at some of the things that's happening in Church. (Inaudible (00:06:49)) and there is no way in Heaven that I'm going to allow the devil to bring those devilish spirits back into this Church, isn’t going to happen.
Adultery will stop you from prospering in things of God. You listen to me now because you're going to hear a lot about adultery till you (inaudible (00:07:30)) but I'm not going to tolerate it, I'm not going to tolerate it amongst my staff and I'm not going to tolerate it amongst my leadership. You can be coming to Church and, of course, we can help you get deliverance but adultery, you can't do that and I don't know whether I haven't preached on it enough but if you're married you're obligated to be faithful. I don't care (inaudible (00:08:03)), there's a right way to do things. You don't go spread your legs for somebody (inaudible (00:08:09)). You can be glad you isn’t dead because we die the body of Christ, sleeping with the body of Christ and committing fornication with Jesus (inaudible (00:08:31)) put your hearts on hold or the key, it's not right, it's not God. I thought I'd let you know and I'll let the other sessions know it isn’t right. That's the spirit and that spirit (inaudible (00:08:55)) and homosexuality, for some reason that thing spread in Churches. It is starting a thing, you know, you've got another adulterous affair, another adulterous affair and some of the earlier situations I've taken, you get that homosexual spirit, the next thing you know you look around and you've got things in spirit everywhere.
No, not as long as I'm alive and pastoring this Church, we'll seek you out and we'll kill you. We've come too far, let's straighten things out. Now I know it isn’t easy all the time and I know there are things and challenges that come in your life but folks, you are doing what's right, (inaudible (00:09:47)). I don't care, I know there are challenges, everybody gets them, you're not the only one. There is not one man in here that doesn't have an opportunity to sin, everybody’s got opportunities to sin, every man in here has the opportunity to cheat on his wife, what's the difference? The men that are faithful to God choose not to and that's where the real issue is, that's what we're going to talk about tonight. Some might say I thought we're going to talk about adultery. No, we're going to talk about the root of adultery, the root of sin, the root of sloppiness, the root of all of the stuff is dealing with faithfulness to God.
It's the first thing that the Lord dealt with me on my fast was faithfulness. I want you to listen to this very carefully tonight, we understand how important it is, the fellowship with the Holy Spirit, how many are getting a understanding of the fellowship. It ought to change your life, it should just absolutely change your life. I mean, you ought to be like a new person spending their time with the Spirit of God. And then we talked about how to be alone with God. How many of you are spending time alone with God? For its sweet man, I mean, you're spending time alone with God after (inaudible (00:11:01)) you know you isn’t wasting your time. It's an awesome thing to spend that time alone with God and (inaudible (00:11:06)) and anointed and ready for the task at hand. (Inaudible (00:11:11)), you can't take a man or woman of God in the Bible in the Old Testament, that was anointed by God and not see the air of faithfulness. (Inaudible (00:11:22)) had the opportunity to see it, Moses made it very clear, he said look man, he said I would rather serve God than to serve sin for a season and folks, everybody has the opportunity to serve sin, you've just got to determine if (inaudible (00:11:40)), who are you going to serve? Well, I choose to serve God. Do you understand what I'm saying, if the choice, I choose to serve God.
Now in serving God, it's going to require faithfulness, it's going to require me being faithful. You know, I'm kind of tired of everybody looking for a little pat on the back because you see it. Oh, bless your heart, it's going to be alright. (Inaudible (00:12:05)) You can't do that, I mean, your faithfulness is towards God and you're faithful towards God. Now in the Old Testament, (inaudible (00:12:25)) blood of Jesus and mercy and Grace and stuff like that, there are consequences for actions. I mean, Moses got angry and arrogant. I mean, (inaudible (00:12:37)) and in the middle of the funeral they want to go complain (inaudible (00:12:45)). God had a problem with that and the reason why God had a problem with that is because his arrogance, you know, Moses the mighty man of God, opened the Red Sea and all the great things that God had used him through, so he wouldn't wait and allow God to show His faithfulness to the children of Israel, he turns around out of anger and arrogance and he hit that rock, BAM, give them water, BAM, and water came out of it, there now take it. Well, wait a minute, God said there's going to be consequences for that. See, I tell you what, they're going into the Promised Land, you'll see it but you won't enter in. And I'm thinking, (inaudible (00:13:55)), we don't even see the power of the blood and the forgiveness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
(Inaudible (00:14:06)) right now today because they're standing up for the right of Christianity and (inaudible (00:14:14)), right now today and (inaudible (00:14:25)) perfect time for me to go to India, I've had lots of indications to go but God said not now, not now, not now, see I'm too bold to be going to India (inaudible (00:14:38)). We take so much for granted and when I begin to look at all this stuff in the time of prayer, here's what the Lord begins to show me about Abraham. Abraham, I mean, think about what Abraham went through, you know, trying to (inaudible (00:15:09)), faithful to God. Think about what Noah went through, about 120 years, it's going to rain, it's going to rain, they laughed at him, it's going to rain, it's going to rain, faithful.
Look at Isaac and Jacob who will not bow down to idols, they're faithful to God, they're already committed to Him. This one word faithful, faithfulness will take you so far with God and all of a sudden I'm thinking of God because (inaudible (00:15:40)), I want to know the power connection. When I'm on the (inaudible (00:15:47)), they're spending time alone with God, (inaudible (00:15:50)), fellowship with God and spend time alone with God (inaudible (00:15:56)) until I begin to study the word faithfulness, it's a power connection and if a man can understand what it is, you know, we've talked about being faithful to the Church, we've talked about being faithful to (inaudible (00:16:10)), we talk about being faithful to this and faithful to that but folks, the reason why you're failing in faithfulness in other areas is because we haven't got the (inaudible (00:16:19)). When I'm going to be faithful to God I'm going to be faithful to my Church, when I'm faithful to God you isn’t got to worry about me, you know, (inaudible (00:16:30)) because my faithfulness is with God, now that motivates my faithfulness in every other area. You know, you try to be faithful to a man and haven't been faithful to God, you got to be faithful to God, you can't be faithful to your pastor until you're faithful to God because your vertical relationship is going to determine your horizontal relationship. So if there's no faithfulness toward God, you know, honey you are going to (inaudible (00:17:00)) unfaithful to your wife, unfaithful to your friends, unfaithful to your Church, unfaithful to your ministry because you isn’t faithful to God.
And until you resolve faithfulness to God, you're going to always be a person with a question mark over your head and the question is will they pass the test and I'm telling you we can eliminate that. We're Godly people, we are (inaudible (00:17:31)), we don't do like everybody else do. Faithful, faithful to God. (Inaudible (00:17:51)) I heard it very loud and clear, (inaudible (00:17:55)) if you want to go to the next level. How do we know there's another level? I mean, wherever you are I'm telling you there's another level. It can be great in your life that there's another level. (Inaudible (00:18:06)), honey there is another level, that level is waiting on you. If you know it's going to get you to the next level, faithfulness to God, can God rely on me, can God trust me.
And listen, let me make it plain, can God trust me to keep His word, can God trust me to say no to sin, can God trust me...you know, in the old days they wouldn't bow down to (inaudible (00:18:40)), you know what they said, they said I can't bow down because it's against my belief, it's faithful to God. Well, he'll kill you, he has to kill me then, I'm faithful to God. Now he does kill me because I am that faithful to God but I will not bow down to another man. See, they're willing to put their life on the line because of their faithfulness, what are you willing to put on the line for your faithfulness towards God? What are you willing to put on the line for your faithfulness toward God? That when the opportunity to sin comes, you don't sit up there and struggle (inaudible (00:19:18)).
Here's what you do, I'm sorry, I'm faithful to God. I can't do that, I'm faithful to God. No I can't go there, I'm faithful to God. No, my faithfulness to God won't let me do that. See, my faithfulness to God now makes it easily (inaudible (00:19:48)) and I remind myself at the precious times of temptation that I am faithful to God and because I am faithful to God I am faithful to my wife, because I'm faithful to God now I am faithful to my husband, (inaudible (00:20:11)). You know, here's the critical part about it, that unfaithed people who don't even have the Holy Spirit, some of them demonstrate a better life of faithfulness than people who have the Spirit of God and the word of God on the inside of them. (Inaudible (00:20:37)) person wouldn't do just from good home training he wouldn't do, being faithful to his home training and we have the Spirit of God, we have the one who said let there be light, it should be easy for us to be faithful to Him. (Inaudible (00:20:55)).
Look at the God we've got and we have problems being faithful to this kind of God. A loving kind sensitive God. Are you following where I want to go here today? Faithfulness to Him will resolve a lot of struggles and debate and battles inwardly that you have. You'll resolve those because it's automatically no longer pressure, you already made your mind up. I can't go there, I can't do that because I'm faithful to God, there's just certain things that my commitment, my loyalty won't allow me to do. There is a line that I won't cross and in the lines of most Christians you need to get those boundaries, where’s the line that you won't cross? You're dangerous if do anything. Where's the line that you won't cross? My family have sons in the ministry, they've just grown and grown and grown and there was one time where I was flying all over the country because they couldn't seem to figure out who they're supposed to be sleeping with, so I had to go and tell them who they're supposed to be sleeping with. Yeah, but you don't understand, the secretary. Get you an ugly secretary or somebody who's not attracted to you. You don't need to be getting all nice looking seductive and there are certain things I don't allow my staff to wear, I don't want a woman working on my staff to come in there with a dress that looks like it's been painted on and then all this way up here and high heels and long finger nails, no no no, you've got to go somewhere with all that, because we represented my God. Faithfulness to God, I better get started here, I think you know where we're going right.
So (inaudible (00:23:18)) so I'm taking every available opportunity to address our issues about being what we're doing here. Look at Luke chapter 6 and (inaudible (00:23:29)), you know, every Christian wants God to show up and do what He promised, every Christian wants God to manifest himself, every Christian wants to see results, why is that not so? What is it that we are not doing for God to be faithful when we really need it? You know, I need to know that honey, if I'm on an airplane that's going down, I need to know that God's going to be faithful to me, I don't (inaudible (00:23:57)), that is not the time for me to wonder if God's going to show up, I need to know that He's going to show up. Look at Luke chapter 6 and I want to start at verse 36, I want you to notice something here, "Be ye therefore merciful as your Father also is merciful." He said you be merciful and then your Father will be merciful. "Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, you shall not be condemned. Forgive and you shall be forgiven." What do you notice here? Give and it shall be given. Go over to Mark 11, let's just look in a (inaudible (00:24:57)). Mark 11 verse 25 "When you stand praying, forgive, if you have ought against any, that's your Father (inaudible (00:25:14)). There's a pattern here folks, if you don't judge others, I won't judge you, if you don't condemn others I won't condemn you, He says if you forgive others God says I'll forgive you, there's a pattern going on here. And then I checked this out in James chapter 4 verse 8 "Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you." Are you seeing a pattern here, talk to me about this pattern, what are you seeing? There are things (inaudible (00:25:48)) and then it goes back and it also says "If you don't, He don't" so it seems to me Gods movement in my life is based on my movement in my life. If I forgive what happens, he forgives. If I condemn not, what happens, He's not going to condemn me. If I judge not, what happens, He won't judge me. If I give, what happens, He'll make sure that it's given unto me. I don't want to say this statement, it's going to be hard on the flesh but whatever you don't have right now you didn't deposit, there's a reason why.
(Inaudible (00:26:41)) you've got to look at yourself. Well, what about this issue we're talking about here, God being faithful to me, faithful to me that when I pray I get answers, I (inaudible (00:26:54)) or when I do this or do that then God does what He's supposed to do or what He promised. I have to have (inaudible (00:27:07)), if He don't do it then I can do it by myself. So I've got to have Him showing and demonstrating faithfulness in my life, I need God to be faithful to me. Now imagine what it must have took for Moses to go before the Red Sea (inaudible (00:27:28)), everybody is trying to figure what's going on, (inaudible (00:27:49)) and the more Moses was demonstrating to God, the more God was (inaudible (00:27:58)) and it was faithfulness to God that caused God to be faithful to Moses and the children of Israel and the Red Sea opened. (Inaudible (00:28:08)), it was like a hurricane coming and that wave all of a sudden parts that water, (inaudible (00:28:19)), imagine how strong that wind had to be to dry the dry ground off, suck that moisture clean out of that ground that they walked over and had no muddy feet. Moses faithfulness to God harvested Gods faithfulness to Moses. I want to know that God is faithful to me at gunpoint, I would like to know that God is going to be there, it is not the time to be figuring (inaudible (00:28:52)), you need to know God's going to be there. When they told me in New York that some guy tried to plot something to assassinate me or shoot me or something, (inaudible (00:29:12)) but God's faithful, it don't matter because He's faithful. I can't to live my life if God is not faithful. I can't afford to do that because I need Him, in Him we move and breathe, I've got to have it.
I can't be playing the games and then looking around and wondering is God real, God must not be real because there isn’t nothing happened yet, I didn't get anything, I don't see nothing yet. I have been praying and praying and isn’t nothing happening yet. You're floating around now, you're having problems because you don't see God as being a faithful God. Well, let's go right back to you, have you been the faithful servant. Brother, would you pray for me, you don't have faith in your own prayers, why? Because you haven't done what you're supposed to do to harvest the faithfulness of God and I want us to harvest the faithfulness of God, I want you and I to harvest the faithfulness of God to such a point that you know He's going to be there when you need Him without a second guess. So how can I have that confidence, because I know I've been there when He needed me, when He said go I went, when He said jump I said how high, do you understand what I'm saying, I became His servant and (inaudible (00:30:39)) God must be reliable, are you reliable, can God trust you to be reliable, can He trust you, how reliable are you, you're not reliable to the people that you know, you know why, because we're reliable to God. Whatever is going on vertically is a result of what's happening horizontally. Put your hands up, everybody, put your hands up right now. Somebody is going to go I don't know if I'm ready to make this decision, too bad, we're going to make it. Say it out loud, Father, I pledge my faithfulness to You right now, in the name of Jesus and receive Your faithfulness to me, in the name of Jesus. That's it. You've got to walk in that man, you've got to walk in that.
Now let's look at some Scriptures. (Inaudible (00:31:53)) can faithfulness be that powerful to produce such a connection that I can actually be blessed for my faithfulness or am I having to wait till I get to Heaven (inaudible (00:32:09)). I want to know if my faithfulness is going to do something for me right now, what will my faithfulness produce for me right now. Proverbs 28, what will my faithfulness produce for me right now, you know, we're talking about getting out of debt, you know, God is faithful in getting people out of debt but is he faithful in getting you out of debt? Well, it all depends on how faithful you are. Check it out, verse 20, read it with me "A faithful man shall abound in blessings", that just tells me right here that as a faithful man I will...do you all understand what it means abounding, that's a serious word, that's a (inaudible (00:33:03)) type of word, that a faithful man will abound in blessings, that means the man is just floating in it, do you understand what I'm saying, I mean he's got blessings coming in, blessing coming out, blessed to the left, blessed to the right, blessings when he's sitting down, blessing when he's standing up, when he goes to New York he's blessed, when he goes to Florida he's blessed, when (inaudible (00:33:29)), the man’s just blessed all the time, why? Because of his faithfulness to God, that a faithful man abounds in blessings, a faithful man. If you believe in God to get you out of debt, you know what (inaudible (00:33:44)) it's your faithfulness to God, faithfulness to not owe God anything, not get in debt with God. (Inaudible (00:33:54)), it ought to 15 or 20 minutes of Lord, thank you, that was good and Lord, I appreciate that and God is so ready to show his faithfulness towards you but his heart forgot to do that, (inaudible (00:34:23)) faithfulness shown towards Him. Sometimes we take it for granted.
The Lord is good, He isn’t supposed to do nothing but what He says, did you hear what I said, he isn’t supposed to do nothing but what he says. A faithful man abounds in blessings, that's an s folks, in blessings. That's anointing, that's prosperity, that's healing, that's deliverance, that's peace, that's happiness, that's joy, it's delightful to say could it get any better Lord (inaudible (00:35:02)), it's the abundant life He promised you. But how do you get it? Faithful, I'm faithful to God. When nobody else will, here's the question, will you? If God can't depend on nobody else, can He depend on you? Do you understand what I'm saying? I asked Lord about that, I said God, the gifts and callings of God are giving what I repented, I recognize that and I know you call who You will and all that stuff. I said but Lord, how come I had to have two or three callings on my life, how come I just couldn't be as happy or as evangelist, one or the other, how come I got (inaudible (00:36:01)), why can't you just keep with one of them. He said because hope, I never had any more problem after He told me this. He said there's other people who's supposed to be doing this but won't and you're the only one I can find faithful enough to get the job done until I can get somebody else to do it.
God spoke to me those several months ago this year and He says I'm about to relieve you from some of this, I've found some faithful men. And I'm going to tell you something, lots of faithful people, you know, if I'm don't have to go do it no more somebody will have to go do it, do you understand what I'm saying? I know what my reason for calling was, my reason for calling was passion (inaudible (00:36:55)), you know, going in there and fighting the devil (inaudible (00:37:03)) , I get high off that, I like that stuff. (Inaudible (00:37:13)) their whole life change, they feel prosperous, you see them a year down the road, they don't look like the same folks and you are like man, that's what I'm talking about, that's what you live for. And then you get on the road to evangelism and they flood the alter with hundreds of folks like what happened in Los Angeles and you don't want to (inaudible (00:37:53)), you want to minister to them all night long. Would God do that, remember the reason He said He called Abraham, He said I called Abraham because I knew he'd be faithful (inaudible (00:38:07), He said I needed somebody that was going to be faithful enough to teach it to his children. There've been times in my life where God said I need you to help me in something, will you? And I said, yeah Lord, what is it? I have a situation over here that I can't get nobody to help me with because all of the preachers have allowed the law to block out my message, will you help me?
And He sent me out to see a guy who had been advertised, He went with me, we went out there to Texas to see the guy right before he got into jail, I think blessings changed that man’s life. (Inaudible (00:38:46)), he did what he wanted to do and that's the only reason he went to jail, (inaudible (00:38:52)) and the Lord said no, I need you to help me, how else can I get the man to repent if nobody is going to show him love, will you help me in this? Yes sir. And anytime you hear that kind of stuff God says I can depend on you (inaudible (00:39:18)) I can depend on you, do you hear what he's saying, you can depend on me. (Inaudible (00:39:27)) can He depend on you to get up because obviously He's tried to get somebody else but they wouldn't get up, can He depend on you. (inaudible (00:39:42)) and they need prayer and God says I need somebody who's faithful, the Bible says in Proverbs a faithful man, who can He find, He's searching for somebody that He can depend on, somebody that's reliable. Oh yeah, I was waiting for the Spirit of God (inaudible (00:40:04)), be careful not to allow excuses to become the rope that you use to climb out of the perfect will of God for your life. Watch me very carefully. The training involves making your bed, somebody challenging you to do it, you have that (inaudible (00:40:42)) and he doesn't bend to the left, he doesn't bend to the right for the sake of the people.
He says (inaudible (00:40:50)). One phrase that the Lord gave me that I use to train someone, some of the leaders we have right now today. A little phrase that simply says why is irrelevant. Check it out now, why is irrelevant, you have to be careful because we set a goal and then when we don't reach it and we'll say we're faithful and then when we fail we have a tendency to come out of it with an excuse, we're the reason why. And so the excuse becomes our avenue to walk out of our faithfulness and we think that we're okay because here's the reason why I couldn't be faithful. (inaudible (00:42:06)), here's the reason why I couldn't be faithful. Now here's what I want you to see, regardless of the reason why faithfulness still was not obtained, why it was not obtained is still irrelevant, the goal wasn't reached, the destination wasn't reached, you can up with all of the excuses of why it wasn't reached, the bottom line it wasn't reached. And I tell you what, that'll train you, that'll discipline you because what happened is you come up with this really important excuse, I was late because I had a flat tire. Okay, you had a flat tire but you still didn't fulfill the objective. But I had a flat tire, but you still didn't fill the objective.
The objective had one thing to fill (inaudible (00:43:14)) That'll get you established, that'll get you disciplined, that'll get you ready for the things of God. I can see right now, Moses, Abraham, God tell them to go up to the mountains, (inaudible (00:43:47)). Abraham, I told you to stop. Well God, I was emotional, I got emotional about this, that's the reason why I didn't stop is because I was really into it. It's irrelevant, there was a goal, you missed the mark. You know where I'm going with this now, you missed the mark, why've you missed the mark is irrelevant and you are going to be able to come with pages of reasons that you missed the mark because you realize that Heaven will operate by what I've just said why is irrelevant. There'll be millions of people on their way to hell, telling God why, thousands of people that missed Heaven that have a reason why but all God knows was I planted a destiny for your life and you never arrived and so I'm not going to judge you, I am not going to judge you by the way of your excuses, I am not going to judge you by the way of your reasons. (inaudible (00:45:19)) No, you've got to focus in on the objective, (inaudible (00:45:33)) because one of the excuses within your minds eyes (inaudible (00:45:39)) you still have an unfulfilled objective that didn't get fulfilled, why not?
Somebody’s life's on the line, somebody need to be faith, somebody need to be delivered, somebody need to be praying for, God has set you up for it, He pleaded you for that very destiny but you never got there. So Heaven is not going to be (inaudible (00:46:03)) sorting through all the excuses, it's got to figure out why. God will only judge you based on that which He called you to do. (inaudible (00:46:17)) I gave you all the reasons (inaudible (00:46:21)) but you don't want to go because you didn't like (inaudible (00:46:27)). Oh, let me see what was that, oh yeah, this is the 195th time I was getting ready to quit. And I had a vision like this one on my left, I had too many visions, had the vision of this Church and maybe two others. It's been very, very clear where it almost look like you could touch them, I mean the visions where I open my eyes and they're still going on, I mean that'll freak you out, your eyes are open and it's like whoa, what's up. And I saw myself coming into Heaven and the gates opened and the angels turned their back, their wings, like in disgrace and I approached the throne of God and I heard these words "Faithless servant, a vision incomplete", that's not what I heard He's supposed to say, I'd always thought He's supposed to say "My good and faithful servant, well done" but I didn't reach my destiny, I was so busy trying to figure out how to die early because I was tired of people, you tired of doing right, they do you wrong. Talking about me and all I'm doing is love them, (inaudible (00:48:55)). That doesn't excuse the fact that I didn't do what God told me to do, God gave me an assignment, He gave me a destiny.
All of my hurts, all of my pains, all of my discouragement, all of the attack on my body, all of everything still won't matter, I didn't reach my destiny. Now here's why it's such a serious thing in Heaven, look who you've got helping you, if you did not have the helper that you had then (inaudible (00:49:46)) Oh Lord I couldn't do that because of a flat tire and He put the anointing on Elijah to outrun (inaudible (00:50:07)) God has enough anointing and has enough faithfulness based on (inaudible (00:50:28)), it's something about a man who appears to be faithful against all odds that opens up the faithfulness of God to anoint him, to do whatever it said cannot be done. You all know what I'm talking about. Simple tenacity (inaudible (00:50:55)) that refuses to accept deceit, I will not quit. There are certain times that the tax on my body (inaudible (00:51:15)) God said go to Africa, he said go there and I went there in the condition I was in and it got healed on the way. I've come to Church, I've been to Church with temperatures that were outrageously high and God healed when I got to my destiny, my provision is at my destination and the excuses are trying to keep me from my provision, that's why why has to be irrelevant, that's why there's got to be somebody in the midst that says sweetheart, I hear you but it's irrelevant and if you can protect yourself from (inaudible (00:52:11)) Why is irrelevant, it's irrelevant that I've got a bunch of staff people that aren't lead by the Holy Spirit, they come and tell me I couldn't do that, they just think I'm a hard man, I know about this God that I serve and I can't tolerate somebody saying I can't do it because of that or this happened or that happened, I will never accept it, small Church attendance because it was raining. I remember one time I (inaudible (00:53:25)) that's the biggest sign to get up at all costs, get here immediately, get past your comfort zone, get to your destination.
People want to come to Church, I want to come tonight but...All you're doing is showing God He can't depend on you, you're not reliable, He wants to use you to (inaudible (00:53:56)) but He don't know how you're going to feel the next Church service so I mean so He's got to go find somebody that's going to be faithful. You know, He's got a steward, do you know what a steward is? A steward is a manager, stewards are found already faithful, they don't become faithful, they're first found faithful. That's the revelation from servants to steward, they're found faithful, God didn't find you faithful. So now what have you done since you've been born again? What test have you passed? You know, my wife and I were talking about this the other day, I have to receive your gift for your account, (inaudible (00:54:47)), do you understand what I'm saying. I've been delivered from that, faithful. You know what, even in that area God says can I depend on you to receive or are you going to act like the rest of these foolish creatures? You need that more than I do. I found out after holding onto this stuff a little bit they’re go home and cry, say God please, let the harvest come, you've got to be faithful to me, do you understand what I'm saying? Why? Because I've got to be faithful to Him. Aah, somebody has been healed on the right side of their back, I felt that right now. Now, let me give you some more Scripture.
What time is it? Nice watch brother. Can I share something, Rick stand up. Let me just show you faithfulness. Rick used to be homeless, no place to stay, something happened in his life and every year God keeps proving His faithfulness to him and he proves his faithfulness back to God. Now, at this very point, he's the owner of how many...I mean, I know your wife oversees one of them. He now has three medical labs, he's the owner, medical labs, owns a salon, sales consultants, do you want to know what happened? When I travel around this country, they take time off and say we're going to go help pastor, London, Australia, we'll be out there to help you because God blessed us and has been faithful to us, I'm going to be faithful to Him and the faithfulness towards God, and don't forget that He bless you, is what keeps the blessing coming in your life, faithfulness is the key. Honey, most people get successful and then they stay home, they get successful you don't see them no more, they're out of debt where the Lord has blessed them, amen, you don't see them no more. Well, don't forget the Lord because as soon as you stop being faithful to Him, He has no choice, not because He wants to but the faithfulness towards you will be hindered because of what you sowed. The whole earth operates by the Kingdom of Gods system which means a man sows the seeds and then he reaps the harvest, faithfulness is the seeds sown and the harvest received.
Look at this, Psalms 75 and I finished this up on Friday. Look at verse 6-7 "For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, it doesn't come from the south. God is the judge, he putteth down one and setteth up another." Turn to your neighbor and tell him God's setting you up. I don't think you understand what He says, He says I got enough power to demote one person and promote another, I can shift down one and push up another. As the people are walking around (inaudible (00:59:26)) right now, when God said promotion don't come from the North, it don't come from the East, it doesn't come from the West, it doesn't come from your boss man, it comes from me, I'm the one that has set you apart, I'm the one that will you where I put you, I'm the one (inaudible (00:59:43)). Now this is something that's got to be practiced in every of your life, (inaudible (01:00:17)) because the faithful man abounds and blesses. Can God depend on you to get into His presence, can God depend on you to pray for others, can God depend on you to sow the seeds so He can release it, what can God depend on you? Ask yourself, can God depend on me to minister to the unfaithed family members, can God depend on me to be the middle person and reconciliation (inaudible (01:00:49)), can God depend on me, whatever God needs to be done can He depend on me to do it? Well folks, answer the question, let's go beyond religion, let's go beyond the norm, let's get off this mountain, we've been here long enough. I like what He said, it's time to come up hither. (inaudible (01:01:18)), it's time to come up hither and you can't do that practicing sin, practice faithfulness, don't practice sin. If you've been looking at somebody’s wife and doing it maybe stop, you devil, I cast you out in the name of Jesus, stop. You had better not look at my wife in a lustful way, we'll have an exorcism because that's my woman, my woman. Can't get enough of your love baby.
Oh God, give mercy (inaudible (01:02:26)) we come before you with faithfulness, that you will come before us with faithfulness. We're not going to let excuses become the thing that keep us out of the supernatural, we're not going to let excuses rob us from the supernatural, we're not going to let sin rob us from the supernatural. (inaudible (01:02:57)) There is a level in you that many haven't reached because of their lack of faithfulness, Lord we're going to break that barrier, we're going to break it in the name of Jesus and we will arrive in the place that you have appointed for us. I give you praise now. We worship you Lord, we receive this word right now, we judge our lives, we judge ourselves, You will be able to rely on us, You can rely on us, (inaudible (01:03:46)) Look no further God, you have found world changes, we're ready Lord, we're ready God, we're determined we're going to see Your word work, we praise you Lord and all of the things that are going on and all the things that seem to stop us and get us distracted and intrude on our mind, you're better than that Lord because the greater one lives on the inside of us and there is nothing that we're being challenged with that is greater than the one that is living on the inside of us, equipping us, guiding us and leading us in the way we should go. Glory, praise you Jesus, praise you Jesus. Thank you Jesus, praise you Jesus.
There are folks right now Lord, in the hospital going through things and they need healing power, I send it now, I send your healing power God to those faithful believers right now, they're being attacked in their body and I send the word of healing to make them whole and well, restoring the bones who have lost, renew unto us the joy of our salvation, renew a right spirit, Oh God. (inaudible (01:05:49)) God, we want You, praise you Jesus.
As previously mentioned, this series goes on for three sets of six tapes each, these can be obtained from Creflo Dollar ministries, PO Box 490124, College Park, Georgia, GA39349 in the United States or from other Creflo Dollar ministries around the world. I really believe that this message in faithfulness is one of the keys to experiencing Heaven on earth. At the same time, I must also stress that until we come to a place where we walk in the fullness of marriage, we will not come to a place where you walk in the fullness of our Christian walk. It just struck me as I was listening to this tape, the two go hand in hand, the next series of tapes that are in this series, all address different aspects of the Christian walk, all of them are central to our walk in marriage, you cannot separate our marriages from our Christian walk. If our marriage is not the way God intended it to be then our Christian walk is not the way God intended it to be. And this is a really important thing to recognize with regard to the ministry, you cannot be the prophet God called us to be until we're the husband God called us to be, likewise, the apostle evangelist, the pastor or the teacher.
And it's really important for women to understand they cannot be the woman of God, that God's called them to be until they are the wife that God's called them to be. God has called women to serve Him through their marriages, through their husbands. The husband is the head of the wife just as Jesus Christ is the head of the husband. It is the husbands job to draw close to God and the wife’s job to draw close to her husband, she cannot serve God by getting into disagreement and disunity and disharmony with her husband. If she will press into God through her husband, she will press her husband towards God. If she bypasses him she will come out of his covering and will expose herself to all sorts of problems. We need to see that the point that was made in the teaching, a loving kind and sensitive God. Husbands, we need to ask ourselves, are we loving kind and sensitive, we need to draw the boundaries that we won't cross, we need to come to a place where we see a marriage which is Heaven on earth as being part of our destiny and we need to seek to accomplish that.
Tithing
I felt impressed just to include in this another teaching by Creflo Dollar or part of it, it's entitled a Covenant connector and it refers to the tithe, it's a little booklet also from Creflo Dollar ministries. Starting, the chapters entitled, the earth is the Lords. For the earth is the Lords and the fullness there of. 1 Corinthians 10:26 "We are owners of nothing but called to be faithful stewards of all that God blesses us with." "For we brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out." 1 Timothy 6:7. In other words, everything on the face of this earth belongs to God, everything. There is absolutely nothing we brought into this world and there is likewise, nothing we can take with us when we leave. As simple as that is to grasp when it comes to most material things, Christians have traditionally been unable or unwilling to accept that idea when it comes to what they label as their money. "The truth of the matter is, God has blessed you with whatever increase you obtain and requires only that you return to Him the tithe of 10% of your increase. To tithe is to return to God 10% of what He has given you. Inherent in our willingness to tithe is the acknowledgment of God's ownership of everything in the earth, including our finances. Therefore, the tithe should be an expression of your appreciation and thanks giving to God for what He has done in your life. It should not be seen as a burden or a loss, it should be seen as the opportunity it is for you to prosper in the things of God and that includes prospering in your marriage. And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land or of the fruit of the trees, the Lord said is Holy unto the Lord and if a man will at all redeem ought of his tithes he shall add there to the 5th part thereof and concerning the tithe of the herd or of the flock, even of whatsoever passeth under the rod, the tent shall be Holy unto the Lord. He shall not search whether it be good or bad, neither shall he change it and if he changed it at all then both it and the change thereof shall be Holy, it shall not be redeemed."
These are the commandments which the Lord commanded Moses for the children of Israel and mount Sinai, Leviticus 27:30 - 34. Notice in the first verse we are told that the tithe belongs to the Lord, it is not yours or mine to do with whatever we choose because it doesn't belong to us, it belongs to God. In Proverbs 3:9 we're instructed to honor the Lord with our substance and with the first fruits of all our increase. The substance of our finances is what we are to honor the Lord with, thanking Him for the provision to have our needs met. The first fruits are equal to the tithe so anywhere in the Bible it refers to first fruits you know it also belongs to the Lord. Now, if you're a good businessman, you know the tithe of your business belongs to God. Only 90% of your business is yours and the first fruits of all your profit should be presented as tithes in honor to the Lord. As a Christian, only 90% of your time is yours, the remainder should be spent in time of prayer, fasting and communion of God. Likewise, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit on loan to you from above. It was purchased with the price and on the day of judgment you will have to give an account of how you carried yourself. What I need for you to see, child of God, is that tithing is not an option, it is not something that has been put up for a vote for us to decide whether or not it's the right thing to do. No, God says that the first fruit, the initial 10% of your increase is His. It is dedicated and set aside for His use. Folks come up with all sorts of reasons as to why they should not, could not or would not tithe. They say things like well, it's an Old Testament thing, it's not mentioned in the New Testament, we don't have to tithe. Others try to justify not tithing by saying that God surely is not moved by something as basic as money. The problem is that up until now we have not understood God's heart on this subject and, in so doing, have missed out on the blessings we are supposed to inherit through tithing.
Working our way through Scripture, we will prove that tithing is a Biblical mandate, a Covenant issue and an opportunity to honor God. Victory in your life is determined by how you handle the tithe. The tithe is Holy, as we discovered in the previous chapter, the tithe is Holy, it belongs to the Lord and it is Holy. Being Holy has nothing to do with how you dress, it's not in outward things, Holiness is the state of being in agreement with God, it is the state of being of one mind with God. To be Holy is to find out what the Bible says and to be in agreement with what God says. In the Old Testament there was something else deemed Holy and sacred unto God and that was the Ark of the Covenant, the Sacred portable chest along with its two related items. The (inaudible (01:15:13)) was the most important sacred object to the Israelites during the wilderness period, also known as the Ark of the Lord, it was the only article of furniture in the inner most room or Holiest of Holies, of Moses tabernacle and of Solomon’s temple. This was something so special that a person could not just touch irrelevantly, it was so Holy that even if you touched it unintentionally you would die. In the Bible, the word death is literally translated as a separation in when a man touches the tithe or mishandles the tithe, separation from God takes place. When you're Holy, whatever the Bible says is wrong is what you say is wrong, whatever the Bible says is right is what you say is right. If the Bible says that behaving in a certain way is sin, well that's what you say is sin, that's Holiness.
Now when He says the tithe is Holy and we understand the definition of Holiness, then we begin to see the tithe as the thing that keeps us in agreement with what God has promised. God has given us a Covenant and then He has given us this system called tithing which is an avenue by which we maintain or break agreement, to tithe is to maintain the agreement between you and God, on the contrary to not tithe is to break agreement with God. Tithing the tithe is the process by which you present your tenth to Jesus, our High Priest, the author and finisher of our faith. When you are tithing the tithe, you are constantly confirming your agreement with God and with the Covenant promises attached to the tithe. The problem most people have with the Leviticus 27 is that it is in the Old Testament, because it is located in that portion of the Bible, most people will say they don't have to receive that as a commandment from God and believe that we're governed only by the New Testament. Well folks, this is what I perceive concerning this New Testament/Old Testament issue, if we're not obligated to keep the entire Bible then God would have only given us the New Testament. You may have been lead to believe that since some publishers only print those little green Bibles that only include the books from Matthew to Revelation. Now we do live under the New Testament but the Old Testament is foreshadow and a foundation, it acts as a column to hold up the beliefs and confirm the position of the New Testament. But how obligated are you, is this just an Old Testament issue, can you just ignore the commandments about tithing because you consider yourself a New Testament Christian.
Well now, let's back up a little bit, let's go to the book of Genesis and answer this question, let's decide once and for all if this is an Old Testament issue or if it is a Covenant issue. Second chapter of Genesis begins the saga of a man by the name of Adam, he was, as you may know, the first man we see in the restructuring of the earth. I didn't say he was the first man on the earth but that's a discussion for another book, another time. God is talking to Adam, he gives him the garden authority and all these other neat things and makes promises of what is to come. Then in Genesis 2:16 and 17 he says of every tree of the garden they must eat freely but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thy shall not eat of it, from that day that thy eats thereof they shall surely die. Well, in fact, you could only eat 90% of the garden, God specifically told Adam not to eat of the dedicated tree, God was telling Adam that they would be able to maintain the agreement they had just as long as Adam did not touch that which was Gods. The success of their agreement was based on whether or not Adam touched the dedicated thing. As far as God was concerned, if that happened, the agreement was off and he would have to separate from Adam. You're probably saying he did eat of the tree and the Bible says he was going to die but yet he lived several hundred more years, there was still a death, the separation that took place in that situation, the glory that Adam had been walking in, the promise to walk like God and be like God was over, he touched Gods stuff and since he touched Gods stuff the agreement was off, not to be reinstated until someone came along to redeem the crown.
I think it's important to understand that tithing is an absolutely fundamental part of our Covenant with God, if you're not tithing you cannot reasonably expect God to heal your marriage and you cannot reasonably expect to have ongoing revelations in the word of God. Tithing is such a fundamental principle and part of our Covenant that if you're not tithing I would urge you forthwith to commence tithing in Jesus name. That completes the message on faithfulness and I'm sure you can see just how absolutely central faithfulness is to this message on marriage and what a critical component it is of seeking to bring Heaven to earth in marriage. Father, in the name of Jesus, I ask you to blow away by Your Spirit anything that I have spoken that is not according to Your word and anything that has been in the teaching and corporated in here that is not according to Your word and I ask you that all that is of you Lord and all that is contained in this tape will find deep root in the hearts of the hearers and take root and grow and produce abundant fruit in Jesus name. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Lord of Lords and King of Kings, Amen.
This message has been recorded by a Church without walls, a ministry of end time issue ministries, Po Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg, 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at james@endtimeissues.org.za. Our phone numbers international dialing code, normally 0027 but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline 0027 11 791 2327 or in South Africa 011 791 2327. My number 0027 83 251 6644 and in South Africa 083 251 6644. Our fax number internationally 0027 11 791 5004 and locally 011 791 5004. All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the word.
We pray that this message has blessed you and that it will assist you in your service of the Lord Jesus Christ, in Jesus name, Amen.
04 06 Before the Judgment Seat of Christ in this Life
Message 6 in Volume 2 of this series ‑ 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' Volume 2 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage' and Lesson 6 'Before the Judgement Seat of Christ in this Life.' This teaching is an inclusion of a teaching given in the church without walls on November 13, 1999 by myself as the first tape in this series of 10 teaching tapes around the subject of judgement in this life in the house of the Lord Jesus Christ. The overall message of this series is how the church experiences judgement in its life. Word of God says that judgement will begin in the House of the Lord and you have heard in previous tapes in this series, various direct and indirect references to the Lord's judgement in this life.
There is no doubt that if you are not walking in the fullness of God's blessings, one of the areas that may well be affecting you is the area of marriage, adultery, and so forth. And in the teaching on One Flesh Bond where we went in some detail into how ungodly One Flesh Bond with a spouse that is no longer resident with you can give the enemy great ammunition with which to attack your marriage, to attack your finances, to attack your health. This tape gives the introductory overview to the concept of judgement in this life. In order to fully understand the subject you would need to obtain the 14-tape series which is available from us.
On the subject of judgement in this life, you can turn to 1 Peter 4:17 and I am reading from the New King James unless I indicate otherwise. 1 Peter 4:17 says, "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? Now if the righteous one is scarcely saved, where will the ungodly and the sinner appear? Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator." What I would like to do then is to read from the book 'The Final Quest' by Rick Joyner, which is a series of five report of the series of five visions experienced by Joyner, and during this progression of visions Joyner sees himself ascending the mountain of God. He sees the demonic battle that is taking place in the world at the moment and he sees into the spirit realm and he sees large numbers of Christians taken prisoner by the enemy by Demons and fallen Angels and placed in considerable bondage and fighting amongst one another.
He subsequently climbs to the top of the mountain and experiences pure worship such as he has never known before and he experiences a particular change in the situation when he reaches Galatians 2:20 which is crucified with Christ, and reaches a place where he is no longer conscious of self and subsequently given the Mantle of Humility which allows him to see it more clearly what is going on. He subsequently goes into one of the rooms in Heaven and from there he finds himself in the judgement hall in Heaven and having gone through a very taxing progression of meetings with people who have previously died he comes before the judgement seat of Christ and in the process of the dialogue that takes in place between Joyner and the Lord Jesus Christ, he reports the following conversation in response to the Lord Jesus asking Joyner whether he wanted to sit on one of the High Thrones in Heaven with Christ for eternity.
In page 118 Joyner responds: There was no way that I could answer "yes" to the Lord's question if I considered myself worthy to sit here. I was not worthy to sit in the company of any who were there. I knew I had been given the opportunity to run for the greatest prize in heaven or earth, and I had failed. I was desperate, but there was still one hope. Even though most of my life had been a failure, I knew that I was here before I had finished my life on earth. When I confessed that I was not worthy, He asked: "But do you want this seat?"
"I do with all of my heart," I responded. The Lord then looked at the galleries and said, "Those empty seats could have been filled in any generation. I gave the invitation to sit here to everyone who has called upon My name. They are still available. Now the last battle has come, and many who are last shall be first. These seats will be filled before the battle is over. Those who will sit here you will know by two things: they will wear the mantle of humility, and they will have My likeness. You now have the mantle. If you can keep it and do not lose it in the battle, when you return you will also have My likeness. Then you will be worthy to sit with these, because I will have made you worthy. All authority and power has been given to Me, and I alone can wield it. You will prevail, and you will be trusted with My authority only when you have come to fully abide in Me. Now turn and look at My household."
I turned and looked back in the direction I had come from. From before His throne I could see the entire room. The spectacle was beyond any earthly comparison for its glory. Millions filled the ranks. Each individual in the lowest rank was more awesome than an army, and I knew had more power. It was far beyond my capacity to absorb such a panorama of glory. Even so, I could see the only a very small portion of the great room was occupied.
I then looked back at the Lord and was astonished to see tears in His eyes. He had wiped the tears away from every eye here, but His own. As a tear ran down His cheek he caught it in His hand. He then offered it to me.
"This is My cup. Will you drink it with Me?"
There was no way that I could refuse Him. As the Lord continued to look at Me I began to feel His great love. Even as foul as I was He still loved me. As undeserving as I was He wanted me to be close to Him. Then He said: "I love all of these with a love that you cannot now understand. I also love all who are supposed to be here but did not come. I have left the ninety nine to go after the one who was lost. My shepherds would not leave the one to go after the ninety nine who are still lost. I came to save the lost. Will you share My heart to go to save the lost? Will you help to fill this room? Will you help to fill these thrones, and every other seat in this hall? Will you take up this quest to bring joy to heaven, to Me and to My Father? This judgment is for My own household, and My own house is not full. The last battle will not be over until My house is full. Only then will it be time for us to redeem the earth, and remove the evil from My creation."
So we see that the emptiness of Heaven and the emptiness of the thrones in Heaven is related back to the judgement. We have also seen that based on that report, 99% of all people who have called on the Lord who could have been there are not in fact in Heaven. I really believe that we have to see that as a very, very sobering warning to the Body of Christ. We are so prone to assume that just because we prayed a decision for Christ that this all going to be planned early. In the same book on page 106, during the judgement process and Joyner is meeting various people who he either knew off during his life or he actually met or people who had died before his life and in the meetings and the conversations that take place, he is coming to realise how little he actually knows about the Kingdom of God and how many mistakes he has made and how much sin there is in his life, even though he has been serving Lord permanently for something like 25 years and published numerous books which are widely considered to be highly anointed and highly prophetic. Page 106 Joyner makes the remark: How could all of those who have not been given the grace of this experience have any hope at all I asked. I heard a new voice, "What you are experiencing here has been given you on Earth. Every relationship, every encounter with another person could teach you what you are learning here if you will keep that cloak of humility on and learn to always keep your attention fixed on his glory. You搀are given this experience now because you will write the vision and those who read it will understand it. Many will then be able to carry the glory and the power that they must carry into the last battle."
I was amazed to recognise this man as a contemporary of mine and I did not know that he had died. He goes on later to say that this man had become so proud at the end of his life that he was doing the Lord's prophets harming the disciples of others to the point that the Lord had to take him away early to humble him. That again the message there is that we can learn on Earth. The challenge is to understand how we learn on Earth and what mechanisms the Lord has provided for us to learn on Earth. Just by way of what I consider to be another salutary warning on page 94, page 95, he had a discussion with a man that he refers as the great reformer. He does not identify the man but it is apparent that this is a man who lived quite some time before Joyner and is widely regarded as a great reformer and in that conversation it transpires that this man was taken to Heaven and sits in Heaven today amongst the foolish virgins, those who only just made it into Heaven in relative terms, sitting in outer darkness in Heaven.
"As he talked, his words were striking me deeply. I, too, was guilty of everything that he was relenting of. Many young men and women who I had brushed off as not being important enough for my time were now passing through my mind. How desperately I wanted to return now and gather them together! This grief that I began to feel was even worse than I had felt about wasting time. I had wasted people! Now many of these were prisoners of the enemy, wounded and captured during the battle on the mountain. This whole battle was for people, and yet people were often regarded as the least important."
In another discussion with regard to Paul in which it is said that if Paul have not learnt in his life that the magnitude of his sinfulness he would not be sitting today on one of the greatest thrones in Heaven. So we see a whole panoply of information that should lead us to very carefully examine our hearts and to very carefully examine our understanding of the Word of God. And when I am seeking to develop in this teaching is to share my understanding in terms of some of the things that I perceive the Word of God shows us in dealing with this life and in a sense correlating what we experience in day-to-day living with what Joyner reports in 'The Final Quest' in what appears in the word and my personal life experience and seeking to serve the Lord and finding the many things that did not seem to work as I expected. We go to 1 Peter 5:8, the word says "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." And I want to stress the word 'may devour.' It is permissive. In other words, Satan cannot devour just because he feels like devouring. He must have permission to devour and by implication, he must have some basis on which to gain permission to devour. Verse 9 says, "Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world." So we are clearly told to resist the devil and to resist him in such a way that he may not devour us.
If we go back a couple of verses, verse 6 says, "Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you." Again, we see that He does not exact us when we feel like being exalted. He exalts us when the exaltation is dear that more significantly verse 5 says, "Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble," which is quoting Proverbs 3:34. So we see the same thread of humility versus pride encapsulated in these verses of Scripture which sum up a lot of the message that Joyner has for us that if we are proud, Satan will recreate havoc in our lives. So let's try and understand a little bit more about what it is that may cause the devil to be able to devour in our lives. We turn to John 10:10, the Scripture says and this is Jesus speaking, "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep." Then we see that pertaining to the passage in 'The Final Quest' that I read a moments ago where the Lord is saying that he laid down his life for the sheep. He went after those that were lost and yet in the church today, this somehow seems uncommon with anybody who considers himself to be in a position of leadership lays down their life in a way that is particularly noticeable. But the key part of this verse that the thief does not come except to steal and to kill and to destroy and the thief that has been referred to there is Satan. And he is coming to kill, steal and destroy those for whom he has obtained permission. We will go back to the verse which says "Seeking him whom he may devour."
If we go then to the Book of Revelation, chapter 12, and we seek to understand the process whereby Satan may gain permission to kill, steal, and destroy in our lives. We turn to Revelation 12:10, "Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, 'Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down.'" It is important to see there first of all that Satan is referred to as the accuser of the brethren that is confirmed in verse 9, which says "So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him." So it will seem from that verse given Revelation refers to the end of the age that as it is today, Satan is still before the Throne of God and he is still accusing the brethren which is every believer night and day and it would appear that the accusation may have something to do with this issue of Satan claiming permission to devour those whom he has permitted or whom he may devour.
If we consider John 6:70, there is a footnote in Lamb's translation of the Bible, from the Aramaic which says that Satan is one who causes to slide to slip or to miss the mark and sometimes I think we lose sight of who and what Satan is if we recognise that his objective in life is to cause us to slide or to slip or to miss the mark. In other words, to cause us to backslide to miss the mark and not to reach our high calling, not to reach what God has called us to do. Perhaps it reduces the mystique roundabout Satan. Again, what I am seeking to do is to understand how he goes about doing that. If we turn to Book of Job chapter 1, we begin to see the picture developing of this accuser of the brethren who is before the Throne of God night and day seeking whom he may devour. Job 1:6, "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. And the Lord said to Satan, 'From where do you come?' So Satan answered the Lord and said, 'From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.' Then the Lord said to Satan, 'Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?' So Satan answered the Lord and said, 'Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not made a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But now, stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face!'
And the Lord said to Satan, 'Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on his person.' So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord." And in the verses that follow, we see that all of Job's possessions are taken away and destroyed that his sons and daughters are killed by great one and that everything that he has, is taken from him barring his wife and himself, and he is not harmed in any way. Then it continues in chapter 2 and again Satan is before the Throne of God and in verse 3, "Then the Lord said to Satan, 'Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil? And still he holds fast to his integrity, although you incited Me against him, to destroy him without cause.' So Satan answered the Lord and said, 'Skin for skin! Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out Your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will surely curse You to Your face!' And the Lord said to Satan, 'Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life.' So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and struck Job with painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. And he took for himself a potsherd with which to scrape himself while he sat in the midst of the ashes. Then his wife said to him, 'Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!' But he said to her, 'You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?' In all this Job did not sin with his lips."
So we see a situation here in terms of which we clearly see Satan coming before the Throne of God. We clearly see a dialogue taking place and we clearly see Satan making certain assertions and requesting that certain things are done and we see God acceding to certain of those requests. The impression one gets from reading those verses of Job is of a capricious and God who in response to provocation from Satan will simply allow Satan to do whatever he feels like doing in a person's life as some form of a test. If that is the case then one is faced with some difficulty in understanding how to live the Christian walk. But if we turn to Job 3:25, we see what I certainly consider to be the pivotal verse in understanding what happened to Job. And it says, "For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes." We see earlier on in Job 1:5 that his sons and daughters were inclined to have significant parties which went on for some time, feasts which went on for days. In Chapter 1 Verse 5 it says, "So it was, when the days of feasting had run their course, that Job would send and sanctify them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, 'It may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.' Thus Job did regularly."
What is important about that particular verse is that Job did it because his sons may have sinned, not because they had sinned. So we see the manifestation of the fear. He did not have complete confidence in what the situation was. He was taking almost enormous precautionary measures in saying, "Well, maybe my children have sinned, so I better sacrifice for them." Instead of trusting God to shame if they had sinned and responding to the sin and confessing it. If we start getting into a situation where we are apologising for things that our children may have done when we do not know whether they have done it, I think that that is indicative of the fear that he refers to in chapter 3 in verse 25. Now, there is a verse in Scripture which says that without faith it is impossible to please God and elsewhere it says that God has not given us the spirit of fear but a spirit of love, power, and a solemn mind, and therefore we see that fear is not the same as faith. It has been taught quite widely and I believe that is in fact true is that faith is the opposite of fear. I cannot have faith and have fear at the same time. If I have faith in God, I will not fear and Scripture repeatedly tells us not to fear. Again, I have had it taught and it does seem to be correct that fear is in fact faith in the devil. So once we have fear, that means that in a certain area, we do not have faith in God. If we do not have faith in God, that is sin. It is not pleasing to God and furthermore it is fear in the devil and on the face of this particular Scripture, according to my understanding, it very clearly indicates that if we have fear, we have faith in the devil and that grants Satan a legal right to do what we fear.
So we see here that notwithstanding the fact that Job was righteous before God, he had on the face of it at least one sin in his life and that was that he had fear and that fear was fulfilled in the same way that if we have faith, the faith comes to pass if we have fear, that which we fear will come to pass. If we begin to understand that even though it is not explicitly mentioned in Job and it seems to me that many of these deeper things about the Word of God are not explicitly revealed possibly because they may have been removed from early manuscripts because Satan was not just prepared to have those things continue or because the Lord knew that if they were made explicit, they would be rejected or the documents would be destroyed. So for whatever reason, the Lord has chosen to obscure these things, but if one follows a process of systematic deductive reason, I believe that one has to conclude that Verse 3 Chapter 25 is the key to the basis of how Satan gained the right to attack Job, taken in the context of 1 Peter 5:8. If we then turn to Lamentations, Chapter 3:38, "Is it not from the mouth of the Most High That woe and well-being proceed? Why should a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins? Let us search out and examine our ways, and turn back to the Lord; Let us lift our hearts and hands to God in heaven. We have transgressed and rebelled; You have not pardoned. You have covered Yourself with anger and pursued us; You have slain and not pitied. You have covered Yourself with a cloud, that prayer should not pass through. You have made us an offscouring and refuse in the midst of the peoples."
So here we see that punishment for sins comes from God or the judgement which leads to the punishment at the very least comes from God and it obtains from the sin that we have in our lives from the transgression against the Word of God. If we turn then to 1 John 2:1-2, we read, "My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world." So we see that Jesus is our advocate with the Father. If we take all of these verses together and put together the jigsaw puzzle which I believe the Lord has given us in these Scriptures, we see God the Father sitting on the Throne of Judgement, we see Satan coming before the Throne of Judgement as the accuser of the brethren, the prosecutor if you like in modern legal parlance, the individual who brings the charges and demands a sentence, we see Jesus before the Throne of God or on the right hand of God, as the advocate pleading on our behalf, pleading in our defence and pleading for remission of the sentence or for the sentence to be waived or for us to receive forgiveness and then we see ourselves effectively in the dock before God being judged and Satan is bringing our sin before the Throne of God in a very rigorous legal basis. He is standing there effectively, one can almost perhaps imagine him standing there with the Bible in his hand and pointing at a specific verse or series of verses in Scripture which the person being tried has transgressed and it seems to me that in dealing with such a situation, an advocate can only plead on the basis of the evidence and if the evidence is such that the accused is in fact guilty and just advocate cannot plead against the guilt has to acknowledge the guilt and the only defence that is left in him is to plead for a remission of sentence or a reduction of sentence or extend in circumstances and I think we come to understand that and we begin to understand why Jesus died on the cross for us to receive forgiveness of sins, because once we confess our sins, he is faithful and just forgive us and so the minute we realise we sin if we immediately go on our knees before God and confess that we have sinned and we repent of that sin, we confess that it is wrong and we receive the forgiveness that Jesus brought for us on the cross, then that sin is washed away and if Satan then comes before the throne, it would seem that the advocate would then say that person has confessed and I paid the price in full. If we do not confess our sins, then it would seem to me that we do not have the covering of the blood of Jesus with regard to that sin. That sin is open, it is exposed. We are guilty because we have not paid the price and we have not taken the step of confessing the sin, repenting of the sin, and in that process, transferring the sin under the blood and receiving forgiveness and receiving grace.
It also would seem that in the same process that grace extends to incorporate on the one hand that the level of the judgement and the level of the sentence and whether in fact we found guilty is a function of our maturity in Christ. A newly born believer who does not know the world, does not know the ways of God, it seems that there are many things that I seem to envisage Jesus standing before the throne and saying to the Father, I urge you to extend grace to this individual at this time because he does not have the knowledge and he is a child in Christ, in much the same way that if a 3-year-old child takes hundred rand note off a table and he goes and puts it in the piggy bank or whatever, we will explain to him gently that it is wrong and just take it back from him and maybe just smack to his hand, but if a 40-year-old man does a similar thing in a business situation, we would expect him to receive a disciplinary hearing possibly to be dispersed possibly even for criminal charges to be placed against him depending on the sum of money involved. As I understand it is a form of grace as we mature in Christ, the graces is in a sense real black and at some point we are called to account for our lives fully without hiding behind the sacrifice that Jesus made and I think that is part of growing in Christ.
And we then see a situation where if we are not conscious of our sins, if we are not seeking God to reveal our sins, if we are not confessing and repenting our sins and receiving forgiveness when we make those sins, we open the door to Satan to go before the Throne of God and one then begins to envisage a situation where there is sin in one's life and Satan goes before the Throne of God, God considers the case, Jesus is unable to argue that the sin is not there, the sin is manifestly there and Jesus is unable to argue or is unable to extend his blood to cover the sin because there has been no confession and no repentance and no receiving of forgiveness and he is also unable to argue extenuating circumstances because the person has been born again for some years. They have plenty of time to read the scriptures, that have plenty of time to understand what the Scriptures say and they show no interest in dealing with the sin or understanding that what is happening in their lives is a consequence of sin and at that point, it would seem that the Father will then grant Satan permission to devour or to kill and steal and destroy in that person's life. So one can envisage him saying touch their finances but do not touch their bodies and one can envisage him at a later stage in the person's spiritual development saying he might touch his body but do not take his life and it would seem that one can perhaps even argue that why people who are relatively young in the Lord tend to possibly obtain and keep healing but may go through a lot of financial and personal loss in other areas and that in some way those people who are very mature in the Lord seem to suffer more with affections and one hears reports from time to time that people who regarded as great men or women of God, who have infirmities that they are just not able to be healed from even though they are laying hands on people and those people have been healed and it would seem that following this chain of thought, what happens there is that as they mature and perhaps deal with other areas in their lives, God then wants them to deal with things which are much more personal and which gives Satan the right to attack their health and so forth.
I really believe that we have to look at each and every instance whether it is illness, whether it is problems with cars, whether it is problems with finances or anything else. We need to seek the Lord to find out where the sin maybe. It does appear that one could draw a conclusion that may be there are certain Scriptures which say that trials and tribulations arise in any event but if we consider the scriptures which deal with the various instances where people were plotting to kill Jesus. For example, when he spoke in the synagogue of Nazareth and they took him to the top of the mountain to throw him off the mountain and it says that Jesus walked through the crowd because it was not their time, it really does seem that if there is absolutely no sin, Satan is unable to touch that person without God's expressed permission in exceptional circumstances. But it does seem to me that it is inconceivable that there is a single person on Earth who is without sin, therefore there is always an opportunity for Satan to attack that person. In Timothy it is Paul who refers to himself as the chief of sinners and in the interview with Joyner in 'The Final Quest' Paul makes the point that at the end of his life, he saw himself as the chief of sinners because there was so much that he knew to do that he did not do and so much that he knew not to do that he did do.
As we come to revelation of sin as anything which is not in the perfect will of God as we come to revelation of understanding that if we do not do what the Word of God tells us to do that is sin and it potentially opens the door for attack and conversely if we do anything that we know that the Word of God says we should not do that also potentially opens the door to attack. Again, I believe that one should not interpret this in a legalistic sense. One has to recognise that that is the practical reality of the spiritual dispensation under which we currently operate. Satan is the God of this world. He is the lord of this world. He is the king of this world. He is free to do what he likes on this world, except with regard to Christians and Jews, those people who have committed their lives to God and serve God and where they have come under the protection and therefore Satan requires some form of permission in order to deal with that. I think a lot of people will have a lot of difficulty with this teaching. A lot of people will say, "Well, what hope have I got?" And the hope that we have is that we have the hope in the blood of Jesus. We have the hope in the sacrifice of Jesus and if we are aware of our sinful natures, if we are aware that our righteousness is filthy rags in the sight of God, and that Jesus Christ is our righteousness. If we continuously stand on the Scripture that Jesus Christ as our righteousness, not as an excuser or a cop out to dealing with the sin in our life, but as a spiritual reality and if we constantly cry out to God to show us the sin in our lives to deliver us from that sin to show us what is required to deliver us from that sin, over time, we will draw closer to God.
If we see any trial or any situation which there is killing, stealing, or destroying in our lives, be it in our finances, be it in our health, be it in our families or whatever, if we immediately become sensitive to the fact that that can only be happening if Satan has permission to do it and he can only get permission if he has gone before the Throne of God, if the advocate has had to admit that the sin exists, if the advocate has to say that there is no repentance and there is no confession and therefore the sin is not covered by the blood. If the advocate has to say that the level of maturity of the believers is not at a level where grace can legitimately or reasonably be extended to them, and if the advocate has to admit that the person is not seeking to deal with sin in their lives and therefore there is no good basis on which the judge should not grant the prosecutor his petition in terms of judgement and sentence. If we can come to understand that, then we can understand that all that is required in the event of any form of attack in our lives is to immediately examine ourselves in the Word of God to immediately go before the Throne of God and to ask the Lord to show us exactly what it is and what we need to do. In my own experience that can very frequently give rise to having to deal with legacy issues, legacy sin, things arising out of adultery, fornication, lying, deception in one's lives before coming to salvation or going back into previous generations down the blood line. Many blood line curses will pass down ten generations.
And none of those things are simply just summarily washed away when we come to salvation as far as I can determine. Some of them, may be, but many of them are just covered for an interval by grace until we have the opportunity to come to the point where we can actually deal with it. But if we not prepared to deal with the blood line issues, if we are not prepared to deal with the sin of our forefathers and to confess it and repent, those sins of the forefathers which have brought curses on the blood line will continue to manifest themselves in our lives. I believe a very classic example of that particular principle which is I believe is starting to manifest in the church now, we see increasing numbers of people saying by the Holy Spirit that God requires the Christian church to confess and repent of the sins that have been committed against the Jewish people in the name of Jesus Christ. I had to do that in Israel in 1995 at two conferences. I read various articles which report other people saying the same thing themselves by the name of Christ have in fact touched the Lord's anointed the Jewish people and done them harm. I believe that is heaped up massive wrath collectively on the Body of Christ for everyone who does not come to a revelation that that is sin in the Body of Christ and that sin must be confessed and repented of by every individual that calls himself by the name of Christ, otherwise it would be passed down through the Body of Christ and the body of the church.
I think there are many other instances like that that we have to examine ourselves. But the positive side of that is that it provides us with an understanding for what is going on. The document that I have written entitled 'Poverty in the Church of Jesus Christ' is a diagnostic document, which just lists dozens of different aspect which I have identified as indications of symptoms of different types of sin and just in broad terms how to deal with it. If one prays about that and deals with it, certainly in my own life I have seen algebraic solution in that area. I think the last thought that comes to mind is people are inclined to see a teaching like this as indicating that it is too hard to be a Christian, and I believe we really have to bring this back to our life experience. We are called Children of God and that is a metaphor, parable if you like, but a metaphor that God has given us that we may better understand that one dimension of being Children of God.
We are also servants of God and that brings in another dimension to which there are some parallels in that metaphor. We are also brethren of Christ that we need to understand that the nature of our relationship [inaudible 00:49:14] is incredibly complex and in a sense multidimensional. He is omnipotent, He is omnipresent, He is omniscient. He knows everything. He is everywhere at all times and He can do all things. Our human understanding is totally incapable of even beginning to comprehend God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and to differentiate between them and to understand the way He works, and for that matter to understand the way Satan works in our lives. If we can just roll back to this very simple metaphor of being children of God, then we need to recognise that the day we are born again, we are like a baby that has just come into the world that is incapable of protecting itself and therefore God extends extreme grace to us in the same way that would happen with the baby, but when that baby is a year old, and is calling around and starting to pull things off table, eventually it has to learn that if it pulls the corner of the tablecloth, the tablecloth will come off and fall on it and it will get hurt and it will probably get a hard hit. When it is a couple of years old and it is toddling around and it taking things it should not take, it needs to learn that it will get disciplined and when it gets to school it will receive more extensive discipline and it will discover everything that it could do at home is no longer permitted to do. When it is in the first rugby team, it will find out that mother is not there to protect it when 180 pound lock or somebody is tackling him and he is going to get hurt.
By the time he has gone on to the army, his parents are able to do very little for him and when he is a reconnaissance commander dropped behind enemy lines, he is pretty much on his own. He need to understand that as we grow in Christ, as we progress in Christ, we move from being that newborn baby wrapped in soft linen cloths protected from everything around us to if we are sincere about following our calling in Christ that we will eventually find ourselves as effectively the reconnaissance commander behind enemy lines in this world which is ridden with evil and with Satan's work and we will find ourselves at a point having to stand on our own two feet having to give account for our actions and if we make mistakes, we will have to pay the price. If a reconnaissance commander fails to maintain his rifle and it jams at the critical incident, he will not be able to win that engagement. At worst, he may be killed, injured, taken captive and brutally tortured or one of those, and therefore we need to understand that as time goes on, as we grow in Christ, we have to accept more and more accountability.
I think really enclosing, there are two prayers that come out of 'The Final Quest' that Joyner mentions which I think are really, really critical to walk in Christ in these days and the first of those is Father, show me the level of my present deception and what to do about that deception and lead me into more truth, recognising that all truth is a journey. Not one of us will reach all truth until we have lived this life and we been judged and found worthy to spend eternity in Heaven and if we do not reach that point, one would assume that we will never ever know all truth. The second prayer is Father, in the name of Jesus I ask you to judge me severely and correct me harshly that I may serve you more perfectly and the essence of that is that unless we receive judgement in this life, we will be judged at the end of our lives on the day of our judgement and we will pay the price for all our sin on that day.
So we should actually welcome the opportunity to be judged in this life. We should welcome the opportunity to experience Satan's killing, stealing, and destroying in our lives as a diagnostic that our lives are not where God wants them to be and we should respond instantly to any incident like that by going before the Throne of God and asking Him to show us the sin and diligently seeking to find the sin and how to deal with the sin in order to be cleansed in order to get a remission of sentence, in order to bring that sin under the blood of Jesus and the sacrifice of the cross. If we are not prepared to do that, we should not be surprised to find that our lives on Earth are pretty miserable. We should also not be surprised to find that at the end of our lives, we come to the Throne of Judgement and we find that perhaps we find ourselves amongst the foolish virgins, we find ourselves amongst those who are cast into outer darkness with the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth or even in extreme cases we find ourselves amongst those who in fact have lost their salvation, and are given their part in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur which is the second death which is spoken about in Revelation 21:8, so I think imposing the key point is we need to seek holiness and sanctification. We need to see anything that goes wrong in our lives as an indicator that there is sin and that if we deal with the sin, we will walk in the full blessing and provision of Almighty God. But if we do not deal with the sin, we will continue to experience distraction in our lives.
That is the end of the original message. A few further points just to tie that message together, just to recap, that is the first of a series of ten messages. It was originally recorded about a year ago. It is interesting that a points of the points in that message confirm things which are presented in the teaching on the third tape on the Kingdom Context ‑ The Call, The End of the Age. Particularly significant that we will only walk in the full authority of Jesus Christ when we fully abide in Christ, we saw that in the teaching on love as well. But there is a paradox here. We cannot fully abide in Christ until our marriages are in full harmony that our marriage can only be in full harmony when we fully abide in Christ. It is a closed loop. The journey to get to abide in fully in Christ is a progression of iterations of progressively drawing closer to God and simultaneously seeking healing of our marriages, yet only can be done in the spirit. The husband must draw closer to Christ and in the process, draw his wife closer to him, and the wife in her terms seek to draw closer to the husband.
The wife cannot fully abide in Christ except through and with her husband. It is just so absolutely critical to understand, wives you cannot hope to abide fully in Christ unless you do so through and with your husband. You cannot go off and do your own things because you are then dividing your husband's house. And the fact that your husband is not godly and is God-fearing and as spiritual as He would like him to be, does not give you a basis for divorce. You chose to marry him. This point alone just reemphasises the point, do not marry outside the faith. It is utter spiritual foolishness. Do not marry a shallow or uncommitted or carnal Christian. A man who calls himself a Christian but has yet to go in Christ. Seek a mature believer. Ideally that man should be at least 7 to 10 years older than you. Do not go and marry a man who is much younger than you in Christ.
If you are a young believer, then perhaps yes, marry a man who is younger than you but who is mature in the Lord, perhaps a man who has grown up in a Christian family. But if you are a mature woman in Christ, do not go and marry a man who has been in Christ much less time than you are and perhaps above that are younger than you. If you do, you will pay a heavy price. But if you do that, that is your problem. You have to live with the consequences. Why is irrelevant as we saw in that teaching on faithfulness. You have done it, you cannot undo it. There is no basis for divorce which says I married the wrong man or I married the wrong woman. Make sure before you marry and if you have made the wrong choice, then make the best of it. Apply the teachings in this series to seek to heal your marriage. If you do apply what is in this series, you should be able to assist your husband to draw closer to God. But you need to repent of your sin in the wrong choice of a marriage partner, that is to say, if you married an unbeliever or as a mature believer you married an immature believer, or a man that was not really committed. If you did not make absolutely sure it was God's will for you to marry that man before you married him. Obviously if you are both unbelievers at the time of marriage and you have come to salvation and he has not, it is a different story. You are told to pray for him and to see it from lay down your life for him. If he leaves you because of your faith, well and good, but if otherwise, you have no basis for divorce. But at the same time, if you are in that situation, recognise that Isaiah 4:1 makes it quite clear that there will be seven times more women than men in the Body of Christ and you see that throughout the body of Christ today. In virtually every congregational I have ever been to since I became aware of this, there is generally anything from one and a half to 5 or 10 times more women than men in the congregation. That is the reality.
Tape 18 in Volume 2, God willing, will deal with this subject in detail. But it is an enormous challenge. If you are a single woman today seeking a godly husband, you need to listen to the rest of these tapes and understand what they are saying to you. I saw again in this teaching, resist the devil through love and through faithfulness. It the same thing, resist the devil in your marriage. Love, faithfulness, and so forth. That brought us again in this teaching, that Job's wife was not touched. Job carried the full brunt of the attack on the flesh. His wife as far as we are told went unscathed. Recognise also from the point of Paul being the chief of all sinners. Satan will always find some basis for attacking you. The challenge is to move forward steadily so that grace can be extended to you. Recognise your accountability. Recognise above all things, seek holiness and sanctification.
Few other points there, if your house is divided, it will fall, you will be judged. If you run flesh with people who are not your spouse, you need to repent, you need to deal with it, and if you are married to them, you need to do whatever you have to do. I know this sounds terribly harsh, but the truth is, if you marry at 14 to a man who is still around who is in a position to take you as his wife, then you are his wife and almost certainly unless by the goodness and the grace of God in some fashion, you are released, but God is not in the business of breaking His word and breaking the commandments of His word. So if you gave yourself willingly as a young girl as a virgin to a man, and that man has not totally disappeared from the scene or is not totally serving Satan, you could have a major problem, even if you have borne children by another man. And men, it is the same with you. If you have taken a woman's virginity, you may have an enormous challenge ahead of you. Just bring your house from a point of being divided. If you are married to a woman even if you have been married for years and she was not a virgin when you married her, you have got major challenges to deal with. The Body of Christ is totally corrupt. I have to say this to you. I do not say it because I want to make you miserable, but I would rather you hear it now than in the age to come on the Day of Judgement.
A few other points relating to something that has a great bearing on the subject of faithfulness, but also in the area of judgement. I mentioned it under the title of judgement simply because it is an area that the Lord has dealt with me very, very severely in recent months. We have to understand that no matter what your secular occupation, it is tent making. It is just a way for God to provide a vehicle through He can provide you with food and income to feed and clothe and accommodative your family. It is never ever any more than that. We tend so easily to want to believe that our career comes first. It is idolatry. Just a few notes on that, a few days ago, do first the work that Yahweh has employed you to do. And then He will remunerate you for your work. Do not expect Him to pay you first and then expect to make time. So often we leave the projects and the activities that God has given us until the end of the day, till the end of the week, the end of month, the end of the year, and they are never get done. The devil will make sure that they are never get done, until we treat God as our most important employer, our most important plant, and realise that He is not unjust and He would not ask us to do things we cannot cope with or never get anyway. Once we do what He is calling us to do, we will walk in the anointing. If we are not coping, we need to understand we are not close enough and we need to deal with the issues that are dealt with in subsequent tapes. And many of the subsequent tapes deal with issues which go further in the area of judgement. But to go further on the subject of tent making, it does not work that way in the world.
If you do not do what you are employed to do, you do not get paid. So why should it work that way in the Kingdom of Heaven. Read Malachi for a series of examples. It is another case where there is a lot of false teachings which goes on to suggest that somehow your service to God comes second to your marriage and various other things. I am talking about changing your employer either. You cannot say to your employer who has employed you to work 8 or 10 hours a day five days a week that you can only work three or four days, four hours a day because you are too busy serving God. No, that is not the intention. If God has given you a job working eight hours a day, you are expected to work eight hours a day for that employer and if He has given you another job working eight hours a day for Him, He expects you to do that as well. But if you are partying and messing around for four hours a day when God expects you to work eight hours a day for Him, you need to sort out your priorities. If you do not, then you cannot expect Him to move and heal your marriage and all the other things.
The consequence of that is if we put our work first, our secular employment, and if the employer exacts some reasonable rates and hours that detriment our relationship with Yahweh and our families, is detrimenting himself. But we need to understand that we should never agree to work unreasonable hours. If your employer is asking you to work hours which are outside the realms of what is contractually required or what is reasonable because it is now eating into the work that Yahweh has given you to do, you need to stand past. You will resign your job and ask Lord to find another job or negotiate and sort it out. But often we do things voluntarily because we are trying to please men and not God. It is utter foolishness to discount rates or agree to deadlines which results in one's relationship with God or one's family being detrimented. At the end of the day, those things have to remain after the work is gone.
A few other thoughts, there is a whole document available from this Ministry entitled 'Poverty in the Church of Jesus Christ,' a discourse on contributory factors based on personal experience towards holiness and sanctification, circumcision of the heart and growth in Christ. It is a document written by myself some years ago and it covers a lot of headlines about the sorts of things that can be causing you to be walking in lack. It is not comprehensive. There are various things that I need to add to it to update it. But they need to be there. Keep in mind that there is a proverb which says that if you curse your mother or your father, your lamp will be put out. So if your health is suffering and you have been failing to honour your mother and father and perhaps you even curse them, you may have a major problem with judgement. Recognise that Satan is not stupid. He is highly capable, highly intelligent.
Just a few headlines, read the word daily. Recognise that there are translation problems with the English translations. Read more than one translation. Apply the word and practise. Do not call any man teacher. The Holy Spirit is your teacher. Look for information from men, but confirm that with God. You will find error concealed amongst truths in most, if not all teaching. Every man has sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. Every man is human. No man is perfect except the Lord Jesus Christ. Recognise that not one [inaudible 01:09:27] shall pass away. If there is a Scripture that you do not like, it does not matter. Women, if your husband does not love you, the Word of God says that even if a man has two wives and he loves one and he does not love the other, that does not constitute a basis for divorce. Feed your spirit constantly. Read the Word of God from Genesis to Revelation at least once a year and try to read the New Testament more frequently. Recognise even if you do not understand it, and even if it is boring, it is still the Word of God and it is feeding your spirit. So do not jump over sections. Pray. Do not neglect prayer. Pray at all times without ceasing.
There is another teaching on praying in the spirit. God's people perish for lack of knowledge and I hope you have seen that in the series on marriage. There is enormous lack of knowledge in the area of marriage. Honour God with the small things, your time, gifts to beggars, etc., as He leads you and that might be 10 or 20 or 50 rands instead of 2, 20, or 50 cents. The joy of the Lord is your strength. Seek that joy. Be separate. Come out from the world. Do not be yoked with unbelievers. Do not be constantly engaged in the things of the world. Forsake not the fellowship of the brethren. Do not get involved in fellowship with unbelievers at the expense of your fellowship with believers. Make the Holy Spirit welcome in your home. Sanctify your home, your car. Play gospel music, prayers and worship in your home 24 hours a day, even when you are not there. The Spirit of God is in your home at all times. The Word of God says in Him we live, we move, we have our being. Take ungodly stuff out of your house. Destroy it. Constantly crucify the flesh. We have got another teaching on it.
If you have not been water baptised, it is an ordinance of God. You need to be water baptised. Pray in the spirit without ceasing, as I said, there is another teaching on it. Avoid foolish and empty words. There is a teaching we are coming too shortly. Restitution. If you have wronged someone, you may be required by Scripture to make right. There is no good ignoring it. There is Scripture on it. The spirit is speaking to you. It does not matter if no man will believe you, make restitution. If you have committed adultery and caused the woman you committed adultery with to lose her job, you may have to make up the loss of income to her husband for as long as it takes her to find a job. We only hear God within the limitations of our [inaudible 01:12:13]. No man hears God perfectly. The day you think you hear God perfectly, there is a day you have totally missed it. So recognise that part of what you think God said to you, may not be God. Get to understand that the one thing that is absolutely certain is that anything that you are certain about is probably containing error. You got to lose confidence himself and trust God. Gain confidence in Jesus. Obey God and not man. There is so much that men will tell you to do and so much that men will tell you scriptural which is not. Obedience in finances. In a previous teaching, I have talked about putting the tithe first. I read that passage from that book by Creflo Dollar. You need to put the tithe first. You need to bring the tithe with joy, you need to honour God with the tithe, you need to praise and worship God with the tithe. It must be joyously brought and it must always be brought first. There is no excuse for delaying the tithe. Pray beforehand to know how to use the tithe.
Obedience to His word and His spirit. If God speaks to you, obey. We have heard about that before. Seek the presence of God. Adultery and fornication, we have talked about at length, the One Flesh Bond. A terrible means whereby Satan will destroy you financially and in other ways. Lust in the heart. Do not lust of the women and desire women who are not your wife. Agreement between husband and wife, we talked about that repeatedly. If you are not in agreement, the devil will take you apart because your house is divided. Jezebel, we will talk about in some detail in a later teaching. Divorce, we have talked about. Pride versus humility. Pride presses virtually all of us. It is a terrible problem. The consequences of sin can take time to harvest. You can sow sin today, but it may take weeks or months or years before you reap the full harvest. We saw that in 'The Call.' Blessings of obedience can also take time. You may sow today and not reap for some time. It is the same with sowing seed. Demons, we will have a whole series, a whole tape on that. The curse of things in your possession. Any demonic Satanic ungodly object in your possession must be burnt. Pornography and African voodoo masks, African carvings which represent idols must be destroyed, physical idols, things that are idols in your life. If your car is an idol, get rid of that. If your house is an idol, fell it, because that is the only way you can destroy that idol in your life. Spirit of stupor comes upon you for disobedience. Eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, if you are not getting revelation from the Word of God, if you are not hearing God, if you are unable to make sense what people are saying, it could be you have got a spirit of stupor. It needs to be bound and cast out, but you must confess the sin first.
Christian ownership of a business. If you own a business, then you are the head of that business and your sin will bring judgement on the entire business. Unequal yoking, do not employ unbelievers unless God clearly shows you to do so. Do not go into partnership with unbelievers. Satan will use those unbelievers as an open door to attack you. Unwise talk and boasting, talk in unsanctified atmospheres about what God has shown you bind demons and fallen angels. If you must discuss those things, if God has given you a promise in a sensitive area, keep quiet about it. I have had a situation where demons heard what I said and in minutes turn around a promise of God because of my foolishness. Satan cannot read our minds. Pray in our hearts to God with our understanding or pray in the Holy Spirit.
Forgiveness, you have heard before. If you do not forgive, the date is not cancelled. A straight path and a narrow gate, we have to understand that. Many are called, but few are chosen. Tithing we have spoken about. Infertile soil, you need to tithe into fertile soil. Do not just give any odd place. Pray and ask God where He wants you to give and do not get deceived to believe that you have to give your tithes to a particular ministry. Give where God leads you to give, otherwise He cannot direct that ministry. If they start getting out of the Will of God, He needs to be able to restore funds. If they are in serious error or deception, do not sow into that ministry but do not use your understanding. Many ministries beat the sheep; you do not want to be there. Sowing and reaping, you should name your seed when you sow. The Word of God does not have any private interpretation. You need to die to self. You need to seek the refiner's fire, we have come across that repeatedly. Unkept and broken vows and promises, we have dealt with in some depth. They have an enormous impact. Satan can use those things to take you apart.
Soulless prayers and false prayers against people who pray with the understanding and ask for things that are not according to the Will of God those words still have eternal significance if they are not cut off. Prayers against God's will can take you into witchcraft. Blood line curse, we will touch on that a bit more in the tape on deliverance and modern curses. People can curse you today and those curses carry just as much weight as they did 6000 years ago, which is caverns and other satanic groups. If you are recognised and marked by Satanists who are fair to kingdom, there will be witches' caverns and Satanists praying against you and doing even more extreme things, unless you pray protection on a regular basis.
Wrong and right actions and right and wrong motives, many of us do the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons. We need to get our hearts right. We need to get our thoughts right. We need to recognise that if we do not believe that God cannot say something because we have a paradigm that is wrong does not mean that God cannot say it. If you truly have been mislead to believe that the Word of God says a man can only have one wife even though you cannot find any relevant Scriptures, you are going to have great difficulty when God tells you to the contrary. I argued with God for months before I finally accepted that truth. I read basically from Genesis to Revelation and in every book, He confirmed the truth.
Realise that there are differences between today and the day that Jesus was crucified and that there has been great apostasy in the church. Again, obey God rather than man, observe the Ten Commandments plus the New Commandment, love one another which sums up the Ten Commandments. We have seen love coming through the teaching time and time again. If, one of the smallest words in the Bible but one of the most significant, all of the promises of God have preconditions. If you will obey His commandments. If you do not obey His commandments, He cannot bless you. We have seen that repeatedly.
God is uncompromisingly righteous and He expects us to seek to be uncompromisingly righteous. He uses strong language to describe sin. We have to look out for planks in our eyes. I keep seeing things that I did not know were wrong in my own life. And in many cases, I keep judging people incorrectly as a consequence. We need to recognise that if we give offense, an offense is a crime. So we need to stop giving offense, but people who are offended at the Word of God were offended and stumble at Jesus, the stumbling stone, then they need to realise that is a crime on their part. Put your hand on whatever you find to do, do not just sit back and do nothing. God has got an enormous amount of work to be done by those who will listen to Him. There are millions and millions going to hell. If you have listened so far in this message, you have an enormous responsibility to spread these truths. Even if there are a few that you do not necessarily agree with, go and spread the truth that you do and pray about the ones that you do not agree with. You will be judged with what you do with this information.
Diligence, we have to be diligent with the Word of God and the Work of God. God stewardship, we must be prudent, and not extravagant with the funds and the businesses He gives us. We must be willing to serve others. We must avoid talebearing and there is a whole teaching on words and the power of the tongue. Translations of the Bible, again, recognise the different translations contain different errors. I would encourage you to read at least two, three, four, five different translations in sequence. Do not read the same translation time and time again. Amplified Bible is very useful. The Lamb's translation from the [inaudible 01:21:20] is very useful if you can get hold of it. The Living Torah, the Jewish translation is excellent, if you can get hold of it.
Satan seeks your areas of weakness. So wherever your areas of weakness are, Satan is going to take you apart there. Seek to grow strong in those areas. Ask the Holy Spirit to help. Persevere, do not give up. Seek to become an overcomer. But pray the right things. As we have touched on in a previous teaching, God never changes. So do not expect His word to say something different in the New Testament to what it said in the Old Testament. Jesus came to fulfil the word, not to replace it. If you oppose the sense, you are opposing God. Pay your taxes. Ignorance does not prevent legal entry by Satan. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you do not know the Scripture, that does not stop Satan from attacking you. Much of what I have shared in this teaching has been taught to me because Satan has been taking me apart and when I prayed about it, I found that it is because there is an area of sin in my life that I did not know about that I did not know was sin consciously, and quite often that it was contrary to what the Lord showed me. It was contrary to what the church was telling me and in that I progressively came to see a lot of the truths. But if you are not prepared to consider those possibilities, you would not grow, you would not learn.
There likely to be extreme tests before extreme abundance. God needs to test you in little before He will give you much and most of us fail when He gives us much. I have seen it in my own life. We get abundance and eventually we slip and slide away from God and He has to bring us back to Him. Do not underrate the power of the Blood of Jesus. If you do not have a full revelation of the Blood of Jesus, there is a teaching on the blood covenant but even that may not give you enough of a revelation. The Blood of Jesus is extremely, extremely powerful.
Praise and worship. God created us to praise and to worship Him. If you do not praise and worship Him with all your heart, if you do not passionately praise and worship Him, if you do not stand and raise your arms and move about and love Him in your praise and worship, you are not honouring Him. And again, I make the point, praise and worship and lovemaking between man and wife are exact parallels. But if you are inhibited and restrained in the way you make love to your wife, you will be inhibited and restrained in the way that you praise and worship God and vice-versa. Do not expect to touch Jesus' heart if you sit in your seat with your hands in your lap during praise and worship.
I could go on, but all of these things require prayer. Any of those areas if you are missing that, if you are getting it wrong, is going to open the doors for Satan to take you apart in judgement in line with the teaching that you have just heard. But that is good news. I am an engineer, so I work on the basis of if you know the things that are breaking, you can fix them. Engineering is about designing solutions. You do not engineer a solution for success. You engineer a solution against failure. You seek to design every component with an equal probability of failure so that there is no weak link. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So in a lot of what I do in business and management consulting and these teachings is to concentrate on the things that can cause failure. It is no good, it is nice to talk about the promises and the blessings and what have you. But let us talk about the things that prevent you getting there and how to fix them and please God by the tongue of series is complete. You will have a pretty complete set of guidelines as to how to fix your marriage and how to fix marriage in the world. How to bring divorce and putting away to an end in the world and I pray Father in the name of Jesus that that will come to pass.
"Father in the name of Jesus we pray that that which has been spoken in this teaching that is of you Lord will reside in the hearts of those who have heard it or read it and I pray Lord that if whatsoever in what I have said here is in error, is incorrect is in any way not of you Lord, I ask you just to blow it away as chaff before a wind, but only that which is pure and of you will remain in the hearts of the hearers of this message, and I pray that you will help them to discern and put into effect that which applies in their lives, in Jesus name."
04 07 The Realm of Exceedingly Abundantly -- Hidden Answers by the Holy Spirit
Creflo Dollar
In volume two of the series understanding God's way in marriage, volume two being towards Heaven on earth in marriage and tape number 7 being answers through prayer, praying mysteries in the spirit. This message is recorded on the 27th of November, the year 2000. During the process of preparing these messages and fasting and praying and seeking the Lord for answers in a variety of areas, I was lead by the Spirit of God to purchase a set of teaching tapes by Dr Creflo Dollar Jnr from World Changes ministries entitled Hidden answers revealed through the prayer of tongues, this is a six tape series on a revelation that was given to Dr Dollar in 1999, it might have been late 1998, in terms of praying in the Spirit and mysteries. I believe it's an extremely important message in the context of moving towards Heaven on earth in marriage. We understand so little of God's plan for marriage in the world today and in the Church today and therefore it is absolutely vital that we know how to pray in order to obtain revelation of how God wants our marriages to be and also to obtain revelation of the change that's necessary in our lives to come to that place. So, as in the number of other tapes in this series, what follows is just a direct copy of, in this case, the fourth tape in this series by Creflo Dollar and I pray that that will bless you.
How many of you, I mean seriously are ready to invade this realm called exceedingly. Now, you do know it's not going to be by your regular means. The God Almighty will have to, you know, allow us to come into a point of revelation knowledge which He has done and if you obey it then you will see the realm of exceedingly. Make your mind up right now that you're going to obey number one, Gods way, number two Gods voice because I think what you've been looking for, what you've been praying for is going to be (inaudible (00:03:11)). Great things don't come, a lot of times, because of our failure to (inaudible (00:03:23)) I returned his phone call and I asked him, I said if you could find it in your heart to please come and preach this Sunday morning of our finance convention (inaudible (00:03:44)) if you could show us how to do it and I said (inaudible (00:03:55)). Now listen, I talked to Him and I said what you up to, (inaudible (00:04:14)) and what I had heard a week before that, there's a relationship between the mistress and the instructions that come from your man of God. (Inaudible (00:05:01)). Now if we're going to get to exceedingly we're going to have to get into this area of believing God for the mistress, if we're going to go exceedingly above what we can ask (inaudible (00:05:23)). Ephesians chapter 3 (inaudible (00:05:50)). I haven't seen my wife all day, you all like that, I like that too. Shall we leave now. I want to introduce some special guests we have here tonight from Brazil, a couple of weeks I was with them and in their country, we are so privileged to have them, (inaudible (00:06:33)), could you please stand and the guest that came with you, we welcome here tonight in the name of Jesus.
Ephesians chapter 3, now what I want to do is instead of starting in the middle of this, I want you to recall the teaching on the anointing, I want to go over that, I want to start in verse one, I want to skip the full context of what this is saying and work our way around and we will do some things tonight, what we don't finish tonight we will go ahead and finish up on Friday night, amen. And get ready for this weekend boy, go ahead and cope with that 19h30, OR Roberts at 11 o' clock, Kenneth Copeland at 6 o' clock, we aren’t going nowhere until we get what we showed up to get. (Inaudible (00:07:27)) I am not leaving till I get what I came expecting. Praise God. Verse one "For this cause I, Paul, a prisoner of Jesus, the anointed one and his anoint", now get that fresh in your thinking tonight, it's going to be important to this message tonight. The anointed one, as is known Christ, the anointed one. Christ, the one who's anointed (inaudible (00:07:54)). He said I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus, the anointed one and his anointing. How many of you would rather be locked up in that anointing? Paul said I am a prisoner, I am a prisoner of Jesus, I am a prisoner, voluntary prisoner like (inaudible (00:08:18)) slave is a voluntary slave, you become a slave by your own wheel and then he goes on and says on behalf of you Gentiles, if you have heard of the dispensation of the Grace of God, which is given to me to you (inaudible (00:08:33)) by revelation, he made known unto me the mystery. Now remember what revelation is.
Revelation is revealed knowledge, revealed by God to your spirit. That’s what it means when you talk about revelation, revealed knowledge and knowledge that doesn't come through the study of outward things, it doesn't come through the study of Sunday school quarterlies, it doesn't come through the studies of (inaudible (00:09:11)), this is knowledge that comes from God that your Glory you didn't have, revealed knowledge, revelation knowledge. Now you've got revelation gifts, where the wisdom is a revelation gift, wisdom revealed. The word of knowledge is a revelation gift, revelation or knowledge revealed to your spirit. (inaudible (00:09:36)) those are revelatory gifts. So the deed of knowledge, he said here, how that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery by revelation. So it used to be a mystery but God revealed it to him and he got a Holy something that used to be a mystery. (Inaudible (00:10:05)) you may understand my knowledge. Now notice something, here he says that God can reveal knowledge to one person and then that person now says that you can get what is now mine.
I can tell of revelation that's been given to me by God and I can impart it into you, Glory be to God and that's what I intend on doing tonight. Whereby where you read you may understand my knowledge, now watch this in the mystery of translate, the anointed one and his anointing, which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of man. So there was a time that other ages did not get it, there was a time where other ages that it was considered a mystery to other ages, there are a lot of things that were considered mysteries, they didn't know it and yet you and I know it. And I'm telling you in these last days, God wants us to know all (inaudible (00:11:16)), other ages did not know about the anointed one and his anointing, like you and I know it tonight. (Inaudible (00:11:24))going to stop right there, Gods got some more stuff He's trying to reveal. I mean, imagine, think about what the knowledge of (inaudible (00:11:35)) what it has done for your life. You just don't put up with (inaudible (00:11:41)) like you used to, do you? You don't put up with folks like you used to, you know that there's a power greater than your burden, there's a power greater than you know and yet God has not seen, He has not stopped making things known unto us.
(Inaudible (00:11:57)) and then tried to go and reveal it and to show you what he got a hold of, just like he did this mystery of Christ which (inaudible (00:12:03)) prophets by the spirit as it is now revealed unto His Holy apostles and prophets by the spirit, as it is now revealed unto His whole apostles and prophets by the spirit, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost revealed unto His Father. Now what did (inaudible (00:12:28)) said God doesn't reveal anything except He first reveals it to His prophet. He doesn't do anything. Now either that's a lie or the truth, he doesn't do anything unless (inaudible (00:12:44)). You mean to tell me Jesus is going to be coming back here and no apostles or prophets are going to know nothing about it. Just because all your life somebody said no man knows the day, I know it's in the Bible but He didn't say that man would not ever know it. The return of Jesus is a mystery, how many of you agree with me? It's a mystery, isn't it? Let me go to Mark chapter 4, it is a mystery. I don't know when Jesus is going to come back, the Bible says no man knows the day nor the hour that He returns. Well, (inaudible (00:13:29)).
But now look what this says here, it may deal with you as it did me. Mark chapter 4 verse 22 "For there is nothing hid which shall not be manifested; neither was anything kept secret but that it should come abroad." Now either that's a lot of truth, if it is the truth then this thing about not knowing when He's going to come back, this thing that's been kept secret, somehow He has to reveal it to His apostles and prophets otherwise Jesus will never get back here. If it was true of what He said (inaudible (00:14:21)) reveal it to His prophets. And in 1 Kings when Elijah was being taken up, they knew that this was the day that your master would be taken up. There was a composite of the rapture of the Church that's coming up for us. We live in that age where God Almighty is about to reveal some secrets. Deuteronomy 29:29 says "The secret things belong to the Lord, the things that have been revealed belong to us." So there are some secret things but by the Spirit of God, He's trying to reveal or let you in on some secrets. You know the number one enemy to the revelation knowledge of God, your tradition. Your tradition will keep you in the dark when all the time God's trying to turn the light on because you have never heard that before. There are a lot of things you have never heard before. Some of you may not have heard and understood where dinosaur fossils came from but they are shown here because we've got the remains. Now figure that out and figure out what these buildings are doing underwater. (Inaudible (00:15:47)), you probably don't know where your cerebellum is or your cerebellum cortex. I thought we was in Bible study tonight.
So just because you don't know nothing but God is trying to let us know that He wants us to know something, He's trying to reveal something to you and it's going to take more than Bible reading to get it. It's going to take some fellowship found in the secret place, it's going to take some time so God can talk to you and tell you some stuff. God will reveal things if you take the time to spend time with Him. (inaudible (00:16:42)) some of you talk too much when you're playing, learn the value of listening, learn the value of when you speak in tongues pausing for a moment and say Lord, I receive that by faith, Lord I receive that by faith. Let me go on, I'm a little ahead of myself. I go back to Ephesians chapter 3, this message is getting bigger as we go. Verse 5 again which (inaudible (00:17:14)) was not made known to the sons of men as it is now revealed unto His Holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit that the Gentiles should be (inaudible (00:17:23)) and have the same body and partakers of this promise in the anointed one that was anointed by the Gospel. Whereof I was made a minister according to the gift of the Grace of God given unto me by (inaudible (00:17:35)) of His power, unto me who (inaudible (00:17:39)) that I should preach amongst the Gentiles, the unsearchable riches of the anointed one and his anoints, now we've done that, I have preached unto you, the riches of the anointed one and his anoints. We studied it, we spent years on it almost and it still won't go away.
Alright now, let's see where we're going from there. Verse 9 "And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery." (inaudible (00:18:13)), that word fellowship, you remember it comes from a Greek word called (inaudible (00:18:20)), to make our men see what their part is, that's what it means, your participation, your fellowship or your participation, to make all men see, now that's what it says, and to make all men see (inaudible (00:18:41) to make all see what the fellowship of the mystery or to make all see what their part is of the mystery which from the beginning of the world had (inaudible (00:19:09)). All mysteries are in God until they're revealed to me. The beginning (inaudible (00:19:24)) who created all things by Jesus, the anointed one, his anointing. Now, get the subject of what He's talking about now, He talks about the mystery of the anointed one and his anointing, how Paul wants to preach and get men to see their part in it and then He says now I want you to see your part in the mystery, He talks about His part in the mystery of the anointed one and his anointing, now He says I want men, I want all to see your part in the mystery. You have a part in these mysteries. Well, nobody's ever preached it before because it's been a mystery. By the way, nobody preach on the mystery.
Today we're going to talk about a mystery. I've heard people say the Lord works in mysterious ways, well they weren't lying but God wants us to know our part in His mysteries. Watch this now, to the intent that nor unto the principalities and powers that (inaudible (00:20:28)) in Heavenly places, He said to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers (inaudible (00:20:36)) might be known by the Church, it's alright, I'm the Church. That is might be known by the Church, (inaudible (00:20:47)) wisdom of God, so He intends on the Church getting the wisdom of God. Say it out loud I receive the wisdom of God. God is just waiting (inaudible (00:21:00)), I receive the wisdom of God, say it again. I receive the many wisdoms of God, I receive the many wisdoms of God. The word of God says if any man (inaudible (00:21:16)) I have the wisdom of God. You see how it works, ask in faith. If you like wisdom ask in faith, (inaudible (00:21:41)). Everybody follow me? There's some wisdom you need for some situations in your life, He said if any man would like wisdom (inaudible (00:21:55)) he will not hold back. Praise God. Lord we ask for wisdom right now by faith. I thank you for wisdom right now, every day of your life, don't ever leave your house without Lord, I thank you for wisdom, I receive it by faith. If you like it ask in faith. The man trying to tell you how to get wisdom, (inaudible (00:22:33)) he said ask. Lord, I ask for wisdom right now and I receive it by faith according to the book of James which says if any man likes wisdom let him ask from God who will give to him liberally (inaudible (00:22:46)). You need to practice that every day of your life.
Now wisdom can be revealed to your understanding and once you get it you can walk and do things you didn't know how to do before but there's something (inaudible (00:23:03)) especially when you read Proverbs, (inaudible (00:23:15)) and yet a secret has been made known. So watch this, He goes on, He said I want the Church to have the wisdom, according to the (inaudible (00:23:29)) by faith in Him. Now look what He says, we have bonus and access, that just means we have liberty and we have access, an open access or an open door, we have the liberty and an open door to boldly go in and ask for this in faith in Him. Therefore I desire that you (inaudible (00:24:02)) at my tribulations for you which is your Glory. For this cause I bow my knee unto the Father of our Lord Jesus, the anointed one of whom the whole family in Heaven and earth is made. Now listen, He said I bowed my knee for this reason, that He would grant you according to the riches of the Glory. Question, what are the riches of the Glory? Go to Colossians chapter one verse 26 says "Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations but now is made manifest to his saints." How do you know there are more mysteries that God is going to make manifest to His saints. Well they aren’t going to do it aside from faith. "To whom God would make known what is the riches of the Glory of this mystery among the Gentiles which is Christ in you, the hope of Glory."
Now translate that word, the riches of the glory is what? The riches of the Glory, the anointing (inaudible (00:25:52)) is your only hope of Glory. Now we go back to Ephesians. You're going to get this tonight if I have to cut your head open and pour it in. Ephesians chapter 3, now notice, he said I bow my knee that He would grant you according to the anointing. He is going to grant you according to the anointing. Do you all see what I just did? He will grant you according to the anointing that's in you, to be (inaudible (00:26:37)) by His Spirit in the inner man, that the anointed one and his anointing may dwell in your hearts by faith. Now let me ask you something, how many of you believe that the anointed one and his anointing lives in your heart? Prove it to me. Well, you remember what He said, by faith, so what's the way you would prove it then? Which is? So by the word of God I prove to you that the anointed one is anointing me based on what the word of God has to say.
I know that He lives in the body of my heart by the word of God, that's how I know, that's what he says. To anoint by the word of God. See because in His last days emotions and feelings are going to be used to try and pull you away from it and to get you to doubt what the word of God says so you've got to know you're anointed by the word of God. I know I'm anointed by the word of God, Hallelujah, (inaudible (00:27:48)) I lay hands on the sick and the sick recover, by the word of God. Hallelujah. I minister the word and it gets into somebody’s heart and it changes them by the word of God. Not because I feel good tonight, by the word of God I'm anointed, I'm anointed by faith in what His word says about the anointing (inaudible (00:28:09)). I receive the indwelling of the anointed one and his anointing in me, which is my hope, of Glory. (Inaudible (00:28:27)) that anointing in you is your expectation of what's going to come on the outside of you. That anointing in you is what's going to determine the manifestation, manifestation according to the anointing in you by faith.
Don't be looking at what you did in the past, just by faith, I've got the Scripture, the Scripture says I'm anointed so by faith I command the anointing in me to bring healing on me, I command the anointing in me to bring promotion on me, I command the...do you understand what I'm saying? I receive it by faith. See, the Glory is based on the anointing that's in me, the Glory is the manifestation is going to be based on the power that (inaudible (00:29:10)), you follow me? It's by the word of God. I know by the word of God that I am anointed, I don't base my anointing based on how many folks that fall out when I lay my hands on them, I'm anointed before I lay my hands on them. Why, because I'm arrogant? No, because word says so. I find the Scripture one day that says I'm anointed and I am not going to let it go, if I lay hands on 50 folks and they just stand there and look at me I'm still anointed and if I won't let that go eventually that anointing going to keep me in and before (inaudible (00:29:48)), with some results. Do you understand what I'm saying? Don't take things out of religion and judge your anointing because He didn't say do it by those things, He said do it by faith or do it by the word of God. That Christ may dwell in your heart by faith, that you (inaudible (00:30:11)) and grounded in love, hot diggity dog.
Now the anointing has a part to (inaudible (00:30:22)) root it and ground it in love. Two ways, the first way, root it and ground it in the fact that you know God loves you, say it out loud, God loves me. Now what does that do, if I know God loves me I know he won't let me suffer. If I know God loves me I know He will do His word. Everybody knows God loves me, I know that but as I do what He says to do He is going to do what He's supposed to do. I mean, if I step on (inaudible (00:30:52)) and I know God loves me then God (inaudible (00:30:54)), get a revelation of God’s love. But not only that, the Bible says to love Him is to keep His command so to give your obedience is going to determine your degree of love for God. Your degree of love for God goes far, I mean it goes past you feeling like you love Him. Your degree of love towards God is always a demonstration of your obedience. And how obedient you are determines your love. Now here's what got me, that Christ, the anointed one, may dwell in your heart by the word of God (inaudible (00:31:35)), that you be rooted and grounded in love may be able, now here's what He says, if you've got the anointing in you by faith and you've got the love working in your life, that you are going to be able, listen to comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth and the length and depth and the height and to know all of the love that the anointed one is anointing which passes knowledge. To know the love of the anointed one and his anointing which passes knowledge.
I need to do a little review here and show you something, go to 1 Corinthians chapter 4, let me finish reading this so you know what I'm after in Ephesians, let me finish reading that so you know what we're after here, what we're hunting. "And to know the love of Christ, the anointed one and his anoints which passes knowledge, that you might be filled with all the fullness of God." Do you know how full that is? Do you know what he means when he says for you to be filled with all of the fullness of God? That means you take all of the anointing, all of the anointing and you fill with the (inaudible (00:33:20)), that's a lot, but that's the key to know the love of the anointed one and his anointing which passes (inaudible (00:33:38)) if I can know the love of the anointed one and his anointing I can be filled with the fullness of God. If I ever get a hold of the love of the anointed and his anointing I can be filled with the fullness of God. Alright, watch this, (inaudible (00:33:56)). 2 Corinthians 5:14 To know the love of Christ which passes all knowledge, that not only passes all knowledge but look at this, for the love of Christ was what? The love of the anointed one and his anointing does what? Remember that word is twofold, just to make it very simple to constrain means to push you to do what you're supposed to do and yet it means to stop you from doing what (inaudible (00:34:54)).
The love of the anointed one constraineth you, now check this out, there is a time in your life where certain things in the flesh dictated certain events that would happen in your life and you would get (inaudible (00:35:19)) to those things but now you've met the anointed one and his anointing, I don't know what you experienced that anointing, you can never be the same again. Whenever you experience the anointing of God, you can never be the same again. And you don't even know why you can't be the same again, just something happened. I will never forget when mama had that diagnosis with that blood thing (inaudible (00:35:56)) she hit the floor, she hasn’t been the same since, the anointing showed up and it changed her life. I don't know how you've experienced the anointing before, some of you've had hard times and you've experienced the anointing, you've found yourself on the floor just crying your eyes out, you never were the same again. You can't be the same once you've experienced the power of God (inaudible (00:36:27)). The constraining force comes over you and you don't even know why but once you've experienced the power of God that what you used to do you (inaudible (00:37:06)).
Now, the anointing, the anointed one, Jesus, the anointed one and his anointing, they have not increased in value. You didn't used to bow to Jesus and was anointed like you used to because you didn't know nothing about it. (inaudible (00:38:36)) It was the power of God (inaudible (00:38:56)) You should have been loony tunes by now. Some of you've forgot how pressurized those situations were that you went through, when you thought you was nothing, what everybody gave up for you and then you thought you were a failure and all that other stuff and you made it. God has given some of you all brand new lives, (inaudible (00:39:38)) a new beginning, the God of the second chance, the third chance, the fourth chance and you love God. I mean, you ought to give Him praise for His goodness and His love and His kindness. He gave you a new beginning, turned around what the devil was trying to put on you, took away what the (inaudible (00:40:17)), gave you what you thought you could never have, you've been infected by the power of the anointed one and his anointing, Glory to God. You know, nobody but Jesus picked you up when you were down, nobody but Jesus kept you in a house when you should have been kicked out, nobody but Jesus (inaudible (00:40:51)) The anointed one and his anointing, showed up when you didn't ask Him to show up, cast you when you didn't ask Him to cast you, blessed you when you know you didn't deserve a blessing, cured you when you know you were supposed to die. Nobody but the anointed one and his anointing and now (inaudible (00:41:39)). And what is that, that's the Law of Christ, constraining you, it won't let you do what you already got no business doing.
Now as that love begins to grow, as you begin to spend more time with Him and experience His power more often. Now the constraining force now no longer keeps you back from doing what you ought not be doing, so now the constraining force now pushed you to do what you're supposed to do. All of a sudden you can't stand (inaudible (00:42:49)). That's the love of Christ. That's the love of the anointed one. Now let me give you the real definition of what Grace is, it is God's unmerited favor and love, His willingness to involve His power in your situation, that's the (inaudible (00:43:55)), it's Gods willingness to favor you with His power, His willingness to get involved with your situation and use His power, the Grace of God, his willingness to get involved with my situation and to bring His power along to remove my burden (inaudible (00:44:20)), Gods Grace. And you just start going through all that and start counting your blessings instead of sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, you don't understand what I've been through and I don't understand why the Lord did this, you are sitting there letting that one thing you don't understand stop you from all the stuff you already did, it constrains me, I've got to do what I've got to do because He's been too good to me. Say Amen.
That liquor bottle has lost its value, you don't value it like you used to. Part of Gods coming in your life, you look at that liquor bottle and all of a sudden you turn your back on the liquor bottle because the liquor bottle can't heal you like Jesus. There's something I thought you never could, you know, stop having sexual intercourse but all of a sudden the anointing came in your life and you were able to keep your legs closed because you said I've got a new man in my life, you tried everything else and (inaudible (00:45:51)), I know somebody that even tried a psychiatrist, even tried the tranquilizers, tried the stress tablets, she tried all that stuff (inaudible (00:46:05)) and all of sudden I'm like man, I love the anointed one and his anointing. Now here's the part I don't understand, I have yet tell me to understand why God would show such mercy when we deserve so much judgment. It passes my knowledge, why in the world, how in the world can He love me, how can He love me like He love me. It almost seems like the time we ought to be judged the worst, that's when He's coming up loving (inaudible (00:46:51)) the love of Christ that passes all knowledge, you know what He said, just know the love of Christ, don't try to figure it out in your head, just know the love of Christ. That you don't have to have knowledge of why He loves you; just know the love of Christ. (Inaudible (00:47:32)), He loves me. I don't know why, all that I know He loves me, (inaudible (00:47:41)), I don't know why but I know He did it, (inaudible (00:47:47)) and the blind man said all I know is I once was burned and now I can see, he said all I know is what the man did for me, all I know is I couldn't see but I can see now (inaudible (00:48:12)) I can see. (Inaudible (00:48:30)), the Lord loves me, turn to your neighbor and say the Lord loves me. (Inaudible (00:48:49))
Go to Ephesians chapter 3 Glory be to God "And to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge that you might be filled with all the fullness of God." He says the love is going to have a lot to do (inaudible (00:49:31)), God can feel a person that has a revelation of his love, to be filled with all the fullness of God, do you know that means that whatever anointing you have on you right now in portions, God wants to give you the fullness of that anointing, can you imagine what your life could be like if you walked in the fullness of the anointing instead of just portions of the anointing, (inaudible (00:49:59)) fullness of God, bringing everything to completion, bringing everything to perfection, that's what He's talking about when He's talking about the fullness of God, not just drips and trickles but bringing (inaudible (00:50:27)), not just healing the anointing that operates every now and then but it's all here, the fullness, can you imagine the fullness of God, I'm after that, I want the fullness, we might already be closer to the fullness than what we expect but not notice He's starting this thing, He says He's passing knowledge, what passes your knowledge, faith for what passes your knowledge, not just what is revealed to your knowledge but faith that's untainted and untouched, that hasn't had a chance to be ladled with pollution, untainted pure faith only comes towards those things that pass your knowledge. Follow me carefully here, now right after He said that, now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly, above all that we ask or think.
Now let me ask you something, is God able to do above what you think? He's got to go far because some of us don't think worth nothing, you still order small fries, small coke and hamburger with nothing on it, instead of getting up there and ordering the biggest. I want a number one with the biggest coke, the biggest sandwich and the biggest fries because I bigger increase on my bigger mind. (Inaudible (00:52:54)) dinner this week without somebody showing us faith and every time we saw it we said out loud, that's the faith of God. I wanted to go to (inaudible (00:53:22)), that's a serious Cajun restaurant, give you fish and dump all the seafood on top of it and give you some bed of rice, I don't know what bed of rice was, man asked me do you want some bed of rice, I said man, I don't want no (inaudible (00:53:38)). You know, we paid the bill and get up to leave, the lady came back and gave me my money back, I said what's wrong, she said there's a gentleman that took care of your bill and I looked at Tash and we said that's the favor of God, and I said would you mind letting me know who he is and she said the guy back there. We went over there and said man, thank you for sowing into our lives and thought he was a member of the Church and he said no, I just watch you on television and you've blessed me and this is my opportunity to kind of get the seed in the ground, (inaudible (00:54:24)).
And that's favor, you're welcome to favor God instead of going around here putting (inaudible (00:54:34)), what would you do with money if it's not an object? I will go get me a car, I will go get me a house but you haven’t got it yet that's why you haven’t got no money, you haven’t got it yet because you've got to understand what the purpose for money is. Money isn’t coming your way because you haven’t got the mystery and the mystery He says I've given unto you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God or to know the mysteries of seed time and harvest. You've got to start believing in God for money for somebody else, then watch the seed money start coming in. (inaudible (00:55:32)) money start coming from everywhere. When Peter needed his tax bills paid, money come in, Jesus (inaudible (00:55:49)). That's wet with the water, get the call of Abraham first which is blessed to be a blessing and all that stuff comes. You can spend your life blessing others and as you (inaudible (00:56:18)) God make sure that the wet come back on you, Tash and I spend our lives blessing others so the wet come back on us. (Inaudible (00:56:28)). Bless to be a blessing that He's given to us to know the mystery of seed time and harvest time. He says I've given unto you to know the mystery of what happens when a man sows the seed in the midst of a need. Now watch this, (inaudible (00:57:20)), now exceedingly, that means above your dreams, beyond your boundaries, beyond your set limits, what are the limits you've set. He says I am able to see past your limits, turn to your neighbor and say no more limits.
Above all that He ask or think according to the power that worketh in us, I'm able to do above what you can ask and above what you think and I'm going to do it according to the power that worketh in me. Now what's the power called that's working in you? That goes with Colossians 1 Christ in you (inaudible (00:58:20)) and he said he's able to do above (inaudible (00:58:25)) based on and according to the power that worketh in you, how much power is working in you? Now if He is going to do above what you ask and above what you think, that means you aren’t asking and you aren’t thinking it because He says I'm going to do what you didn't ask me, what you didn't think. Now listen, (inaudible (00:58:57)). He said that I'm going to give and I can do above your thinking and above your asking abilities, did you see that now? I go above your not so thinking and I go above your not so asking, I can do something above your thinking and above your asking, in other words, you haven’t got to think it and you haven’t got to ask it in your natural language and I can do above your asking ability and above your thinking ability, God Almighty. See, we used to label in God what we can ask and what we can think and God's trying to get us above what we can ask with our English language and above what we can think with what we know, according to the power that worketh in us.
(Inaudible (01:00:28)) I'm going to do according to the power, I'm going to do according to the power that worketh in us, I'm going to do above what you can think, I'm going to do above what you can ask and I'm going to do according to the power that worketh in you. Alright, now watch this, what power is in us again? Who had to come before you had the anointing? Do you know what it was? So do you have it in you? You have Holiness in you, don't you? (Inaudible (01:01:05)), isn't that the power that's working in you? So He says I'm going to do according to the power that's working in you, not according to what you ask, (inaudible (01:01:30)) but I'm going to do it according to the power that worketh in you, it's the Holy Ghost that's working in you, when you begin to speak in the Holy Ghost and speak in tongues, that's what He's going to do, He's going to do according to (inaudible (01:01:46)). Anybody following me here? According to the power that worketh in you, what can that mean? Holy Ghost is working in me and He's going to work up and He's going to work on my vocal chords and He said (inaudible (01:02:37)), look at it again just to get it in your head, some of you are looking at me thinking what that man say, well come on that, see what we can see.
1 Corinthians 14 "For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God for no man understandeth him, howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries." Now watch this, let's get into this a little bit more. Verse 4 "He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself." Alright, watch this, verse 14 "For if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prays but my understanding is fruitful." Isn't that asking above what you can think? Your spirit pray but your mind is unfruitful. Now watch this, what is it then? I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the understanding also I sing with the spirit and I sing with the understanding also. Else when thy shall bless with the spirit, underline that word bless, what does the word bless mean? I can empower to prosper in the spirit, I can edify, empower, you can bless with the spirit, how shall he that occupy the room of the unlearned say amen at the giving of (inaudible (01:04:57)), he understandeth not what thy said. Now I've got to put this in balance but I've got to bring out something that we've not held onto because we've been so busy trying to put this in balance. He says a man when he prays in the spirit, blesses with the spirit. I empower to prosper with the spirit. (Inaudible (01:05:18)) I just blessed with the spirit. I don't know what I blessed him with but it's got to be good because (inaudible (01:05:31)). I blessed with the spirit.
Now watch this, verse 17 "For thou verily givest thanks well, but the other is not edified." Let me read 16 so you can get this. "Else when thou bless with the spirit, how shall he that occupieth the room of the unlearned say amen at the giving of thanks, seeing he understandeth not thou sayest? For thou verily givest thanks well." Well, when did you give thanks well? When you were praying in tongues. You give thanks well when you pray in tongues. Over my food, the best way for me to thank God. (inaudible (01:06:19)). Now the balance is, I don't necessarily want to do that around folks that don't understand because they might think I'm weird and take the turkey from me. But now wait a minute, I can give thanks in the spirit well. (Inaudible (01:06:34)) I've given perfect thanks with the spirit. (Inaudible (01:06:43)) I've given perfect thanks and blessed him perfectly. Now look what your minds doing, your mind don't achieve nothing and so (inaudible (01:06:56)) and you thought having faith in what you wanted tells you about what you did. (Inaudible (01:07:09)). It's untouched by my carnal mind, untouched by my flesh, untouched by my spirit (inaudible (01:07:45)), in the name of Jesus I release my faith for something that would pass what I can ask or seek and yet the Bible says I bless in the spirit.
When you're in a hard place in the world and you've got to eat the food, you need to get rid of quietness, if you're looking at something that’s looking at you (inaudible (01:08:25)). Lord, I receive that this food right now is blessed and I give you perfect thanks giving for the nutrients of it somewhere in it, in Jesus name. Lord be something with it please. What? He says I do that better than when I say Lord, thank you for this food, He said I did better when I (inaudible (01:08:51)), Lord, I receive that food by my faith, what I just said I receive all that food and I made his. Now, can you see how your faith is untainted, I mean what else is your faith going to do, you are either going to have to release your faithfulness, you can't figure out what you did because you don't know what you did. What you going to do? How are you going to stop it from coming to path? (inaudible (01:09:15)) but here's what you do know, when I speak in tongues I speak mysteries, I speak answers, I bless perfectly, I give thanks perfectly and so now I've got to release my faith. (inaudible (01:09:39)), I will release my faith that when I speak in tongues it's the power that's working in me that's causing this thing and I'm having faith in the power that's working in me, not faith in what I understand or what I can comprehend. I spent years doing it but I did not understand it. I knew there was a reason, I knew I had to spend an enormous amount of time praying in tongues but I didn't understand why.
I tell you, the thing that really convinced me is when I read a book by brother Hagan and the book said that when a man speaks in tongues he prays the perfect prayer. Well I see that praying in tongues is a perfect prayer, why pray in English? And so I spent more time...(inaudible (01:10:34)) but I had to pray more in tongues because there was so much more I could accomplish in tongues than I could accomplish in my own understanding. You try it at home, you spend an hour praying in your language at home, your comprehended language, the ones you understand, the ones you speak, this is tongues. (inaudible (01:10:57)) praying like in English or Portuguese or whatever your language is, you come out feeling like you didn't quite accomplish anything, that you didn't quite finish anything, that you come out thinking that maybe there's something else I need to be praying for and the whole time your minds trying to think about what else do I need to be praying for, now wait a minute, I thought I was supposed to pray for somebody at Church, what was I supposed to be...and you never quite come out with the peace that says it is well and yet you go in praying in tongues for a whole hour and don't even know in your brain what you been praying and come out with peace that passes all understanding.
See, there's something to this that we hadn't tapped in on. See, we've got some of it in our English language as it had been declared the word. I mean, that was close because we begin to declare the word and the word was power, you see and then things begin to happen. When we have very little...here's the major key in operating this, we have very little trust in praying and having faith for the ministry and the only thing that's going to help you do this is trust. See, I trust God that when I speak in tongues and pray in tongues, man I'm praying some powerful things and then I release my faith and I trust, my faith is untainted. Now there are things that are beginning to happen in my life and my ministry and people begin to ask what in the world did you do to get that happen and I was like I don't know, I just believed for the mystery but I trust God so that when my mind tells me you are wasting your time, you aint did nothing, you ain't accomplished nothing, you'd better talk to the Lord where you will understand. I mean think about that, what if I'm in trouble, (inaudible (01:12:53)), do you know why you've got to take a breath while you're praying, so you can at least stop praying for a while and say Lord I receive that right now. (Inaudible (01:13:09))
Well, I mean you pray in tongues like that while you're in trouble but then all of a sudden now you want to start talking in English, Lord help me please, Lord you know I need your help, Lord Jesus please. You are accomplishing so much more when you're pointing the spirit. Why? Because you're praying for answers, you're praying for answers and our biggest enemy is our head, I call this your limit setter. This is a place that pollutes your faith, this is the place that tells you can't do it or that can't happen but by praying the mystery you go past this place, it can't touch your faith and yet you're releasing faith from mystery. Now, here's what we'll hopefully get into tomorrow, my time flies. (Inaudible (01:15:02)) Praise the Lord. I figure pray the mysteries then what? The next thing that happens is God begins to give you opportunities to pass the test of obedience. All of a sudden stuff come up and you know God told you to do it, what you doing? Your obedience is leading you to the manifestation of your Glory. Well, how did it get started? According to the power that you put in you.
See, no power works without this now, not in Gods system. Yet the life is in the power of the tongue and what we're going to look at is a mystery that occurred in (inaudible (01:16:10)) and yet it was the act of obedience to obey the prophet that won that battle on the line. Praying for the mystery and omitting obedience, you're just going to (inaudible (01:16:28)). Sit back and let me see is it worth it for anybody but I trust God and I trust His word and I'm going to start spending my time, all of my time praying and believing God for the message (inaudible (01:16:57)). Now I lay me down to sleep is just not going to work for your healing. (Inaudible (01:17:27)). You're going to have to finally have ultimate faith and trust in the power that God has put in you to get to that level of exceedingly, I don't know how we're going to do a lot of things but I know who knows and I put my faith in who knows. I know who knows and I know this work, I've done it but I didn't know what I was doing. I knew I had to pray hours in the spirit, I knew I had to pray hours in the spirit, what was I doing? I was praying the mysteries.
See, the Bible even said pray that you may interpret and I continue to pray that I may interpret but I don't wait until my comprehension before I release my faith to the man, it's faith, if the comprehension wants to come it will come on but I'm not going to wait to say Lord I believe I received that once I understand it. I say Lord I believe I received the mystery of what I don't understand for that particular situation and it happens, in the name of Jesus. See God will reveal certain things for you to do. We were at the meeting now, Lord told me not to do that, Praise the Lord, now that's an act of obedience, I mean I heard God clear, He came and spoke to me and even told Tash, I said the prayer of God just told me not to do that and not to say that anymore and it just came in my spirit. Now wait a minute, that act of obedience determines your manifestation. Amen. So now you've got to make a decision, I know there's Heaven, I've been trying to teach it as often as I can so I can get it in your spirit but this like the last day kind of revelation stuff that's going to be coming and this is the stuff that going to separate the sheep from the goat. The goats going to be still lying there trying to figure out bah, how do I do this, bah, what do goats sound like? But the sheep going to be (inaudible (01:19:52)). I receive that right now for my business Lord, hallelujah, Glory to God.
Creflo Dollars ministry World Changes Ministries International can be contacted in South Africa on international dialing code 002711 792 5562 or locally in South Africa 011 792 5562. In the United States, in Canada they can be contacted on 1 888 252 7788, their website is www.worldchanges.org, their address in South Africa is Creflo Dollar Ministries, Private Bag 3575, Cresta, 2118, Republic of South Africa and in the United States, PO Box 490124, College Park, Georgia, GA30349 in the United States. As mentioned before, this tape that has just been played is one of a set of six which go into a variety of aspects in greater detail. In order to complete this teaching I would like to, just very briefly, give you one or two comments and then share the steps to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The point that is so vital about this teaching is if we had to go into the realm of exceedingly abundantly in marriage, if we are to experience God's best Heaven on earth in marriage, we have to walk in the spirit, we need to be lead by the spirit, we need the gifts of the spirit in order to get there and this teaching on prayer in the Holy Spirit is absolutely a vital.
Creflo Dollar gives, in his book, SOS: Help, my flesh needs discipline, the seven steps to receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit. One, understand that the Holy Spirit was poured out on the day of Pentecost at 02:38. Two, the born again experience is the only qualification necessary for receiving the Holy Spirit baptism, Act 2:38. Three, the laying on of hands is Scriptural, Act 8:17. Four, know what to expect, Acts 19:6. Five, disregard all fears about receiving counterfeit for the Holy Spirit, Luke 11:11-13, there are counterfeits but we are charged to walk in faith. Six, open your mouth as an act of faith to receive the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 5:18&19. Seven, let all things be done decently and in order, 1 Corinthians 14:33.
In order to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, as indicated, it is Scriptural for the impartation of the Holy Spirit come by the laying on of hands, except in exceptional circumstances. So unless you're clearly lead by the Lord to pray on your own, I would recommend that you find a charismatic Church or a Church in which the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the laying on of hands is an established practice and (inaudible (01:24:09)) for ministry. If you're unable to make contact with such people, I would suggest that you contact ministries such as this or Creflo Dollar, Kenneth Copeland, Bennie Hinn, Rick Godwin, Casey Treat or other ministries around the world who will be able to help you, possibly even telephonically if you're in a remote area, certainly if necessary we will be happy to help you although our ministry is prophetic and teaching and not pastoral.
Father, in the name of Jesus, I bring this message before you and I ask that if there's anything contained herein which is not according to your word and not according to your will, that you will blow it away and that it will find no root in the hearts of the hearers but I pray that everything in this message which is according to your word and according to your will, will find deep root in the hearts of the hearers, that you will water it and nourish it by your spirit and that it will grow and produce abundant fruit in Jesus name. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Amen.
This message has been recorded by a Church without walls, a ministry of end time issue ministries, Po Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg, 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at james@endtimeissues.org.za. Our phone numbers international dialing code, normally 0027 but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline 0027 11 791 2327 or in South Africa 011 791 2327. My number 0027 83 251 6644 and in South Africa 083 251 6644. Our fax number internationally 0027 11 791 5004 and locally 011 791 5004. All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the word.
Please feel free to copy any of our materials in part or in full as the Lord leads you. Understanding that the manner in which you utilize those materials and the manner in which you cite them and quote them is for your account on the Day of Judgment. So we would ask you to use the materials widely, but please feel free to copy them however you see fit and to share these truths with anybody as the Lord leads. I would urge those of you who received copies of these tapes at no charge that once you've listened to them that you consider passing them on and blessing others with them. Our heart's desire is that they should not become an artifact sitting on a bookshelf and gathering dust but that the word of God contained in these teachings should be spread as far and as widely as possible. Should you be lead by the Lord to sow into this Ministry, our bank account is end time issue ministries, the account number is 042 752 7805, the branch is the Standard Bank of South Africa, Randburg branch and the branch code is 018 005.
You've been listening to these messages, you've realized that you do not have a personal saving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that if you were to die right now, you would not spend Eternity in Heaven with him. I would urge you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to pray the prayer of salvation. The steps to salvation are as follows. Firstly admit and recognize that you are a sinner. Romans 3 verse 23 says "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Secondly, accept and believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that he came to Earth as a man, that he was crucified and died on the cross, that on the third day, he rose again and is now seated at the right hand of the Father and that by his death and resurrection he took your sons for Eternity. Romans 5:8 says, "but God demonstrates his own love towards us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Thirdly, confess your sins, repent of your sins and turn around. Repentance means turning around, it means ceasing to do what you now realize is wrong. 1 John 19 says, "if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness for confess your faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, that you believe this and receive his salvation and invite him to dwell in your heart." Romans 10: 9 and 10 says, "if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved, for with the heart one believes unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. Give thanks to God for your salvation, pray and cry out to God and give thanks to him for saving you. Work out your salvation by the Spirit of God." Philippians 2:12 says, "therefore, my beloved, as you've always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."
Salvation is a process. You are saved the moment you pray the sinner's prayer, the prayer of salvation and invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart and be Lord of your life. But Salvation is also a process whereby your mind is renewed and you come to have a personal and deep relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is your choice how far you go in that relationship. He desires a wonderful and a deep and intimate relationship with you, but it is your choice whether you will do what is necessary to come to that place through reading your Bible, praying, seeking counsel, seeking guidance. You should be water baptized at the first possible opportunity. Matthew 3:6 says "And were baptized by him in the Jordan confessing their sins." Encourage you to ask the Lord to lead you to somebody who has some knowledge of the basic ordinance of water baptism who can water baptize you, which leads you to a Church where they can water baptize you.
There's no reason why you cannot be water baptized today as a symbolic cleansing and washing of your sins. In fact, the minute you have prayed the sinners prayer it would be preferable for you to be water baptized. Choose to be obedient to the word of God, accept the Bible in its original Hebrew as given by the Spirit of God and choose to live your life according to that. 1John 5:3 says "For this is the love of God that we keep his Commandments and his Commandments are not burdensome." I encourage you to read the word of God daily and to put into practice everything that you encounter. As a principle which I believe will bear fruit in your life, I would encourage you to make an effort right now, after you've prayed this prayer, start reading your Bible from the book of John through to the book of Revelation.
And then make a discipline of reading the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation at least two, three, four times a year. And read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi at least once a year. And I would encourage you to do that using different translations. Ask God to lead you to the Church where he wants you to be at this time where they will teach you, they will guide you, they will pray for you and they will help you to walk in the fullness of what God has called you to be. Be aware that God may move you from Church to Church over time to teach you new things. And you should not be reluctant to do this.
04 08 How to Discipline Your Flesh
Kenneth Copeland
In volume two of this series Understanding Gods way in marriage, volume two deals with towards Heaven on earth in marriage and this teaching is entitled How to discipline your flesh. It is a copy of a single tape teaching by Kenneth Copeland entitled How to discipline your flesh. The flesh is one of the key aspects that needs to be brought into submission and to be dealt with in coming into a place where we experience Heaven on earth in marriage and, in fact, in every aspect of the Christian walk.
Hebrews 12:1, we'll start reading there with the first verse. "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside" underline the word us, let us lay, "let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us and let us run with patience the race that is set before us looking unto Jesus the author and the finisher of our faith; who the joy that was set before him endured the cross despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds."
Now right there we can see a very important fact, that he said if we'll consider Jesus we'll not be wearied and faint mentally, now the warfare that we're involved in is a mental war. The battle is from the spirit realm, now this is something that takes a little thinking about for a moment, I need to define a couple of things here to you so you'll get good insight of what we're going to talk about because we're going to talk about something tonight that I've never heard anybody preach on it, I've never heard anybody teach on it, I've never heard anybody talk about it, I've never really heard much about it except from the spirit of God. So I've been praying about it, I sensed in my spirit, I better share some things with you about it. I believe that we will find that it is the very key to Satan’s operation. The Bible says we're not ignorant of his devices and we learn how he operates, I want you to know, we can stop how he operates in our own personal lives. If we just go on blindly then he will continue to deceive. See, he doesn't have any power, if he had any power it would not be necessary for him to be the deceiver, I mean he'd just come in and kill you if he had any power and he doesn't have any power, he has to deceive you to cause you to do things that change your destiny. Now all destiny is not of God. Somebody said now that person is a man of destiny, well which destiny? God's, his or the devils. See destiny means destination, what is your destination, some people are bound and destined to hell, that's the way they're headed. Now they don't have to be and that is not the destiny that God set out for them. God's destiny, His destination is towards the Kingdom of Glory.
Now I began that to show you this. Satan is a spirit, the demonic activity that we deal with in this earth are spiritual beings. However, even though they are spirits they are not functioning in the spiritual world, not the spiritual Kingdom, they are spirit beings but they are functioning in the soulish Kingdom, the devilish Kingdom, he is the prince of the power of the air, not the prince of the power of the Kingdom of God, Jesus is the prince of peace, hallelujah. Are you listening to what I'm saying? I want you to get this. People have had the idea that Satan is equal to God, no, he is not equal to God, he's been kicked out of the spiritual Kingdom of God, the world of the spirit. Now he is a spirit but he operates actually...I said this that the warfare comes from the spiritual realm, in speaking of the spiritual realm I'm talking about that realm that is above the realm of the flesh that you can see or feel or touch, you know, physically. Satan does not operate in the spiritual world, he operates in the soulish world, he operates in the world of emotions, he operates in the realm of feelings, he operates in the realm of the mind, he's after your consciousness, he wants your mind.
Maybe this will help you understand the picture that I want to paint to you, I don't have a lot of time to spend on that product but I do want to qualify it to you because I want you to see where the realm of combat is. It's much easier to fight the war if you know where the battle is, amen, praise the Lord. Alright, have you ever heard anybody say this, you know I had a vision and I saw Jesus and He was standing there and I'm just looking at Him like I was looking at you and all of the questions that I wanted to ask Him just went away. Now there were a few things that I asked Him but all of the other things that thought about later, why didn't I ask Him about that, have you ever heard anybody say that, maybe some of you have experienced that, I wonder why I didn't ask Him about that, why didn't I ask Him about this, why didn't I say this, I just stood there. Why? Why is that so? Because if you saw Jesus, you were operating by the discerning of spirits gift in 1 Corinthians 12, to discern means to see end days, you are seeing into the spirit realm, you are seeing into the Kingdom of God, not just the soulish realm, you are seeing into the spirit realm so in that spirit realm your mind was not functioning, your spirit was functioning and the questions that you had on your heart were the ones that you asked Him and the stuff that you're just playing around in your mind didn't even come up. For a moment there you were in the spirit, we are learning how to walk in the spirit, being controlled by the spirit of God as we learn how to walk in the spirit and not in the vanity of our minds, as we learn to walk in the spirit then we will begin to receive some things from the spirit of God where we will be caught up in the spirit.
Now you can't just go push a button and say I tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to be like John on the isle of (inaudible (00:08:49)) and I'm going to get in the spirit. Now that's a realm of getting in the spirit where you get off into the according to the will of God. We can walk in the spiritual realm by the power of Almighty God in authority over the soulish intellectual realm with the word of God and stay in a place where God can catch us on (inaudible (00:09:19)) another level of the world of the spirit which the apostle John talked about, the apostle Paul talked about but if we're not walking in the spirit, we're really not candidate to be caught up in the spirit or caught up into that higher level of the spirit of God that everybody would give anything if they could get in, they say but when it comes right down to it, it's because you won't give anything is the reason you're not experiencing more of it. Oh, I'd just give anything to do that, why don't you pray in the spirit about six hours a day, oh I don't know when I'd have time to do that, well don't give me that give anything business, until you make up your mind quit lying about it. You might as well say amen, that's a good place to shout right there for a few people. I know that goes down pretty rough but there's some things like this that we need to go ahead and swallow, choke them down. Now folks, the body of Christ in the earth right now is responsible for the Glory of God, the value of the word of God and the quality of the word of God, the wonders of God, see the Bible says that I will pour out my spirit on my hand maidens and my servants, they shall prophesize and I'll show signs and wonders, if there are no hand maidens and servants that can walk in the spirit there'll be no signs and wonders, if there are no signs and wonders there is no outpouring, if there is no outpouring of the rain there is no harvest, if there is no harvest there is no end time and it will have to go on and on and on and we'll miss what God is doing right now and God (inaudible (00:11:15)) and come on up in the higher realm and get (inaudible (00:11:21)) over with and get it in the ground and marry it and go on to the ages to come in Christ Jesus, hallelujah.
And we have a great responsibility to carry out in that area and some of the things of God that we're just going to have to take from the word of God and just swallow, swallowing the Scriptures. I love those Scriptures says my God shall cause you to triumph in Christ Jesus, oh I love to swallow that one, goes down good. But laying aside every weight and the sin that easily deceits me, I don't like that, I don't like to swallow that. The easy sins are the ones you don't want to get rid of, the easy stuff. Satan doesn't come up to you and just blare it out to you, why don't you be a prostitute, why don't you be a killer, nobody starts off a killer, it starts off little and then it grows. He has to operate that way because all things follow the law of God that is plant seed, it will grow, that is the law in Genesis, that is the way it is and he has to start with seed and he plants the seed right there, right in the mind. When you were a little boy, he didn't start you off desiring to be a hit man for the mob, he started you off wondering what would happen if you just cussed a little bit, oh I remember the day. I mean I was raised in a Christian home, I didn't know (inaudible (00:13:25)), maybe God would kill me, something would just come out of the balloons, just burn me up right there. Now I knew other people didn't somehow didn't think God would put up with it, I was nine years old and I remember it got on me all day long, I thought about it all morning long, we had a long driveway outside our house and the garage several feet behind the house and this driveway went from all the way from the garage all the way out to the front street and it was long and I'd walk up and down that driveway and all morning long I was thinking about, I wondered what would happen if I cussed.
Now that's a West Texas term to our international guests, that means speak with profanity but boy there is such a thing and it's just plain old West Texas cussing and that's what I was thinking about and there were members of my family that were genius at it, I mean it, they invented cuss words man and I thought about that all day, thought about it, working on my mind, a little nine year old boy and this thing was working on my mind. Well, I'd been to Sunday school and that's one thing that thrilled me, what Willy George was talking about earlier, about training our kids and raising them up in the word of God and teaching them the real thing instead of little old watered down silly little old Sunday school quarterly junk, trying to boil it down to the three year old level. You get it down on their level and they'll argue with you about it just like anybody else will but you just give it to them out of the Bible and they'll just grab it and go with it. They don't have to understand it, they just believe. Well, I didn't know any of the Bible, I mean all I knew was enough Bible verses to get me through training union every Sunday evening when they stood you up there and had that Bible verse quoting contest and I mean, all you had to do was just miss once and they let you sit down so I missed, that's what I wanted to do was sit down. And I'd think about God don't want me to do this, mama don't want me to do this, daddy don't want me to do this but I want to do it and I wrestled with that all morning, I wrestled with it way up into the afternoon and so finally I thought well, boy here goes my...if I die I just die.
Worked up all the courage I could and said just about half a word, nothing helped, so I finished it, nothing helped, so I said another one, nothing helped, I said another one, nothing helped. Boy, I remember it like it's yesterday, I started walking down that driveway, I was walking along that driveway, I'd take a rock and cuss it, cuss that one, I cussed the dog, the cat, I cussed the house, I cussed the garage, I called in everything I could think of. I walked all the way down that driveway doing that and got all the way inside that garage and I went down (inaudible (00:17:12)) when I got inside that garage I was moving on, I called that garage everything you could think of, nine year old boy. I knew that afternoon that something moved in on my thinking, I knew something moved into my mind, I couldn't tell you what it was but I want you to know about twenty years later I could have told you what it was. That thing ruled my life, like to have destroyed my folks home, like to have destroyed me spiritually, mentally, physically. My body began to gain weight, I began having trouble in school, I mean at nine years old. It didn't show up all that quickly, it was a gradual thing and I began to be honorary where my mother and my daddy were concerned. Oh, I loved them, don't misunderstand that but I just started to, you know, just a little more at a time, just a little more at a time and I would think about things...well, I wonder, I'd like to try that, well you know, I didn't die when I started cussing, maybe I'll try that.
I wanted to smoke, I'd smoke anything I could set on fire, I wanted to bad. My grandfather was a real smoker, I mean he loved it. He told me one day, he said you know, I love tobacco. I mean, his sitting there in his chair and said I love tobacco and picked his tobacco can up and smelt it. He said I can think of any way to use it that I haven't used it. He's sitting there telling me, just a little boy, telling me this. I'm like well, I don't know why I can't use it. You kidding, my mama would have jumped on me like a chicken on a buzz, not going to put up with that. But that wasn't quite enough to keep me from it. Now that started haunting me, I smoked grape vines, I peeled cedar bark off of posts and shred it and smoke, just burn it, dear God, set your neck on fire. Now what if somebody had come along and offered me a joint, are you kidding me, if you could set fire to it I would have smoked it. I enjoyed the rebellion and before it was all over with, by the time I was a grown man I was rebellious to everything that had a legal tone to it, I was rebellious to law, I was rebellious to my mother and my father, I was rebellious to God. On one hand I wanted God but on the other hand I didn't want to do what He told me to do and I didn't want to hear it from Him, I didn't want to hear anything about Him because every time you said anything to me about Him it looked like to me you were trying to rope me in and channel me and tie me up and put me in some kind of a straight and I don't want that, I want to be free and all the time I was in bondage.
It started with that seed back there, by the time I got delivered of it it took some strong deliverance to get me free of it. I didn't receive freedom from the thing until I was 25 years old and never did walk in the fullness of the freedom of it because I didn't know how to stay free from it. Dear God, I want you to know, I'd have gone wild in the service of deliverance like we had here last night (inaudible (00:21:25)). Are you kidding me, that's what I wanted, I didn't know how to get it. And when I did get it I would receive some deliverance momentarily and then it would start over again, the seeds would start being planted again, in another area it wouldn't be long, I'd have a crop and I'd be bound again, I'd be bound over into something else. Bound with doubt, bound with unbelief. I got up every morning of the world mad at my mother and dad, I mean they come in and got me up every morning, I was mad by the time I got out of bed. What was you mad at? Well, me mostly but really, I didn't know, I was just mad. I don't care what mama cooked, I didn't like it. I want out of this place, I've got to get out of here, I've got to leave here. Where you going? I don't know, anywhere but here. I hate this town, I hate this house, blah blah blah. Had a bird nest on the ground and didn't know it. Had it made and didn't know it. I could have been learning intercessory prayer from my mother and learning the integrity of God from my dad, are you kidding me, I could have been on spiritual easy street by the time I was 15 years old and too dumb to know it. Why? Because I was a spiritual Scriptural illiterate, I didn't know anything about God, you could try to tell me about God, it didn't make sense to my mind, my mind had been captured, there was a law in motion where my mind was concerned and I had no idea what it was, my flesh was boss over everything I did and by the time I was 20 years old I was 100 pounds overweight, headed for destruction, couldn't stop it, I was out of control, my body was out of control and I knew it and I didn't know what to do with it, I didn't know how to stop the pain.
Thank God for His mercy, oh thank God for His mercy, say thank God for His mercy. Now I want to show you tonight, at least give you some insight into what I believe the key to Satan’s seed planting, the way he gets that started, you can teach it to a child, it is so simple yet it is one of the most profound things in its reality that you will ever see from the word of God. I want us to look at the book of Ephesians 4, I'll put you in remembrance of the fact that the seventh chapter of the book of Mark, Jesus made the statement about several evil things, evil forces. There were forces of the flesh listed in the fifth chapter of the book of Galatians, do you remember that? Works of the flesh, fruit of the spirit. There are certain things that come out of and is based in the spiritual world but there are other things based in that soulish realm that comes out of there and each of those places Jesus, in the seventh chapter of Mark, the apostle Paul by the Holy Spirit in the book of Galatians chapter 5, mentioned lasciviousness. Now I had a long time learning how to say it, much less find out what it was. I never heard anybody preach on lasciviousness. Sometimes Galatians call it (inaudible (00:25:25)), it's been translated immoral, immorality or an unrestrained life but if this is the problem with preaching on it from an immoral stand point or from an unrestrained stand point, it doesn't start off that way. The actual meaning of the word is no restraint, unrestrained, lasciviousness is pressure applied to the flesh to cause it to grow and come to a place where it is dominant over the soul and the spirit. When the flesh is dominating it is its weakest. Now catch on to what I'm saying to you, when the flesh is dominating the spirit and the soul, it is its weakest.
When the flesh has yielded to the spirit it is its strongest because the thing that the flesh uses to dominate the system will be its weakest point. If food is your weakness, it was Eve's weakness, food is the ground, physical food is the ground for more human failure and lasciviousness than any other item, it's the very thing that Adam was attacked, it's the thing that Satan attacked Jesus on first. Now he hit Him in two other areas also but man, I'm telling you, he came after Him with bread first, powerful play. You'll see some insight into it, there's a lot of you that are going to take this message tonight and get rid of what you know you should have been rid of a long time ago which is about two thirds of you. Somebody said you sure have lost a lot of weight, I didn't lose a lot of weight, in fact if you want to know the truth I didn't really lose any weight, I didn't go on a diet, I stopped lasciviousness in my life, the weight took care of itself. All that flesh that left was not me, that was add on flesh, it was not my flesh. Somebody said you ought not talk that fat on you ugly because you know the Bible said no man hated his own flesh, that fat was not my flesh and I hated it, it was added on. Are you listening to me? Now what I have now on me is necessary, you've got to have some flesh on you. I don't hate this but I'm not having any trouble with it either because it's something that God taught me about lasciviousness.
Now I want to show you something in the word of God, let me show you where lasciviousness heads, I want to show you what it's designed to do. If we see what Satan has in mind, the goal that he's after, the end of this sin, we know the wages of all sin is death and if we know where it's going, we see the point (inaudible (00:29:39)), we see the track that it's taking, we can begin to analyze it's workman, see what's in the thing and begin to know the difference. When we see it packaged up in different packages, all sin is the same, all sin is selfishness and each different sin is just selfishness with a different ribbon around it. Sins of sex have one kind of ribbon around them, gluttony has another kind of ribbon around it and (inaudible (00:30:17)) but it's still selfish. I mean, you didn't gain all that weight for somebody else. You didn't get off into stealing for somebody else, I didn't get off into that cussing for somebody else, it's because I wanted to. The big need either through sin or through pride or a combination of the two, I have become predominant in my thinking, when that happens lasciviousness has fertile ground.
Now let's look here in the full chapter of the book of Ephesians and we'll find out what the end of the thing is. Notice the 17th verse, this I say therefore and testify in the Lord that you henceforth are from now on walk not as other gentiles walk. Now gentiles does not mean that you are not a Jew or not an Israeli, that's a better word because to be a Jew actually is a wrong word to call someone that is the seed of Abraham or that is an Israeli, unless they're from the tribe of Judah. You see that, it's a slang word that's been applied to all of Israelis but it really isn't. Now before Jesus came, that was a word applied to people that were outside the Abrahamic Covenant which in most cases was somebody that was not an Israeli, you could be a (inaudible (00:32:14)) and come into Judaism and you were no longer a gentile. The word gentile means without God, now even the Israeli world itself has taken on the fact that anybody that is not a natural born Jew is a gentile and that isn't right. The word gentile means to be without God and the Bible said if you belong to Christ then are you Abrahams seed and you are heirs according to the same promise. So he says we're no longer gentiles, the apostle Paul writes this to the Church and said you're no longer gentile, you used to be a gentile without Christ but you're not without God anymore. So now what he's saying is this, that you from now on don't walk as gentiles, walk in the vanity of their minds, don't walk in your mind, don't just be controlled by your mind all the time, you're going to have to come to a place where you're controlled by your spirit, by the Spirit of God through the word of God.
If all you ever do is reason things out you're going to miss God 100% of the time because the natural mind is an (inaudible (00:33:30)) against God, you know why? Faith doesn't come out of the mind, it comes out of the heart. And it takes faith to walk with God. Watch this now, don't walk as gentiles walk and the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart, who being passed feeling or (inaudible (00:34:03)) or have had the conscience seared over until it has no more voice to the mind or to the body. Have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all, say all, what does that mean? It means all, doesn't it? All uncleanness with greediness. Now think about that. The ultimate goal of Satan in the life of a believer through lasciviousness is to bring you to a place where you will walk exactly like the world walks, can tell no different even though you're boring in and maybe have experienced the Holy Spirit speaking with other tongues and all these good things but through lasciviousness you have come to a place where you're walking again in the vanity of your mind, alienated from the life of God, working all uncleanness with greediness, separated totally from God's life and come to a place where you have no shame about (inaudible (00:35:40)). Do you ever notice a back slidden Christian is worse than he was before he got saved? That doesn't mean he's beyond God, that doesn't mean he's out there to a place where God can't get through to him. Oh, our God knows how to deliver them, there are a lot of people delivering it in here last night, they thought they never would get back in the right relationship with God again.
But if you learn what I'm telling you tonight, you not only can stop it before it comes to that level, you not only can do that, you can take authority over it after it's come to this level, break the power of it and come back in the right relationship with the Father. And then keep lasciviousness where it belongs, under your foot in the name of Jesus. Now, it doesn't start out as a total immoral wipe out of the life of God, it doesn't present itself as greediness and all uncleanness, that's not the way it presents itself at all, that is Satan’s goal for lasciviousness and that is what it will produce. What is (inaudible (00:37:10))? It starts out as a thought, the mind is the ground of Satan’s seed, starts off as a thought. 2 Corinthians 10, do you remember what it says? Our warfare is not of the flesh, what does it say? Casting down imaginations, reasonings, lasciviousness, casting them down, bringing into captivity every, every, every, every, not 10% of them, every thought, all thoughts, all thoughts, bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ Jesus. You could say it like this, to the obedience of the word of God. If your mind is not renewed to the word of God you will never be able to come to a place where lasciviousness might take hold of you somewhere in your life. It doesn't start off at why don't you go down there and blow about 8000 tonight on that poker table, it didn't start that way. Why don't you become a 400 dollar a day junkie? Why don't you just bite you off about a 5/6/700 dollar a day H habit? No no no, it started off with one snort, one joint that somebody else let you just borrow because it's not going to bother you.
You know what, it actually started a whole lot more innocently than that. Now let's go on beyond being born again, you're born again, you're a child of God, you want to live for God, I mean let's go on up the ladder a few runs, I don't have time to talk about it out there in the sin realm, we'll bounce back at it a little bit. So alright, let's talk about lasciviousness and the life of a Christian, how's this thing work? Well the basic fundamental operation of it is no restraint, no restraint. First, no restraint to thoughts. Well, you know I know I shouldn't eat that but I just can't help it, just one is not going to hurt. Oh really, you just ate the seed, now it's going to grow. Somebody said I never count calories, yes you do, you just wait until after you swallow them to count them, your body counts every one of them that goes through your mouth. If you count them before you eat them they wouldn't bother you. Are you hearing me? You know that thought that it didn't...well, you might have stopped and restrained it for a moment but then thought oh, what the hell, I mean just a little bit, it never stops there, it sure never did with me. I used to get so mad at my wife, she could eat one bite of a piece of candy, do you ever know anybody like that? See now, the power of temperance worked in her life, it was not working in mine, I didn't even know where it was, never heard of it because I was practicing lasciviousness. She practiced the temperance of God, she used to take a little bite and sit that piece of candy up in the kitchen window and take a little bite each day for nine days. I took nearly and the whole box and all was gone. I mean, if a box smell good I'd eat the ins out of it.
But it didn't stop that way, I didn't used to be that way, I remember when I wasn't that way and I had some help becoming that way. My mother went to work one time back when I was a kid and there was a lady that came there to help her and she was a cook, she was a professional pie cook, that woman could cook a pie, she could make a hog out of anybody and I'd come home from school and mother wouldn't be home yet, I was 13 years old and she'd call me the baby, she would fix baby a pie. Now she'd tell mother, she'd say I'm going to cook a pie today, is that alright, mother would say yes, that's alright, she cooked two. Mama wouldn't know she cooked two, I'd come home from school, she'd set me down at the table and give me my pie, the whole pie I'm talking about, I ate the whole thing man and then didn't let mama know and I ate some of theirs. (inaudible (00:43:26)) my mother started studying nutrition and started trying to tell the rest of our family that we were killing ourselves at the table and we called her old crazy, while we walked around like this. And I liked to kill myself with it but I thought she was nuts but it didn't start with a whole pie at a time, it's just a thought, just a thought. Unchecked, even if you did check it, it had no determination behind it and here is the key to breaking Satan’s back.
Being determined to fulfill Gods word at any price, any price, what will you pay for the glory of God, what will you pay for the power of God in your life, what kind of price will you pay to get somebody to deliver some drugs to keep somebody from going to hell? I can stand up here and tell you all night long that a quarter of a million people there died and are going to hell and you'd sit there and look at me and look at me, trying to bat your sweet eyes at me but then I could throw one little ugly word in there, just one little four letter word that actually means nothing, I could throw that in there and you'd go coughing and spitting and blowing, did you hear what he said? And all the time I kept telling you a quarter of a million people are there dying and going to hell and you don't care but let me say one little out of line word and oh dear Lord, everybody get all upset because brother Copeland is talking that way. See how out of line priorities get, what price will you pay to get somebody born again? When you have a thought, she didn't have any right to say that to me, the next thought is now wait a minute, I ought to not be thinking that, I ought to stop this but I don't want to stop blessing God, I've got to stop this but I don't feel like stopping it. I've got to stop this, I don't want to be feeling that way about them. Somebody walks through the door, I won't tell you what she said to me, can you? You didn't restrain your thought, then it got down into your mouth.
Now remember what we read there in the book of Ephesians when it said coming past feelings, dead to shame, do you remember that James said...believes in, everything he claims to be if he cannot bridle his tongue is vain, it's vanity. What did Paul say? He said if you're walking in the vanity of your mind, you're walking just like the world. Here is the operation of lasciviousness, of thought, unrestrained, really not much thought given to it, did you see that guy run out in front of me on the freeway? I wish my horn was a gun. And then just drive another 100 yards and you've forgotten about it and just go on but the seeds been planted, seeds have been planted. See how it starts, everything that Satan can do in your life that is so small and so minute, you don't pay attention to it so that they're just one more little notch, one more little area and it grows a little more and it grows a little more, what he's doing is robbing you of the power that it takes for you to run him off and then when it gets to a place where he considers himself safe enough, where your faith has been covered enough by this junk and you don't realize it's there then he'll move in on you in sickness and disease or something and you stand up and say Satan get away from me in the name of Jesus and he says ha-ha, says who, why don't you call (inaudible (00:48:44)), you can't do it so you had that thought and you thought yes, I can I think, don't be thinking that way, that's unbelief but it can happen.
It started again, what do you call that? Doubt, doubt is a direct result of lasciviousness, lasciviousness is no restraint, a seed of doubt, you may not be able to do that, yes I can do that, I think. Oh yes I can, I ought better not be thinking that way, I shouldn't be thinking that way, I know I can't, I really wonder if that junk all in God's preaching (inaudible (00:49:45)), I tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to watch their lives for a few days and see if they're in. Now you've got your eyes off Jesus, you've got it off of me and off of other preachers and you get your eyes off Jesus and get it on us, we're going to let you down because don't base your faith on another person, base it on Jesus, on the word of God, He'll never let you down. What's the problem in there? What's the key to all of that? How do you control those stuff? Bringing in the captivity, every thought, every thought, bringing into captivity to what, the word. You're going to have to start your day programming your mind on the word of God, if you start your day on anything else your mind is open for lasciviousness and when it begins to function and operate, the little seeds begin to grow, the little seeds begin to happen and you think well, I ought to be praising God this morning but I just don't feel like it and then the next thing you know somebody says something you don't like and so your next thought was I shouldn't come against them over that, I ought to be (inaudible (00:50:57)) and you're acting and saying things that you know good well you shouldn't be doing but there is no restraint for it.
Did you notice when you get in a meeting like this and the power of God is in operation and you're around other people that are strong in the Lord, did you ever notice how easy it is to restrain the devil and how easy it is to restrain thoughts like that? When I got delivered up to (inaudible (00:51:26)), my buddy's Church there down in Houston and he was pastoring down there, (inaudible (00:51:43)) and oh, I was in such bondage, oh dear God, I was so miserable. I knew I was supposed to be in the ministry, couldn't figure out how. Oh dear God, I'd surrendered to God to the ministry and then just wouldn't do what He told me to do. I said yes God, I'll be in the ministry, you've called me to preach, I know you have, He said (inaudible (00:52:01)). Oh yes God, I have a willing heart, I'll go for you want me to do, I'll say what you want me to say, I'll sing songs you tell me to sing, I want you to give that fellow your car, I couldn't do that. First thought you had, lasciviousness stepped in the way. Now here's something I want you to notice, I'll get back to down there to brother Suttons Church in a minute. The thing has (inaudible (00:52:35)), there's two ends of it that one way works this way and the other way works this way, they're opposite ends and I want you to see this.
Lasciviousness, no restraint, works to keep you from restraining the flesh but it always works to restrain your spirit from walking with God. On one side of the picture, it is a very difficult restrainer but on the other side of the picture it has no restraint at all. Can you see what I'm saying to you? I have a thought, well now, don't be talking that way but I don't have any restraint to that. But then right on the other hand, the Lord says something to me and I think oh well, I can't do that. It's restraining me from this and there's not restraint over there but I can on opposite force into operation which is the force of the word of God that produces the spiritual fruit of temperance, the spiritual fruit of joy, the spiritual fruit of faith and above all, the spiritual fruit of the love of God but I have to do it with the word of God.
I was having a horrible time getting loose from that tobacco devil, I mean that thing, I threw away more cigarettes than I was smoking and I was smoking a lot of them and then couldn't afford it. I'd throw them out the car window and turn around and go back and get them, feel like a fool walking around out there in a bar ditch, looking for a pack of cigarettes that I just threw out the car. Throw one out the car and run over it with my own car, not have money enough to go buy any more and stand there and cry like a baby. How dumb can you get? I'll tell you how dumb you can get, you can get so dumb, your mind is so full of vanity, see that's nothing but vain man, standing there crying over something that's killing me and couldn't get loose from the thing. I wouldn't have had any trouble with that thing if I'd known what to do with the first thought that I ever had about it. I wouldn't have any trouble with it. Don't have any trouble with it now. Never have the thought of ever going back to it, I never have that thought, why? Because there was a time in my life I was settling, it's been settled. Now I've had several dreams over the years that I was smoking again, those (inaudible (00:55:25)), did you ever dream that? Did you ever dream you were smoking? Every time I'd dream that it was a cigarette about three feet long and I never did get the opportunity to light the thing, it was already lit and I didn't realize I was smoking till the smoke was coming out my mouth, I thought oh no, not again, couldn't have been from God.
I didn't get the chance for choice, God always gives you the chance of choice, you have a chance to make a choice, you have the right to choice, Satan can't cram that down your throat, nobody was hooked on drugs before they got the first fix. He cannot cram that down your throat, as a God Almighty created being in there, you have a right to choose your thoughts, not only do you have a right to cast them down, you have a right to fix the thoughts that go in your mind and stay and you have a right to the things that come out your mouth. Jesus said out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. First is lasciviousness of the mind and the thoughts, no restraint of thoughts. Secondly, lasciviousness of the tongue, no restraint of the tongue. Thirdly is lasciviousness of the body and its actions and what it does and what it partakes of. I was down there in Houston and I got into that meeting, I called my dad and quit my job and I went on down there to that meeting down in Houston, I started packing cigarettes up over that sun visor because I didn't want to be smoking around all these preachers. I had respect for them, it wasn't because I figured they were going to jump on me about it, they were too lovely to do that. They shoved me up in a corner and prayed for me all night long but they wouldn't chew me out about it. I just had more respect in that for them and I stuffed those cigarettes up there.
I want you to see something, for a few hours I had a reason not to smoke that was more powerful than the desire to smoke and my reason was my respect for these men of God. Now that won't be enough long, you may quit smoking because you have respect for your wife or for your husband and she hates the nasty stuff and you may quit for a while just on account of her. You may quit for a while because you don't want your children to do it but that isn't going to last very long. So after a while lasciviousness will grow in your mind and in your mouth and then on your body and you'll go back to it again. First you'll start doing it where they can't see you, now you're lying about it. Then one thing leads to another and finally you'll get man and say what do I care what they think, who are they to tell me when I can smoke and what I can't, of course I know none of you have ever thought anything like that but I got down there in that meeting and for a day or two there I just didn't want to smoke around them but they were preaching the word down there.
I'd never been under any word, I'd never been exposed to the power of God, I'd been a Christian for a good long time but I didn't know anything about the word of God and I got in that meeting down there and they started preaching under (inaudible (00:58:54)), I got caught up in the word, I didn't want to go anywhere else, I didn't want to run around town, I wanted to get back in the meeting man, I wanted to get in there where the word is going forth, they're coming on with stuff that is turning me on man, Brother Sutton got to preaching on the second coming of Jesus and I want you to know I got (inaudible (00:59:12)), I couldn't understand what I was doing, I stayed with them all the time, I didn't go so tired of me, I wouldn't let them run me off, I just stayed right at their heels all the time, they'd be having conversations back and forth and I'd be listening to their conversations and the little bit I'd say what? Just butt in between them while they were talking. See I wormed my way into the thing because I told them I'd sing for them and they let me. And when I got into the inner circle, I mean every time they went to have a meal they had dragged me along. I went everywhere they went, I wanted to hear everything they had to say, I heard Hilton Sutton say you know a man is healed before he even sees it, I thought what does that mean, how could you be healed before you could see it. Just boom of brain, just went tilt.
Bothered me all afternoon but that thought had my mind captured, to make an illustration of this I wasn't thinking about cigarettes, I'm thinking about how can you be healed when you can't see it and they had Church all day long man, some guys would sneak out in the front yard and smoke, I didn't want to sneak out in the front yard and smoke, they were liable to say something I'd miss. My mind had been captured by the Spirit of God, He had me capsuled in a way that I was not having really to make mental decisions, I'm just in there being just kind of held up by the Spirit of God and He's just feeding me on the Spirit of God, on the word of God. I had just kind of gotten over into a mental, spiritual limbo, just letting the Lord feed me. I thought this is the greatest thing I've run into, dear God, I've got it made, all I've got to do is stand in meetings but then after a while the meeting ended, where you going to go now. I know what I'm going to do, I'm going to go down, I'm going to get my wife, we're going to get back up here in this and it had been two to three weeks and I got in the car, headed down that (inaudible (01:01:28)) to get her and I looked up over my sun visor, there was a packet of cigarettes I stuck up there near three weeks before, I hadn't even thought about them.
Now see what had happened, the word had captured my thinking and had really for a while there wiped that out of my mind, it was not aggravating me, I wasn't thinking about it, there was no desire there. (inaudible (01:01:52)), I stuck them back up over that sun visor, I started to throw them away and I thought no, I'm just going to leave them there, blessed God, I'm either delivered or I'm not, I just left them there, they finally dried up until the tobacco would drop down in my face, I just got them, threw them down, that was the end of that. I found out then that I could put the word of God in my mind and keep it there and keep it there and keep it there, that's the reason these meetings are so important, you can come and get with other believers and get in this corporate faith atmosphere and get out from under all that pressure out there and what turns me off is to spend tens of thousands dollars to have a meeting like this and you've got something going on here that will set people free when all they have to do is just come sit down and just sit there and we'll just feed you the word of God till we reprogram your consciousness with the power and victory and the faith of Almighty God and you can get up and walk off and leave the sin sitting right there and you can't come because of a little league ball game. Somewhere down the line we are going to have to answer to that jazz.
See the power of Almighty God moves so powerfully and we're too busy. Well, the word of God had some say about that, there was a King who sent some folks out for a wedding feast and this guy said I can't come, I've bought a cow. I can just hear God now, see if a fat frazzling cow can keep you out of hell, you just bought a cow, I just bought your redemption. Now I'm talking to myself as well as I'm talking to you, we have been too busy with the world. Oh, Brother Robertson said something last night that shook me right down to my insides, he used a phrase I'd never heard before, he said God is not coming, Jesus is not coming for a prostitute Church, He is not coming for a Church that's in bed with the world. God help us, break the power of no restraints, what am I actually talking about, I'm talking about Holiness, I just came at it from the negative side, I came at it from the lasciviousness side, we've been looking at Holiness through the backend of the barrel, Holiness is the restraining of the things that are against Almighty God and receiving the things of God to replace them with.
Now let's go back to Hebrews 12, look at this again. He said let us lay it aside, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which does so easily beset us and let us run. We are going to have to lay aside the weights, we're going to have to lay aside the sin, we're going to have to run with patience the race that is set before us looking unto Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith, it didn't say just lay aside the weight, it didn't say just lay aside the sin, it didn't say just you be Holy, it says look at Jesus, how do you look at Jesus? I did my best to look at Jesus, the first five years I was born again, I wanted to see Him with my natural eye, I wanted Him to appear to me in my room somewhere, I wanted to see Him that way, I thought if I could ever do that boy, I'd get rid of all this junk that's been bothering me. That would've been wonderful but it didn't happen, then I saw Him in the word, oh I'm telling you something, I know what He looks like, I know what He is like, I know His nature, I know Him better than I know anybody, I mean better than I know anybody and I found out about Him right here in the word. My physical senses nor my mind are big enough and can gain enough to reach out by physical feelings or mental gymnastics of any kind, no kind of intellectual reaching, nobodies intellect is big enough to know God. Are you kidding me? The least God is so big we can't even imagine Him, you can't even imagine God. The Bible said He had to come down to us, He said my thoughts are higher than your thoughts, my ways are higher than your ways.
People say don't we feel God, come on, don't we feel God. We have little momentary grasps of something about God but our feelings can come nowhere near knowing God, a man and his wife can never know one another, can never ever know one another just through their physical bodies. A human being is too great a thing to just know them through physical touch and through physical intimacy, you can never know somebody through just the physical feelings. You can't ever know another human being mentally, you think you know him and five minutes later they will prove to you you didn't know anything about them and you've been around them for 30 years and they prove to you again and again and again, you really didn't know anything about them in your mind but you find two people that have put their trust in one another and that trust has been put to the crowd time and time and time again and something on the inside of them has been welded together by the power of Almighty God.
It's the reason how young people don't know anything about marriage because they haven't seen what I'm talking about in their mama and their daddy. Their mama and daddy where marriage is concerned is still walking in the vanity of their mind and to their kids it doesn't look any different than just living together. Why? Because of the same thing I'm talking to you about tonight, this is something you have to work out my friend, you have to work at this every day, you have to work at it where your marriage is concerned, you have to work at it where your marriage with Jesus is concerned, you have to work at it where your spiritual life is concerned, you'll have to work at it where you mental life is concerned, I'll tell you what, there's no room for spiritually lazy people in the Kingdom of God, you can't be lazy and make it, you're going to have to work at this and develop it and let God develop in you and you develop in God and the only way you're ever going to do it is make up your mind, and you heart, their heart, you're going to walk in the love of God, you're going to walk in the commandments of God, you're going to walk in the word of God and you are going to be what God sent Jesus to the cross to produce and make a firm quality decision that I'm taking a party over every thought that comes into my mind and I'm going to learn enough about Jesus in His word to be able to bring my thoughts into obedience to Him.
People thought for years they were bringing their thoughts into obedience to Jesus when they thought God put that cancer on that baby, that's because you don't know Jesus, all you know is bunch of religious talk, you don't know Jesus, I know Him. I know Him like I know my dad, (inaudible (01:10:17)), somebody come up and tell me that AW Copeland would put sickness and disease on a little baby, you better not say it in my reach, I get mad over that. Why? I know him, I've known him for 46 years, our trust between one another has been put to the test time and time and time, boy I tested it for 20 years, I mean I tested him as a daddy, I tested her as a mama, I put their parenthood to the test and do you know it held up. And all the hell that I put them through I could call home and dad would say what's the matter now, I'd say well, I'm starving out here, he'd say why don't you come home where you belong, I'd say do you care, no, come on home, you got any money you could send me, ha-ha, he'd always send it and say come on home. I'd be around there a few days and get mad and (inaudible (01:11:33)) but every time I put their parenthood to the test it held up and finally after a while I began to realize that what was happening, I was learning them, I began to realize what they were like.
I was at Fort Bliss Texas, I can tell you what time it was, it was just before 5 'o clock in the afternoon because we had just gotten off duty, I'm at a basic training camp at Fort Bliss, I mean they're about to kill me out there man, you know I wasn't cut out for this, I wasn't liking none of this and I come dragging in (inaudible (01:12:13)), there's a letter in there from my dad and my dad never was a letter writer, every letter I ever got from him you could read just about that quick. Where are you? Call now, dad. He always had a grand habit, you'd write him a letter and ask him something, he'd take your letter and answer it down at the bottom and mail it back to you but it worked, you didn't have any doubt about what you had asked. But see, all these years now, 21 years have gone by and all this time that there had been one test right after another between us and he always held up, she always held up as a mother and daddy, they always prayed. I knew they were praying, I mean you didn't have to ask me, I knew what turkey I was. Somebody come up and tell me I was going to hell, I'd be the first one to agree, I just didn't know how to stop it. And I got that letter and opened it up and it was a letter from my daddy telling me how much he loved me and it came to me as a revelation.
Now I knew it in my mind but it came as a revelation to me, just like a revelation from the word of God. I know the Holy Spirit put it in my heart. See these family things will work by the Spirit of God if you'll give them a chance, it will finally get through to your children, your children can finally get through to the parents if that love is real, it will come as a revelation to God and it will work between a man and his wife and a wife and her husband. There will finally come a revelation of love and when you get that you're beyond what can happen with just a man and a woman living together, you're not living together anymore my friend, you are married by the power of Almighty God and you have a right standing with God to produce immortal souls in the earth with God's blessing and sanction on it. Oh, you're the most powerful thing this side of Heaven when you and your wife are one and there's come a revelation inside you and this testing has proven itself and its proven how and its worked out and you know there's something down on the inside of you that loves her until you cannot explain it anymore, you can't tell your children when they come up and say how do you know when you fall in love with the right one, you just look at them and say you will know.
Well, it's that Godly revelation that happens inside people, when that happens inside you with God Almighty it begins to fill up your consciousness, you have those kind of thoughts. If there is any thought that approaches me, any thought, I want you to listen to me, we're going to fix some marriages tonight, any thought that approaches me about being unfaithful to Gloria, any thought of it, the first trickle of it in my mind, it's no longer that I have to say oh no, I don't want to be thinking that way, just get away from me, I ought not be thinking that way. Now because of my mind being renewed to the word and the fact that I'm free of that, I'm free from that force and my minds been renewed of the word of God and a revelation of her love and my love for her is only inside of me and it's the first thought of something like that, there is a fury that rises up on the inside of me. The Bible says in Hebrews 5 that through practice the flesh can be trained to know the difference between good and evil. You get to the point where your body will rebel in the right direction. If you're going to be rebellious, rebel against the devil, not God. Amen.
Kenneth Copeland ministries can be contacted in South Africa, that's Private Bag X909, Fontaine Bleu, 2032, Republic of South Africa, telephone 011 792 4626 or facsimile 011 792 6390. Kenneth Copeland ministries can be contacted in the United States at Fortworth, Texas, 761920001. Their website address is www.kcn.org. This teaching raises some extremely important aspects with regard to this teaching on marriage, important to realize that Satan operates in the soulish realm even though Satan is a spirit and therefore Satan seeks to focus us on the soulish or carnal or fleshly level and distract us from spiritual matters. That is why certain aspects of Scripture are subject to such serious attacks and our previous teaching on praying in tongues is an area where because it is so immensely powerful spiritually, Satan has exercised a lot of deception and a lot of attack and a lot of counterfeiting. In the same way, the same applies to marriage, this is why Satan wants us to believe that sexual intercourse is carnal and dirty instead of spiritual and Holy and pure within marriage. It is also why Satan uses the spiritual power of the sexual act in the Satanic church which is covenance and so forth.
This message also reaffirms God wants us to go up in higher realm, we need to lay aside every weight to seek the marriage in Heaven that God has given us in the marriage where you are. I really pray that by now you will understand that there is no such thing as a marriage that can't work, there is only a marriage that doesn't work because one or both spouses choose not to make the effort. If both spouses decide to make the marriage work and to seek God with all their hearts, minds and soul and strength and the power of teachings in this series, their marriage will be healed and their marriage will work. An important point, we don't have to understand it, we just need to believe the Bible and the deception of sin. If we do it nothing happens so we do more and more, lust and adultery are exactly the same as the swearing and cussing that was referred to in this teaching. We have to be clear however that disgust for sex in marriage is just as wrong as an ungodly desire for sex outside of marriage. In this sense, if we control sexual love in marriage in an ungodly way in the mistaken belief it is carnal and wrong then you will harden your heart in other areas. By the same token, an area of lasciviousness is if you start thinking that you can't love your wife or your husband or that you're married to the wrong spouse, that is no different again from the swearing that was referred to in this teaching.
God created man and woman to fall in love and to love and not to fall out of love, the only way love can end is if it is murdered through persistent treachery on the part of one’s spouse. There must be restraint with regard to lust in marriage as opposed to unrestrained (inaudible (01:20:53)), we must restrain all ungodly thoughts as distinct from an unrestrained love of God. We must be determined to fulfill Gods word at any price. An important point which is something that the Lord has said to me too, Jesus is not coming for a prostitute Church that is in bed with the world and sad to say, as has been revealed during this series of teachings, at the moment the Church of Jesus Christ is a sullied whore that has prostituted itself with the world, where the vast majority of its members are spiritually joined to the world through adultery and fornication and illegal ungodly putting away of divorce. Also important to understand the point, we cannot know people by our minds, we cannot lean to our own understanding to choose a marriage partner, only God by his Spirit can lead us to the right husband or wife and we could only come to know our husband or wife by the spirit as we come to be joined to them, as we come to be united with them, as we come to come into complete harmony with them, we will come to know them by the Spirit. If we learn to our own understandings and seek to understand them intellectually, we will always be disappointed. And again, as we said in this teaching, marriage between a man and a wife who are in harmony and agreement is the most powerful thing this side of Heaven when you and your wife are in agreement and it's quite amazing, I haven't listened to this tape for probably two/three years and I had no recollection whatsoever that the statements that I just recapped were on this tape and it's a powerful and independent confirmation. As we saw on the previous tape with Creflo Dollar as well, in terms of what God is saying about marriage, and I urge you as you listen to this series, see how God has put together this composite of tapes from different men of God to reinforce the message here with regard to marriage.
Father, in the name of Jesus, I pray that anything that has been uttered in this teaching on this tape, that is not of you and is not according to your word will be blown away and will find no root in the hearts of the hearers. I pray also Lord, that everything that is on this tape that is of you and according to your word and according to your will, will find deep root in the hearts of the hearers and will grow and produce abundant fruit in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in Jesus name, Amen.
This message has been recorded by a Church without walls, a ministry of end time issue ministries, Po Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg, 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at james@endtimeissues.org.za. Our phone numbers international dialing code, normally 0027 but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline 0027 11 791 2327 or in South Africa 011 791 2327. My number 0027 83 251 6644 and in South Africa 083 251 6644. Our fax number internationally 0027 11 791 5004 and locally 011 791 5004. All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the word.
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You've been listening to these messages, you've realized that you do not have a personal saving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that if you were to die right now, you would not spend Eternity in Heaven with him. I would urge you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to pray the prayer of salvation. The steps to salvation are as follows. Firstly admit and recognize that you are a sinner. Romans 3 verse 23 says "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Secondly, accept and believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that he came to Earth as a man, that he was crucified and died on the cross, that on the third day, he rose again and is now seated at the right hand of the Father and that by his death and resurrection he took your sons for Eternity. Romans 5:8 says, "but God demonstrates his own love towards us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Thirdly, confess your sins, repent of your sins and turn around. Repentance means turning around, it means ceasing to do what you now realize is wrong. 1 John 19 says, "if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness for confess your faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, that you believe this and receive his salvation and invite him to dwell in your heart." Romans 10: 9 and 10 says, "if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved, for with the heart one believes unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. Give thanks to God for your salvation, pray and cry out to God and give thanks to him for saving you. Work out your salvation by the Spirit of God." Philippians 2:12 says, "therefore, my beloved, as you've always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."
Salvation is a process. You are saved the moment you pray the sinner's prayer, the prayer of salvation and invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart and be Lord of your life. But Salvation is also a process whereby your mind is renewed and you come to have a personal and deep relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is your choice how far you go in that relationship. He desires a wonderful and a deep and intimate relationship with you, but it is your choice whether you will do what is necessary to come to that place through reading your Bible, praying, seeking counsel, seeking guidance. You should be water baptized at the first possible opportunity. Matthew 3:6 says "And were baptized by him in the Jordan confessing their sins." Encourage you to ask the Lord to lead you to somebody who has some knowledge of the basic ordinance of water baptism who can water baptize you, which leads you to a Church where they can water baptize you.
There's no reason why you cannot be water baptized today as a symbolic cleansing and washing of your sins. In fact, the minute you have prayed the sinners prayer it would be preferable for you to be water baptized. Choose to be obedient to the word of God, accept the Bible in its original Hebrew as given by the Spirit of God and choose to live your life according to that. 1John 5:3 says "For this is the love of God that we keep his Commandments and his Commandments are not burdensome." I encourage you to read the word of God daily and to put into practice everything that you encounter. As a principle which I believe will bear fruit in your life, I would encourage you to make an effort right now, after you've prayed this prayer, start reading your Bible from the book of John through to the book of Revelation.
And then make a discipline of reading the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation at least two, three, four times a year. And read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi at least once a year. And I would encourage you to do that using different translations. Ask God to lead you to the Church where he wants you to be at this time where they will teach you, they will guide you, they will pray for you and they will help you to walk in the fullness of what God has called you to be. Be aware that God may move you from Church to Church over time to teach you new things. And you should not be reluctant to do this. The service of God is a personal choice. It's a wonderful choice. And if you will step out by faith today and pray the sinner's prayer and follow Him, you will reap a rich harvest if that is your desire to be found faithful on the Day of Judgment. Should you have listened to this and have decided that you and I are ready to make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, I would ask you to pray the following prayer with me in Jesus' name.
Father, I come to You in the name of Jesus and I confess that I'm a sinner. I confess that I don't have a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and I recognize that without Jesus, if I were to die right now, I would spend Eternity in hell and not with You. I confess that I've sinned and I repented those sins and I turned around. I choose to turn my back on sin and to serve God. I confess that Jesus Christ came to Earth as a man, that he was crucified, that he died and was buried and that he was resurrected on the third day and that he sits on the right hand of the father. I confess by faith that he died to take all of my sins and I thank You Jesus for taking my sin and I give You my sin right now in Jesus' name.
I confess by faith that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and I choose now Lord Jesus to make You the Lord of my life. I invite You to come and dwell in my heart. I invite You to take charge of my life. I invite You to start leading and guiding me and directing me and I give You my life and everything that I have and I commit myself to serving You now. Lord Jesus, I thank You that You've heard...
04 09 Renewing Your Mind
Kenneth Copeland
In volume two, of the series understanding Gods way in marriage, volume two deals with the subject towards Heaven on earth in marriage and this teaching number nine is entitled renewing your mind. This is a continuation of the compendium of teachings by various leading apostolic men of God around the world, dealing with a variety of fundamental issues to the Christian walk which are absolutely central to learning to walk the Christian walk and in particular, as we've seen, learning to walk in the fullness of what marriage is intended to be. Marriage is shadow and a type of our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and until we walk in the fullness of marriage, we cannot walk in the fullness of our relationship with Jesus Christ and conversely until we walk in the fullness of our relationship with the Lord Jesus we will not walk in the fullness of marriage. So the two go hand in hand, renewing your mind bends on the previous teaching, in terms of disciplining your flesh. Our minds have to be renewed, we have to come to a place where we see things Gods way and not our way and not the worlds way, our minds need to be changed.
Lord, we ask you in the name of Jesus, as we reach into the Holy Spirit, we ask You by the Spirit to reach into us, search our heart as we search your heart and open our understanding, open the eyes of our understanding and show us Jesus. We want to be like Him, we want to be more and more and more like Jesus in every way, every day. We invite you to rise and live big within us all, today in the word and we thank you for it in Jesus name, Amen. Open your bibles to the book of Colossians. I've had people from time to time to ask me, Brother Copeland, how should we go about studying the Bible in order to get the most out of it. Well, if you really just take a tip from the titles, there's one called Old Testament, one called New Testament, I'd start on what's new. I mean if I didn't know anything about the thing I'd say well, you know, there's a new one and an old one and we're living in this new one. Spend the majority of your study time in the New Testament predominantly in the letters to the Churches. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that needs to read, that needs to be studied but don't study that without studying the letters to the Churches, that's where our lives are. If you pictured in your mind, you see the cross standing there, there's Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, there stands the cross, Acts, Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians and so forth. And so, where we enter at the cross, amen. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is record of the first thirty years of Jesus life on this earth and the book of Acts is record of the next thirty years of his ministry at the right hand of the father, glorified majesty, praise the Lord.
Now, Colossians 3:1, if you then be risen with Christ and we are the word of God, do you remember, says in the book of Ephesians that we've been raised up with Him and made to sit with Him in Heavenly places, Amen. That He hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in Heavenly places. Now in the heart of God and in the mind of God, I'm going to spend this moment on this before reading because I want this to be fixed in your mind before we read it. In the heart of God, in the mind of God, as far as He's concerned all this mess you and I are living with as far as living with and living in, as far as He's concerned, it's all over. Now we need to learn that, God is not dealing with us as a people bound up, bound down, full of sin, sickness, demons and fear. The Bible says He meets our needs according to His riches and Glory by Christ Jesus. I asked Him one time and I tell you, the day I asked Him I was poor as a rat man. I said Lord, what does that mean, He said I will meet your needs like He's already here. He said I'm not bound to depression and inflation and what the stock market does and all that, He said and neither are you if you just learn. If it were not for witnessing to the world the moment you got born again, you just gone on to Heaven because that's where you belong. And in the heart and the mind of God, that's where you are. Now we need to get that into our thinking, it isn't that He doesn't pay any attention to this world, that's not the thing but His design and His desire when He raised Jesus from the dead and He seated at the right end of majesty on high, is that you are in Him and He's in you. And what do you have to worry about when you're in God and God's in you but by not having our minds renewed to that, we live in this world like we were bound to it and really it's bound before us if we only knew it.
Now, let's redress this with that in your mind. If He then be risen with Christ seek those things which are above where Christ sits on the right hand of God, (inaudible (00:06:41)) your affection. Now my Bible has a little number two by the word affections so I look over here in the cross reference and it says or which means that it's a better rendering of the Greek word, a better translation of it. Or mind, M I N D, mind. So let's read it that way, set your mind on things above, not on things of the earth for you're dead and your life is hidden with Christ in God, hallelujah. Now I'm already excited because I've already preached this to me, I know how it's going to come out. Praise the Lord. The Bible said we're crucified with Christ yet nevertheless, we live. Not us but Christ in us, the hope of Glory.
Now, let me paraphrase this with these words so that I want you to see the point of what we're going to be talking about. If you then be risen with Christ, seek those things which you're above for Christ sitteth on the right hand of God, set your mind. Now once you realize He's talking about setting your mind, then you begin to realize what are the translators of the King James Bible were trying to tell us with the word affection. Set your affection, set your mind, whatever you set your mind on continually is what you will have affection for. See, that's what they're trying to get over to us, they had to pick one word to say it with or thought they did and then so they picked the word affection. Set your mind, consequently your affections, on things above and not on things of the earth.
Now we've used that just in a little small area over here and preached against sins of the flesh with it and that which is right, I'm not doing away with that but there's a much larger concept of this. I mean, there's more to life than just, you know, smoking, drinking, kicking the cat and adultery. I mean there's a whole lot more involved in this than that. There's a lot of people don't do that anymore, that are living in pure hell, so there's a larger concept of this than just what momentary desires of the flesh are involved with. This has to do with all of your life, so let me say it like this, set your mind consequently or affections on things above, not on things of the earth, don't allow a problem to become the biggest thing in your life. You can have some situation, some problem, some fact of your life that you start thinking about when you wake up in the morning and you think about it at every meal and you think and struggle and fuss with this thing, all day long and it's the last thing on your mind when you go to bed.
Now I've got something I want to share with you. You are a spiritual being, you are also a mental being and you also got (inaudible (00:10:31)) so you are going to get up in the morning thinking about something and you are going to think about something predominantly all day long and you're going to be thinking when you go to bed at night. There ain't no getting away from that. People try to get away from that with dope but you can't, all that dope does is scramble your brain so that you don't have any trust of what you do think about. Alcohol scrambles it in another way but both of them do the same job, they leave you without any control and that's where the devil wants you because (inaudible (00:11:13)) stop you from thinking. You go down here to the hospital and you go where there are patients that are in a coma, they can't do anything, can't bat either eye, from the looks of it it looks like they're dead but if you get some of them to come back, you get them healed from whatever cause of coma, they will tell you they were thinking all the time, they just couldn't get through to the folks that were standing around them, there was a gap between the thinking that was going on in their minds and the physical brain that transfers those thoughts out into this natural physical world and into the body.
A lot of times people are praying over their mind and they need to be praying over their brain and vice versa. You affect the brain with drugs or some sort of food substance or something other, you can affect the brain and the mind still be functioning. Are you listening to me? You can have a disease of the brain, you can also have a disease of the mind. Now, as the Lord leads, we'll get over into that area at one time or another, it's extremely interesting. God opened the door to me in that area, one day I was about to lay hands on a little girl who had brain damage and since I knew she had brain damage, God used it to show me something before I prayed for it. I started laying my hands on her, the Lord said don't touch her yet, you're about to pray in the wrong direction. He said you're about to pray for something that her folks hadn't got faith enough to agree with you on and you want to get in an area of agreement where you can. And so I was about to pray for a miracle in her brain to replace the damage that had been done to her brain which I've seen God do before, I mean that wasn't anything strange to me but her folks were living with this problem and it was on their minds night and day. They got up thinking about it, they thought about it all day long, at work whatever they did there was this little baby face in their face all day long.
And the problem, not the answer, the problem was in their eyes all day. And so, faith (inaudible (00:14:01)) and where this was concerned, the word was not first place in their lives concerning this, the problem was first place in their lives concerning this. So the Lord said I want you to pray something that they've got some faith that they can agree with you on because they're scrambled up over in this other area, faith was there but they were not developing it where the word was concerned. I said well how do you want me to pray, He said well, you know that it's a proven fact that the average person uses less than 12% of their mental capacity. I said yes, that's been proven, science has proven that. He said well, why don't you just pray for her development in the 85-90% she's got left, that she's not using anyway, ain't nobody using it. I mean, the average guy on the street and in the eyes of God really, God looks at it, we think we're so smart and we're walking around using less than 15% of our mental capacity. In tests show that Mr Einstein was using about 15% of human capacity and think he was so smart, well in some ways he was but the man couldn't intelligently sit down and make out a grocery list. His mind was way out here in one area but in another area he's almost helpless, like a little child, they say he's such a mental giant but he couldn't figure out his income tax. Well, the income tax people can do that.
So I lay hands on her and prayed in that way. Well, let's open mind, my understanding about something. She had brain damage, we were dealing with mental capacity, not mind problem, brain problem. Now there are people that have mind problems and the brain is just flesh and blood, it's what your mind uses for expression in the flesh and blood world but after your bodies dead...let me ask you something, when a person dies does their brain die? Have you never heard the expression brain dead? Well, the brains dead, that's where they get the expression brain dead, the things dead, it's been unplugged. Why? Not anything in there to use it, the man’s gone. They put the body on a life support system but the man isn't there and the soul is part of the man, the soul and the spirit are inseparable, they cannot be separated. The soul is made up of the will, the mind and the emotional make up. You'll be just as emotional after you get out of your body as you are now. If you were not hell wouldn't be a place of torture. People in hell are emotional, they all crying out to God, they lost their soul, it didn't mean it isn't there because it is, it means they don't have any control over it.
Now when a man’s gone and the souls moved out, the minds gone, brain hasn't got nothing to do. It's dead, brain dead. So our lives can be totally and will be totally changed and totally change the course and outcome of the future when we stop worrying and struggling with a problem. I don't care what the problem is, some people destroy their lives over a little old problem, (inaudible (00:18:45)). Other, it does mount to something. The devil will use insignificant, unimportant things to destroy whole societies of people if he can get their attention on it. Whatever you give the most of your attention to in your mind, you will perpetuate it. For instance, the devil will use something like physical body weight to drive somebody absolutely up the wall, I lived on top of that wall for years. I have to careful now that he doesn't try to do it now. And for a long period of time in my life, and the Lord (inaudible (00:19:50)) said you better change this, you cannot change it by worrying about it and struggling about it, you can't change it by crying about it. Oh, if you could, I'd look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, if you could change it by crying about it but you can't.
There are men and women that have gone after it in the natural world and changed their physical appearance but their body weight is still on their mind 24 hours a day even though he is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now all they can think about is pumping iron, well he can live a life with a 28 inch waist and a peanut brain and do absolutely nothing where life is concerned and live all of his life still under the torture of body weight and he hasn't done anything about it. He just took a different avenue of worry. Poverty, you can get on your mind that you don't have enough and that you're living in poverty, the Bible says that a poor man’s poverty is his own destruction. He don't believe he'll ever be anything but poor and it is such a hell hole that he's raised up in and one of his major problems is he's surrounded by poor folks. Everybody talks poverty, you're surrounded by the very thing that's killing him, so he perpetuates it. He talks about it, he thinks about it, even if he breaks out of it...I had a school teacher one time, I heard him tell my mama this, he said I was raised in the ghetto in such terrible, horrible poverty and he said I wake up every morning thinking about it, he said I can still smell it in my nose, I can smell where I was raised and he said I live my life with a fright and a worry that something will happen and I'll wind up back in there. Well let me tell you something, guess what, that's exactly where he's headed.
A spirit of poverty can drive a person to financial wealth but they're not wealthy people, they have not prospered in God, they've prospered in poverty. And the poor guy goes crazy to get sick, what's on his mind every day is money which is poverty's left hand. You're either thinking about food or money. No brother Copeland, you don't understand, we're starving. Well, you're thinking about food. The fat guy over here is thinking about food, here's the skinny guy in the ghetto, he's thinking about food. The devil's got them both dying over the same substance and the world is full of it. What about those poor folks over there in Asca living in the middle of that drought, the Bible says you had to get rain. You can have food, I don't care what kind of drought you've got, there's people all over Africa have proven that and are proving it today. That the word works, I mean one little Church right in the middle of the worst spot in that whole place over there. The pastor got a hold of a faith tape one day and started believing it and started preaching it in the middle of a place where the government had taken up all the Bibles. They had the worst drought that they've ever had in history, they were dying of starvation, dying of lack, businesses had gone so bad in that area that in a town that once had been a prosperous city, there was now only one store open in the downtown area and it was a government sponsored store where they passed out one cup a tea and one biscuit per person per day, only thing open in town. People lined up to get that biscuit and cup a tea, hopelessness, sleeping on the street, get up in the morning and just stand there all day and lay back down at night and never take one step out of that spot.
Now that's the kind of area that I'm talking about. And these folks got to praying and believing God in the middle of that and God blessed them and it rained on the Church. But you know what they did first, they got the word of God on their minds instead of the problem, they began to study and look at faith and study that and develop that instead of drought and poverty and they got outside and said do you know we're acting in faith here, we've got to go repair the levy out there on the reservoir. And they're out there in pure sand, rebuilding the dam on the little reservoir out there but they're studying faith, not poverty. There's other folks laying on the street down there, they're called homeless, we've built up a bunch of them in this country and the news media found out what we're doing about it so they're preaching it to us, they're preaching homelessness to us. That's not homelessness, it's worthlessness. I mean brother Copeland, they don't have any job, come on folks, there's not a lack of jobs. Come on brother, they can work right where they are. If I'm sleeping on the street, somehow or other I'd find me a broom, I'd get my hands on a broom and I'd start sweeping the streets, I'd be working, you can't keep me from working. Now I can keep me from working and a lot of time I do my best at that but you understand what I'm talking about here.
God is (inaudible (00:26:16)) seed for the soul and bread for the ear and it's happened time and again, I tell you, one of the grandest testimonies I ever heard was about an old bust homeless on the street, been on drugs, blown his mind and everything else he had, he actually had...well, I don't want to get back off into that but anyway, he was off into that whole thing, sleeping in the street and that whole business wouldn't last long, sick, somebody down there preaching Jesus and gave him a bowl of soup or something and you had to hear Jesus to get the soup. Not a thing in the world wrong with that, I'd bribe you with biscuits every way I can, if I can get the word of God into you, amen. And got the guy born again and got him going and got him on the word and now he's productive, got a wife, children, teaching the word, preaching the word, got a good job, doesn't beg anybody for nothing, he just went to God but what happened? He got his poverty off his mind and got Jesus on him mind, see that's the combat area.
You can take the guy a blanket, you can take all his government programs and everything else, I mean, you know, they've proven in different cities in the United States what'll happen if you build homes for those people. You've got a homeless man living in a house, he's still homeless, in his mind it's not his home so somebody else would come in there and kill him for his blanket. Man, that is no answer, the government knows it's no answer, it's just all they know how to do and all the Christians are hid out somewhere, you know, watching TV, a whole lot of them are homeless. Whatever you worry and struggle with all day long, you will perpetuate, it will stay with you. The struggling won't change it, the crying about it won't change it, the hardest things ever in my entire life was to get this weight business off my mind, well I didn't dwell on it all the time and I have to stay right up on top of it now to keep from doing that and replace those thoughts. God has provided new thoughts to replace them with, he's not going to replace them for you, you're going to have to do that. You have to do that, but I don't want to do that, it don't make any difference, you have some decisions you have to make.
I didn't make a decision to be thin, (inaudible (00:29:15)), that didn't get it off my mind. If I'd just made a decision to be thin then I'd have all that getting thin to do and I did a whole lot of that, I lost about 25000 pounds. Lose 20 and put it back, probably more than that (inaudible (00:29:35)) and I went on a fast one time, I went to the Lord, I said we're going to have this out, I'm tired of this, this things getting in the way of my ministry and everything else, I've got to have my mind renewed and I've got sense enough to know that what I'm doing is not changing anything, I'm out of line here somewhere. Now there are people, I could call them by name right now and you'd say, oh yeah because you know who they are, that have problems in their lives with their flesh, pornography or adultery, alcohol, drugs, whatever and know the Lord and love Him with all their heart and just fast and pray and cry and beg God to get these dirty books out of my life but they don't go away. And it's not because they don't know the Lord but to struggle and to worry and the fasting and the praying and the balling and the crying about it, if you don't do what the word says you won't get rid of it.
Like that woman where brother Hagan, I tell you, I've heard this tape over and over and I get so tickled out of it, I get tickled every time I think about it. They had just finished a service and there was people still around the alter and he was praying with somebody else and he said all of a sudden this woman screamed, he said it sounded like a freight train coming through a tunnel, (inaudible (00:31:12)) and he run over there to help her and she said Oh God, just screamed bloody murder, he said can I help you, Oh I want God to take this snuff, he said Lady, He don't dip, what does He want with your snuff, he said now if you're going to make the decision...see, the word says crucify you...if you will make the decision, that's where the problem is so hard, is in that area of decision, if you will make the decision to be free from it, then do what the word says, you release the power of God and the (inaudible (00:32:11)), now that's where I was having some of the trouble (inaudible (00:32:15)), I'm struggling and crying about it and I'd been fasting for days and when I went to the Lord about the weight, several things He said to me, I won't take time getting into that but the one thing that lead me out of that was He said you don't have a weight problem, I thought I did, you know, you could have fooled me.
I mean, I come out of the service, I haven't been out of the service 30 days until I was up to 260 pounds, I thought I had a weight problem, you know, and He said no, you don't have a weight problem, you've got a food problem. I didn't want to hear that. I want to be skinny and eat pie too. Most people want to be rich so they don't have to do anything and that's the wrong motive for wealth, in fact it will get you killed. So the (inaudible (00:33:23)), He said you will fire people for putting the wrong brand of oil in one of your vehicles, I said you've got that right. He said why are you that way? I said because everything I have belongs to God, everything I have comes from God through the people of God and I am not going to let somebody tear it up. He said you're a hypocrite, I mean that hurt, I said Lord, who me, not me. Dear Lord, if there is anything in the world that I just did everything I knew I'd do (inaudible (00:34:06)), He said yes, you're a hypocrite, I said well if you say I am I must be, He said you are, you fire folks for putting the wrong brand of oil, less the wrong weight of oil or the wrong kind, He said you're firing for putting the wrong brand of oil in one of your vehicles and He said you stuff stuff in your body and you don't even know what it is. Lead me over there and showed me the Scripture, said be where the Kings meet, it's deceitful and I said well, what is deceitful mean? He said looks good, tastes good but isn't. I said Lord, I ain’t liking this at all, (inaudible (00:34:47)), I told you when we started it wasn't easy and I said Lord, you delivered me from drinking, you delivered me from smoking, how are you going to deliver me from eating, I'll die. He said I didn't deliver you from breathing, I delivered you from breathing smoke. He said I didn't deliver you from drinking, I delivered you from drinking alcohol. He said anybody in their right mind ought to know better than to drink alcohol, it will kill you, everybody knows it will kill you but you're dealing with something here more than just knowing it will kill you. He said I'm not going to deliver you from eating, I'm going to deliver you from eating the same kind of junk that you were drinking and smoking. Well, it didn't happen in five minutes and that's been about 12 or 13 years ago and I'm still working on it because it's the rest of your life. But I will tell you this because there's more to it than this, I'm just using this. The only reason I'm telling you all this is to make this point to you.
The problem in this was not just my body had too much fat on it and that my heart was having problems and was going to continue to get worse or that kind of thing, there's more to it than just my physical life, the main problem area was the thing that was on my mind all day. I got up with it, I lived with it all day, I struggled with it, I cried about it, I moaned about it, I got mad about it, I got irritated with God about it, got mad at Gloria about it, the thing I'd get mad at her about, she'd take one little bit out of a piece of candy and put it up in the kitchen window and let it sit, she'd take a little bite tomorrow and skip a day and a little bite the next day, that made me mad because by that time I had eaten all of the candy and half of the box, you know, she's nibbling on this, I don't even want to get into that. You know, she'd eat one corner out of a pancake, dear God. So the thing that's important here is that thing was up in front of me all day long, I did not have my mind set on things from above. Consequently, other areas of my life were coming apart. Now I want to just touch on this, this is going to be another Bible lesson down the road later too because it's another (inaudible (00:38:02)) but in the area of lasciviousness, lasciviousness is a lack of restraint. If you have an area in your life where there is no restraint, another area in your life comes up where you try to restrain it and your restraint mechanism is hindered by what you've been doing over in that other area, you'll fall in this one and that's the problem with it because in the spirit realm sin is death and in the spirit realm it don't know the difference between sins because the wage of each one of them is the same outcome, it's death, it's the flesh that knows the difference between but if you've got an area in your life where you just don't see any use to resist that and you just totally indulge in that. If you don't practice resistance when it comes time to resist something that you know good and well you better resist, you're resisting equipment is all rusted up because you've been letting it lie dormant over here, now when you need it it won't work, even though there's two different fields of activity where sin and so forth is concerned.
Now let's get back in the mainstream of this right here. Don't allow a problem to become the biggest thing in your life. Worrying and struggling with it won't change anything. Let's go to the book of Roman 12, this is familiar Scripture but I want you to look at it in a little different way, I want it to settle something for you. "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God" Now, the word holy right there, let's rethink that because we lose sight when you use the word holy, you lose sight of what it actually means. The word holy means separated unto God for His use. Now there's a lot of people that have desire to be separated unto God for His use but are still struggling with things over here in this flesh world and think, well, you know, I mean God could never use me, look at me, I mean I'm just an old ugly thing. And you hear somebody say lifting holy hands unto Him, he's like I couldn't lift my hands because I know what kind of ugly thoughts I've been having and I haven't fasted enough and I haven't prayed enough.
Now wait a minute, you're doing what we talked about before, you've come up to the stove and said well, you know, stove, I really don't deserve any heat, I'm just so unworthy, if you had proved to me that you would accept me and give me a little heat I'll go get you some wood. And you look at that and you say that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Well, if you realize the spiritual significance of all of this from Gods stand point you realize how stupid it is to try to clean yourself up to go to God when all the time He's come to clean you up so you can go to God. So the faith element is involved here. In the spirit world the Bible says "Walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh", what we've said was if I could keep from fulfilling the lusts of the flesh then I could walk in the Spirit. It's walking in the Spirit that will quieten your flesh. Now the resisting of those things that we've been redeemed from is part of walking in the Spirit but if we deem it a problem and are not trying to walk in the Spirit by faith, that's when you get into trouble. I don't do certain things just because us Baptists don't do that. Or I don't do certain things just because us assembly God folks don't do that. I don't do certain things just because we charismatic’s don't do that. You know, us Lutherans, there are certain things that we just don't do, bet you some of you do. There's no power in that, there's no faith in that. If you've got your faith in being a Lutheran, you're in a world of hurt, you're in trouble and you're going to find it out one of these days, you already know it if you just admit it. And so will all the rest of us if we've got our faith in anything but the word of God. It's the word, Jesus said you'll know the truth and the truth will make you free.
If you want to be free from a food situation then find out what the word has to say about it because that is what will make you free from it. If you want to be free in prayer, find out what the word has to say about prayer and the truth concerning prayer will make you free in prayer. If you want to get in bondage in prayer start praying prayers based on what you heard somebody else pray or based on what they say somebody said because their brother's sister in law's cousin's aunt next door neighbor heard half a tape. You know man, if you want to get bound up in prayer, pray like you think you feel like you should sometimes instead of what the word has to say about it. If you have to cross every feeling you have, do what the word says, amen. Find out what the word has to say about it and settle it in your mind, settle it in your mind. Now let's read the rest of this with that in our thinking. Present your body, a living sacrifice, separated unto God for his use, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service or in today’s (inaudible (00:44:08)) would be that's the least you could do and be not conformed to this world but be transformed. Let me stop right there. You can't just not conform to this world, we spend too much of our time not conforming and actually...my choice of words are not the greatest in the world here but you know what the word says that Abraham considered not his own body, you can't just consider not, you've got to consider something because you have a considerer inside that considers and it considers all the time so you're going to have to consider something.
So you can't just consider not and leave yourself with nothing to consider because you spend all your time considering not but the word says consider Jesus, the apostle and the high priest of our confessions what lest you think in your mind. Get your mind on Him. How do I do that? I'm about to show you but I want to show you first what happens when you do. Conform not to this world but be transformed via the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Remain here and do this, this is no special talent, this is not something God has just put aside for a few. Well brother Copeland, you know, I'm just an average Church member, I really don't have the kind of faith you do. Yeah, you do, you lying thing. You haven't told me that you're filled with humility, you're just lazy. Either that or you honestly don't know what belongs to you in Christ Jesus, either way needs to be changed.
Now I want to tell you again, it's not easy to renew your mind, you have had years to develop unbelief, there is an unbelieving system at work, we are shoved into an unbelieving, no you can't, don't you dare...you're shoved into that pipeline before you're three days old. Particularly if your parents didn't know anything about faith. I mean, my parents loved God, they were born again before I was ever born into this world. They loved the Lord with all their heart and I've heard daddy say it, I've heard him say it with his own mouth. Stand there and shake his head and smile and say my God, how dumb we were, I don't know how we ever lived because of ignorance of the world and things about the word. Love the Lord but the Bible says in Ephesians 2 that if you're a stranger from the Covenance of promise then you're without hoping, without God in the world. You can do that and be born again. Brother Darryl and I were talking about that yesterday and some folks that he was ministering to that had been diagnosed with cancer, they're dying and he's healed. Well you see, God's no respective person and this man he was talking to knows the Lord and loves the Lord. But here's a very self efficient, very strong, very moral man, spent his whole life in Church that not only didn't preach healing but didn't think anybody (inaudible (00:48:29)) if it was, it was in a negative way. We don't want that healing stuff coming, well don't worry about it, you won't be bothered with it.
Well that admirable quality of strength and independence and all of that as a man and being a good man and very moral man and a man that had great respect for God and I know, I prayed with him see and he appreciated it and just ready to pray with me but he didn't have the foggiest notion about how to pray himself. Well, I'm not putting the man down for it but that doesn't keep it from being a shame. For a man lead his wife and now lead his whole life not having his mind actually renewed, then born again but never have a renewed mind because (inaudible (00:49:34)) but that's no excuse, you've got a Bible and the Holy Ghost lead and guide him into it. Jesus said if you hunger and thirst for righteousness you'll be failed, you'll be failed. My mother hungered and thirsted for it, right in the midst they finally kicked her out of her Church but that didn't stop her either, she hungered and thirsted for it but she dug a lot of it out for herself and God lead people around her that didn't know. Even back there at a time when there wasn't a handful of them on earth, there's one or two of them found her, amen. What was she doing all that time? She hungered and thirsted for it, she was renewing her mind, she didn't, in a lot of cases, realize that's what she was doing but that's what was happening and it opened the door for a whole lot of things to take place. The shame of all of that, this man’s very strength and independence and self reliance is misguided just enough to be destructive to him when the time comes because self reliance won't do it. Just being a good moral person won't get you healed. Well, being an immoral person certainly ain't going to get you healed.
What are we talking about? We're talking about somebody that's had their mind renewed and just simply knows how when the time comes. Now if you tried to do it just, you know, Prue, bless her heart, forgive me now because I really do not like to bring something up and then take an opposition to it and I don't believe in that and that's not what I'm doing in this case except this is from the world and I've got to tell you folks, you can get you one of those tapes, it's got 747000 times on it, it tells you that you're great. You know what I'm talking about, mental affirmations. That is a true principle and it will work up to a point but you ain’t got enough tapes, not enough time in the day as long as you're trying to affect the tree by climbing up in the top of it and knock the leaves out of it and that's what you're doing with that. It takes the word of God to renew your mind. Now you can get some momentary results in it and thank God somebody's tapped into the truth that the mind can be renewed but you're just going to renew it with more junk and it's not going to do you a whole lot of good. If you renew your mind to the fact that you can accomplish wealth and you go out and get the wealth and then kill yourself with it. You ain't done anything, you just went from a poor, poor man to a rich poor man because you didn't prosper in God and without prospering in God it will kill you. Anything will without God. Not anything on this earth that won't kill you if you haven't got God, do you understand that? He is the author of life and Gloria and I get amused at things we hear people say.
As a lady said to her, that's the reason we put this daily broadcast on here, by the way, is to renew your mind. You know, I mean, I go out and spend from 6-8 million dollars more a year to get this thing on the air and somebody comes up and says oh, we love your ministries, it’s done so much good for us. Gloria said have you seen the daily broadcast? Well, yeah, I don't get to watch it much though. Well, how come? Well, it comes on the same time as Sesame Street does. I told Gloria, what I said was not of the Lord, I said you ought have told her to turn big bird off unless you want big bird results. Well, my grandbaby likes to watch Sesame Street. You'd be surprised how much your grandbaby will get out of the word of God. And your grandbaby is going to grow up and need it's mind renewed and all it will know is Sesame Street. Well, there's nothing wrong with Sesame Street, there are some Biblical principles that Sesame Street uses to teach with, they didn't get them out of the Bible but the fact that they work proves that they are in the Bible, you can go to the Bible and find them but it is not a renewing of the mind and when the problems of life arise that big dumb stupid yellow bird is not going to have the answers to the storms of life and when that's all you have to call on and your mind steps aside and opens the door for your spirit, for your faith and where all the power is and the only thing that's in your spirit is....I mean, you know, that's all that comes out of you, that and you'll start cussing and you can't figure out why. You will start damning things, God's not the damner, that's the reason that's vain. She doesn't realize what she was saying, she doesn't realize what she's saying. She said I watched one or two of those but I just really don't have time to watch it because Sesame Street comes on at the same time. I mean I'm spending 6 million dollars and she's watching Sesame Street, that gives you that warm feeling all over.
And the next word out of her mouth, she said well, we've been going through some real problems. I'm not saying this to down her, don't misunderstand it, that's not my point in this at all. Every one of us in this room in one degree or another are guilty of what I'm saying. We're crying out to God over things that are self induced. Do you hear that Kenneth? Yeah, I heard it, amen. I read a letter one time that a preacher wrote to a group of missionaries in the field and foreign land, this letter said whatever you do don't let this prosperity message (inaudible (00:56:56)), don't let this prosperity message get into your Churches, it's already split up half the Churches in the United States. I thought dear God, I didn't know we had that kind of influence but we don't, he was just lying, exaggerating. But he said split up half of the Churches in this United States, went ahead to tell how terrible all of us were, preaching that God would help you financially, went all the way down through this whole page, flipped it over, half of the next page, end of that story, paragraph, we don't really know whether we're going to be able to send you your monthly support or not because our finances are so bad. I thought anybody that can read ought to be able to see what's going on here. Here's a fellow telling you don't let the prosperity message get in and then on the next page it says we're going to cut off your support. Well, what are you going to do, you can't get no support from God and you can't get any from me, you're in trouble. You're going to have to go back to bartending or something. At least in the world they'll pay you for what you do, sometimes.
Are you listening to me? But I'll tell you what, most of the people that read that paper without a renewed mind never connected to it, never connected to. Don’t be conformed He said to the world but be he transformed...now let me ask you a question, is there any area in your life where you would definitely enjoy a transformation? Any of you that does not, you're either lying and we'll pray for you for that or you're the dumbest fellow I've ever met, you need to be transformed out of that imbecilic attitude that you've got. Of course there is, I mean, everybody knows the answer to that question. There are some things that need transforming that people have given up on a long time ago and really don't realize in some cases they can be transformed. Others, people have worried about it and cried about it but that won't transform it. You can (inaudible (00:59:27)), that won't transform it. You can get organized and get everybody in town that's got the problem, it won't transform it. You're going to have to renew your mind to get it transformed in your life.
I want to touch on this part of it because I want to get back to the main stream of this, don't allow problems to become the biggest thing in your life. There are people that have problems imposed upon them that they didn't have anything to do with. My mother’s people are Cherokee people and in Cherokee history you find that the Cherokee nation was a highly civilized nation of people, they were not at war with anybody as far as the quiet man and all of this kind of thing, they weren't at war with anybody. Highly civilized people and had their language, had an alphabet and had the language on paper, they could communicate on paper in Cherokee which the other Indian tribes could not do. Highly civilized people and when the trail of tears happened, when they came through Cherokee territory, they dragged Cherokees out of their household, they didn't live in tents, they didn't live in Hogon, they lived in houses that had kitchens on them and owned property and land and had a congress with two bodies that we call a senate and a house of representatives. A two bodied congress and a high chief, I mean they had the same form of governance that we had, they didn't get it from us, those are civilized people and just because they were called Indians they were dragged into that trail of tears and lost everything they had and they weren't at war with anybody. Now there's a situation imposed on them. If you were a Cherokee boy, for instance, you weren't Cherokee, you was Indian so you're no good. Well, it didn't have anything to do with this and here he's been robbed and whipped, driven like cattle into a land he didn't like, he didn't have anything to do with, without clothes to live there in that kind of climate, without food and all this kind of thing and the only thing he did wrong was be a Cherokee.
Now in that imprisonment, in all of that kind of (inaudible (01:02:32)), do you think that we've got a problem now that's on his mind all day, absolutely so. Here you've got a little African boy running up and down the bank of a river one day, the son of a chief, enjoying life as he knows it and somebody come in there to point a gun, grab him up by the hair and throw him in a box and carry him off several thousand miles and put him (inaudible (01:02:56)) in a place where he can't understand what anybody is saying and can't understand what he did wrong. He's got a problem that's going to be on his mind all day. Now if you try to fight that in the natural, it'll destroy you. Well, it isn't fair, so get fair, ain't nothing fair in this life, it ain't going to be fair. Well, if I was just white it would change, do you want me to tell you some white stories? See, a white man can't see it through a black man’s eyes, black man can't see it through a white man’s eyes, there ain't no use in you trying, you ought to be looking at it through the eyes of the word. Forget about what those folks...yeah, but brother Copeland you don't know what they're doing to me. That's not the point, I didn't say it was easy, I'm talking about success in life, I'm talking about success with God, I'm talking about God's kind of success and I don't care where you are, who you are, the apostle Paul proved...I mean, here's a man that's a Roman and a Jew. Well, when it's time to be a Jew, the Romans hated him, when it's time to be a Roman, the Jews hated him. Then he became a Christian and the Romans and the Jews both hated him. Threw him in prison and he writes two thirds of the New Testament, do you understand what I'm saying, do you now? Has he been worried about this, it ain't fair, how come God did this to me, I sat at the feet of (inaudible (01:04:40)), they ought to be happy with me. (inaudible (01:04:42)), they don't believe in the resurrection, that's why they're so sad you see.
Life isn't fair but right on the other hand, if you get in the word and renew your mind, what's fair about using the name of Jesus on the devil, ain't nothing fair about it. He doesn't have a chance so don't give him one. Take authority over it and renew your mind, you can do things that the word of God will teach you how to do to change your mind, everybody in town will be persecuting you and you don't know it. And for goodness sakes, don't read about it or ask them about it and then ball about it when they talk ugly about you. The Lord asked me one day, He said do you think you're ready for me to expose this ministry on a national basis, oh yes, He said no, you're not, you're nowhere near, I said how come, He said you're too high tempered, He said anything that I expose to the world, they're going to talk ugly about it and He said you ain't nowhere near ready, He said you will fight and carry on. He said first thing I want you to do is promise me, give me your word that you'll never read things about yourself in print and I promised Him, I'm so glad, who cares what they write about you, it will be at the bottom of the birdcage tomorrow so who cares, I don't care, it doesn't mean anything. But now, if you don't want to get embarrassed, you don't bring me something written about me because I won't read it. Well, don't bring me something good written about me either, I have a tendency to believe that so just don't fool with it. Begin to realize who you are.
You're not a black Christian, you're not a white Christian, you're not a Holy Ghost Baptist, you're a joint heir with Christ Jesus seated in Heavenly places, hallelujah, amen. If you believe God and renew your mind, by replacing your thoughts with Gods thoughts. The word says in Isaiah 55, let the wicked man forsake his thoughts, you can forsake your thoughts, you can forsake your thoughts. God said my thoughts are higher than your thoughts and my ways are higher than your ways, amen. Did you ever see somebody that...somebody said that, you know, that fellow don't know his whipped, did you ever see somebody like that? I had (inaudible (01:07:46)), he didn't tell me this, he'd never do this but, you know, I've talked to folks that knew him. One fellow that ran with him, they weren't brothers but they were like brothers, now he had four brothers and one of his brothers and he were real close to one another and he backed this up, but the other one is the one who told me this, is that you couldn't whip AW Copeland because he'd fight you every day until he won. And that's when the fight was over, when he won, that's when it was over because he wouldn't clear. You might beat him up and knock him down but you'd better sleep with one eye open because tomorrow we're going to do this again and again and again, got a whipping every day. Now my mother had a brother like that. Now what you don't want to do, you know, you don't want to get them together, dear God, it would never end, we'd have another 100 year war.
Now Christians ought to renew their mind to that, most of them. The most of them, I'm sad to tell you, get up every morning expecting to be whipped by the devil and when you call them on the telephone they say well, you know, we're going through such tests and such trials. I know one couple, I've know them for years and years and years, I've known them over 20 years since I've been in the ministry, I knew them before I got saved and every time you call those folks on the telephone they just got out of one trial and they're just in another one now. And if you look back over it's the same one they've been in all this time. Even though you come under testing’s and trials, you ought to pass them. You don't have to retake your third grade test over and over and over again to get out of high school, you take the third grade test and you take the fourth grade test and then the fifth grade and the sixth grade, (inaudible (01:09:49)), it's an open book test. Pass it, the answers are all in there. The devils not testing you to see how much you know, he's testing you to keep you from knowing anything, amen. So the renewing of the mind, he says here not only will transform but then you'll be able to prove some things, you'll be able to prove some things in your life, you can (inaudible (01:10:23)) what the will of God is in your life.
Turn with me to the 112th Psalm, in the 2 Corinthians 10:3, which we'll read later, the word says casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge or against the word of God, bringing into captivity, bringing into captivity, bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ or to the obedience of the word. When there's a thought comes by and says you're not healed, you're not going to get your healing this time. Well see, even though you have that thought, you don't have to take that thought. Do you remember something that Jesus said when He said why take ye thought for the morrow, it has trouble enough of itself or it's evil enough of its own, notice how He said that. Why take ye thought, then in another place He said why take ye thought saying what shall we wear, what shall we put on. There's a clue there now, you don't have to take the thought even though you thought it. He says why take ye thought, he knew he was going to think it. Even though you had a thought doesn't necessarily mean it's yours unless you take it and possess it.
Now He tells us and gives us a clue how you take a thought. Why take ye the thought saying, you say it and bring it home if it stay with you. Why take ye the thought saying what shall we wear, what shall we put on, here's somebody struggling with his everyday life. Your Heavenly Father knows you have need of these things, seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness or your right standing with Him and all His things will be added to you. I'll tell you another way to say that, set your mind on things above, don't let problems become the first place in your life, amen. So there is a way to do it obviously. Now, this tells us as we read down through this Psalms 112, praise ye the Lord, blessed is the man that feareth the Lord and delights greatly in His commandments or as we would say, delights greatly in His word. His seed shall be mighty upon the earth, the generation of the upright shall be blessed, that's you if you're born again. Wealth and riches shall be in His house and His righteousness endureth forever. Well, see how that connected wealth and riches and righteousness on right standing with God Jesus, that seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all His things here be added unto you. You don't have to go out seeking wealth in order to be wealthy, that's the wrong motive for it.
You seek to give and seek your right place in God. Well, in order to fulfill your right place of God, somewhere down the line you're going to have to have something to give, you're going to have to have something to bless with, amen. Besides that He knows you have need of what to wear and all that kind of thing and there's nowhere in the word that God wants you to wear the worst, He wants you to wear the best, you're His representative. Well I know lovely Christians that are poor, I do too and it's a shame. Wealth and riches shall be in His house and His righteousness endureth forever unto the upright there arises light and darkness, he's gracious, full of compassion and righteous. A good man shows favor and lendeth or he's a giver, he'll guide his affairs with discretion or wisdom and good judgment. Surely he shall not be moved forever, the righteous shall be an everlasting remembrance, he shall not be afraid of evil tidings or bad news, he's heart is fixed trusting in the Lord, he's part is fixed trusting in the Lord, he's heart is established, he shall not be afraid until he sees desire upon his enemies, he hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor, his righteousness endured forever, his horns shall be exalted with honor, the wicked shall see it and be grieved, (inaudible (01:14:40)) and melt away. The desire of the wicked shall perish, the bad thing and the bad news and all that, it'll just die.
Now this says that his heart is fixed, the first thing you're going to have to do to establish your heart is to first establish your mind and fix your mind on the word in order to establish your heart in faith and in trusting the Lord. In order to do that it's going to take an act of your will. Did any of you get to watch OR Roberts this morning talking about using your will? You can will, you can will, you can will, you can will not to do it, you can will to do it. And the apostle Paul said those things that you both see and learn in me, do them. Now, Philippians 4, fix your mind on things above, cast out thoughts, bring into obedience every thought, forsake thoughts and boy, I'm telling you right now, you can't get lazy at this, this is something you have to do and you have to watch over it and guard over it. Then that thought has been cast down, that thought that says you can't make it, you're a loser, you're sick, you're broke, you'll never make it, you're homeless, you can't do it, you're this, you're that, you can't do it because you was born under the wrong sign, you're born on the wrong side of town, you're not going to make it, you can't be a successful pastor because you're black, you can't be a successful pastor because you're white, you can't be successful, forsake those thoughts. And the funny part of it is, it's hard to do. I don't know why you want to keep thinking destructively because it's the course of least resistance, amen.
Now, forsake that thought, cast it down the word says. And the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but powerful through God, mighty through God for the pulling down of strong holes. So don't try to do it with booze, don't try to capture your thoughts with drugs. Those of you who didn't know anything about drugs, you know, talk about Heroin and that kind of stuff being dream world, dreamland, never never land. That cocaine gives you a shot of confidence, ain't that a joke. It ain't dream world, you're in a dream if you think you're going to get out of it, you're in a dream if you think that's going to change anything for the better, it can't, it'll kill you. All it does is get you where you don't care if it does kill you and boy, you get in that shape, hell is at your door. A friend of mine was standing between two railroad cars, he was a bank robber, he's standing between two railroad cars and he was about to step off between those cars, he was about to kill himself and he said out loud "I'm going to end this", thank God he had a Holy Ghost wife, she was praying. Just about the time he started to step off there was a voice coming and said don't do that, suicide is not the end of that, it's the beginning of it. Boy, he said, I grabbed hope and I got thinking about, you know, if there is a hell, I ain’t got no way out of that if I get in there.
Well you see, that thought was from God too, he didn't realize it, he just analyzed the New Testament because he would have lost his soul, everybody in hell has a soul but they've lost control of their will. Everybody in hell wills all day, every day, to get out but their will won't work. You can will to stay out and it will work for you because you choose Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior and save your soul. You want to see somebody that's lost their soul? Go down (inaudible (01:20:07)), go down and walk through that penitentiary, talk to men that exercise their will every day and (inaudible (01:20:19)), they've got guards standing over them, bars around them and he says no, you can't leave, can't go home, can't see your wife, can't see your children, can't make a living, can't go here, can't go there, have to go where I tell you to go and all day his will says I'm getting out of here, I've got to get out of here, I have to leave here. But he doesn't have any control over his soul, his will, his emotions or his mind because somebody else is thinking for him, somebody else is feeling for him and somebody else is exercising their will over his. He's lost his soul, at least temporarily.
However, in the middle of that he made Jesus Christ the Lord of his life and saved his soul. He was born again and renew his mind and eventually, walked right out the door. But you have to renew your mind. No question about it, it has to be done. Once your mind is renewed, your sprit begins to be established in the things of the word and the things of the Lord and all hell can break loose and you'd be just as calm because you're somebody from another world, amen. (inaudible (01:21:42)) and you didn't even hear it and you think well, praise the Lord, some of these days they'll understand and when all hell falls in around you that same bunch will come out and say would you pray for us? Why sure, that's what you're for, amen. Be careful or be anxious for nothing, Philippians 4:6, in everything by prayer and supplication with thanks giving, let your request be known to God and the peace of God which passes all understanding shall keep your heart and mind through Christ Jesus. Finally brother, (inaudible (01:22:33)) honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, it may be true and not of good report, get it off your mind. If there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things. Now if he just stopped right there you could have maybe, you know, conned your way out of there and say yes (inaudible (01:22:58)) don't understand my problem. Those things which you have both learned and received and heard and seen in me, do them. What things? Those things he just lined up there. That's what he was doing in their (inaudible (01:23:16)) and he said now you do it. You take authority over your mind.
You not only cast thoughts down and bring those thoughts into captivity but here you choose what you think. You think all of these things. You set your mind, you command it to think like it wants to think. Now the devil can, he'll do his best to get you out into an area of mental warfare and lie to you with such strength. See, God delivered me from being manic depressive and I'm telling you, there's all kinds of things involved in it and you come to a place where you're detached from your thoughts and they get so mixed up that to be a manic depressive is grief when there is nothing to grieve about. And even thought I know what to do, it's almost impossible to do it because I'm having such a warfare in my mind. But rather than to let it go and just yield to it which I liked to have done one time and (inaudible (01:24:40)) cost me my life and my ministry and everything else. And rather than to just let it go I pulled aside with God and pulled out into a place with Him back in 1983 and just went off back up there in the woods and just stayed there, just God and me and I told Him, I said I'm going to leave one of two ways, I'm either going to leave here in a box or I'm leaving here with a ministry renewed.
Now the decision was made there and God honored it and there was a lot of times I'd just be hanging there by a thread and I knew what to do but (inaudible (01:25:28)). I mean it seemed like to me that the devil just had a claw right in my face and just squeezed my mind into oblivion. But I’m here to tell you today, he cannot maintain an attack, he doesn't have the power, he is a dead spirit and we are filled with the living God and don't you come tell me you can't do it. I know better than that. And you can drive down the road just like I did and shout at the very top of your voice until it breaks, it may not break for an hour but during that hour you'd better get your stuff together, you understand what I mean with that. And it comes back, bless God, do it again. And those people that are around somebody like that, don't knock them in the head, get in there and fight with them, fight the devil, don't let the devil take somebody away from you. Get in there and fight the fight of faith, you may get so irritated with him, you can't figure out why they're like that but you're not over there in their bodies, you're not over there in their minds and somewhere down the line I had to settle it with God and I settled it with the blood and the bread and went to the word with it and settled it with it. I won't quit, oh dear God, I like to have (inaudible (01:27:03)), I want to do it.
Argued with God and try to get Him to let me quit. I didn't want (inaudible (01:27:13)), I hate this place, full of sin, sickness, demons, spirits, everything I don't like but then the Lord said why don't you go do something about it, what goods it going to do you if you come to Heaven, I said well, let me come and see PLEASE. But I got into a place one time where I could have if I wanted to because you push God with that long enough, I mean He's not going to turn you down from now on because you actually belong there. Now you cut the reward system very short and you may cost somebody else and you certainly cost God, certain situations and plans of His but if you want to go to Heaven you can and I'd settle that and fix my mind, fix it, fix it. When the pressure comes off of you and it will, it's not going to just stay on you 24 hours a day, it can't. The first place, the devil ain't got that many demons and the second place, he ain't got that much power and it will come in waves and when it eases up, don't just oh thank God, somebody turn the TV on which I did (inaudible (01:28:47)) because I was physically worn to exhaustion to start with and that was stupid, that was my fault. And when that kind of thing comes, when that let's up a little bit, boy get into the word right then and build your fort, build your attack, launch an attack on the devil. Well I'm too tired, well so is he. I mean, jump in the middle of him with both hands, both feet and the word of the living God. Yeah, but what if I die, well you've been talking about dying, you've been going around telling everybody this thing is just killing me, I didn't really mean it, then don't say it then. You understand why I said now when I started this it ain't an easy battle, it ain't an easy battle with all that other junk either, amen. I've gone far enough today, let's stand.
With regard to Bible reading, the books from Matthew to Revelation contain a concise summary of much in Scripture but it is important to understand that Genesis to Malachi is still Scripture and while Jesus fulfilled certain provisions of the mosaic Covenant and introduced a new and better Covenant, with respect to forgiveness from sin the mosaic Covenant or the laws of Moses, the Torah remain except where expressly changed under the new Covenant. God has done this because mankind has progressively slipped further and further from the perfect state in which man was created to the state which characterizes mankind, the world and the Church today. That's apart from certain specific ordinances that have changed, the remainder of the so-called Old Testament, probably about 99% of the text remains valid and enforced today.
It's also important to realize that many of Jesus teachings, such as what we know as the sermon on the Mount, was simply restating principles of Torah, the mosaic law that had been corrupted by (inaudible (01:30:58)). Jesus was in many cases reinstating, not changing. This is particularly important to understand in the context of marriage teachings. Important to understand in the context of marriage, whatever you focus your mind on will determine who you are and where you go, it's vital that you focus on Jesus and your spouse, not your secretary, your boss or your job. Your job is important but not if it becomes an idol. Important also not to pray for something where those involved do not have faith to agree with you, can apply in marriage in many areas. If your spouse has not come to a Revelation of where you believe God is taking you in marriage they may not be able to pray with you in agreement. You may need to go a step at a time, like the example with the child with the damaged brain. No one can keep you from getting your marriage healed except you, an important point out of this teaching. If things are not changing there's something out of line spiritually, you need to get into the word, you need to get into these teachings, you need to get to the bottom of it, you need to make a decision to get your marriage healed.
You don't have a marriage problem, if you have a problem in your marriage it's because of wrong knowledge, wrong practice, wrong doctrine. Renew your mind with the truth that's presented in these Scriptures, turn to God, don't turn to man. Your marriage can be healed. Keep your bodies as a living sacrifice, Holy and acceptable unto God, separated unto Him. It's vital that this extends into marriage and it's vital that we realize that sexual lovemaking is not dirty, it is part of the living sacrifice, it is part of praise and worship in a sense before God, it should be beautiful before God. In the same way that if we lift Holy hands in praise we do so in an uninhibited fashion, you must walk in the Spirit by faith, keep our minds on Jesus, you must focus on the word of God and we must pray as necessary in order to get the truth. Realize that anything that God exposes to the world, the world will talk ugly about you as was said in this teaching. This applies particularly in this teaching on marriage, you will find an enormous amount of resistance. Replace your thoughts with Gods thoughts and when it comes to the crunch, settle it with the blood and the bread, take communion with your spouse and commit to experiencing Heaven on earth in your marriage, it can be done but it requires a quality decision by you, by your spouse, even to start with a quality decision by one of you, a commitment to walk in the principles in these teachings.
04 10 The Power of the Tongue
Kenneth Copeland
In volume two, of the series understanding God's way in marriage, volume two towards Heaven on earth in marriage, teaching number ten, the power of the tongue. The way we speak to people is an absolutely critical part of marriage, how we relate to one another, how husbands speak to wives, how wives speak to husbands. The following teaching is a teaching again by Kenneth Copeland which deals specifically with this subject.
Let's read from James 3, starting with the very first verse "My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation. For in many things we offend all. If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect or mature man, and able also to bridle the whole body. Behold, we put bits in the horses mouths, that they may obey us; and we turn about their whole body. Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm, withersoever the governor listeth. Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity; so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; or sets in motion the wheel of nature and it is set on fire of hell. For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tames, and hath been tamed of mankind. But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh. Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual and devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, (what would that wisdom from above be? that would be the word of God, Luke 11:49, Jesus called the word of God the wisdom of God, so let's read that verse that way, verse 17) But the word of God is from above and is first pure then peaceable, the word is gentle, the word is easy to be intreated, the word is full of mercy, the word is full of good fruits, the word is without partiality, and the word is without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace." Praise God.
If we find out exactly how our enemy functions and he works and we have the weapons that are more powerful than his, and we have access and know how to use those weapons, then frankly in my estimation and the way I understand spiritual things and the way I understand the word of God, after studying it, you wouldn't have to study it very long to understand this. To know how my enemy works and to have at my disposable weapons that are more powerful than his, not to stop him in his works (inaudible (00:04:45)). I mean just to stand by and let it go on looks to me like it would be a sin yet right on the other hand most Christian people do that. Now they don't do it making up their mind, well you know, I'm just going to let the devil run over me today. I mean after all, I think he ought to have a shot once in a while, (inaudible (00:05:07)) and nobody does it that way. I want to show you something today about the operation of Satan and the way he works and if you'll catch onto it and begin to realize it, he'll never ever be able to put anything over on you.
I was praying, this took place almost ten years ago. I was praying one afternoon, I had some meetings that were coming up and I was praying about it and I was just beginning to learn some of these things then and the Spirit of the Lord began to deal with me, it dealt with me all afternoon long on this very thing that I'm going to share with you today, this very principle. He said to me, He said you wait until you get in that meeting over there, before you ever bind the devil and go over there to preach and He said that's just not very smart. Well now, I never had really thought about it, I just kind of was taking it one day at a time, he'd hit me and I'd try to do something about it. He'd take my money away from me, (inaudible (00:06:20)) and pray about it a while and beg God a while and anything else I could, kick chairs over, you know, you think of at the time but the money was gone. Now can you see what I mean.
Now people don't do that in the natural but they do it where spiritual things are concerned. And then I had the Lord say this to me and I'll never forget it. He said if they'd kicked out Capone while he was a bouncer down at one of those joints, it wouldn't have been so hard to handle but they waited until he became a King size criminal and had boundaries built up around him, for you couldn't get to him and then it took an army to get him down. And this is what I was doing in my own affairs, I would wait until Satan had built his defenses against me and had really walked in there and plundered everything I had and then tried to do something about it. And the Lord said why don't you start praying and believe in me and take care of the things that you have to do and then start your confession working now, this was about this time of year. He said you've got those meetings coming up this summer, he said why don't you start believing God (inaudible (00:07:27)) and just take care of it now and he said then you'll have to be faced with that when you get there. And then He said when time comes for that meeting, He said all you have to do is just say Father, I roll all the care of this meeting over on you in the name of Jesus and just go on.
Now that was ten years ago and we've never had a meeting yet that missed the budget and boy, I couldn't have said that right then, I mean we hadn't missed any budgets but I want you to know it was getting awful close, it was rough and it looked like a disaster was going to take place any minute, all the time it looked that way. Now, when God created man, He created a spiritual being in His own likeness, He created a God like individual and gave him authority. Now depending on your view point, depending on where you stand, depending on your knowledge of God, it will depend on your knowledge of God just how deeply you understand what it means when God said I give you (inaudible (00:08:58)). Now you have to understand this, all the angels of God including Satan and all of his crowd, when God says what He says they know what He means and from that point on, because you see, they know how God operates, Satan at one time had the anointing of God on him, he had it inside in the spiritual thing, they know what the law is, they know exactly what God's laws are, they know exactly how God operates and when God says something they know how He operates and if they're going to get around Him they know what they're going to have to do to get around Him.
Now if God says I give you authority, do you know what that means? That means you have the right to say something where that's involved because in God's Kingdom, in God's way, in God's method of operation, He uses words. Words are the weapons and ordinance of God. Words carry the power that give His authority its power of authority. If God has authority over the atmosphere, it's when He says peace be still, it's atmosphere obeys that authority, do you follow that. Now if you give a policeman authority and then you give him a gun and he has the right to shoot the gun (inaudible (00:10:42)). If the city of Fortworth tells a policeman you have authority over this right here and then they give him a weapon to back up that authority with. Well then the crook what he's going to have to do to get around that gun, ain't that right? I mean, he's faced with that pistol, he knows what that thing will do, he knows the kind of fire power it has, he's got to figure out some way of getting around that gun, if he can get around that gun he can get around the Lord. What Satan knows and has no doubt about the fact, that in order to get around God you have to get around His word because (inaudible (00:11:19)), that's where the power is, that's where all the dynamite is stored, it's at the storehouse of God's power, it's His word and Satan knew that.
Alright, what did God do, He creates a spiritual being, a being that is in his class and He says subdue the earth. Now that means that Satan and all the rest of the angels, all the other angels knew that and we're not having any trouble with them, Satan’s the only one we're having any trouble with, the thief is the one we're having trouble with. But the minute that God said that, that automatically indicates to all of the angels, everybody that knows how God operates and anyway, when He says (inaudible (00:12:09)) that means when this guy says anything and (inaudible (00:12:12)), it better obey because words are the basic fundamental authority of God. How did He create this earth? With words. What brought it into existence? Words. So now Satan is immediately affected, he immediately knows what he has to do, you've got to get around those words some way. Now this is the first time he ever faced anybody but God that had the right to speak words and choose them too because he never had that right, weren't any other angel ever had that right. They could speak words but they couldn't choose them, they had to speak whatever they was told. And when Satan stood up and said I (inaudible (00:12:59)). When he started talking, brother, you could send his battle home, it was all over right then.
See, here's the type on Heaven, He didn't physically go up to the gates, he never did get that far. He didn't go in there, you know, trying to shoot God from (inaudible (00:13:29)), they don't need any keys on locks on that gate, you can't get there, you don't belong there. He tried it, he said I will (inaudible (00:13:39)), you've got to say it first, that's the way things are made. Well, I just don't believe that too much, I don't care whether you do or not, that's the way the system is made, that's the way it's made, some of you may not like gasoline (inaudible (00:13:58)), some guy comes out there and says well, I don't believe in putting gas in the hole in the back, I believe it ought to be put in the radiator. I don't care, you're not going anywhere because the thing is not made that way. You have to get in line of the way it's made. Now, you know, I've been flying for 20 years and it's always amazing to me is how you'll find some guy that'll come along and knows more than the guy that built the machine and it won't take him too long, he'll stick it up like (inaudible (00:14:35)) out here somewhere but he knew better, you know, than the guy that made the thing. And everybody that's ever made an airplane put it on the market, made a little book, it went along with it, it said operators handbook and the guy that built the machine tells the way the system is made. You get in line with it (inaudible (00:14:54)). Ain't that funny?
Some guy thinks he knows more about his Ford than Ford. Now they may have made some mistakes but they know what they had in mind when they put the thing together, they know the steps that they took when they made it, you see, and if you'll follow the same direction, the same steps, you're going to come out a lot better operating the machines that they made if you're operating it in line with the way the thing was made in the first place, ain't that right? And it just doesn't work very well if you take a Lincoln Continental and take it off down there in the jungles of South America and make a Jeep out of it, it won't go very far. Now you can take a vehicle that was made with that in mind and drive around down in there and actually use the same principles of manufacturer as one did the other but you've got one out of its class. You go to pull on automobiles and drag and make a truck out of a car, it don't work but you can take a truck and make a truck out of it, it works alright.
Now the same thing is true if the way God made the Heavens and the earth. The same thing is true with every single thing that you and I have anything to do with and He tells us here in the book of James exactly how the system works and He describes both systems that are involved, the system of God and the system of Satan and puts man right in the middle of it and tells him exactly how both systems operate and looks like you and me don't have sense enough to work it. We would if we'd get in and operate it, you see, and we do operate it all the time, it's not a matter of making a choice of whether or not we're going to operate as long as you're operating your five physical senses, you're operating one or the other. People operate these very principles under Satan’s instruction in the negative, not realizing that that's what they're doing. And you bring it over into the positive and begin to function like this and it makes you stick out like a sore thumb, somebody said he's crazy. He's going around saying things with his mouth, thinking they're going to come to past. Why you not going to get (inaudible (00:17:07)).
Just wait five minutes, just let the subject change, just five minutes time, let them just blab on, don't say nothing about it, (inaudible (00:17:28)) and then let them blab on and it won't take you five minutes and you know what one of them will say, well I'll tell you one thing, it will be just like it always is, just as sure as we go down there and buy that new set of tires, we'll blow two of them out before we get a thousand miles on it, has it happened yet or are they speaking of things that are not as though they were? That's the very guy that said he wouldn't do that, yet he did it over and over and over. Well, that don't work for me, it just did. And the only way it works for you, sees in the negative because that is the only way you're pushing it. Now, before I get into what James has said here and show you how that system works and how Satan’s using it. If you find out how he's using it, I tell you (inaudible (00:18:29)), it ain't hard to pull his plug. You can put a stop to him, he has a very difficult term getting anything to work when everything is going his way.
So I mean he's got to get everything lined up just exactly right because he's a dead spirit, he doesn't have any life in him, everything he does he's got to get somebody else to do it, he doesn't have any of his own, he has to get his life (inaudible (00:18:58)), ever since he gave up his position with God, he's always had to get his license from men, he had to get a license from Adam to even open his mouth here. Now, why do you suppose James knew so much about this? And when do you suppose he got so deeply involved in this? I mean, Mark wrote something about it, Jesus taught about it, it's all over the Bible, Solomon taught it, (inaudible (00:19:26)) taught it, Samuel taught it, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Nehemiah got a whole bunch together one day and they stood and made confessions of faith before the Lord, the Bible says for a quarter of a day. And you think we're long winded. A fourth of a day, standing before God and speaking confessions of their mouth under the instruction of the Lord, saying it with their mouths and then they wrote it down on paper, everything they said and everybody that deserved signed it, praise God. No wonder (inaudible (00:20:09)).
Alright, James was raised in the same home as Jesus. Now Jesus did not do any miracles until He was 30 years old and (inaudible (00:20:22)) and that was a little premature, He told His mother it was, He said woman, this is before my time. But you see, He didn't start living by faith after He was 30 years old because if He had to it wouldn't have pleased God and the Bible said He grew in the wisdom and the stature of God and He pleased God perfectly, so He had to be living by faith, He lived by Faith by the time He had mental knowledge of how to use His own physical body, He had to live by faith. Well see, you can't live by faith without talking faith. Now do you remember what Mary told those men there at the wedding feast of Cana, she said whatever He says to you, you do it. Now she'd already found that out about Him, whatever He says will come fast. And it was pretty obvious that He didn't talk like everybody else, that if everything was going in one direction He'd always go the direction of the Father, He'd always go toward what the word would say, (inaudible (00:21:23)), He just stuck out above everybody else, (inaudible (00:21:27)). And His brothers thought He was a lunatic, that's what the Bible said, they thought He'd lost His mind and James found out later that He hadn't lost His mind but all the time He'd been living in the same household with the son of the living God, hallelujah.
Well, he began to find out, something began to think about that and meditate on that, thank God because just take the way Jesus lived. If you knew how Jesus lived it wouldn't be hard to write that third chapter James at all because all you had to do, just take the way Jesus lived and write it down, that would be easy to see. He said whatever they tell you, she told that (inaudible (00:22:07)) whatever He tells you to do, you do it, whatever He says, you better do that. Now, this chapter of James makes two vital statements that we're going to look at today. One of them is that there is nothing in this earth that is so great and so powerful including your body, that you can't turn around with your tongue. The other statement that has to be learned and understood in this, as is that the entire course of nature that surrounds any human being is controlled with that human beings tongue. Now let's take the latter one first because most of you understand the first one, why we can just read this verse of Scripture here to find this out "Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds yet are they turned about with a very small helm withersoever the governor listeth." In other words, I don't care how fierce the winds are in your life or how big your ship is, if you will take the authority of the governor over the thing, take authority over the rudder, you can turn the ship.
But now I want you to notice something that he says here starting with verse 5. "Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth." Now, you know what kindling wood is, but kindling is what starts the fire. You don't build a bonfire and then put the kindling in on top of it, you put the kindling at the bottom of the thing, the kindling wood is at the bottom of the fire, I don't care how big the fire gets, it started on the kindling wood, isn't that right? Where did the thing start to begin with, you don't go in and lay a great big old log out there in the fireplace (inaudible (00:24:20)), it won't burn. That log is too big, the log of life, the circumstances of this planet that the way it was put into motion, the operation that it is in because God put it that way, Satan is not big enough to start the bonfire with the big logs of this planet, it has to be started with the kindling of a man’s tongue or he can't start it to start with, it's too big for him, he's not of God, he's a fallen angel. Can you understand that? If he was, he would have destroyed this thing thousands of years ago and wipe every human being out with one stroke, he'd have killed Adam to start with instead of messing with him. He couldn't kill him, he can't do it. He's got to have some kindling.
You ever been stuck out in the woods and it's cold and you are wet and all you've got is one match, I have and you're standing there thinking I've only got one match, I've got to make this work and I've got to have fire and you've got all kinds of wood laying around there and one match and you can't find any kindling. Man, you get to a place where you think about burning the sleeve off your shirt or something, it's getting cold. What are you going to do for some kindling wood, you have got to have something to start the fire or you are not going to get a fire, isn't that true? Well now, you analyze Satan’s operation a little bit, begin to realize that's what he's faced with, that's what he's faced with. The Bible says the power of life and death is in the tongue. That's a Scripture that will get you up in the middle of the night once you begin to think about this a little bit. He says that the tongue is a little member, it's small, it boasteth great things, behold how great a matter or how big a fire, a little fire starts or kindles, the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity.
What do you mean by that? A world of iniquity? The entire world of iniquity, the whole thing that Satan does, every single thing in the world of iniquity, all of the Kingdom of the damned, the whole operation depends on that piece of kindling to operate. The whole thing depends on that little member, if he can't get that little member he can't get the man, nor the circumstances that affect that man’s life. I don't care how hard he tries, when that man has the shield of faith up, it will quench all (inaudible (00:27:24)), I don't know about that. Well, there you go again, you going against the creator trying to figure your way out and you can do that all you want to, you can get born again, baptized in the Holy Ghost, go to WIPU meetings four times a week and you can just enjoy Church, go to Sunday school, get there every time but every time the storms of life hits your household, it's going to knock a slat out of everything you try to do and you're the very one that will be walking around in there ringing your hands, my God why me? Why did it happen to me? Am I not saved? Yes, you're saved. Am I not baptized in the Holy Ghost? Yes, you're baptized in the Holy Ghost. I mean, don't I minister to the field? Yes, you minister to the field. Didn't I get folks saved? Yes, you get folks saved, don't make any difference, you've got 22 million of them saved, this is the way the system works and if you don't get it in line with it and begin to build your defenses with it somewhere down the line you're going to get your back gate kicked open and all hell's going to break lose right there in your yard. Now whether you like that kind of talk or not, it's so. And you might have said is that all you preach about is words? As a matter of fact, yes.
In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God and the word became flesh and dwelled among men. God's never done anything in this planet but what He said it first. That's the way you got saved, with words. Well, I don't think it matters that much. Yes, and that's the reason your boat keeps bringing leaks because you don't think it matters that much and Jesus said by your words are you justified, by your words are you convinced and you will stand judgment for every idol word that proceeds out of your mouth. Now bless God, if that don't mean it means something then I don't understand words to start with. How could you put it in higher priority on something than that, He didn't say by your fasting are you justified, He didn't even say by your praying are you justified, He said by your words are you justified and by your words are you condemned.
Now when you understand what Satan's up against, you understand what he's got to do, then you can begin to see from the things around you how it works. If you don't know what he's up against, if you don't know what he's facing and what he's got to do to put it into motion, then you will never get much out of the experiences of life. Now if he can possibly do it, he'll keep your attention on the experiences of life, he'll keep you trying to analyze what happened to you and keep this old, old, old, old lie that he's sold among religious people that the storms of life come on us to teach us and if he can keep that in front of you, he'll keep you in the storms of life, never learning anything because every time one of them if I don't care if it's a carbon copy of the last one. Ain't that right, why sure it's right. And I've had people say to me, you know, you're just too hard, I'm going to get harder. I found out how it works.
Now, God's never done anything in this earth that He didn't first say it. How long and how many times did He say the Messiah was coming? If you've got time to count it, it'll go up into thousands of times over that many years. He just kept saying He's coming. He described Him every way you could think of, he just kept saying He's coming and He said my word go forth out of my mouth and it'll not return unto me void, it'll accomplish that which I preach and I'll tell you what, all of the circumstances and all of the earth look like it wasn't any way but do you think He'd move with that, He just kept saying it, He just kept pounding it in there, He didn't make (inaudible (00:31:54)), He just kept on saying it. Well see, Satan had the same problem and he stood up and said I will exalt my throne above the sides of the Lord and God said no, you won't. And when the two of thems word clashed, the word of a free spirit, a spirit with the authority of words spoke then it had an usurped authority over a dead angelic spirits words and Gods words came out victoriously, ain't that right? Same thing will happen in your life.
Satan will come along and say you're not going to make it. Now if you agree with him, he'll run the (inaudible (00:32:40)), he'll push it as far as you will keep on agreeing with him but when you stomp your foot and say no sir, the word of God says I don't have to do that and that I'm the righteousness of God and I'm not going any further, I am not going to have the sickness and disease in my body anymore. But I'm telling you, when you make that decision and you put that word out of your mouth, then I want you to know right now if you intend to walk by the thing, if you intend to change the things that are around you and bridal this body and change it then you're going to have to be unwilling to change or relive or move one ounce, hells going to have to move, I'm not going to. I know God won't, you follow me?
Sympathy then begins to move in on the scene. Oh, that's too hard brother Copeland. Now don't be hard on all those folks, be easy on them, let them die. No, I can't do that because I'd have to be responsible for it then because I found this out, I've learned this. Oh listen, the easiest thing in the world is to be to go easy on you, that's what most of all the preachers are doing now. Boy, I tell you what, you go to settling down on it and not relenting, not turning but let me tell you something, I had a most unusual experience, any of you that know Kenneth Hagan will know how unusual this is because I've been around him now for almost 11 years and all the things I ever heard him say, other than in the pulpit, you could write them on the back of your hand, you know, I mean he just doesn't talk much until he gets the anointing of God on him, then he does. But a few nights ago in our meeting in Tulsa, he and I had a meeting and we were discussing some of the things of the word of God and he upped and talking and I know good and well, God's anointing came on because I had to find this out. And he started telling something’s about the early days of his ministry and he got to talking about something’s and Smith Wigglesworth ministry and see, God used Smith Wigglesworth ministry where Kenneth Hagan was concerned, the way He used Kenneth Hagan’s ministry where I'm concerned. And he knew men that had been on his staff and had ministered with him and before they died and then he'd read a lot of material about Wigglesworth back there years ago that's now out of print.
You can't find it anymore and he said they were ministering one night and they usually had prayer cards because there were so many people to minister to, they had to set this thing up where if you got prayed for, they had to keep as many people out of prayer line twice as they possibly could because it just...you know, how you going to pray for 50 thousand people, there's no way and there'd just be a sea of people to minister to. So they were done with this when this particular time, for some reason or another, they didn't have any prayer cards or something, he'd told them, he'd said if you've been prayed for the night before then don't get in this prayer line. Well, here come a fellow up here on two crutches, now you got the picture. I mean, here comes a guy on two crutches, he comes up on that platform and the guy was telling Hagan, he said now (inaudible (00:36:17)) but I didn't want to go tell that old man get off that platform, to go get a guy that's got two crutches and make him get off the platform. He said I wasn't going to do that.
And then he said so the guy walks on up there in front of Mr. Wigglesworth and he turns him round and starts praying for him and says wasn't you up in this prayer line last night, yes, what are you doing up here again tonight? See how hard he's being? He's not being hard on the man, he's being hard on the thing that got him that way. And he said yes, I was up here last night, he said but I didn't get anything last night. Don't you talk that unbelief to me, you're here and now and got sense enough to know it and turned him around and (inaudible (00:37:13)) and run him off of the platform. Now that's rough but the man got healed. Now just to be mean about it, not knowing what you're doing is another thing, that's not what I'm talking about at all. Wigglesworth wasn't mad at the man, he was mad at the thing that Satan had sold him and got him in that shape. Jesus was that way a lot more than most Christian people would like to admit, he was that way. The (inaudible (00:38:00)) came in there begging, squalling, balling, that's the reason her daughter was flat on her back, he called the woman a dog. Now I tell you, that's pretty rough but boy, it got her attention. Made her mad, the minute it made her mad she changed her sin and said she is going to get it, she said with her mouth then that she is going to get deliverance for that girl, she said (inaudible (00:38:33)), He said well for that sin go on your way, your daughter as well. I can just see Him smiling, He doesn't let it in there, you know, and beat the devil again at his own game, praise God.
Now, read here just a moment, wasn't it because I want you to make certain that you know and you're thinking exactly what I'm saying here. Verse 6 "The is a fire, a world of iniquity: so it the tongue among our members" Now he says the tongue is the fire, it is the world of iniquity, the whole world of iniquity depends on the key and he says the tongue is the same thing among our members. It is the same thing among our members. I want to show you something here, I tell you this hurt me right down to the core when I first heard it because I realized what I'd done. Christian people, honest Christian people, I don't mean born again people, why they'd rather just take you out and skin them as to use God's name in vain. Now, if you stop any of them and ask them and say well, what is vain about saying the phrase God damn a thing or another, why would that be vain? Why is that so bad? I don't know but that is just bad to say, why? I know it is and I agree with you but why? If it's vain it would have to be because God's not the damner, ain't that right? I mean, if He was the damner it wouldn't be vain, we could say oh yes, let's bless that thing, say God damn that thing, that's blessing.
(inaudible (00:40:40)) that's the most backwards, most squirrely thinking I've ever heard. No it isn't, do you stand around there and say God is the one who burns your crop? You turn back around and say God (inaudible (00:40:54)), God took my baby from me, God took my daddy from me, well if it's not vain in one place it's not vain in another and if it's vain to say his a damner then it's vain to turn right around and say he's a damner, he's just using another set of words. The reason God is so vehemently against that is because is not the damner and you say God damn a thing or another you license Satan to condemn it and destroy it. That's what God hates about it and then give Him the credit for it. God gets the blame, Satan gets the destruction and the world don't know the difference between the two, so what do they do? They write in their insurance policies on acts of God, talk about vanity, that's as vain as you can get. if you ever was using Gods name in vain it's just as vain saying, that is an act of God that brought damnation on Southern California or damnation in Argentina, (inaudible (00:41:59)) God damn that thing over there then. Is that right or is it not? See, when you begin to learn how the system works you begin to see (inaudible (00:42:14)), somebody said well, I always thought that's what it was, yes you did and as long as Satan made you think that and could keep you thinking that then he'll tear up everything in sight.
It's when we start thinking according to the word of God that we begin to realize right in the middle of all this, see James has already made another statement in the first chapter of James, let no man say when he's tested, he's tested of God, don't say that. Let no man say it and yet people go around saying it all the time. Alright, read on here a little bit further, "the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body", now isn't this what Jesus said, He said it's not what goes in a man’s mouth that defiles him, it's what comes out. Well everybody's always thought that that was just the several words that we prophesized as profane but I found out in front of the readings, the word of God, that God considers profanity anything that is cross wise of His word, His nature, His name or His power and He is love, He is not sickness, disease, damnation, He is not the cause of the destruction of this planet. And Jesus said that, He said the thief come up but for to kill, to steal and to destroy. I have come to have my life and have it abundantly, praise God. Somebody said well then how come I haven't got abundant life? If you listen five more minutes I will show you, not because it isn't being offered, it's because we rejected not knowing how the system works.
Any of you guys working on automobiles or working on your old car, particularly when you was a kid and didn't know how to work the thing and didn't how to make it work? And you hit a particular piece and you start putting the thing back on there and it wouldn't go and you stand there and look at it and think (inaudible (00:44:22)), that won't go on there and yet, I know it will because I took it off. And you get the thing all built back up and you've still got this piece in your hand. (inaudible (00:44:34)), you can't get a screwdriver in there, you can't get it turned and you finally...somebody that knows comes out there with a grin on their face, takes that thing away from you and there it went. That won't go on there, I don't know how he did that but you can't be stupid enough to stand there and say I don't care if he didn't put it back, it won't go. No, you automatically know that he knows how that thing was made, he's probably been through the same darn thing you went through and had to go get the book and find out how the guy that machined the part put it on there and (inaudible (00:45:19)).
Now, what we need to find out is how the guys that machined these parts did it, the parts of his body, praise God, and what makes it work. How the thing functions to start with, then you can see how Satan got in to tear it up, then you can take the very same weapons and put him out and stop him from turning up anymore. Now, he says that the tongue defiles the whole body and set up on fire the course or the...my cross reference says the wheel of nature and it, the tongue, is set on fire of hell. Now that's the way the system works, Satan does not, hell does not go set on fire the course of nature against you and cause it to run over you. No, he has to set on fire the tongue and then the tongue releases and starts in motion the course of nature and once Satan gets it built up, then it runs over you. Now you see, we've been given the full armor of God but most people are not wearing it, they tear it down with the tongue.
Now, let me show you exactly how he does this in praying about it. One of the things that caused me to pray about it as much as anything else is because so many people have been under fire since about the last week...it looked like with no warning, nothing at all, just broke in and took there somebody's loved one, I mean there's been preachers and famous preachers that have lost members of their families, just in the last 65 days, well actually really just the days of 1977. Some of you go around saying why but you don't hear very much about actually why. A theme like is an unanswerable question but it is because we just read the answer, he just got through telling you what causes it, he said the course of nature is set on fire by the tongue and the tongue is set on fire by hell. Now are you going to believe the word of God, I'm telling you something, when Satan moves in on a thing like this, the moment you say it with your mouth is not the moment he's looking for.
Now you listen to me, the moment you were born again and particularly, if you went ahead and received the Holy Spirit of God, you became by yourself a thousand times stronger than he is, right then. I mean, he knows he's no match for you, you were born in the lightness of God, made the righteousness of God, given the full armor of God, given the authority and the power of attorney to use the name of Jesus, that name which at that name he's already backed off how many millions of times. What did Jesus use on him? The word and his own disciples came back and said you know, the devil is a subject to us in your name and at that time his name had not even been exalted. Now he's been given a name highly exalted, above every name, that at that name ever knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He's Lord. Every what confess? Tongue, it is involved in everything you do.
So now, here you're coming along, you are a potential stranger, then you're going to get me into the word, all of a sudden you just quit wagging that Bible around with you and you start digging in that thing. All of a sudden you hear on the radio that Jerry Seville is going to be preaching in town, you think you know I ought to go to that meeting and you think he's about to find out, he's going to go to saying the wrong things, he's about to find out, Jesus said Satan cometh immediately to take out the word which was sown in their heart and these are laid by the wayside to have no root in themselves and endure it but for a time. Afterward, when persecution and affliction arises for the words sake, immediately they become offended, they get mad, get mad at God and mad at the guy that's preaching it.
Now, the way it works is this, you're walking along here and you say well, I'll tell you what, I'd rather die in a car wreck than I had to get in one of them little planes, Satan says okay. Now, if he's dumb enough to run over you that day, then everybody that heard you say that would catalogue that and say boy, you wouldn't catch me saying that, that's what it will get for you. No, no, he just writes it in the book, it's already judged, he has to operate this way, this is the reason we've got the advantage over him, you could've stopped right then and said nope, in the name of Jesus, you ain't catching me dying in a car wreck and I renounce that in Jesus, I repent of it right now and I'm asking you to forgive my disobedient mouth, in the name of Jesus and Satan’s oh. But the main problem is nobody knew what they had done would ever show up again so he just waits and somebody else will come along in a few weeks and says I'll tell you what, you need to stop there at the airport, we'll fly you down there. You ain't going to get me on one of them little airplanes, I'd rather die in a car wreck than ride one of them and Satan said mm-hhmm, just let him go on, let him shoot his big blab mouth off. Then two years later in the middle of the night, right after a great meeting and the guy comes out of there after he's given his testimony and stood up before people and said Glory to God and Satan wipes him out out in the freeway and somebody says why did that happen to deacon Smith but the course of nature was already set.
I was in Beaumont, Texas and this lady came to me and she said brother Copeland, I have something I want to put before you because she said I have got to know, I have to know. She said my husband and I were saved at the same time, had five or six children, she said both of us love God, we both go here at this Church, where I had just started a meeting, she said we both go to this Church and then said he loved God, we were both in the same Sunday school class, we pray together, we believe God together but she said here not too long ago we had an automobile accident that was just out of sight. She said there was a guy that was drunk, ran over our car, said he crossed a major intersection, ran a red light doing over 100 miles an hour and hit our car and it broke that car in half, he hit it so hard their car came in two and she said our family were scattered out all over a block and a half and she said I was laying out on the grass and between those two highways, the meridian between the two roads, she said I was laying up there and she said I never did go unconscious but she said I knew my body was broken up from one end to the other and said I was laying there praying and in the spirit and believing God and she said I could tell that I couldn't move much but I could see one of my babies lying over here and his skull was split, she didn't know it then but his skull was split all the way and the boy lived. She said but now my husband said there wasn't anything wrong with him, the doctor said he was the least injured of the bunch and he died before the next morning, he didn't live through the night and the rest of us lived. She said now I don't understand that, she said we both love God, both of us love the Lord.
Well, I didn't understand it either. I said I'll tell you what, let's you and I set ourselves in agreement, I said you forget about all of the old time religion excuses of God and His great wisdom, was lonely without Him, that's the biggest bunch of rot that anybody ever sold somebody in grief, that is a bunch of hoohie. Somebody said well, He looked down through the years and saw that he's going to turn from God and He took him out, (inaudible (00:54:45)). God didn't take him, He's not to be accused. So I said I tell you what, you forget all that and I will too and we'll just get before God here and we'll set ourselves in agreement that the Spirit of God will reveal to us from the word what happened and I found out later, in general what happened through the whole thing. I asked the Lord one time, I said what causes that, He said well, my word tells you what causes that, my people perish for lack of knowledge. Now there's the answer if you want to know the answer to that, why did it happen, lack of knowledge. But he is super Christian, I don't care if he was, he still sees through a glass darkly, ain't that right?
Man, as much as we find them out in these last days, every time you find out something you find out how little you know. I thank God my confession is praise the Lord, He just within me knows it and whatever I need you give me the time, praise God, rather than be caught short. Well, we went ahead with the meeting and I was teaching on some of these things but now you see, that was eight years ago, I didn't know as much about this then as I do now and I really never had seen that part which says the course of the wheel of nature, all of it is put in motion by the tongue, I knew then that you could use the tongue and release faith and change things with it, I could see that. I could see (inaudible (00:56:24)) but I didn't see that it was at the very bottom, I didn't see it was the kindling, I didn't see it was where it all started. I was beginning to see it, I saw (inaudible (00:56:34)), she came up there after one of the morning services and we'd been teaching on the words of (inaudible (00:56:41)), she came up there and said Glory to God brother Copeland, I saw it, I know what happened, I said well, tell me lady, I want to know and not only that but I tell you, it broke the power of grief over her, it broke the power of the whole thing and once she saw what happened she said I'll tell you one thing, it'll never happen in this household again. I said well, what happened? She said while I was laying there on my back...now you follow me carefully because this is the way the system works and I'll tell you right now, fear is the basis for the words of doubt and unbelief that spew out our mouths and you get a man under pressure and getting scared and he'll say what's in his heart and when he says it under that kind of pressure he in bleeds every word of it will come to pass with all of his heart.
And that's the weapon that Satan uses, is fear. She said he walked up there to me, she said I was laying out there on that grass on my back, she said I knew that I was broken up all over and she said I didn't want to move so I just lay there praying in the Spirit. Well now, you see, she chose words that were beyond her intellect, she stepped away from her intellect and began to speak words of God at a moment like that and Satan didn't have a chance with her because those words are according to what? The perfect will of God. (inaudible (00:58:25)) and praise the will of God for the saints. Well see, she was taking advantage of that, she said he walked up there and stood over me and looked me right in the face and said I am a dead man, died before morning, wasn't anything physically wrong with him, she lived, little boy with the split skull lived, every member of the family lived but him. Now you stop and think about this mess, somebody said I know those people over there, I know they believe God, I know that they walk with faith, how come it happened to him? No, you don't know, you don't know what comes out of a man’s mouth in the midnight hours, you don't know what a man says right before he does, good or bad. The very last thing he said may have cancelled the whole deal just before he left, that's happened too. There's going to be a lot of Heavens population that's going to surprise a lot of uppity folks, I guarantee you because there's many an old boy that grabbed (inaudible (00:59:51)) on the way out and made it, praise God.
But now, we must be determined to be the uncompromising (inaudible (01:00:05)) and stop that. Now here's all of Satan’s team over here, here's all of God's team, all the angels of God, all of God's forces, all the corporate power of Heaven and here stands a man in the earth. Now Jesus has already said with His mouth every word that proceeds out of your mouth will be judged, when is it judged? When it comes out of your mouth. Did you ever notice God putting anything off? It's judged now, whoever is responsible to bring it to pass is the one that acts on it. See you speak words of doubt and unbelief and so forth like that and Satan and his bunch are responsible for it, they're the ones who act on it. And right on the other hand, you start speaking words of faith and the power of God, Satan will work to get you to change what you've already said but if you won't change it, he can't. Now the problem most people have is being double minded, James had something to say about that, he said the double minded men (inaudible (01:01:32)) is unstable. Now what he means is by being unstable he's bouncing from one to the other and he said (inaudible (01:01:43)) not think he's going to get anything from the Lord, he can't. He'll say one thing and then Satan will move on, he'll say something else right behind him so that God will move on and the two forces clash and it just negates everything, they're both just standing there and here he is right in the middle just flopping from one side to the other and he never gets anything, he is just always at the mercy, whatever he feels at the time and whatever (inaudible (01:02:05)), well he's up one day and down the next. He's unstable see, he's been tossed to and fro.
But now, if he's unstable and continues to be unstable, he will wind up somewhere down the line bending towards the negative and that bitter water will overtake the sweet water, every single time because the course of this world is in the negative and you're going to get a lot of negative help. Now what happens when you pray for someone, you say I believe (inaudible (01:02:37)), I tell you what, you had better take it easy a couple of days. Man of two minds, he says you're healed but you'd better be careful. Now that's not an easy thing to change and when you change it, the more you change it, the more affirmative you get, the uglier looking you are to the people around you, you're being hard. They're having such a hard time and you won't even hold their hand, I don't need to hold their hand, they didn't want me to hold their hand when they was healed before. (inaudible (01:03:21)), yes they are, I said they were. And like brother Wigglesworth said (inaudible (01:03:33)) sense enough to know it.
Now he wasn't talking about their lack of intelligence, he's talking about the lack of knowledge of the word. He wasn't just being hard, he meant what he said, that when they come up healed it's a different thing and that man told Kenneth Hagan and brother Hagan told me, he said I tell you, he said people get so mad at him that they want to storm that platform, pull him off of it, before anybody could get out of their seat, something had happened, just had you on your knees (inaudible (01:04:01)) before God, for such magnificent things would take place. But you see, when people have been so oriented over in sympathy, what does sympathy do? Sympathy fully agrees with your woe and your grief and says oh my God, I wish there was something we could do. In other words, you had it anyway and I'm agreeing with you. Well, any two of you agree, (inaudible (01:04:29)) anything, it'll come fast and that thing just keeps on and on.
Now in closing, let me show you this, when we begin to guard what we say and begin to be very, very aware of it and pray in that direction, like David did, he said put a watch over my mouth, put a guard on my tongue, let me know it, let me know when my tongue is disobedient. Solomon said put away from you a disobedient mouth, the Bible says give Satan no place and stop all corrupt communication from coming out of your mouth. When you begin to stop that corrupt communication, you begin to put a stop to it and you are absolutely intolerable of any kind of a word that you know that Jesus of Nazareth cannot function and operate on that day. And you begin to operate that way, you will see a little result in the beginning but that's not when it really, really counts. The results is there in the world of the spirit but it's going to have to be manifest in the world of the natural and when you begin, you're like a little bitty tiny baby that's standing behind a huge dam and you've got a little bitty bucket and a little bitty spoon and the dams got holes in it, (inaudible (01:05:58)), that's your dam and you're the one who poked the holes in there. And here you stand out here, you just a little bitty baby believer. I mean, you've just now started.
At the time your life is the worst is when you are the least capable of handling it, ain't that true. I mean, the day you was born again, that would be the worst time of your life. And that's when you was least capable of handling it, that's where the rest of us ought to be coming in and helping you but some of us get stuck out there, that bucket (inaudible (01:06:32)) and you get at looking at that thing. Don't look at the whole dam like that, start on the hole that's closest to you and plug that hole up. As little as you are, you're bigger than that one hole and the more you plug, the more you grow. Now what you're after is this, whereby the assistance of the power of God, the Spirit of God, the believers and the family of God and the coming together like this, where God can give us the advantage over that dam that's full of holes and got leaks all over it. By the time you get all those down, it doesn't get them all closed, you'd be gone, then you can take care and then strengthen that dam before the leaks break.
But the key to it is to build a fence out of the confession of your mouth that becomes a solid front of the shield of the faith of God that is built brick by brick by word by word by word by word by word until you're slinging that brick, slinging the materials of that wall, well on out there and you reach out there and you get all of 1977's meetings established before the first of January, Glory to God. Get it done, get moving in that direction, the angels of God will weave and interweave a wall around you, Satan called it a hedge when he ran up into Job, Job tore the heads down and Satan didn't know it, God had to tell him. Said behold, he is in their power but he never did tear it down where his own life was concerned. He never did say I'm going to die, he said well, I don't care whether I live or die, I'll serve God and God said don't you touch his life. Hedge is still up where his life is concerned.
And the very moment that he went to operate in faith, the wall went back up, praise the Lord. Now, you get that wall built up there and get it built and just keep building, keep building, keep building, I don't care how tired you get, you don't have a week off in spiritual affairs. You don't take off and go play, you come home with no house, no fence or nothing, you are going to have to live this life under God. I will tell his angels of God to interweave a hedge that's built around you and that thing keeps growing and getting bigger and when you do miss it and you do get a hole poked in it, the angels of God by your instruction and that hedge is so big, Satan can't get through that little hole. And you just go back over there and fix that, you might catch his finger in it and slap his finger and get it out of that hole and fix it back up.
You get that wall built up where it's impenetrable and if anybody tear it down it is you. All the storms of life come and they bang up against that thing. Man, some of them stand out there roaring, saying I'm King Kong, you know if they want to, roar on monkey. Just keep standing on the word of God, just keep standing on the word, just keep standing on the word. Now, the key to it is the word of God, that's where we'll begin, He said no man can tame his tongue with the natural power of man, with the same power that you tame beasts with, you can't do that because out of (inaudible (01:10:22)). The tongue doesn't have any choice, the heart is where the choice is made, you pump that heart full of the word of God and it'll come out your mouth. You pump it full of the word and it'll come out of your mouth. If you don't, it won't and if it doesn't come out of your mouth, guess what does and there goes your wall. There's a lot of people who never do get the thing built up, they don't even get it way tie. Get mad, go out there and kick it down. (inaudible (01:10:56)) Rave on mama, they'll bring you home in a basket and all your kin folk will say see, that other thing don't work, I told you it didn't. They didn't hear you in your midnight hour.
Besides that, when you talk that way it sounded natural to them, sounded like you finally got some sense. Thank the Lord, he's finally like us, we'll all go down together. Thomas always talked that way, Jesus (inaudible (01:11:43)) and you know what Thomas said let's go die with him. Did you ever notice out of that that Jesus would not use the word death, it wasn't involved in His vocabulary. It was not involved in mine either, yes it is. Oh yes, most English speaking people use the word death to express themselves more than any other word in the entire English language. Scared me to death, thrilled me to death, worried me to death, I'm just dying to go, (inaudible (01:12:26)), you don't understand, my husband about to die. Jesus would use the word sleep because that's the way He looked at it. (inaudible (01:12:46)) what he sees or what he feels, (inaudible (01:12:49)) what he believes and he knew as long as he's operating in the word and in the power of God, it was no harder to raise God from the dead than it was to wake Him up from sleep. Yes, but that is Jesus but He wasn't using anything different than what's been given to you and me.
Now, what we're going to do this morning. I want you to stand on your feet. We are going to exercise our faith right now, the Bible says you shall reap what you sow, we are going to replough the field and dig up all the seed so we get a very distinct crop failure on what we've already sown, Glory to God. And the Bible says you'll reap what you sow, it goes ahead to teach us that the seeds that we sow are words and what you reap is what you sow with your mouth, you sow under the spirit, you will reap spiritual things, you sow to the natural you'll reap natural things because that's the way you sow it, is with words. Now, Jesus has left us knowing this, when He left the earth He left us knowing this, that He is the high priest, the apostle and the high priest of our profession, His the high priest of our mouths. It's not just us saying it, Glory to God when we say it then He backs it. He's also let us know that he's our advocate with the Father, even the righteous Jesus Christ, when we confess our sin before Him.
Now did you ever notice that that system works that way. How do you get rid of sin? By speaking it with your mouth, you speak the sin with your mouth and it removes it from your life, you speak it with your mouth, you speak it away from you. I will show you something, the same thing. You see, God is light, in Him is light, He is light, isn't that what the word says? We walk in the light as He is in the light, He is the light. At the speed of light time stands still, there is no time when you get beyond the speed of light, it stands still. Now don't ask me why, I don't know why but I know it does and our scientists just keep fooling around with it, they don't know just exactly what to do with it, they ought to buy them a Bible and they can find out.
But in order to begin time, to start it in the motion God said light be. What did He do? He thrust the light out away from Himself with His words. We take the light of God, that very power, the faith of Almighty God that's inside us and when we confess a sin, the Bible said he is just to forgive us our sins when we confess them and cleanse us of all unrighteousness. And that's when we put the system to work. You speak that sin with your mouth and push it away from you with your words, I repent and I confess this sin of wrong words in the name of Jesus of Nazareth and I receive my forgiveness for them and right here and now by the blood of the lamb and the word of my testimony, I close out, reject and every other way condemn and cancel every word that has ever come out of my mouth in my whole entire existence that was cross wires of the word of God and anything that Jesus could not operate upon. Glory to God.
Now we can replant this garden, would you like to do that this morning? Okay, I want you to just lift your hand unto God and I will lead you into it, say it out loud with your mouth. Oh Father in Heaven, in the name of Jesus, I receive your word that says the tongue is what defiles me, the tongue sets on fire the course of nature around me and hell sets on fire the tongue. This day I am determined that hell will not set my tongue on fire. I renounce, I reject and I repent of every word that has even proceeded out of my mouth that was against God, that Jesus could not operate on, I cancel its power by dedicating my mouth to the success of Gods power in my life, to the Glory of God, to the uplifting of Jesus, to the ministering of Grace, to the healing of people, to the prosperity of the Kingdom of God, for my own healing and deliverance, everything that's becoming to God and all that I speak, I speak in the name of Jesus and I declare as the oracles of God. I am saved, I am healed, I am filled with the Spirit, I am Gods child, I am victorious, I am the righteousness of God, the life that I now live, I live under the son of God who gave Himself for me and I thank my God, in Jesus name, I am determined to be single minded by the words of my mouth. Now just praise Him and thank Him and rejoice in it.
Alright, now let's pray this together. Father, put a guard over my mouth continually, in Jesus name I pray. Now just worship God, thank Him and praise Him for that, praise Him for that, worship Him for that. Alright, now let me tell you something, do you believe what you said? Well now, don't walk out of here and go right straight over at that cafeteria and walk up there in the buffet line and say (inaudible (01:20:02)). I preached very near the same thing in a meeting that we had not too many weeks ago. Larry Taylor and I, he was sitting right beside me, he is my witness what I'm telling you is so. We left that Saturday afternoon service and went right straight back to the hotel which took less than five minutes to drive over there. I hadn't eaten in all that day and about half of the day before and so I said let's go in and get us a salad or something before going to get ready for the nights service, he said okay so we just stepped into the hotel restaurant there. There were four people walked in there right behind us and sat down over there and they smiled real big and waved and said boy, we sure enjoyed that afternoon service, dear Lord, God that is good and they just bragged on it, you know, and I felt so good about that, it just thrilled me so. They brought them their menus, sat them down in front of them and that's exactly what that man said, all I have to do is just read one of these things and I gain two pounds. I looked at Larry and he looked at me, I preached over there for an hour and a half, just hard as I could go, read every Scripture I could think of, I read about 15 Scriptures that afternoon in that thing where the word of God said that and he walked out of there and in less than 15 minutes and blurted that thing out with his mouth and he can't understand how come he is overweight. Ah yeah, but I didn't say nothing ugly. Well, it depends on how you like that roll on your stomach. You think the fat's ugly then you said something ugly because that's why you've got it.
Took me 32 years to find that out. I stood in front of the mirror and chewed myself out for eating every other day and just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and couldn't understand why, I knew I was eating too much, I can understand that part of it but what was going in my mouth wasn't what defiled me, it was what was coming out and I went on a fast and fasted for a week and told God I had to have (inaudible (01:22:21)), You tell me what's wrong, He told me in about an hour. The only thing that it was, that hour occurred on the seventh day. But He told it again, He said some of it you're not going to like because I'm going to have to straighten your attitude out where this situation is concerned and it was true and He let me know right quickly, I was a hypocrite because I was preaching on these things, you see, and turning right around and doing them where that was concerned. I was being moved with what I felt, with what I saw and when I changed my words, thanked God, I tell you what, it did not take two weeks time to get rid of the fat, the fat left like it was scared but the tongue had to be taken authority over first.
Now, that was a year ago this month and one year later I weigh two pounds less than I did a year ago when that weight came off of me. You might have said you mean you don't have any more weight problems, I never did have any weight problems, I had a tongue problem, had a food problem and it was set on fire by hell and that's where I was headed, until I changed it, it didn't change because I would go on a diet for two or three weeks, see my body go down a little bit but my tongue would get worse. I'd get under pressure and then I'd stand up and say I can't understand how come everything I like is illegally immoral or fattening. Well I got rid of the illegal and the immoral back there about 10/12/15 years ago see, when I got (inaudible (01:24:16)) was still there so I had to get rid of them and when I got rid of them there ain't more problems with (inaudible (01:24:22)), praise the Lord. Father, we thank You this morning, in Jesus name for Your word. Dear God, we thank You that this thing is in our midst, that we do have something we can find out about these things. We give You the praise, the Honor and the Glory for it, in the mighty precious name of Jesus, we thank You, amen.
Kenneth Copeland ministries can be contacted in South Africa at Private Bag X909, Fontaine Bleu, 2032, telephone 011 792 4626, facsimile 011 792 6390. Kenneth Copeland ministries in the United States on Fortworth, Texas, 76192-0001. Their website address is www.kcn.org. A few further Scriptures which relate to the subject of the tongue, Proverbs 26:18 & 19 "Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says "I was only joking!" In our present society we tend to have a very slack attitude to joking and we tend to think that the jokes are acceptable but virtually all jokes involve lies and as we've seen in this teaching, we have to be careful with what we speak. Proverbs 26:20 "Where there is no wood, the fire goes out and where there is no talebearer, strife ceases." Proverbs 26:22 "The words of a talebearer are like tasty trifles, they go down into the innermost body" Proverbs 26:23 "Fervent lips of the wicked heart are like earthen where covered with silver dross." Proverbs 26:24-26 "He who hates disguises it with his lips and lays up deceit within himself, when he speaks kindly do not believe him; for there are seven abominations in his heart. Though his hatred is covered by deceit, his wickedness will be revealed before the assembly.” Leviticus 19:16 "You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people, nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor, I am the Lord" Proverbs 11:13 "A talebearer reveals secrets but he who’s a faithful spirit conceals a matter"
And there were some discussion of this in the teaching on faithfulness but we really need to recognize, it is not for us to discuss information that has come to our attention about another party. It is not for a wife to go and discuss her problems with her husband with any third party and it is not for her husband to discuss his problems with his wife with any third party, those things need to be resolved between them and God except in very specific aspects of counseling. But I also have to say that I find no Scriptural basis for marriage counseling and marriage dispute resolution in the way that it is practiced in the world and the Church today. We are told to resolve these matters privately at home. Clearly if it can't be resolved then council can be sought but again, from bitter personal experience I have to say to you that the council that is available in the Church today is generally unscriptural. We also need to note that keeping secrets is not Scriptural, it is not right for a wife to have somebody tell her something on the basis that she's not to share it with her husband, there should be no secrets and nothing kept between the two otherwise the house is divided and that is not acceptable. Surprises as well, often involve an element of deceit and therefore should be treated with caution.
A few notes made during this particular teaching that perhaps add to what's there. The Scripture was quoted that the wisdom from above is pure and that is the word. Therefore we must note that that which the word says concerning marriage is wisdom and it is clear, we dare not speak against it. I found so many instances of people who speak against what is in the word of God concerning marriage as a consequence of the false teachings of their age. We have to say things before we receive them, we have to say that our marriage's are going to be healed, if you're listening to this tape and your marriage is not Heaven on earth, stop confessing that it's not Heaven on earth and start confessing that it will become Heaven on earth, start giving thanks for that, start giving thanks for the love that you have for your wife, start giving thanks for the desire that you have for your husband, get your mouth in line with the word of God. Speak positively over your marriage, don't make foolish statements like I no longer love my husband. Firstly, it's a lie, it's an abomination in the sight of God and it's completely destructive. We can't live by faith without talking faith.
There is nothing so powerful in this world that you cannot turn it around with your words and you can turn your life around with your words, you can turn your marriage around with your words, there is nothing to stop your marriage turning around except the words that come out of your mouth and the mouth of your spouse. We must learn from our mistakes and our trials and move forward, we must keep saying the word of God over our lives and not agree with Satan. It is not being hard on a man when we don't sympathize, we agree when he makes negative statements. It is not being hard on a wife when a husband refuses to agree with her when she makes negative confessions over their relationship or over the marriage. Again, we've seen in this teach numerous wrong beliefs which are widely still practiced by most in the Church that have been dealt with. God is love and He created sexual lovemaking, therefore it must be beautiful and good, not carnal and dirty. We need to find out how God, who created us, has created marriage to be. We need to seek God on this subject.
The tongue is set on fire by hell and that is in turn by demons in the flesh which is the subject of one of the teachings that follows. Don’t curse your marriage or your spouse or your children with your words and your thoughts. If you can't speak good of your marriage or your spouse, keep quiet. Again, don't talk about your spouse or tell tales behind their backs, every word will be judged when it comes out of your mouth, whoever is responsible to permit the pass will act, God or Satan. Husband or wife, do not agree with negative statements from your spouse. The wife should submit to her husband if he tells her to go into wrong action but she's not to agree with her words with that action, she's to express her concern that it is contrary to the word of God and then to tell him that she will nevertheless submit because that's what the word of God requires of her. Plug the leaks in the dam, one hold at a time, one step at a time, to heal your marriage. Build a fence out of the confession of your mouth, only you can tear down that fence with your words. You can build it with your words and you can tear it down with your words.
I would urge you just to pray a brief confession with me over your marriage right now. Father, I come to You in the name of Jesus and I thank You that I have the most blessed marriage on earth, that we experience Heaven on earth in our marriage. I thank You that I love my wife Your way and that she submits to me and desires me according to Your word and that we serve Jesus together. I thank You Father, that everything that is wrong in our lives up till this moment, we confess as sin, every wrong confession that we've prayed over our marriage we renounce now and set aside and I thank You Father that You will lead us and guide us by the hand and lead us into marriage the way You intended it to be. I thank You that You will open our eyes to see the things that You need us to see and that You will guide us by Your Holy Spirit to put them into practice in our lives, in Jesus name, Amen. Father, in the name of Jesus, I ask that anything that is contained in this teaching which is contrary to Your word or Your way, will be blown away and find no root in the hearts of the hearers and that everything in this message which is according to Your will and Your word will find root in the hearers and grow abundantly and produce abundant fruit, in Jesus name. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Amen.
04 11 The Anointing and the Four Offices of Jesus
Benny Hinn
This series on marriage, 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' volume 2, 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage,' teaching #11, the anointing. In a number of the preceding messages, we had referenced to the anointing and the importance of the anointing. The impartation of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus was the basis in which he was able to perform the miracles that he performed during his walk on Earth and the impartation of the Holy Spirit on modern believers is the image, the life of God imparted to our earthly bodies which enables us to walk in the fullness of God's blessings and to come to a place of change and transformation. While the technical application of the principles contained in this entire series on marriage will make an enormous difference to any marriage, I have no doubt that without the anointing of the Holy Spirit on that marriage and on the participants in that marriage, we will not accomplish the ideal of experiencing Heaven on Earth in marriage.
There are many teachings available on the anointing and the Holy Spirit. The tape that follows is the first of the two-part series by Benny Hinn entitled 'Capturing the Anointing.'
Preaching by Benny Hinn:
Exodus 25, how to capture the anointing. How we want to capture the anointing of the holy ghost, say amen. Father God today gave us truth and knowledge, revelation, in Jesus name may we capture the anointing. May this joy so increase, may our prayer life reach a new height because of the anointing, anoint our work, anoint our study, anoint our prayers, and today even as you like, Lord may we see how we can capture the anointing. In Jesus name, when everybody said, people are hungry for their anointing. Everywhere we go, they are hungry for their anointing. Ministers hungry for their anointing. It is not uncommon to see hundreds of preachers in one service in a morning teaching, some you will see them they are weeping, weeping, weeping. They are hungry for anointing. One time I was in Arizona when one of our [inaudible 0:02:45] teaching in the morning, began teaching at 10, it was already 1:30 or still teaching, and I said I got to quit. I got to go and have lunch. And one man front row screamed out, "You are not quitting. I came a thousand miles for it and you are not quitting." Remember him guys? He won't let me quit. And the whole place went and I said boy, if I quit they are going to kill me. But they are hungry for their anointing.
Amazingly God chose the most incredible place in the Old Covenant to show us how to capture the anointing. Three years ago or so I did a teaching on this, but never in a detailed and the magnificent description of the Holy Ghost is about to give us, not in that we have done it. And I have been teaching on prayers and the Lord it is rebirth. Last week second service that thing was burst in him. But now we got to keep it. Seek, experiment, grow and touch our lives. Say amen. By the anointing, that's kept.
Exodus 25:1: "Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 'Speak to the children of Israel, that they bring Me an offering. From everyone who gives it willingly with his heart you shall take My offering.'" We shall go through it in just a second but please look at verse 8, "And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them." How many wants God to dwell among you and in you? That's the anointing. Amazingly, God begins to give us details here that may mean nothing to you unless you see with the eye of the Holy Ghost. You read the old covenant, I do not know what this all means. Remember this, there are no meaningless, detailed in God's words. Everything the old covenant contains is a shadow. Everything the new covenant contains is the substance of that shadow. The old covenant was revealed in the new and the new was hidden in the old.
When you look at the old covenant, you have the new and the old concealed. When you read the new, you have the old and the new revealed. So today we are looking at hidden revelation but by the power of God and help of the spirits, we are going to see these revelations and understand them. So God says in verse 3, "And this is the offering which you shall take from them: gold, silver, and bronze." Revelation 3:18 Jesus said buy from me gold. Anytime you see gold in the Bible, it speaks of what is divine, what is holy, what is of God. Then he said silver. Silver is redemption. Everything redeemed was brought with silver. Number 18, verse 16, the Bible states that God commended Moses to buy with silver what has been redeemed. You redeem with silver he says. So silver speaks of redemption in the Bible. And brass, Revelation 1:15, when Jesus appeared he speaks were like brass. Brass speaks of suffering, speaks of prosecution, speaks of paying a price. So here we see in the first portion of this we see Jesus as God, Jesus as redeemer, Jesus as saviour, who suffered and then he said bring me blue, the colour blue in a [inaudible 0:06:24] speaking of Jesus the son of the living God. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is presented as the son of God and every time you read the Scriptures and you see the colours mentioned, remember this, these colours are symbolic of so much in God's word. God puts great emphasis in the old covenant on colour and on numbers and things like this. Please notice people of God, this Bible has much more than just revelation knowledge.
Recently, my wife was asleep and I was sitting up watching a programme on the Discovery channel. I know there is not much you achieve on television, it is mostly drunk stuff. You can only watch Christian TV for so long. I mean wants us to be balanced. Say amen. There are some programmes I enjoy watching, so I don’t enjoy watching on Christian television. Just because this, some people just don’t agree moving. Now they do, thank God. I love watching the praise the Lord programme that come on 55. I love watching James Robertson. I like watching some of the music programmes that come on and I like those old [inaudible 0:07:35]. Thank God. Nancy Harmon, beautiful, but now there are times we want to watch those lion shows and elephants and all, animal stuff. I just switch those people with mother nature. The little ant knows how to find something that is mother nature. Wish those morons would know not mother nature. God Almighty those animals what they do. And the more they discover about animals and things, they know more about the ways of God. The Bible says in Romans without excuse, are you hearing this? While watching this programme and there was a Jewish scientist talking about the Scriptures, the old covenant and he began to say things got my attention. You know, in the Hebrew language, every letter has a meaning, the alphabet. For example, if you say A, you mean captain. If you say B, you mean cows and things and like that.
In the English, if you say A, it is A. But if you say it in Hebrew, it means captain. So every Hebrew letter is a word. This man through computer went through the Book of Esther to discover in one portion of the Book of Esther as he took the letters of the alphabet in Hebrew, put them together as they were written. I mean he took a verse and just began to put the words of each letter together. Are you hearing what I am talking about? And came up with the exact date, the year of the holocaust. Came with the names of the murderers of the holocaust. Came with description that took place in the Second World War hidden prophecy in the letters of the alphabets as they were put together into verses of Scripture. So this book has been proven over and over to be the Word of God. Not only through fulfil prophecy and revelation, more than that. Scientists are discovering events and history through hidden words, hidden letter we just read and do not know behind that may very well be a date of some event coming in the future. Isn’t that incredible? The Bible is God's holy word.
So when you read these things like blue and purple, don’t take it lightly. God puts great importance on the word of the living God. Jesus said every little dots is important. Think of it, he said Heaven and Earth shall pass away but one little dot will be taken out of the lot. Brother, one little dot is more important than Heaven and Earth. So he goes on to say, and blue Jesus the son of God and purple, Jesus the king, in the gospel where do we see him as king, in Mathew. Where do we see him as God's son, in John. And scarlet, the saviour. Where do we see him as saviour? In Luke. And fine line, the perfect man. What is that? In Mark. Are you following me here? And then it goes on to say and coarse hair, now the coarse hair in the Scriptures in Zechariah 13, in verse 4 and 5, coarse hair is symbolic of the office of the prophets but also coarse hair was symbolic of sin. We find that in Leviticus 9:3. Stay in Exodus 25 please. So coarse hair is symbolic of the prophets who became sinned. So God says to Moses, bring me gold what is divine, bring me silver for redeem, bring me brass the one who suffered, bring me blue my son, bring me purple my king, bring me scarlet the saviour, bring me white linen, the perfect man, bring me goat's hair a prophet who became sinned for the world. All symbolic of Jesus Christ. This Bible says of God is a revelation of Jesus Christ from Genesis to Revelation. He goes on to say, and ram's skin dyed red. Ram is the substitute animal. Ram symbolise substitutions in Genesis 22 when Abraham looked and saw a ram caught in the bush who became a substitute for his son Isaac. You find that in Genesis 22:13. Badger skin, Ezekiel 16:10. What is badger? Psalm sons sea lion, very ugly skin. And God said give me badger skin. What is that symbolic of? Jesus on the cross, Isaiah 53 says was no beauty in him, we should desire no [inaudible 0:12:46] when we shall see him, there is no beauty in him. God says, give me the badger skin, what represents what is ugly and it represents the cross. This goes on now, and [inaudible 0:12:58]. Incorruptible another word. The word [inaudible 0:13:02] is the name of the wood found in the Arabian area there. The only kind of wood that does not decay. Literally it's incorruptible wood.
What is wood symbolic of in the Bible? Everywhere you look, it's symbolic of humanity. It is symbolic of the flesh. Here we see incorruptible flesh and only man walks in an incorruptible body, symbolic of Jesus, the perfect man. The Bible says in Acts, thou wilt not suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Here all of it is symbolic of Jesus. Oil for the light the anointing, spices for anointing, sweet incense. The perfume that Jesus Christ is to you and me, scent of God. In 2 Corinthians, [inaudible 0:13:48] one more time because you are going to see something fantastic. In 2 Corinthians 2:14-15, and Fred will read for us later, it says that Jesus Christ is the saviour. He is the perfume that God smells in the things. Here God asks for spices, for sweet incense, the perfume that Jesus Christ is, then He asks for stones and onyx stones. What is that, but the church, Malachi 3:7, the day I gather my jewels he said. To be set in the [inaudible 0:14:27]. Now, I want you all to look at me please as I show you something fantastic that the Holy Ghost showed me. How many want the anointing to dwell in your life? Listen very carefully. Look at this if you will, one by one very slowly and let's see this revelation. God in the gold became a man in the redeemer silver and suffered in the brass. The son of God, the blue, the king of kings and the purple, the saviour of the world in the scarlet, and the fine linen the perfect man, a prophet who became sin, who became the substitute for our sin, who became ugly in our sin and the badge of skin whose body knew no corruption, the anointed of God who became the light of the world in the oil for the light, and the perfume onto God that is enough as a sweet incense came into the onyx stone, the church. Look at me, and I want to ask that a sound be made while I am saying this. Not a child make a whisper, this is very important.
Jesus Christ, God Almighty in the gold, Jesus Christ the redeemer in the silver, Jesus Christ the one who suffered in the brass, Jesus Christ God's son in the blue, the king of kings in the purple, the saviour of the world in the scarlet, the perfect man in the white, the prophet who became sinned in the goat's hair. The substitute who took [inaudible 0:16:28] became ugly with it, who saw no corruption when he was buried in the [inaudible 0:16:36] wood. The anointed lamb of God who became a light of the world, the perfume God smells in the saints came and dwelled in the onyx stone, church. God said those stones are to be set in the [inaudible 0:16:54]. Now listen, the high priest war, a white garment over a blue garment, over that the [inaudible 0:17:07]. What the [inaudible 0:17:08] was a covering of his chest and his back that covered only his shoulder, chest and back and the [inaudible 0:17:17] which was just like a cover like you would wear something like this. You would have a piece here, that's over your shoulder, and the same piece on the back. This was made up of the four colours I had mentioned, the blue, the white, the purple, the scarlet, all symbolic of Jesus, the blue is God's son, the purple is the king, the saviour and the scarlet and the man in the white and the high priest wore it. God said to Moses, He said over that [inaudible 0:17:51], everywhere you look in the Bible is symbolic of divine glory.
Over that [inaudible 0:18:03] God said put the breast plate. That breast plate was another piece of cloth heavier than the [inaudible 0:18:10], on it sat 12 different stones, each of them symbolic of one of the tribes of Israel, a different jewel. These are symbolic of the church in its perfection. Malachi 3:7 says, there I gather my jewels. Jesus in revelation was seen with these stones on his chest as the high priest of God saying the church is in the heart of God. The breast plate, which sat over the [inaudible 0:18:46] speaks of judgement in the Bible. I will show that to you. Exodus 28:29, the breast plate always speaks of judgement. "Aaron shall bear the names of the children of Israel on the breastplate of judgment upon his heart." Where are you written? On the heart of Jesus Christ. The high priest. Are you hearing me? See this is meat. We are not here to give you milk. I think the day of milk is over with. The church is maturing. We go beyond baby foods. Look at this. God became a man's redeemer, suffered. He is the son of God, he is the king of kings. He is the saviour. He is the son of man. He is the prophet who became sinned. He is the substitute who became ugly on the cross. He is the anointed lamb of God who became a light of the world. He is the perfume God smelled and he came to dwell in the stones, but the stones came to dwell in divine glory. He said [inaudible 0:20:38] stones and stones to be set in divine glory. When God brought you out of the world, He made you like a jewel, Malachi 3:7 and sets you in divine glory. And then it sets stones for the breastplate, stones for judgement. Why? The moment the church comes into divine glory, the church will judge the world, 1 Corinthians 6:2. The moment you are set into divine glory, you become a judge.
When Jesus Christ comes back to this world, we will judge the world. Are you hearing me? Daniel 7:18: "But the saints of the Most High shall take the kingdom." The Bible states you will judge the world. You will judge angels. 1 Corinthians 6:2-3. Symbolic. Moses writes all this. Most likely he did not know what he was writing. Romans 15:4 states "All this was written for our learning." Jesus in John 5:4-6 said, Moses everything of your oath was of me. Do not look at the old covenant as a meaningless something. The word of God. God looks at Moses in verse 8 and says, "Now, I have a sanctuary." Saints, when the son of God comes into your heart, and think of Jesus is all that we just read. How many have just captured everything I gave? Let me see your hand up high. If you have not get the tape, here it is all over again. When Jesus, the son of God comes into your heart, at that moment you become a sanctuary for God to dwell in.
Now God says, "Moses, now that I have what I need, start building the tabernacle exactly after the shadow you see in Heaven." Verse 9, "According to all that I show thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of the instruments before, thereof even social you make it." Verse 10, "God begins with the ark of the covenant and they shall make an ark of wood." God begins from the inside out, not from the outside in. When God starts working on His church, He does not start with the flesh. He starts with the spirit man and works His way out. With the tabernacle He said, "Let's start with the ark and will go out." God always starts with the inside and goes outside. But to see Him inside, we have to go in from the outside. So let's enter in from the outside and the first thing you see in that tabernacle, if you approach Him, you will see a faint surrounding the tabernacle, surrounding the tent which was a tent of two departments, one called the holy place, the other holy of holies and the tent was made of fine linen, perfect white, that's Jesus the perfect man. Remember this, when the world approaches the tabernacle, they will see the man Christ, who is sinless, who is spotless, but they look up and they will see the badges that cover the tabernacle. This is something very, very puzzling to me. God tells Moses, He tells Moses, "I want you to cover the tabernacle, the actual tent with four coverings but makes sure that the outside covering is the ugliest." He said, "First cover it with the white." Jesus the man perfect. Then the purple, Jesus the king. Then the scarlet, Jesus the saviour. Then the badges skin, Jesus the ugly, the deformed on the cross.
When the world looks at Jesus, all they see is the ugliness of the cross. But if you ever walk in, you see the perfection of the son of the God. But the world will never see it. All they see from the outside is the white Jesus the perfect man, but they look and say, "Look at that horrible covering. Who wants that?" God said to Moses, He said, "Moses, I want you to measure the linens, measure the purple, measure the scarlet, but do not measure the badges skin." The badges skin had no measurement, it was all over the place, why? Because the cross is immeasurable in its effect to humanity. In other words, God is saying, nobody can be left out. HalleluYah. I said HalleluYah. When you look at that fence, you saw sixty people. Why sixty? God puts emphasis even on numbers. He is a detailed God. Number three in the Bible is the number of testimony, the number of Gods as the God trinity, the triangle God. But also it is the number of testimony. Every time Jesus testified it, he said the Father in me, the holy ghost fill me.
Number four in the Bible is the number of the world, the four wings of the Earth. Number five, grace, forgiveness. Everything inside is for the grace of God. Provision, forgiveness. The number Jesus in Luke 7 verse 41 told the story of a man who [inaudible 0:26:57]. Do you also remember, when he set the five thousand, he set them in the groups of fifty, provision. Five offices of the church. Grace. It is the number of God's grace, God's forgiveness, God's provision, God's mercy.
Number six is the number of men. Number seven perfection. Everything perfect is in seven. Something amazes me about OCC. Every seven years something new happens here. It took us seven months to build this building. God visited my life on the 21st, three 7. Ministry's birth, December 7. Everything is in seven with me. Why does God do that? I do not know.
Number eight, new beginning. Everything in eight is a new thing. On the seventh [inaudible 0:28:10] on the eighth Adam start living. Noah on the eighth day. Number ten, I skipped nine, do not worry about it. [inaudible 0:28:33]. Number ten, responsibility. Number eleven, destruction.
Are you enjoying this? I feel the anointing here. Lift your hand and say, "I am ready for anything right now." Listen, when you approach that tabernacle, the covering on top, the badges skin had eleven attachments to it. Why eleven? God destroys ten. Destruction. Number forty, number of testing. Twelve, administration. Number forty, testing. Number fifty, liberty. When was Pentecost? Fifty days after resurrection. Number sixty, men's responsibility. If you came to the tabernacle, you saw sixty people, so sixty. Jesus became men's responsibility. He took men's responsibility before God. Now why is this? God said, "Moses, I want you to put that fence around the tabernacle, white. I want you to take those full sixty of them, which means Jesus took upon him men's responsibility. And I want you to cover every pole with silver, redemption, suffering." He is a redeemer who suffered when he saw in Revelation 1:15, his feet was [inaudible 0:30:39]. Then He said I wanted to put a rope of goat's hair, the prophet who became sinned and connected to the ground on the other side with a nail, that is also brass. But make sure the nail is half in and halfway out. Somebody in the over floor is being set free from alcohol right now while I am speaking. I feel the anointing is breaking loose here. A woman to my right, a lady who has been suffering with migraines for the last ten years got her healing right now while I am speaking. There is a young man on the balcony on drugs, God Almighty, I blink that devil. Your pride held one in the last three or four days. God is setting you free. And there is an aunt somewhere back there with depression, God is going to set you free in the next five minutes. HalleluYah. O HalleluYah. Free that for me Fred.
And I will fasten him as a nail in a plate. Now watch this. When there was huge approach to tabernacle, what did they see? They saw the friends Jesus Christ, they saw the poles. What did the poles symbolise? He is a perfect man, the perfect wood, the incorruptible wood, the perfect man, he is redeemer in the silver, he is saviour, he is the prophet who sit in the robe, he died. He was buried and God said, keep heavens up, he was raised from the dead. My Lord, the whole God fell in a pole, in a cup, in a socket, in a rope, and in the hell. All symbolic of Jesus Christ. And then they came to the east side of the tabernacle and saw the gate. The gate with the four colours, the blue, the purple, the white, the scarlet, and they said, this gate, what is it symbolising Jesus Christ, the son of man, the son of God, king of kings and saviour of the world. When they went through that gate, then they saw what was going on and they are outside that gate and amazingly God said I want the fence to be side. The number of ministry in perfection and humility. They went back in there and the second day step in, they faced blood and fire. The first cheater of the anointing of God is a fullness of Jesus Christ in your life. You want to know the anointing of God in your life. You better know him as king who is worshipped. A king who is obeyed as a son of God who is worshipped, as a man who identifies with you as a saviour of the world who took away your sins. Are you hearing all this? And once you know in the four positions, he is my king in Matthew, I obey him. He is the man in Mark. I identify with him. He is the saviour in Luke. I depend on him for my sins. He took my sins. He is the son of God in John. I worship him. HalleluYah. I said HalleluYah. Look at this, the gospels begin with obedience and end up with worship. I obey him in Matthew as king. I identify with him in Mark. Luke, he took my sin and my sorrow, I follow him, but in John in worship him.
And once you pass that first key, [inaudible 0:34:56] was asked one day, why are people healed in your service? She said, "Let them experience Jesus and they will be." You pass that and you face the blood. And every time you find the blood [inaudible 0:35:18]. For God told Moses, the fire must never quit burning on that alter of sacrifice. Day and night the fire burns, consuming sacrifice after sacrifice after sacrifice. Blood is being shed continuously. When we come to Jesus, the blood must continually cleanse us. The days of blood quits cleansing as the day the holy ghost quits anointing. The blood in Ephesians 1:7 for Jesus. The blood in 1 John 1:7 cleanses. The blood Romans 5:9 justifies forgiveness, took care of my past, cleansing of my present and justification of my future.
The blood took care of my past, my present, and my future. In forgiveness, he removed the past, in cleansing, he removes the present, he justification he takes care of the future, all by the blood of the lamb. Not one of you are to ever feel guilty and empty. There is therefore now no condemnation to what in Christ Jesus. You are to pray Father I am not a sinner. I am a saint. There isn’t one book written to the sinners in Rome, to the sinners in Torrence, not to the saints in Rome and Torrence and [inaudible 0:36:43]. Say I am a saint. I went to the presence of God boldly, not with fear. That priest on the blue garment that came almost just below the knee, he knew it was balanced. Wide bells because he would walk you can hear him. When he would go into that holy of holies, as long as the bells were ringing he was alive, they had connected a little rope to his ankles because if ever the bells quit ringing, they will put him out as he was dead. We do not walk in with bells. We walk in with shouting. And no rope to our ankles for we will never be struck with death. We will be struck with life in there. Someone shout HalleluYah. If the believer only knows what is for him in the anointing, he will never live without it. Then the third key walk in to the laver. God said to Moses, build the laver which is a big cup and saucer. He says makes sure it is made up of the women's mirrors. Exodus 38:8 states be sure it is made up of the women's mirrors. Why every time you look into the Word of God, you see yourself in it. Exodus 38:8: "He made the laver of bronze and its base of bronze, from the bronze mirrors of the serving women who assembled at the door of the tabernacle of meeting."
Glasses, mirror, and God said this to Moses. He said, "Moses, be sure that that laver has no measurements." Why? Because the word of God is immeasurable. No limits to what the word of God can do in our lives.
We are here to eat the words. Forget your hotdogs. Men are from Heaven with oils dripping down your lips. The laver, the Bible says it was filled with water that water is symbolic of the Word of God that cleanses you, the Bible says, by the washing of the water of the word. If you want the anointing, know Jesus in his four offices, know his blood that came released from the past, present and future and know the word that can keep you clean every single day. Now I am done. Next week we will finish, but listen to this. I just gave you three keys, there are four more. And what I have for you next week, God is my witness, it is twenty times better than this morning. This was really only the shrimp, the appetiser. I do not eat shrimps, but anyway, that is the appetiser. People of God, we want the anointing. Come on people just lift your hands up high and keep your seats. There is a Mary in this auditorium, Tom do not move please, the anointing is fallen stronger now. Even though I did not even see, I felt you move. There is a Mary sitting here, Mary, your husband has abused you with words. And the anointing this morning is going to break every bondage on that man. I want you to stand for your husband darling for God is going to set him free today. There you are come here honey, that girl right there, come here. Total deliverance. Every word spoken against her shall be gone. Go in Jesus mighty name every word spoken against you. Lift your hands and pray and come on. That's right honey. That's why I am here. That's the ladder of liberty darling. That's liberty on your life right now. Thank you Jesus. There is a Joan here, you have a child Joan, harassed by Satan himself. The devil wants to kill your boy. But God tells me right now there is a cloud of protection over your son because of your prayer. The words for you, your son will be saved in the next few weeks. HalleluYah. People the anointing, what I am about to say the next three minutes could be more powerful than everything I have said today in my teaching. The anointing is difficult to capture unless you are like Elisa who will say I am sticking around till I get it. God we will try to discourage you. Jesus walks with his disciples and make them think he wanted to keep walking so that he can be asked to come with us. Stay home as the Lord lives where you want to go. Elisa knew something. Elisa knew there will be one more minute and if I miss it I will miss it for life. A better one will come, it may never come back like that again. For when you capture it, you capture it for life.
God said to me years ago, he said, "Benny, start around Catharine. A lot of people do not like her. A lot do not like to listen to her. But one moment while you are there I am going to give you the anointing, for the anointing is poured from vessel to vessel. It does not come from the cloud." Timothy is around Paul long enough and one day Paul said, "Timothy, come on, I want to see you." It was then that the anointing was imparted. Timothy was not even smart enough to stick around Paul. He was [inaudible 0:44:55]. I would think of Moses and Joshua. Joshua said, "Where you go, I am going. Because one day that anointing will leave your life and be mine. Or God may just release it on me at any minute." His own brother Aeron missed it. His own sister but we think you are boy, and was struck with leprosy. Sometimes your family are the first to mark the anointing on your life. And his own brother who was really called by God, it wasn’t Joshua, God said, but Aeron was stupid, never realised. No do not look to Moses. Look to that something in him that may come on you. Joshua said, "I see something in Moses I want. Moses, I may not be your brother but nothing I will not do I am going where you are going. You go talk to God for forty days, I will gladly be half way up there alone if I can just get the drop of it." Aeron died, the family died, but Joshua carried the anointing.
Elisa said to Elija let me go home help my dad. He said if you are going to look back forget it. I am not appraising him, that's what everybody said. Jesus said you want to follow me, forget everything behind you and come after me. Won't belong before the same anointing on Jesus will come on you. And the three who said Lord we will walk very close to you and only they had the powerful anointing. The greatest revelation of the future and Peter his shadow healed the sick. But one man solo process born out of season he said even though he couldn’t see him physically he said I don’t care about the rest, I am going to get closer than anybody and God said you will and your very [inaudible 0:47:32] will be anointed. Handkerchief rubbed on his body and Demons came out. And when you are anointed, your prayer life won't be a struggle. It will be pleasure. So when I teach on the anointing, I am not just wasting your time. I am giving you what can change your eternity, today, next Sunday, we are changing your eternity and God told me and I don’t know when this is going to happen, but the Lord said to me, He said what I used Catherine to birth in you. He said you caught what one woman released. He said if you are faithful, thousands will catch what you have relieved. And who better than my own church. Are you hearing me? So as I teach, don’t just sit there and look at your notes. Be praying, Lord it could happen while he is saying something, I am not listening to it. It could happen while [inaudible 0:48:46] somebody or something. It could happen while he is laughing at something. Because God does not release it when you are sillier. I was around Ms. Skumen one day when she was looking at a bicycle, checking a bicycle. Now that is not very spiritually, she had the biggest earrings on, the biggest sunglasses you ever saw in your life, covered your face. She was not even singing HalleluYah. She was just looking at a bicycle. Rather the hotel was vibrating with the presence of God. And I was in the lobby looking at her and I thought, God you even anointed when she checks her bicycle. God said to me when you are anointed, you are anointed. Whether you are behind a pulpit or on a bicycle. But never, never forget that one moment it happened, it could be today for you. Lift your hands and say Lord may I not miss it. HalleluYah, HalleluYah. OCC is coming, will be fed much, blessed much, received much, God help us if we don’t use it. Let's all stand please.
Hope that the preceding message by Benny Hinn, pastor at the Orlando Christian Centre has made a dramatic change in your life. If you like further help in knowing or growing in Jesus Christ, write to us today. When you write, we will also send you a free catalogue listing a host of life-changing messages by Benny Hinn. So write today to the Orlando Christian Centre, 7601 Forrest City Road, Orlando, Florida 32810.
James Robertson: The full tape set is available from Benny Hinn Ministry in South Africa, dialling code 021, telephone number 739400 and fax 739405. International dialling code 0027 or from Good Hope Tape Ministries, PO Box 379, Constantia 7848, Republic of South Africa. Benny Hinn is certainly to my own knowledge the individual in the world with the highest profile in terms of dramatic encounters with the Holy Spirit of God and certainly widely published in that field. He has produced a number of tapes, including a video entitled "Seven Keys to the Anointing" which elaborates on what was expounded in the two tape series that we have just listened to the first tape. He has travelled and given teachings around the world. He has published a book called "The Anointing" and a book called "Good Morning Holy Spirit" which is basically his testimony and describes a dramatic encounter or series of dramatic encounters with the Holy Spirit. My own life has been significantly impacted by Benny Hinn's Ministry. In December 1993 I heard him preach for the first time, experienced a dramatic and powerful presence of God in the meeting. Subsequently read the book "Good Morning Holy Spirit" and I personally had a major encounter with the Holy Spirit of God and with the spirit of God where he imparted an anointing to me which I must confess I have not nurtured and treated wisely. I will certainly encourage people listening to this teaching to seek the fullness of the anointing as described by Benny Hinn in these teachings and described by others and is a wonderful gift from God, and certainly must rank amongst the most important and best gifts.
We are to do greater things than Jesus did, we must at least first come to a level of anointing which is comparable to the anointing that was on Jesus. Even if do not aspire to do the works that Jesus did, we need the anointing of the Holy Spirit. This is not to say that you do not necessarily have an anointing on your life right now, simply to say that there is a really powerful and dramatic anointing available to those who will lay down their lives in obedience and faithfulness, sanctify themselves, be obedient in their finances and do all that is necessary to come into a place where they can receive the blessings of God. Just on that point, in the month or so prior to having this dramatic encounter with the spirit of God, I was impressed by the Holy Spirit to give generously to beggars in the street and to be obedient with my finances in all things and that it does seem to me based on teachings that I read at that time and one of the key things that is close to the Lord's heart is the lost and the homeless and therefore he will test us in terms of our heart towards them and our willingness to help them and to bless them financially and in other ways.
While listening to this teaching, I made a number of notes which I would like to share with you and in doing so, refer back to a comment I made earlier in the series where I stated that while I felt that the many of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle had fallen into place for me, the full ambit of the picture with regard to marriage being Heaven on Earth was still incomplete for me and I expected it to become more detailed as the teachings progressed. I have been extremely blessed as the last series of teachings by Creflo Dollar and Kenneth Copeland have put together a mosaic in which little pieces of revelation have come to me and I have seen how the Lord has put together this whole series by bringing in teachings from various people to amplify and extend the scope of the teaching and also with some of the testimonies and examples used in those teachings which have just more fully rounded the picture with regard to marriage and I just give God the glory for that. He has a picture which is greater and more glorious than anything that I can imagine right now and it will continue to be that way for the rest of our lives, but we need to seek to know the Lord's heart in marriage. So a few points that came out of this tape that we have just listened to is that certainly the anointing can and will take your joy to new levels and take your prayer life to new heights. But if we look at the context the thing that struck me again listening to this tape is that the Lord has been building His house with the various truths and the teachings that have been combined in this series with regard to faithfulness, with regard to the anointing tongues, etc., etc. All of these truths that have been restored or being restored are building towards the marriage supper of the lamb at which stage the bride will be spotless and therefore would have been restored to all truth and therefore they are also building towards the restoration of marriage, because as we continually see the restoration of the fullness of marriage on the Earth is a necessary prerequisite for the marriage supper of the lamb. We cannot go to the marriage supper of the lamb and not understanding the fullness of God's plan for marriage and not understanding principles of marriage in the sullied state that our view of marriage is today.
The teaching gave a new life to the holiness of Jesus whose is royal and his priestly identity in offices and his attributes and it is really important that we just see how holy and how awesome Jesus is particularly in his capacity as the head of the church and as the bridegroom. It is also important to recognise out of these teachings just the headlines, the moment the church comes into divine glory, they will judge the world. The truth regarding marriage must therefore first be restored because we will not be able to judge the world in the areas of marriage and adultery and fornication until we know the truth in these series. But before we can judge and rule the world, we must judge and rule our own households. The point was made that God begins with the inside out. So in the process of seeking to come into God's divine plan for your marriage and my marriage, we need to understand that He will start changing our hearts before the marriage can be healed. He will start on the inside and work outward. It is important to understand that part of this process that we refer to repeatedly in the series is crucified with Christ, laying down our lives with Christ and we need to understand that in a metaphorical sense, dead flesh is ugly to the world. They cannot see the beauty in the heart of a believer who is been crucified with Christ. They cannot see the beauty of the cross. They cannot see the beauty of Jesus' sacrifice. Now, it is foolishness to them and it seems to me that God's form of marriage is not seductive and attractive from the world's perspective. It requires service and not lordship. It requires responsibility and not right. It involves love and not lust. It entails the beauty of the meek and gentle heart, not the outward adorning and trappings of jewellery and fine clothing.
The word will find the picture of marriage which is being described in the series unattractive. It will not involve women asserting themselves and dressing up garishly and extravagantly and exposing their bodies in unrighteous fashions and conducting themselves towards their husbands in domineering and non-submissive fashion. It involves wives who are in gentle submission to their husbands, husbands who are seeking to be like Jesus who are not assertive and domineering and worldly. And the world will look at that marriage and they won't understand what it is about. And we need to understand that as long as Christians keep looking at the world's type of marriage as a pattern for marriage within the body of Christ, we are missing the point totally. As long as Christians are watching programmes like "Days of our lives" we have completely missed the boat in terms of what marriage is intended to be. We need to cut these things out of our lives. We need to be looking inside as we need to be looking to the Holy Spirit. We need to be looking to the spirit of God, to the spirit of Jesus to show us the type of marriage that he has in mind, and that he has for us.
Interesting point, the significance of different numbers we have touched on in this teaching, six being the number of man, seven being the number of perfection, eight being new beginning. An important point, seven is the number of perfection, it is the number of completion, it is the number of covenant. Isaiah 4:1 refers to this age, a situation where one man will have seven women where seven women will cleave to one man. Many people interpret that as being carnal, as being worldly, but the reality is if that was the case, God would have used the number six, not the number of seven. The fact that there are seven women seeking the covering of one godly man says very clearly to us that this is perfection. This is completion. God started with one man and one woman and he has been building to the end where there will be seven women to one man. It is also important to realise, eight is the number of new beginnings, a man plus seven wives, new beginning.
Jesus took man's responsibility. This was one of the points made in the teachings and it is important that we understand that a husband assumes or takes woman's responsibility. He assumes responsibility spiritually for that woman. He covers her, he protects her, he is her prophet, her priest. All the aspects that were touched on in this teaching are all symbolic of Jesus Christ in the same way that marriage in a way symbolic of Jesus Christ. The point was also made that the first key to the anointing is to know the fullness of Jesus Christ in his four offices ‑ King in Matthew, man in Mark, saviour in Luke, son of God in John. The point was made as king I obey him, submit to him. As man I identify with him and walk with him. As saviour, he took my sins and I follow him. As the son of God, I worship and adore him. And again we see the parallels in marriage, the husband as the king, the head of the wife, the husband is the man, the fellow human being with all the frailties that the wife has and identifying with her as a fellow human being. The saviour, the husband is the covering who takes the sin of the wife, who recovers his wife, who shelters her from the sin, who lays down his life for his wife. The son of God, we read in Romans that as many as are led by the spirit of God they are sons of God. So the husband lays down his life and seeks to be led by the spirit of God. He becomes a son of God and therefore the wife sees her husband led by the spirit of God as the son of God.
So we see again this duplication running through and by the same token, looking at the other side of the coin, we see the service of the wife to the husband. She obeys and submits to him, she identifies with him. She follows him and she adores or worships him. She desires him and she ministers to him in lovemaking in the same way that we minister to Jesus in praise and worship. We need to understand these parallels firstly to understand why Satan is so hell bent on destroying marriage and keeping the church from the truth and secondly to understand the beauty that marriage has called to be. As you look at that you just see more and more what the perfect form of marriage is intended to be. The blood of Jesus took care of my past, my present, and my future and the blood of the covenant between husband and wife shared in the virgin flesh of the bride takes care of her past, her present and her future. Her husband becomes all things to her in Christ and that is so important. We have to understand the covenant of significance, the exchange, their strengths and their weaknesses. So all of wife's weaknesses she exchanges with her husband for his strength, his protection and everything else and all her strength, her abilities, her gifting, and her calling she exchanges for his weaknesses.
It is important that we understand that men have weakness so much that the world ridicules and makes fun if the weaknesses of men and makes much of the strength of women. Yes, it is absolutely true. God created women with complementary strength to the strength of men. Men cannot bear children, women can. Women can endure pain in childbearing that is not something that men are called to do. It is not a case of one being stronger than the other. They are different, they are created different, they are created to perform different functions in their marriage. We saw in the laver, the washing of the woman's mirrors. Every time you are looking to the word of God, we have to see ourselves in it. We have to see ourselves in marriage as it is portrayed. Husbands have to see yourselves in Jesus. Wives have to see yourselves in the church. We need to examine ourselves in the word of God continuously.
The Word of God is immeasurable. There are no limits to what the word can do in your life and your marriage and that is an enormously important point. God can do a miracle in your marriage if you will ask Him and if you will do what He tells you to do and if you will put aside your wrong understanding, your pagan beliefs with regard to marriage, the things that you have been taught and seek to know the Lord Jesus in his role as the bridegroom. The Word of God cleanses you. We need to know the offices of Jesus. We need to know the blood and we need to know the word. Those are fundamental aspects in dealing with and coming to a place where we can receive and experience the anointing of God and there is a parallel in marriage. We need to know the offices of the husband and both the husband and wife need to understand them and need to walk in them. We need to understand the significance of the blood covenant and we have seen how desperately neglected that is in the world today in the context of marriage and in the context of virginity. We need to understand the significance of the Word of God as the mirror that provides us with the means of seeing God's vision for our marriage and we also need to see the mirror effect that I have talked about previously. The wife mirrors the husband's relationship with Jesus. The children mirror the wife's relationship with her husband and so forth. We need to see that mirror, we need to use that mirror. If your wife is diffident and is unable to come to you husband in a bold fashion, then the probability is that you are being conducting yourself in a similar fashion towards Jesus. You are not coming to him free in the knowledge of the fact that you can come boldly before the throne of grace. If your wife is repeatedly telling you things you already know, then the probability is that you are telling Jesus things repeatedly that he already knows or asking him things or whatever the case may be. Use the mirror of marriage that God has given you to draw closer to Jesus.
Interestingly at the end of the tape by the spirit prophetically Benny Hinn ministered to two people, the woman who was abused, broke the bondage on her husband, set him free by the anointing and the child set free who had been protected by the anointing because of his mother's prayers and it was significant to me that the Lord had permitted this particular tape to be created and preserved for this teaching that we see the importance of the anointing and healing broken marriages and healing abused wives and healing demonised and attacked children. The anointing breaks the yokes. It removes the bondage. It sets the captives free and the anointing is available to you and to me in order for our marriages to get healed.
It is also important to understand the importance of a faithful praying wife or the role that a woman can play in her family. If her husband is not where he should be before God, his wife can intercede and lay down her life and we see the dramatic example there of a woman abused and God intervened to turn the situation around. The anointing comment was made, you need to stick around until you get it. God will try and discourage you. It may never come back again. When you capture it, you capture it for life. It is poured from vessel to vessel. The anointing for marriage, we need to stick around. We need to hang in there. It does not matter how bad your marriage looks at the moment, your marriage can be healed and it will be healed if you will seek the anointing of God for yourself and for your family and specifically for the husband. If the husband is not serving God or has backslidden, the wife must seek the anointing for her husband and for herself. She must seek the anointing for her husband's house, not seek the anointing for herself personally in isolation. She must lift her husband up. She must be a pillar in his house and not some satellite that thinks it has its own identity and can go off and do her own thing.
The comment was made that the family can be the first to mock the anointing. This is so important. It is vital wives that you reverence and esteem the anointing on your husband's life and therefore on your own life because you are one with him. Encourage your husband, uplift him and encourage him to seek the anointing, seek the anointing for him because you are one with him. Seek the anointing with him. Forget everything and follow Jesus but do it as a family, do it as a family unit, you are one flesh. Husband and wife cannot follow different agendas, cannot go down different roads, cannot serve God in unrelated and uncoordinated and separate ministries. God has called you as a house to serve Him. He has called you as one spiritual unit to serve Him. He will not I do not believe call husband and wife to go off in different directions. If that is the way you believe God has called you, I have to suggest you that there is a strong possibility that one of you could be mistaken.
Another dimension of the anointing which I felt impressed to touch on in this teaching, everyone of us to a greater or lesser extent receive an anointing as we are called and equipped in the ministry. The vast majority of Christians therefore are anointed by God, even to a small degree. Men of God who are widely known around the world, even if they have gone off the tangent, even if we do not agree with what they are teaching, we have to accept first of all as we have seen repeatedly in the series, they could be in error or we can be in error if we judge them. We are told not to judge them. The Word of God says that God is able to make His servants stand and it is not for us to judge His servants. But they are anointed of God. They have been called. They have been anointed. It does not matter whether they are backslidden or not. Psalm 1:15 says: "Do not touch my anointed ones and do my prophets no harm." 1 Samuel 24 gives us an example where Saul goes into the cave and David cuts off the corner of his robe and Psalm verse 5 not happened afterward that David's heart troubled him because he had cut Saul's robe and he has said to his men, the Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my master, the Lord's anointed to stretch out my hand against him, seeing he is the anointed of the Lord. So David restrained his servants with these words and did not allow them to rise against Saul and Saul got up from the cave and went on his way. In this case, it was perceived that it was God's will that Saul went into the cave and was made vulnerable to David. 1 Samuel 26, we see again, where Saul in camp and sleeping. Verse 7-11: "So David and Abishai came to the people by night; and there Saul lay sleeping within the camp, with his spear stuck in the ground by his head. And Abner and the people lay all around him. Then Abishai said to David, 'God has delivered your enemy into your hand this day. Now therefore, please, let me strike him at once with the spear, right to the earth; and I will not have to strike him a second time!' But David said to Abishai, 'Do not destroy him; for who can stretch out his hand against the Lord’s anointed, and be guiltless?' David said furthermore, 'As the Lord lives, the Lord shall strike him, or his day shall come to die, or he shall go out to battle and perish. The Lord forbid that I should stretch out my hand against the Lord’s anointed. But please, take now the spear and the jug of water that are by his head, and let us go.'"
So again, two instances where God tested David by bringing Saul into a place where David could easily have killed him and in both cases David said I will not stretch out my hand against the Lord's anointed. The context is that at that point Saul had already been rejected years earlier from being king. He had been anointed king, he disobeyed in the matter of the Amalekites and in 1 Samuel 15, Samuel was sent to tell Saul that God had regretted making him king and that he would take the kingdom from him. Immediately thereafter the Lord sent Samuel to go and anoint David as king of Israel. Subsequently David killed Goliath and married Saul's daughter. The people of Israel praised David more than Saul. Saul turned against David and for years, Saul hunted David like a fugitive for absolutely no reason and so we see the man who has already been rejected as king hunting the man who has been anointed by God as the new king of Israel. The old king has disobeyed God. He is not in the will of God, he is sinning greatly, he is doing all sorts of things which are completely ungodly, he is deceiving, he is lying, he is suspicious that Lord has taken his spirit away from Saul and anointed and imparted the spirit to David. So David has every basis to say I have been anointed king, God has delivered Saul into my hand, and I will destroy him. Yet on two occasions David says I will not stretch out my hand against the Lord's anointed. We have to understand if we do not agree with a brother or sister in Christ, it is not for us to speak out about them publicly to condemn them, to whisper about them, to talebear about them. If we walk in the office of apostle and God specifically sends us to them with a message to correct them, that is between the apostle who was sent and the person who receives the message or the Prophet who is sent and it is not for wider discussion. If people discern that there is error, they are free to walk away and to dissociate from that ministry, but they are not to touch the Lord's anointed.
The same applies in marriage. Husband and wife, wife particularly, your husband is anointed by God as the prophet, priest, king, the head of your family. You may not, you dare not speak against him because you are touching the Lord's anointed. He is anointed as your head. Do not touch your husband spiritually, physically, or in any other way in a damaging sense, you will incur the wrath of God. Husbands on the other hand, you are told to love your wife as Christ loved the church. That certainly does not include verbal or physical abuse of any sort.
While preparing this message I came across a book by Creflo Dollar called "The anointing to live accessing the power and avoiding the pitfalls." And I just want to read a few headlines out of that which seem to me to be relevant. We need to learn to equip ourselves with the power of God's anointing. The anointing will enable us to eliminate every potential limitation in life by operating in the fullness of God's power. Luke 4:16-19, Jesus says: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He has anointed Me To preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed; To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." That is what the anointing is for. That is what the messiah means. It is about the anointing. And if we are to be little Christ-like ones as was taught in a previous teaching, we need the anointing. We cannot be like Christ without the anointing of Christ without the Holy Spirit and all the things that are wrong in our marriages will only be healed by that. A very interesting point made in this particular book on the coming of the Antichrist, since Christ means the anointing or the anointed one and his anointing, the Antichrist means the anti-anointed one and anti-anointing. The anti-anointing is that which seeks to destroy the anointing in our lives, the demonic. If we are oppressed by Demons, if we are getting into lust, if we are getting into any ungodly behaviour as a consequence of demonic infestation of our flesh, we will lose the anointing. We cannot walk in the anointing and walk in sin, the two are [inaudible 1:19:55]. So we need to understand that there are many Antichrist in the world which are evil spirits, Demons and that is the subject of next teaching. We cannot afford unforgiveness, bitterness, lying, gossip, [inaudible 1:20:11], lust, [inaudible 1:20:13] are all anti-anointing.
We need to seek the anointing in the last day. Success will be based primarily on the willingness to pay the price for the anointing and the commitment to do the things that will keep it operating in the lives of believers. Failure will be the result of those who allow the antichrist to reign supreme in their lives and I have certainly seen this. I was blessed with a wonderful anointing in the beginning of 1994, laid hands on a number of people, saw them miraculously healed, words of knowledge, words of wisdom and then because of strife in my marriage and just a complete in a Jezebelic spirit in the wife that I had at that time that anointing was just eroded, I got more and more into hurt, into bitterness, into unforgiveness, and for a number of years up until very, very recently and even today, I do not walk onto the anointing that I had at the beginning of 1994 because of what the anti-anointing, Antichrist, the Jezebel spirits, and the other demonic spirits that attack me had time and this has been a long road in terms of which the Lord has first permitted me to experience these things for the sake of understanding how a Jezebelic rebellious attacking wife can destroy the anointing in a man's life and right now I am seeking for the restoration of that anointing, I have been fasting, I have been praying, but I have to say to you that once you have that level of anointing, it is desperate shame and a source of great sadness not to walk in it, and I have a great hunger to experience it again. My point in raising it is that wife you can destroy the anointing on her husband's life, maybe not destroy it, but you can bring him into a place where he is not walking in it.
The point is made in the book that the anointing is for abundant life and that most people today are not truly living, they are nearly surviving. The picture that I have expounded to you with regard to marriage very briefly is one of abundant life that is one of joy and blessing, it is one of fulfilment, it is a life in which husband and wife are wonderfully in love with each other, wonderfully in love with Jesus where their children are a real blessing, where the whole family is walking under anointing where the power of God and the love of God is rephrase that in the light of the teaching for love of God and therefore the power of God is flowing mightily in their family where their prayers are in complete unity. In order to get to that place, husband and wife need to walk in the fullness of the anointing. We cannot get there in our own strength. We cannot get there in our own understanding, only the Holy Spirit in the anointing can take us there. The point is made that unholy alliances, unholy relationships can destroy the anointing in our lives. We should not marry unbelievers. Again, I make the point, if you are married to an unbeliever, there is not much you can do about it, if you are a man and you knowingly married an unbeliever when you are a mature believer, you may come to a point where God will command you to come to repentance. If you know you did it in rebellion, you may in fact be required by God to repent and put that woman away. Apart from that, there is very little basis for putting away or divorce. I am not aware of any passage of Scripture which relates to a believing woman who married an unbeliever being permitted to divorce and to leave and just not have been conscionable or tolerable. That woman knew what she was doing and she has to live with the consequences.
Things that can destroy the anointing, deception, anger. We must forgive there is a place for godly anger but we must not allow to drive after the sun goes down. Stealing in any shape or form, if you do not tithe, you are stealing from God. Sins of the mouth, we have heard all about corrupt communication. Murmuring, complaining, criticising others, constantly talking about your problems, your communication is corrupt and you are grieving the Holy Spirit. Word of God says a good man out of the good treasure of the heart bring forth good things and evil man out of the evil treasure bring it forth evil things. But I say on to you that every idle word that men speak they shall give account on the day of judgement. We have heard in the previous teaching about issues regarding words, constrained by our love for the anointing for the love of Christ constraint with us. 2 Corinthians 5:14: "For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died." If we do not love the anointing, if we do not love Jesus, how can we expect to experience it and to walk in it? Constrain us means to arrest or compel, that is precisely what the love for the anointing will do in your life. It will compel you to stop when you are about to do something that will violate the anointing. We need to come to that place. Most believers seldom feel constrained before they enter into a non-holy alliance because they have not developed a personal relationship with Christ, the anointed one and his anointing. As a result they value their sinful habits and religious traditions more than their relationship with him. I have to say, this applies perhaps more in the area of marriage than any other area of the Christian walk today.
In discussing these truths with believers over the last five years or so, I have found very, very, very few Christians who truly are prepared to lay down their religious traditions in favour of what the word of God really says about marriage. We cannot afford to be like that anymore. We will be harshly judged if we value our traditions more than the Word of God and more than the anointing. Contagious attitudes both negative and positive. "If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" Colossians 3:1-3. We have to be focused on Jesus. We have to be focussed on him and his anointing. We have to treasure and value his presence in our lives and his anointing on our lives more than anything else. We have to lay aside all these other things. Philippians 4:8 describes what we are to set our affections on whatever is true on us just pure, lovely of good report or whatever is full of virtue and prayers. The root word for affection is said by Creflo Dollar in his book.
Seducing spirits and the anointing will seek to take us away from the anointing. 1 Timothy 4:1: "Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of Demons." And we see also that the next verse begins forbidding to marry. There is an enormously close correlation between the anointing our relationship with Jesus and marriage. Another point that instead of obeying God's instruction on walking away from the voice of the serpent, Eve decided to reason with him. An extremely important point that perhaps came through in this teaching so far. Adam and Eve fell because Adam listened to the voice of his wife instead of the voice of God. Men, you have to understand by all means discuss things with your wives, consult with them, but you have to do what God has told you to do, it does not matter what your wife thinks of what God has told you to do. You are accountable before God, she is not. It is not fair and just to put her in a place where her opinion counts more than God and if you do that, you are sinning and you are perpetuating Adam and Eve's sin.
Further point in the book, however Eve's mistake was not from her exaggeration of God's command but in responding at all. Instead of walking away, she engaged in a conversation with a seducing spirit by establishing her relationship with the serpent, she opened herself up to deception and disobedience. We need to understand in dealing with these things you cannot argue with the lying spirit or a religious spirit, they are lying. They are agents of Satan. Satan is the father of lies. They are not interested in the truth. They are interested in deception. No form of rational argument is going to win. You have to simply present the facts as written and then you need to walk on or keep silent. I have fallen into the trap repeatedly of arguing with people on some of these truths. If you find that you cannot accept the truths that are in these teachings, please examine yourself the Word of God. Please ask yourself whether there is not a seducing spirit or a lying spirit or a religious spirit, which is lying to you and telling you things that you want to believe because you do not want to let go of what you are taught at the Bible school, what you believed since childhood. Ask the Lord to remove the scales from your eyes and see the absolute utter distraction and appalling spiritual filth associated with marriage in the world today, and repent and turn around and seek the truth.
Instead of walking away from the serpent or going to God directly with her concerns, Eve does exactly what God instruct her not to do, eat the forbidden fruit. We need to understand that. Men, you have a responsibility to look after your wives. And wives, you have a responsibility to go directly to your husband if anything crops up which is perhaps not quite right, anything where the devil may be speaking to you, it is not your job to discern the voice of God on your own. It is your job to take whatever you believe God may have spoken to you to your husband and he is responsible for the final decision. If you do not do that you can lead the whole family into serious destruction as happened with regard to Eve. We need to understand we cannot compromise the anointing. We cannot compromise the word of God.
It has been a while since you have heard the Lord speaking to you or with your vision seemed to be stagnating rather than manifesting, judge yourself. We have mentioned before in the series, ask the Lord to judge you. We are very, very incapable of judging ourselves but we need if there is something wrong to assess to judge ourselves the anointing and the blood. We need to understand the power of the blood. The people in Moses' time had to believe that the blood of the animal sprinkled on the mercy secretly acceptable to God. There was an element of faith to be in right standing with God. Without faith in God's promise to cover your sin, the blood of Jesus is ineffective. It is not the blood that matters so much; it is what the blood accomplishes. You have to walk by faith. The same applies to the blood of the blood covenant in marriage. If you do not have faith in the covenant that has been cut in the virgin bride in the flesh and the blood of the virgin, you do not understand how important the marriage covenant is. If you remain in ignorance concerning what the blood of Jesus is accomplishing for years to limit the power of the blood in your life.
It is difficult for the Holy Ghost to operate freely in your life. When you are more conscious of your sins, then you are at God's forgiveness. We have to walk in God's forgiveness. We have to be in Christ, the anointed one and his anointing. We can be anointed for knowledge. We can be anointed to have the fear of the Lord. If you are going to walk in the fear of the Lord, you are going to have to hate sin. That is really all the fear of the Lord is, identifying and aligning yourself to the attitudes of God. I realised recently that the fear of God's judgement is to realise that if you sin, you are going to be judged and you really do not want to go through that loss and so forth. Again, it is not punishment, it is just dealing with the consequences of your sin. If you put your hand on the hot plate once and burnt it, you really do not want to go there again. Sin is the same thing. You need to come to a place where you understand that sin is like put your hand on the hot plate and there may be a whole diversity of hot plates and things of boiling water but you do not want to go there. That is the fear of the Lord. Notice that God anointed Jesus with the Holy Ghost. As a result, miracles were performed, burdens were removed, and yokes were destroyed. We need to be crucified with Christ. We need that desperately in order to walk in the anointing. You cannot get a miracle from God by focusing on your problems. That is why so many Christians miss it. They are so focused on their needs that they never look to God as the source. You need to give heed, highly focused attention, with expectancy. When you read the Bible give heed to the word. In other words, focus your attention on the Bible with expectancy. Too many Christians open their Bible to expect nothing. They read God have pleasure in the prosperity of His servants, Psalm 35:27 and expect nothing. A major key to drawing from the anointing power of the spirit is expectancy. Look at what it did for the beggar at the beautiful gate in Acts 3:6-8. This man's expectancy placed a demand on the anointing that was in Peter. He expected to receive from the power of God and as a result his yoke was destroyed. If you allow the hurt to remain in your heart, the deadly poison of unforgiveness and bitterness will infect your spirit and eventually destroy the anointing.
The anointing won't be affected if you allow sin to cling to us. Make up your mind right now to play with the anointing by keeping your expectations high. Shake off hurt and attack when they came. You are anointed and have the ability to win in every circumstance and situation. You are not merely a natural man or woman. You are a born-again believer painted on and filled with the very power and personality of God's Holy Spirit. Lift your hands to Heaven and make this confession. Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus I want to see your power operating and flowing in my life as I see it flowing in the lives of those in the Bible. Give me a hunger [inaudible 1:35:32] for your burden removing yoke destroying power in the name of Jesus. I will walk in the anointing of the anointed one. I will get results today. I will get results tomorrow. I will get greater results until Jesus returns because I am anointed. I declare this now in Jesus name.
It is important to realise that it was the anointing on Paul that protected him from harm from the serpent. The anointing is available to every believer and it is an absolute necessity for those who plan to live victoriously in these last days, particularly when it comes to the area of marriage. It is going to take supernatural strength to survive in the last days. I can do all things through Christ, the anointed one and his anointing which strengthens me until you have a revelation that Christ speaks of the anointing, you cannot understand how important the anointing is. If you think that Christ is just a label or just the name of a person and you do not understand it as the anointing, then you won't treasure the anointing, you won't seek the anointing until you are walking in the fullness of that power that the anointing is overflowing and spreading out around from you so that even as you walk people are healed without you even physically touching them. You are not walking in the anointing. You are not walking in Christ. You may have an anointing on you, but it is not encompassing you at the level that you can be truly recognised as being a little Christian, a little Christ-like one.
I have strength for all things in the anointed one and his anointing who empowers me. I am ready for anything and equal to anything through him who infuses inner strength into me. I am self-sufficient in the anointed one, and the anointing's sufficiency, Philippians 4:13. Faith is your withdrawal slip on the anointing. Without faith you cannot walk in the anointing. If you lack faith in the presence and power of the anointing, you are living without expectant. Expectancy is a major key to seeing the anointing flow and worked to remove burdens and destroy yokes. It is also a major key to seeing your marriage healed.
Creflo Dollar concludes the final result. Now that you realise that the anointing dwells in your heart by faith, let me show you the end result of operating in the anointing. Ephesians 3:17-19 says: "That Christ, the anointed one and his anointing may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height and to know the love of Christ the anointed one and his anointing which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." Then the anointing within you works by faith. You are better able to understand the love of Christ and when that happens, you will become filled with God's fullness. What a thought, to be filled with God himself and to have complete comprehension of his love for us. The anointing enables you to do everything God has ordained. It leads you to your final destination Heaven but it is more than that. God's plan for you is much more than just making it to Heaven. Your ultimate destiny is to get there in victory, fully conformed to the image of the anointed one, free from yokes and burden, having dominion over Satan and completely filled with the fullness of God. Decide right now to yield to the power of the anointing and get ready to experience supernatural progress in every area of your life. I strongly recommend this book to anybody who has taken seriously this message with regard to the anointing. In the previous teachings, we have given contact details for Creflo Dollar that can be found in South Africa 011-792-5562 and in the United States and Canada 1-888-252-7788.
Father in the name of Jesus I ask that anything that has been contained in this teaching that is not of you will be blown away and find no root in the hearers, but I ask Father that everything in this teaching that is according to your word and according to your will, will find root in the hearts of the hearers that it will produce abundant fruit in the name of Jesus. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in Jesus name. Amen.
This message has been recorded by a church without walls, a ministry of End Time Issue Ministries, PO Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at James@End-Time-Issues.org.za. Our phone numbers, international dialling code normally 0027 but this may vary from country to country, the two 7 is standard. Our landline 0027-11791-2327 or when South Africa 011-791-2327. My mobile number 0027-83251-6644 and in South Africa 083-251-6644. Our fax number internationally 0027-11791-5004 and locally 011-791-5004. All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the work.
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If in listening to these messages, you have realised that you do not have a personal serving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that if you were to die right now you would not spend eternity in Heaven with him, I would urge you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and saviour and to pray the prayer of salvation. These tapes to salvation are as follows. Firstly, admit and recognise that you are a sinner. Romans 3:23 says "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Secondly, accept and believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that he came to Earth as a man, that he crucified and died on the cross, that on the third day he rose again. He is now seated at the right hand of the Father, and that by his death and resurrection, he took your sins for eternity. Romans 5:8 says: "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Thirdly confess your sins, repent of your sins, and turn around. Repentance means turning around. It means ceasing to do what you now realise is wrong.
1 John 1:9 says: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Four, confess your faith that Jesus Christ is Lord that you believe this and receive his salvation and invite him to dwell in your heart. Romans 10:9-10 says: "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." Give thanks to God for your salvation. Pray and cry out to God and give thanks to Him for saving you. Sixthly, work out your salvation by the Spirit of God. Philippians 2:12 says: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Salvation is a process. You are saved the moment you pray the sinners' prayer, the prayer of salvation and invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart and be Lord of your life. But salvation is also a process whereby your mind is renewed and you come to have a personal and deep relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is your choice how far you go in that relationship. He desires a wonderful and a deep and an intimate relationship with you, but it is your choice whether you will do what is necessary to come to that place through reading your Bible, praying, seeking counsel, seeking guidance.
You should be water baptised at the first possible opportunity. Matthew 3:6 says: "And were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." I encourage you to ask the Lord to lead you to somebody who has some knowledge of the basic ordinance of water baptism who can water baptise you or to lead you to a church where they can water baptise you. There is no reason why you cannot be water baptised today as a symbolic cleansing and washing of your sins. In fact, the minute you pray the sinners' prayer, it would be preferable for you to be water baptised.
Choose to be obedient to the Word of God, accept the Bible in its original Hebrew as given by the Spirit of God and choose to live your life according to that. 1 John 5:3 says: "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome." I encourage you to read the Word of God daily and to put into practice everything that you encounter. As a principle which I believe will bear fruit in your life, I would encourage you to make an effort right now after you have prayed this prayer, start reading your Bible from the Book of John through to the Book of Revelation and then make a discipline of reading the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation at least two, three, four times a year and read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi at least once a year. And I would encourage you to do that using different translations.
Ask God to lead you to the church where He wants you to be at this time, where they will teach you, they will guide you, they will pray for you and they will help you to walk in the fullness of what God has called you to be. Be aware that He may move you, God may move you from church to church over time to teach you new things and you should not be reluctant to do this. The service of God is a personal choice. It is a wonderful choice and if you will step out by faith today and pray the sinners' prayer and follow Him, you will reap a rich harvest if that is your desire to be found faithful on the Day of Judgement. Should you have listened to this and have decided that you are now ready to make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, I would ask you to pray the following prayer with me, in Jesus name.
Father, I come to you in the name of Jesus and I confess that I am a sinner. I confess that I don't have a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and I recognise that without Jesus if I were to die right now, I would spend eternity in hell and not with you. I confess that I have sinned and I repent of those sins and I turn around, I choose to turn my back on sin and to serve God. I confess that Jesus Christ came to Earth as a man that he was crucified that he died and was buried and that he was resurrected on the third day, and that he sits on the right hand of the Father. I confess by faith that he died to take all of my sins, and I thank you Jesus for taking my sin and I give you my sin right now in Jesus name.
I confess by faith that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and I choose now Lord Jesus to make you the Lord of my life. I invite you to come and dwell in my heart. I invite you to take charge of my life. I invite you to start leading and guiding me and directing me and I give you my life and everything that I have and I commit myself to serving you now, Lord Jesus. I thank you that you have heard me and I thank you that you have now come to live in me, and I thank you for saving me. I thank you that I am now child of the most high God. I thank you that I am now servant of the most high God and that you will lead me and guide me into the paths that you want me to walk. I ask you Lord to lead me to the church where you want me to be. I ask you in the name of Jesus to bring the people that you want in my life into my life by your spirit and to remove the people that you don't want in my life by your spirit, in Jesus name.
I ask you to close all doors in my life that you do not want opened that no man may open and I ask you to open every door in my life that you want opened that no man may close it, in Jesus name. Father, I ask you to teach me to be lead by your spirit. I ask you to open my eyes to have a revelation of the Word of God. I ask you to give me a hunger for the Word of God and for your spirit and I ask you to teach me to pray, in Jesus name. I thank you Father and I thank you Jesus for saving me and I declare that I am now child of God and I praise you and I worship you and I glorify your holy name and I thank you for changing me and saving me and delivering me, in Jesus name. Amen.
Now that you have prayed that prayer and you are born again into the Body of Christ, realise that the Christian walk is a journey, which Apostle Paul likens it to a marathon race. You need guidance, you need assistance. If you have no one to help you, pray and ask the Holy Spirit of God to come into your life and to help you. If you need to contact somebody, contact any of the major ministries. If you are not sure who to contact, contact this ministry through the address and telephone and email, details that was supplied earlier. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
04 12 Demonic Oppression of the Flesh and Deliverance
Series on marriage "Understanding God's Way in Marriage," volume 2 "Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage" and teaching 12 is "Demonic Oppression of the Flesh and Deliverance." A number of the previous teachings which are dealt with the flesh with the Antichrist with the power of the tongue and various other aspects of what has been touched on in preceding teachings have all to some extent referred directly or alluded to the existence of Demons and the possibility that Demons can oppress the flesh of born-again believers. Many Christians have difficulty receiving that, but it is a harsh reality of the Christian walk that to the extent that our flesh is unregenerate. It is still in bondage to the demonic oppression that was present before we came to salvation and that even after we come to salvation, we can be severely oppressed and even become more oppressed by demonic infestation. Rick Joyner in his book 'The Final Quest' presents two visions in which he was shown very graphically the extent of demonic oppression of the Body of Christ in this age. In order to assist with the process of coming to the place for your marriage is indeed Heaven on Earth. One of the things that is necessary, it is necessary for the Christian walk in general, but it is particularly necessary to come to the place where God intends marriage to be is that we need to get free of whatever Demons are oppressing us. We need to cut off whatever bloodline curses maybe in effect. We need to remove all roots of rejection, hate, and other bitterness and other things that are present in our flesh and which provokes the sort of reactions that we have talked about destroying the anointing, bringing about strife and division, unforgiveness, bitterness, anger, jealousy, the overweight that Kenneth Copeland spoke of as a demonic manifestation in his life. We need to understand Demons and how to deal with them. In order to provide a basic introduction, the following teaching is a copy of a tape by Carol Offer on the subjective of introduction "Can Christians have Demons." It is one of the 15-tape set based on her manual, which is entitled "The Study of the Ministry of Deliverance. Can you Administer the Children's Spirit." The manual itself and the teaching that goes with it is the most comprehensive set of documentation that we have encountered with regard to deliverance. There are various other sources of information and this will be touched on towards the end of the tape space permitting.
Preaching by Carol: We are going to begin the lecture now, these lectures unfortunately are not the same every time and we cannot say that we follow the manual strictly, because as the Lord reveals new things to me, it just gets added on. So that is why there is a blank page in your manual and you should come equipped with a pen or a pencil and your Bible because you are going to take notes of anything that is not in your manual. If you have an old manual, a manual from a different course, that is quite sufficient, you just have to write down all the new things and then you got to go and do your own homework. This course is very, very intense. We are going to do it over two weekends, you really cannot get the full benefit of this course unless you go and sit with the Bible and check out all the Scriptures. You got to go and read up these things. You do not just accept anything anybody says to you. You go and do the research yourself. The more you put in, the more you are going to get off. So it is up to you to re-read the lesson before the next, so you got to go over the notes that you understand everything. But the greatest, the most important work of Satan among men today is to counterfeit the doctrines and experiences of God as revealed in Scripture in order to deceive the sin. Satan is very busy, I am sure you have all noticed. Men are commanded to prove and test all doctrines and experiences in a supernatural realm, 1 John 4:1, to see for God or for Satan. We don’t expect every supernatural experience as coming from the Lord. We go and test it according to the Scriptures.
We judge by the word of God. The knowledge of truth is the first essential in warfare against Demons and error. If you do not know truth, you are going to be deceived. The leaders are in great danger when they expect anything and everything in the realm of the supernatural as being from the Lord. Check out Revelation 16:14 and you will see the signs and wonders are going to be performed in the last days by Satan. Being a believer does not exclude you. Believers inspect on the ones Satan concentrates on and words against. If a believer makes [inaudible 0:06:00] study God's word he will still pray to Satan's Demons through ignorance and ignorance is no guarantee against the working of evil spirit. This is a chief means by which Satan and his forces try to control men. The world has been carefully prepared to receive the ones whom the Scripture calls the lawless one according to the working of Satan with all power, signs, and lying wonders, 2 Thessalonians 2:9. We will not drop into a spiritual vacuum. The world has been prepared for him and unfortunately a lot of the church are deceived and blind to it and are actually going along with it. In Ezekiel 44:23 God instructed the leaders to teach the children between the holy and the unholy. This knowledge enables them to know what things would bring blessing and what things would bring curses into their lives. In Deuteronomy 30:15-19, choose this day, life or death.
I trust that this course will instruct you to discern between the holy and unholy, to recognise the sin and to bring you to repentance and then to freedom. This is going to test anything, there are thirty points between each to look at. The first one is the theology of it, that you are going to test this course, there is nothing to test anything else that anybody ever preaches to you or teaches you. You take the liability of the Bible. You test the personal nature of God. Even what I bring you does it line up with Scripture. The doctrine of the trinity and unique nature and ministry of Jesus. Now, this is not nine easy steps or eight easy steps to freedom. Demons usually [inaudible 0:08:06] people's soles over a period of years. Although they are often evicted immediately we have to in cases where it is a prophet that occurs tracing back the ground and renewing of the mind that will take time. But that is not always instant. Sometimes you got to work through a process. You and I are unique. God sees us as individuals and will minister to us as such. So Job focussed deliverance immediately and you know that your problems are not half as that and you have to walk this road. God looks at the heart of the man. His ways are not our ways. Jesus is the deliver and we as sons of God are to be led by the spirit of God. As we go through this course, we must examine our own lives and not those of our husbands or our wives or our parents or even our bosses. We are looking at ourselves asking the Lord to show us things in our life. It is very quick to point a finger and see everything in your husband or your wife or anybody else instead of looking at you.
We must not be ignorant of Satan's theme, because he is going to do that. He is going to try and get you to look at everybody else. If you can get the focus on to others and [inaudible 0:09:28] you would have victory. Uncovering the wiles of the devil can also bring you attention focused on to the enemy rather than on God. This must be avoided at all costs. So we choose on who to focus. Each one of us chooses to keep our focus on Jesus Christ. We will be giving you some unpleasant things, so I urge you to make an effort to keep your eyes on Jesus and on truth. He is the way the life and the truth. If our eyes are not single, you can mix the importance of truth that is represented and [inaudible 0:10:07] we must have a love for the truth. The mind is going to be the battleground. Watch for the errors. They may come from every angle. Our eyes must be on Jesus. [inaudible 0:10:19] to get a hot seat and I mean it. [inaudible 0:10:23] getting uncomfortable, the enemy is going to try [inaudible 0:10:26] not to come back because that is the area that the Lord is going to deal with you.
If you are discerning, you will notice that there is a slumbering bewitchment captivating the minds of people, believers and unbelievers. There is religious deception and seduction, separation and disunity in the body. The new age is the biggest threat to the church today because it is infiltrating everywhere and most of the church do not even know what is seduction. Our most [inaudible 0:11:05] love for the Lord Jesus to improve our relationship with him. We must stay in your heart. You are not sombre. I want to be free. But free for what? Free for you can just go back in your life at sin. Free so that you can just pick something and carry on. No, free so that your relationship with Jesus can improve and go ahead. What is the purpose of having deliverance? [inaudible 0:11:38] says blessed are the poor in spirit. Are you poor? Are you brute? Are you broken? The language of broken is [inaudible 0:11:51]. I do not know the choice to go in there. Deep inside there is a hunger for grace. Isaiah 42:3 says: "A bruised reed He will not break, And smoking flax He will not quench; He will bring forth justice for truth." You do not know which way to go in the mix. Matthew 5:4: "Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted." To mourn is to show on the outside what is going on in the inside. Not to cover it with a lid or to be a [inaudible 0:12:31]. Quit pretending that you stop. Quit pretending that you are in pain. Quit pretending that you do not know which way to go but come honestly before God, open yourself up to the Lord Jesus, not with humility and with [inaudible 0:12:50].
I was having burden, extra baggage from the past that is weighing you down. Matthew 11:28 Jesus said: "Come to Me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." Many of us are yoking to think from the past and from our ancestors and we do not even know about. Jesus claims to set the captives free and to heal the broken hearted. Will you yield your body, your soul and your spirit to him today? Will you yield to the Holy Spirit because he will lead you into all truth. You are now on page 1 that was the introduction. Nowhere Scripture do we see a ministry of deliverance. You see it is a hope ministry. It is not some exclusive thing where you now must stand up here and preach about this or minister to hundreds of people. If the Body of Christ was functioning as it should function, this teaching will be incorporated in almost every sermon and the people would be able to receive ministry every Sunday. But we have a tremendous backlog because this ministry is now being taught and the ministry has come to the people. The mark looks as though we are some kind of exclusive deliverance ministry and people get all wobbly about that. So really I think I am somebody's official in the deliverance ministry or somebody exclusive doing this. I am in the hope ministry.
But we are called to a ministry of reconciliation and in 2 Corinthians 5:20: "Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God." And being reconciled to God is speaking about the relationship of getting rid of things that are blocking the relationship. Now Demons are found wherever there are people. They are not sitting unanimous or non-moral creation unless people are involved. So they are not interested in the haunted house. Unless there were people living there that has actually given right to Demons to be there. Otherwise they are not going to just turn moving to a place. If Demons are in a home or in an ornament or in an idol is because man has given him that power by worshiping him.
The mandate is to steal, kill, and destroy. Open your Bible to Matthew 15:22: "And behold, a woman of Canaan came from that region and cried out to Him, saying, 'Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed.' But He answered her not a word. And His disciples came and urged Him, saying, 'Send her away, for she cries out after us.' But He answered and said, 'I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' Then she came and worshiped Him, saying, 'Lord, help me!' But He answered and said, 'It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.' And she said, 'Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.' Then Jesus answered and said to her, 'O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire.' And her daughter was healed from that very hour." We can see that the ministry of deliverance and healing is the right of every child of God. Every child of God has a right to that. But each man owes responsibility. He owes responsibility to hate the work of the flesh, all evil, and the devil and be accountable for his lust and [inaudible 0:17:17]. Each man must be responsible for that. The aim of this ministry is to lead God's people out of captivity, insecurity for reconciling men to his Father. The Old Testament is a type and shadow of the New Testament. Coming out of Egypt, crossing the Red Sea in Jordan and entering into the promised land, defeating all the enemies and taking our inheritance is our work as a believer, coming out of the world system, and coming out of Egypt being born-again, that time [inaudible 0:17:52] no legal right to be there. We have to get rid of them.
Exodus 23:30 says: "Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased, and you inherit the land." It is like the peeling of an onion. That is why there are people that will attend this course more than once because they will see the certain amount of ministry and then they go and have their minds renewed by the Word of God and then they will come back and they will seek more ministry. And that is how we all walk. None of us can stand out and say, "Well, I am free. I do not need any ministry." No, it is an ongoing process, and each one of us must be ready and humble enough to say, "Lord, keep working with me. Do not take your hand off me Lord." Why does God want to deal with these things? Because He has called us to be holy. Holy people do not have Demons. The Demons are got to be got through this. Every Christian who accepts Jesus as his saviour and Lord [inaudible 0:18:57] follow him, living in his victory over Satan will be able to find deliverance from all forms of demonic oppression. This he does by faith and obedience. This is not a magic wand ministry and it is not a quick fix ministry. You have got to take responsibility for your sins, you got to come face this, you got to repent for this. We can only pray that the Holy Spirit then does the work and Jesus sets you free.
In the Book of Joshua, apathy, unbelief and disobedience kept the Israelites from entering the promised land and possessing their inheritance. These same things are passed from our inheritance. Do you know what apathy means? Apathy is passionless existence. Might you know when you had a lot of pressure and you got stress and you got problems and you have given up hope, you can live a passionless existence. You just trod alone. You just keep going, but you do not know where you are going. The method of this, deliverance is a ministry of love and intercession. You cannot be in a ministry of deliverance if you do not have a love for God's people and you do not have the compassion for the people and then you must see a prayer, a person who says a lot of times in prayer [inaudible 0:20:27]. For those of you who are thinking that God is calling you to his ministry, they are the free foundation stones that you must get into your life. You must have a love for all of God's people even the ugly ones and you must have a compassion for them and then you must be able to press. If you do not know those things sorted out first, then you can come into the deliverance ministry. Salvation is a finished work. Jesus has done it all. We are not going to come and do something. We are only going to impose Satan's defeat. We are saved. The Greek word [inaudible 0:21:01] means it is perfectly perfect and completely complete. It has been done, it has been accomplished, it is finished. That word say to deliver or protect you [inaudible 0:21:19]. Salvation includes deliverance from evil spirits. Jesus has taken my place on the cross so that I do not have to have all this. He is my substitute. At convergence there are areas of our hearts that has not received the truth, we must appropriate each work of the cross in our lives to experience the finished work. This process is called sanctification.
Sanctification begins when a person consecrates his love to God and continues all the days of his life. In this dedication, the person and the Lord work together in the setting apart person. Not just you, the Holy Spirit is working with you setting you apart. It is Luke 9:23, "Then He said to them all, 'If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.'" Matthew 12:28: "But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you." The Holy Spirit sets you free and you come into your inheritance. Now, this ministry Jesus said was a miracle. You can be the Scripture [inaudible 0:22:39] Mark 9 and Luke says in the Book of Acts that Philip was working miracles with deliverance. Now what is a miracle? A miracle is a divine intervention of a transcendence [inaudible 0:22:53] God who reaches into His creation and brings about a whole new work outside and apart from any law of nature. So deliverance is a miracle because that is exactly what happened. Now what is your inheritance. I inherited this righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. The [inaudible 0:23:18] inner healing are companion ministries. So as you have the deliverance, you then have the healing. They flow together, so one after the other, sometimes you can have the inner healing and then the deliverance. God does not have an order about this.
By this inner healing we do not mean patching up. We do not mean visualization and this course is going to teach us a lot about visualization and what come into the church. It is there to be old, that is what inner healing, [inaudible 0:23:54] and leave us with replacement with resurrection ways. So inner healing is the application of the crucified and resurrected life of Jesus Christ and his blood to those paths of our hearts that is not fully [inaudible 0:24:11] when we first receive Jesus as saviour. It is not to erase our memory, but it enables us to cherish even the worst moment of our lives for [inaudible 0:24:22] God has inscribed eternal lessons into our heart and prepared us to minister to all who have suffered in the same way. When you work there, you can minister to somebody who is going through. If you have never been there, you do not understand. You will not be able to. So God uses these horrible things that have happened to us in the past for His glory because we can now minister to others.
The word is a mirror which reflects the defilement of the inner lust, that is why as we get into the word, as we study the word, we will begin to see that we do not match up to the word. We do not, but we can be cleansed and set free from the sin. The word changes men and women into mature believers in Christ. In the Old Testament, we see the laver, the washing that took place, Exodus 38:8. The laver was there in the tabernacle with that has to wash [inaudible 0:25:22]. That is the word [inaudible 0:25:24]. In the New Testament, we have got Hebrews 4:12-13: "For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." Spiritual warfare is a vital path of the ministry. We worn the half of another. We call that intercession. Putting down strong holds, binding and [inaudible 0:25:59] which we are going to deal with more in lesson 9.
Delivering from evil spirits, remove the supernatural path of the problem, but the first he is able to deal with a natural problem that being the flesh. Now no man goes to war unless he knows who he is fighting and what his enemies' weapon and tactics are. So we are not giving glory to the devil now, we are just looking at the way he works but we can see it, understand it and then be aware of these themes in the verses. Satan was created by God [inaudible 0:26:35] Lord Jesus Christ. All things were created by Him, Colossians 1:16-17. There is no creature that was not created by God. Satan fell from his holy state when he rebelled against God [inaudible 0:26:50] angels to do sex with him. Humans are said to be angels who sinned and did not obtain the original state. You can grasp some extra Scripture 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6. You want to know about Satan's original state before, you can find that in Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14.
Now, I am not going to go through the nature of Satan. You are going to read this at home, but I do want to just point out to you 2.13, Satan's desire to control, he is known as the prince of this world. He ruled the business, social, political and religious activities of the majority of mankind. He rules that. Just remember that, as you go through all these things, you can learn about in full the [inaudible 0:27:47] you can read about that. Look at 2.3 now, the enemy's hierarchy and if you turn to page 8 and then turn over the page, the page after page 8, you can see the whole hierarchy of Satan. You have got a very highly organised setup. Right at the top up, you have got Satan or Lucifer as he is known. You see there is chief rulers and principality, they hold the highest rank in authority. And they are from ancient times. Then, the second rank is authority and power. They derive power from and execute the will of the chief rulers. [inaudible 0:27:47] authority to carry out all manner of evil and wickedness. The third layer of the world forces. These are rulers of darkness of this world, rank [inaudible 0:28:50] orders and assignment and then the first grouping is the spiritual forces in the heavenly which afflicts humanity in a malicious and evil way. They are violent malignant and they affect you and I. You can study this at home. Going back to page 3, so Lucifer who became Satan or the devil has control over the world through his hierarchy of fallen angels or Demons and evil spirit. So Christ Jesus came to defeat them and restore authority to man, put faith in him. So Jesus has destroyed Satan and his work. He has innumerable means to Satan and many millenniums of experience cannot be overcome by arguments. We cannot argue with Satan and tell him to get off to you and to leave your life. You cannot argue with him. You are not going to overcome him by pleading. You are not going to overcome by begging for mercy or any other dealings with him. He must be rejected and resisted and all relationships cut off from him.
You can write down a Scripture James 4:7: "Submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you." 1 Peter 5:8-9: "Your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world." 2 Corinthians 10:4-7: "For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds," and Ephesians 6:10-18, we cannot do anything without the armour of God. So those Scriptures are very important. So we can see that the nature of Demon spirits, they have a personality. They are spirit being. They are morally perverted. They have a supernatural strength and feel. You all know of the story of the [inaudible 0:31:09] but no change could bind him, you just snaps him.
Turn over the page you will see that there are [inaudible 0:31:17] about Demons. They are unclean. They are come and go in the bodies of men. They work with blood. They seek comfort. They can trick, can make decisions, can distinguish between different places, they seek fellowship and company with each other all wicked and seek control of men. So we do not find Demons on their own. They like to be in the families. So how does the enemy operate? He comes to steal, to kill, and to destroy and he comes to devour. How does he devour us as Christians? By gain advantage over those who will not forgive. 2 Corinthians 10:11, whom you forgive anything I also forgive. For if indeed I also given that one for your sake in the presence of cross, Satan should take advantage of us if we are not ignorant of [inaudible 0:32:15]. We need to forgive. By firing flaming [inaudible 0:32:23] which leads minds astray. There is a cross in it so that minds must be corrupted. Do you know how many times you have been sitting in church? You might even know how we are battling to concentrate. You are thinking of hundreds of different things. Those are the arrows that have been shot at you to prevent you from receiving truth and the very act of Sunday morning sitting in a church. By oppressing people, we read in Acts 10, God anointed Jesus madness of the Holy Spirit on the power we think about doing good and healing all you were oppressed by the devil for God was with him. By enslaving and domination people and by demonization and by demonization we mean entering the person's body and their soul. So Demons can infest a person. The word infest means that they gather all around the person. There is temporary control over certain areas of that person's life or they can inhabit a person. They are not ruling yet, but they just inhabiting, they go into hiding and they lie dormant but must expose themselves when they are anointing. We have been to meetings Toronto and we have seen Demons manifesting. Why are the Demons manifesting? Because there is an anointing and when that anointing comes, these things come out of hiding. You are sitting in church and the next thing you feel very strange because there is an anointing. These things got to come out. They have got to reveal themselves and unfortunately the majority of the church does not know how to deal with it.
Thirdly, they can obsess. They manage to instil themselves securely in some area of the person's character. The Demons [inaudible 0:34:11] feeling, hope, and actions. And lastly they can possess. Demons now have full control of the body, the soul, and the spirit of that person. The original personality is highly oppressed. Now we think what, am I possessed? Listen carefully. Despite the awesome powers of Satan and his Demons, believers may confidently rest in the sovereign Creator and saviour. He defeated Satan's hope at the cross. Do you see the banner? Colossians 2:15, just to remind you throughout the course Jesus has defeated Satan. You know the banners always tell a story. I do not know if [inaudible 0:35:03] she knows all the story behind the banner that she created, but I am going to share with you quickly this is not just [inaudible 0:35:12]. The colour blue is the colour of authority. Exodus 25:4, 26:1-4, and 1 Corinthians 15:4-7. The white garment depicts the righteousness of Jesus. The purity, the holiness of God and His cross. Scriptures of Revelation 6:2, 7:9, 15:6, 19:8. The change is a symbol of binding or oppression, [inaudible 0:35:52] Psalm 20:7, there are [inaudible 0:35:55] to counter Satan's number. 2 Samuel 21:20 there are eleven altogether, the number of disintegration. Eleven is the number of disintegration. Lawlessness or disorder, Matthew 20:6, Exodus 26:7, Deuteronomy 1:1-8. The crows on Jesus' head depicts royalty, eternal life. Revelation 2:10, James 1:12. The black cross depicts death. We all have to die to self. Psalm 21:3. If you look to the front of your manual, it also tells a story, Barbara would read for me. With the hands raised means praise, pray, and service. You cannot have praise without the service. Praise, pray, and service, Psalm 134:2 and 1 Timothy 2:8. So he defeated Satan's [inaudible 0:37:10] at the cross, controlled all things and guarantees his wisdom, his love and faithfulness that he will never leave us or forsake us. Neither can any Demon separates us from the love of Christ for Demons believe in symbols and believers may believe in trusting their saviour who has accomplished complete salvation for mankind. So not one person should be sitting here afraid because it has all been accomplished, we just enforce Satan's defeat.
Now can a Christian [inaudible 0:37:45]. That has been a very big question. First of all, we must establish what is equipped. For those who have never done these things, so you cannot call yourself a Christian. I seek gently to check what you have done these things before you call yourself a Christian. Because God does not have grandchildren. You have to come to this place yourself and there is a day and hour that you remember doing this. It is things how I did sometime when I was a child. If you have not done it, but you can remember exactly when you did it but you need to inspect. What is a Christian? A Christian is a person who is convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit and acknowledges that he is a sinner. He confesses and repents of all his sin and then he forsakes them. He has made aware of the redemption work of the cross and believes that if he asks God for forgiveness in faith, he will receive it. The Holy Spirit then floods his heart and he places a personal trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and consecrates his lust. He believes with his whole heart that Almighty God has saved him by grace and accepts him as he is. As he receives Jesus, he receives love and is in union with him. This union means that the Father has a true obedient son Christ in a Demon container you and I. This union will be perfected and it will Christ operating in and as the believer. Now for us to go through deliverance, we must make sure that we are born again that we know that salvation is ours. That step number one.
The second step, if you want to have deliverance from all these things, that you have to make sure that you have been obedient and the third step of obedience is to go through a water baptism and water baptism according to Scripture. Not the [inaudible 0:40:06] that you had when you were little in a certain denomination. That is not baptism. You got to first believe before you baptise. So if you have not been baptised then that is something that we are very willing to help you with to do in the last lecture, we got a baptism [inaudible 0:40:23] and we are going to baptise people on the last lecture like we usually do. The next step is to filled with the Holy Spirit that you will have power to be able to witness and in lesson 7 we pray for people that have not received baptism of the Holy Spirit to receive that. Because if anything cleaned up so you are not going to repeat any other spirit you are going to receive the Holy Spirit and be given a gift of speaking in power. That is what we are going to do through the course.
Now the purpose of the body, why has the Lord put us in a body of the believer? God knew that the body would need to mature to stand against the enemy and the flesh. He knew that. He knew that we are going to need people to help us. So what does God do, he gave us gifts and these gifts were to protect us. These gifts to protect us is to bring completeness, maturity, up righteousness having [inaudible 0:41:23] being totally obedient and these people are the apostles, prophets, evangelists, and the teachers. They have been put into the body to bring us to this maturity or the perfection. Now the Greek word for perfect is [inaudible 0:41:41] and if we look at this [inaudible 0:41:42] we see three times or actually four is [inaudible 0:41:48] Scripture with a different type of meaning. So the first one is in Ephesians 4 where we say that Jesus gave gift to the body to perfect them is to bring back into alignment. So these apostles, pastors, and teachers and evangelists are going to bring us back into alignment because we are out of alignment. That is what they are preaching and they are teaching us to do. Then we are out of alignment there is an open door to demonic attack. The second one is in Hebrews 11:3 and let us turn to that one and we read it together. "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible." That word framed is [inaudible 0:42:50]. Now that framed is to put in order, to put in order by the Word of God. So these pastors and teachers are to put us in order because most people who come for deliverance are in a chaotic state so that God has given the ministry to bring us this order and we find that we need to have deliverance because we are in a chaotic state. So the third one is to restore what you are reinstating and just turn to Galatians 6:1: "Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted." So that word restore is [inaudible 0:43:50] to reinstate because of a misconduct. In other words, you are straightening out. You have been laid astray, being deceived by some [inaudible 0:43:59] which has been caused by false doctrine or defiled by moral mistake.
The third one is in 1 Thessalonians 3:10 and I am going to just read it to you it means to adjust and to arrange and said "Night and day praying exceedingly that we may see your face and perfect what is lacking in your faith?" To perfect what was lacking in your faith. To bring into order to your life. So as we speak and teach the word as apostle and ministry do that, [inaudible 0:44:33] sin is dealt with by repentance which is a powerful tool removing the ground of Satan's attack, people are aligned, the Demons are cast out, and inner healing is administered. So the five fold ministry must bring us back into alignment, they must put us in order, they must reinstate us and adjust us and arrange us. A heart that has been protected once the Holy Spirit has come and search out the inner most man to shine into all the different path to investigate, to expose, to dig out all that is unlike Christ. There you hide a secret sin, however, do not want to be searched, probed, or convicted. I do not want to know those things because then your sin will be exposed. And Satan loves secrecy. The power of sin is in secrecy.
Now Christians cannot be Demons possessed. Please check your vocabulary, from this day onward you will never say a Christian is possessed, because a Christian cannot be possessed. Possessed people you will find in mental asylum. They have no control over themselves anymore. Everything is being taken over by a Demon. We are spirit beings with a soul and we live in a body. The soul consists of the intellect, the will and emotion. Before salvation, man is a body with a spirit. The soul and spirit are one because his soul dominates the spirit. Adam was getting sin. At conversion when you are born again, the truth separates the soul and the spirit, that is Scriptures from Hebrews 4 that I have just read to you. So that the sons of God are led by the spirit through the dictating to the body and the soul. When we go to death, a physical death, there is separation of the inner man from the outer man. That is what happens with death. The body will then go to the grave. He pretends to death. In Ecclesiastes 3:19-21 and James 2:26, the spirit returns to God and the soul either goes to Heaven or waiting the resurrection or to hell [inaudible 0:47:05] resurrection of the body and in a new resurrected body in all infinity. There is no soul sleep. There is nothing like that. So if you have been brought up in a catholic church and you got that kind of thinking, it is incorrect and you need Scriptures for that please come to me at any time or drop me a little note to say you want the Scriptures on all those and I will gladly give you all those. I will just leave it with Keith and you can pick it you from him.
So our spirits are saved or born again made alive at salvation after which our souls become subject to the process of sanctification. Now sanctification is not striving to be holy as everyone else. It is a process by which the Holy Spirit brings up more and more on the cross and into new life. How come, why cannot a Christian be possessed? Because we are redeemed by the blood of the lamb. We have been brought with a cross and we read up those Scriptures and we will see that. Deliverance for a Christian represents the eviction of cleft passing spirit who are spotless in our souls and bodies. We all know the [inaudible 0:48:23]. Lot of us has got [inaudible 0:48:28] because you have been brought with a price that is hanging in there and they are not going to go with pleading, with begging, but will only go when you take a [inaudible 0:48:39] over them in the name of Jesus and as the blood of the lamb. Otherwise they are not going to go off. The Demons are in your body and in your soul. They are inside. So you are not going to tell them to go off you, you are going to tell them to come out of you. Pull them out, which is kind of [inaudible 0:49:05] lesson 7 everybody is looking at and we see the result.
Causes of demonization, now, why do you become demonised. First of all, personal involvement. An existent and yielded lust. God sees the heart. [inaudible 0:49:25] attitude is just taking ground to have a foothold. So you got a problem with [inaudible 0:49:31]. Believe me, you now have Demons. Demons of anger, Demons of [inaudible 0:49:38], possibly a murder spirit. You could have bitterness, resentment, unforgiveness, rebellion, selfishness, things that had been around you for years. You just carry on with it. You can be sure that has opened the door for demonic infestation.
The second cause of demonization is inherited factors. Ancestral involvement. Now this one kind of give everybody a wobble because they kind of think we just forget about the Old Testament, we only look at the New Testament. That is not so. Demons manage to extend they live on families even though they are not the guilty person because of the authority transparent that occurs during [inaudible 0:50:26], oaths, ceremonies and festivals. So when we talk about freemasonry, we will see that there your grandfather was a freemason. You do not even know what freemason is about, you could have the Demons of that freemasonry because you were actually dedicated to [inaudible 0:50:42] and so on. So those things have to be cut off and dealt with. And there is a Scripture there on Ezekiel for those who feel that we cannot have that problem. Now, Satan is a legalist. The bottom line is that he has been given grounds due to sin or purpose you could be oppressed or tormented by a Demon until a hole in the head is shot and the Demon cast out. Now we see that many sicknesses have a demonic thought. So we can believe that we will healed of those illnesses and of evil that have got those demonic roots. Not so, because if the Lord Jesus sets us free and they leave, then we must believe we are going to be healed because that thing was caused by Demons. Then you have to put your faith on to believe especially if you have any heart disease, any diabetes, any cancers in your family, things like that, you have got to believe, well God, nothing is impossible for you, just think of demonic thing coming down from one generation to the rest as ideal with this and set free, I am going to be healed. You have got to believe that and you have got to put your faith on because if you do not believe it, then what is for you. You have got to believe that God is going to heal you, not only deliver you. To heal to deliver, they go together.
We see that Jesus called the women that have the issue of [inaudible 0:52:11] called to the spirit of infirmity. Infirmity is a moral, physical or spiritual weakness. It is a flow in our characters or in our personality. Like if we have those, infirmity can come up and you can be healed of that. I have given you lots of Scriptures for deliverance in the New Testament which you can go and read about it at home. Very seldom do we find a single Demon in a person, very seldom, I do not think I have ever found only one in a person. Demons come in family groupings. In Mark 1:23-24 there is the [inaudible 0:52:55] Demons. A strong man or a ruler spirit he was in charge of the demonic operation in this man. He shouted let us alone. We see that a demonised spirit can be invaded by rank of evil spirit. They are set up as a coordinated person as evil with the latest spirit under the authority of a leader. Six thousand Demons under a leader, my name is legion for we are men. Now, six thousand. Believe me when [inaudible 0:53:31] more than six thousand because you jerk and cough and blow and [inaudible 0:53:38] more than six thousand. But these Demons come in these families, so we do not get this whole array of things like one of anger. We find anger, resentment, bitterness, and all the things that will go with it have redeemed over time. So we get the strong man the Lord focuses, strong man we bind you, we then plunder you and then the strong men go.
When Jesus commanded them to come out in Scripture, we see that from the Greek it was a continuous sense. He does not say just come out. He [inaudible 0:54:13] come out. So many times I have heard people say why do you have to say it a hundred times and Jesus only said it once. Well, first of all, I am not the Lord Jesus. I am his disciple and these things are sudden. They do not budge. You have got to be actually be very firm and you go repeat yourself and they see that you are really serious. So if you want to be in this ministry, as we say together, you have got to have a tenacity of a bull dog. So now, why do not we [inaudible 0:54:47] to the Demons? Why do not we just find out what the strong man is and then it would be easy? The object of deliverance is to evict, to cast it out, not to seek for it. We follow Jesus' example and if you allow the person to speak or you allow the Demon to speak, you have a lovely conversation to tell you that [inaudible 0:55:08] what you are really doing then is you are allowing that person to operate as a medium when Demon converses with you. You are obtaining information, causes the person to fall into sin. Now turn with me now to Deuteronomy 18 and you can see what the Lord says about this. Deuteronomy 18:10-12: "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you." Any person who uses the medium that is an abomination to the Lord. So we do not allow people to operate as medium. And we have access to all truths and all power in and to the Holy Spirit and [inaudible 0:56:25] for the one who has called us to walk there will equip us for walk in for this ministry.
Now you must be saying well who can minister this deliverance. Can anybody do it? You have to go and do five courses, go to Bible school, what you have to do to be able to minister deliverance? Well, the whole church is an army that is in the midst of a spiritual battle. The whole church. [inaudible 0:56:48] just get it right out of your head that you play in church. You are really playing a game because if you are sitting there we are just listening to what the person is saying and go home and forget what they said by lunch time, you are a [inaudible 0:57:02] and you are same there. You are in a battle. You did not get saved for fun, you are saved for the purpose. Spread the gospel, to go out and do the work of the ministry. So all can minister deliverance. We see Jesus sent out twelve, he then sent out seventy and he commissioned every one of us, his followers, you and I, have been commissioned to do that. But we seek from all these people if they had a relationship with Jesus that what gave them authority. And of course these are tied with the Holy Spirit, they were given power. So you cannot think that you can go and do deliverance if you do not have a relationship with Jesus. If you are not spending time with him, if you are not in communion with him and you do not hear from him, [inaudible 0:57:50] then you are doing exorcism.
In Acts 4:13 we see that these people have been with Jesus and was full of the Holy Spirit. You have to spend time with Jesus and be full with his Holy Spirit. Now there are some people who do not seem to get with [inaudible 0:58:13] and then they think I see Carol do it, I see another lady do it, so I am going to do it, I am going to just cast off the Demon. Well, I just like to warn you that if you look in Scripture in Acts 19, what happens to people who try and do deliverance but are not in that relationship with Jesus. Turn to Acts 19:14-15: "There were seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, who did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, 'Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?' Then the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, overpowered them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded." Now we did have a situation like that with somebody [inaudible 0:59:16] I did so that they just like to join in and of course I did not know what was going on. I just felt anybody will help to this ministry because I was on my own at that time and he came along and he started taking authority over the Demons and these Demons [inaudible 0:59:33], Jesus I know, Carol I know, who are you? Well, this guy got up [inaudible 0:59:37] quickly ran [inaudible 0:59:42]. But there really is a seriousness in this and if you do not have a relationship with Jesus, please do not think you can do these things. There is a time to go to war and a time not to. Not all are sent to the frontline. Although some will stay at home to intercede or will benefit from the victory of battles won for one needs the other. We cannot do it without one another. Turn to 1 Samuel 30:21-24: "Now David came to the two hundred men who had been so weary that they could not follow David, whom they also had made to stay at the Brook Besor. So they went out to meet David and to meet the people who were with him. And when David came near the people, he greeted them. Then all the wicked and worthless men of those who went with David answered and said, 'Because they did not go with us, we will not give them any of the spoil that we have recovered, except for every man’s wife and children, that they may lead them away and depart.' But David said, 'My brethren, you shall not do so with what the Lord has given us, who has preserved us and delivered into our hand the troop that came against us. For who will heed you in this matter? But as his part is who goes down to the battle, so shall his part be who stays by the supplies; they shall share alike.'" Some are too weary to go to the battle. Some have got other things in their life. They have to intercede, they stay at home.
We see that there are certain considerations needed, newly wed do not try and get into deliverance ministry when you just got married. If you are tired, extremely exhausted, your job is too taxing or you are fearful and afraid, you do not go to battle or with a new home, you just opened a new business, you just got engaged or you [inaudible 1:02:10] do not go into this ministry because it really does drain you even if you are healthy and strong. If you know that God is calling you and all these other things taught about them, you can go into the ministry. [inaudible 1:02:24]. He started with thirty two thousand people. Twenty two thousand were fearful. Three hundred were caught out of the ten thousand. A sovereign God calls three hundred to go and nine thousand seven hundred not to go. There was no choice of this. God selected them. There was no rebuke or disappointment recorded. Their rightful place was at home and not at war. Those who should go should not think they are more spiritual or more favourite of God than those who stayed behind. Those who stayed behind should not criticise those whom God called to battle. Now for those who are going to war, what are the requirement? First of all, the anointing of God. No man can cast out any Demon without the anointing of God. The greater your love for people and your compassion for people, the greater your anointing will be. It destroys the yoke of bondage. You must be able to hear the voice of God. It cannot be that you never had a word of knowledge or word of wisdom. It cannot be that the first time you minister you hope you are going to get something. We must endure God in your walk with Him. You must exercise the gifts of the Holy Spirit. You must be uncompromising with series to be defeated by defeated soul will come out and walk away. You got to be determined to get this thing out. You got to have a servant spirit, a listening ear and be willing to lay down your life because we sit for hours with people, listening to the story to try and discern the root to get hold of the root of this problem. Have compassion and be able to love the counsel from whom he is. Communicate this love, watch your body language and your facial expressions, etc., so that is [inaudible 1:04:31] and your eyes go [inaudible 1:04:38] close your eyes when you listen to them. Have patience and be able to be quick root not just look for symptoms and must be able to confront the [inaudible 1:04:47] with personal responsibility and accountability. And that means dealing with retention, because if there is no retention, there is no deliverance.
Now, all of us, I presume, are here because we are preparing to have deliverance or we are preparing to be trained up to do deliverance. In preparation for deliverance, we must allow the Holy Spirit to search our hearts for sin since repentance will remove the ground for Satan to attack us. We must know the Demons did not create our sin. Demons did not create our sins. They are ours alone. Demonization is a process that deals with sin and continuously invite demonic infestation when a man will not repent and will not turn from the way he is going. Jesus said in Mark 7:21-22: "For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness." All these evil things come from within and defile a man. Demons cannot defile us unless we have already defiled ourselves with sin. So what is repentance and what must be repent from? First of all you must repent from [inaudible 1:06:31]. In Scriptures, Acts 26:20, that is your religious work of being on every committee of attending church religiously, never missing a sermon. Reading your Bible faithfully every day, but come lunchtime you do not know what you have read because you are not even doing what you hear. All the religious works, HalleluYah, in church [inaudible 1:07:04] but in the heart there is nothing. Most of the religious works [inaudible 1:07:10]. Secondly we must repent of the works of the flesh and you want to lift, read Galatians 5:19-21. We need to do a good work from salvation. So repentance is to be [inaudible 1:07:29] that we have called for Lord Jesus Christ. [inaudible 1:07:34] because I said that you [inaudible 1:07:38] Holy Spirit. You must be sorry for hurting God and the other people by what we have done, what we said, our actions. It is being willing to die to what we are deemed and allowing God to change us into what He wants us to be. It is the foundation for deliverance. True repentance is a change of mind and a change of attitude. We will deal with your actions, your words, your deeds. It involves giving us all our own futile human effort to save our souls. We must understand that we cannot repent when we feel like it. You cannot. Repentance is a gift that God gave to you. He knocks on your door and He says "Here it is, now turn from the way you are going." It is not going to just come every day. If you are sitting here, this might be the last chance of your lifetime to repent and to turn from the way you are going. He does know that. [inaudible 1:08:50] you know this is God speaking to me.
We must understand that we cannot repent when we see that. Remember that and if we need to take it when it is [inaudible 1:09:03]. Let us be sure to repent when God's [inaudible 1:09:07] repentance is moving in our lives. We must hate sin. We must hate our sinful nature. We must be broken before the Lord. Brokenness is a total shuttering of all human strength and ability. There is recognition of the full reality of sin and the reproach it brings to Christ with absolute assurance that the things are going to change. Change is going to come from all of this that is reeling and [inaudible 1:09:40] will come. You have five things that flow out of repentance. It is not just the case of I repent. Many people say that. I sat before a pastor one day and he said, Carla repent. [inaudible 1:09:54]. That is not repentance. Repentance is conviction. When a person is convicted of sin, some will be brought on to their knees and completely humble and feel that they have no hope in themselves. They cannot see a way out. And many of you [inaudible 1:10:13] because you cannot be a way out. You do not know where you are going to end up. The Word of God are conscience in the Holy Spirit when conviction. Then in conclusion, a deep sorrow and humiliation of heart of godly sorrow, 2 Corinthians 7:9, will lead to repentance. Godly sorrow will lead to repentance. The heart is then broken for the sin. When there is confession of sin, it is individual, it is specific, nothing can replace confession. You have got to sit down and confess every sin. And that goes on forever. The Lord is always reminding you of sin, but you just even recall, ten years ago you remember how you actually more of that person, can you just confess that sin? Be specific and truthful. [inaudible 1:11:08] Psalm 32:1-5 and 1 John 1:9 and then there is a conversion, there is a hundred and eighty degree turnabout from your evil ways. The heart has broken from sin. It never want anything to do with sin anymore. It is broken from sin. Conversion to God and aversion from the world. Then there is a confession of Christ. The culmination of the walk of repentance. You will see fruits of repentance. You cannot say I have repented and so you will see the fruits of that repentance. The fruit will come and those persons can keep quiet when the Lord Jesus has touched them and healed them and delivered them and forgiven them. You cannot keep quiet because like a load has been taken off you.
Now there are steps into repentance and this is your homework that you are going to do either tonight or you are going to do tomorrow before you come to the course. You are going to go through these steps of repentance, you are going to deal with the sin in your life because each one of us has got individual sin and so when you come back here, do know that as far as you know, your sin has been dealt with that you are now ready to receive deliverance from any Demon activity in your life. The next thing that you are going to just look at briefly is the four principles that God would require of us to have this established before we have deliverance. The first one is honouring our parents. Deuteronomy 5:16 says: "Honour your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may be well with you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you." How many of us think of parents? Because we know [inaudible 1:13:04] what they were supposed to be. They let us down. Some of us have been abused by our parents, emotionally, physically, sexually. [inaudible 1:13:18] ten years ago, I do not see them, I do not want to see them, I want nothing to do with it because they did not teach me, they did not lead me, they did not help me, they have done nothing for me. But what the Scripture says very specific. To honour your parents is to obey them, to respect them, to love them, to cherish them, and to forgive them because they are not perfect. They have made much of mistakes and they will go on making mistakes if you are young and you feel like your parents are going to make mistakes, but you need to forgive them.
Those who have been abused in any way it is extremely difficult, but the Lord will give you grace if you will now make a decision [inaudible 1:14:06] make a decision but if you just honour your parents, you will go [inaudible 1:14:14]. You will go and ask for forgiveness if you were in rebellion, you will go and make right if you have not seen them for five years, you will pick up the phone, you will just make right. You will ask for forgiveness because that is what needed. But you need to make right for our parents. The second thing is judging. Matthew 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." And many of us have judged our parents. We just thought they were absolute [inaudible 1:14:48]. We have judged our pastors, we have judged the shepherds [inaudible 1:14:54]. We judge many people. Decide today that that is going to stop. You are not going to judge any longer. You have blamed, condemnation, anger, envy or jealousy. We cannot judge with an impure heart that is dishonouring our parents. What you have judged in your parents, you will end up doing or becoming. So if you have critical parents, you become a critical person. If you are critical now in your home, your child will have criticism. Romans 2:1: "Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things." [inaudible 1:15:41] the Bible is very clear that no matter how [inaudible 1:15:46] are that has called a child to become bitter, full of hatred, etc. It is still the child's bitterness or his hatred, no one else's. It does not matter what they did, reaction that you have is yours and you have got to get rid of that. And God has given us the way because he deals with our rubbish and He forgives others.
Every person is accountable for his or her own actions and responses to something. The next one is starting [inaudible 1:16:25]. Galatians 6:7: "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap." Rebellion in teenage years is often reaped years later. And besides if you were very rebellious, you were into all sorts of things, very promiscuous and then you got born again and now everything seems to be going well and suddenly your marriage starts falling apart, you have problems with lust, or you have problems where you are angry about relationships, you are incredibly jealous about your wife or your husband, you might even become frigid or impotent, you are reaping what you sow and you can earn God's mercy because if you forgive and you deal with all these things, God is a merciful God. So often people think that they got no way with these things, as we are ruled by lust and then end up with tremendous problems once they marry.
The last one and I think it is the most important one of all, dealing with unforgiveness. This is the one thing that Demons would not go which is unforgiveness in a man's heart or a woman's heart. Matthew 6:14-15: "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Mark 11:25: "And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses." Please, do not attend this course if you are holding something against somebody. Please, do not come and have deliverance. Deal with it before. When we forgive, it is coming from the heart, not pretending. Not, "Okay, well, I forgive you." It must come from the heart. It does not come from self effort. It comes from realisation our desperate situation and that our only hope using God's mercy and this can explore into our hearts. His mercy must flow into our heart. It is possible to forgive someone and stay away from. You can forgive people that have hurt you. That does not mean you got to be [inaudible 1:18:51]. It does not mean you need to have tea with them and dinner with them and things like that. You can forgive people and not see them. Forgiving someone is when you release them from the debt that they owe you. It does not necessarily mean you are going to trust them again or have a close relationship with them again. It does not mean that you will forget what they did. Forgiveness does not mean that your memory goes blank. You will remember but the pain and hurt won't be there when you do the calling.
Forgiveness is three-fold. God's forgiveness to us, [inaudible 1:19:37] He always forgives us when we come humbly before Him. Our forgiveness to others, we need to give others and then the hardest one of all is to forgive ourselves. How can you hold something against you yourself when God has forgiven? Some of us have done terrible things in our youth. Some of us would not have any godly upbringing and we have done horrible things. Now you need to forgive yourself for being led astray like that. There are three steps. Concept the unforgiveness, the bitterness, the hatred or whatever [inaudible 1:20:20]. Make a decision to break fully with these and not to walk in agreement with Satan because you see when you are holding these in your heart, you are working in agreement with Satan. You got to decide you are not going to do that. Secondly, renounce. That means to turn away, wholeheartedly turn your back on it, separate yourself from that sin and thirdly, make a decision with your mind and consecrate with your mouth. You forgive that person or persons who have hurt you or have wronged you, individually and specifically and ask the Lord to forgive them too. That concludes the teaching.
James Robertson: Carol Offer is based in Johannesburg and can be contacted at Johannesburg, that is 011-476-1566 or on email Carol@netactive.co.za. She does have very limited resources and accordingly I would ask that before contacting her if possible you contact us on Johannesburg 7912327 or James@End-Time-Issues.org.za and other details that are contained on other tapes in this series. The total subject matter of the manual of which we have just heard the first teaching comprises nine lessons. Lesson 2: "Doorways to Demonic Infiltration and Inheritance" includes a discussion of Freemasonry. Lesson 3: "Doorways to Demonic Infiltration Occultic Involvement," which discusses some Satanic symbols. Lesson 4: "Doorways to Demonic Infiltration Rebellion, Witchcraft, Spirit of Jezebel." Lesson 5: "Doorways to Demonic Infiltration and Sexual Sin." Lesson 6: "Rejection, Healing of Bruises and Awareness." The Christian scriptural identity and possession. Lesson 7: "Fear, pride, mind controlling other strong men, [inaudible 1:23:02] positions and [inaudible 1:23:03]." Lesson 8: "The authority of the believer and his weapons." Lesson 9: "Spiritual Warfare." And then various prayers. In the tape that follows this, God willing, we will deal with Jezebel and with some more information regarding deliverance. There are a number of other ministries which deal with deliverance and I just like to provide some information there just for your reference. Derek Princes published a number of books in the field of deliverance. The Ministry in South Africa, dialling code 0123489537. I believe there is also a website, Bob Larson in the United States, www.BobLarson.org and Ministry in the area of exorcism. A few books which may be of interest and reference, most of these books are some of them introductory and some of them are fairly advanced in nature. In that particular order, Benny Hinn has a series on setting the captives free and also a series on Demons and Devils, both of which are fairly good background information and in fact what introduced me to the field of deliverance.
Derek Prince has a book "Blessing or Curse: You Can Choose. Freedom from oppression you thought you had to live with." He has another book "They Shall Expel Demons: What You Need to Know about Demons--Your Invisible Enemies." Mary Garrison also has a ministry in deliverance. She has a book "How To Conduct Spiritual Warfare As I See It!" Incidentally Derek Prince has published a number of other books, those are just a few samples. Mary Garrison's books are good introductory books on deliverance. Also by Mary Garrison, "The Keys to The Kingdom are Binding, Loosing and Knowledge." Further book by Mary Garrison, "How to Try a Spirit: Identify Evil Spirits and the Fruit They Manifest."
A good introduction to the basic groups of Demons, but the manual that we have just referred to from Carol Offer goes a lot further. Rebecca Brown also has a significant ministry in deliverance. "He Came To Set The Captives Free" is one of her books and another book of hers "Unbroken Curses: Hidden Source of Trouble in the Christian's Life" by Rebecca Brown with Daniel Yoder. Maxwell Whyte also has a deliverance ministry, "Cursing Out Demons" and another book "Power Over Demons, Submit Yourselves To God, Resist The Devil And He Will Flee From You" H.A. Maxwell Whyte. Marilyn Hickey also has some work in the area of deliverance. "Break the Generation Curse" is a book of hers. Bob Larson I have referred to a minute ago has an exorcism ministry. People that have been referred to up till now all minister in the area of what I would prophetic deliverance. In other words, they are given revelation by the spirit of God. Larson has been led by the Lord into a ministry, which deals with some very powerful oppression possession situations in an exorcism format where he calls on the Lord's angels to insist an assistant to interrogate the Demons. He has a book, Bob Larson, "In the name of Satan" how the forces of evil work and what you can do to defeat them. A very sobering book in terms of just how complex and manipulative the Demons are and how they get to get legal right in our lives. It is certainly quite an eye opener if that is something that the Lord leads you into. I was led by the Lord to buy that in a secular book shop and it taught me quite a lot.
Recent book publication by Bob Larson is "Spiritual Warfare" includes the latest information on the influence of witchcraft and paganism in today's culture, warnings about activities leading to demonic bondage, biblical foundation for understanding spiritual warfare, Satanic possession and how to perform an exorcism. A variety of topics there. C. Fred Dickason has produced a book called "Demon Possession and the Christian: A New Perspective" with a forward by Mark Bubeck. If you are interested in obtaining any of these books, you are welcome to contact this ministry and we will supply you with more information. Another book not directly on deliverance, but has a bearing on this topic "Masonry: Beyond the Light" by William Schnoebelen and he also a companion book on Wicca witchcraft. The book on masonry is a startling revelation of the demonic powers that gain a hold on Freemasons as a consequence of the vows, etc., that are taken and also a challenging exposé of the principalities and powers that operate and the actual physical world organisations that lie behind Freemasonry and linking that back to the Mafia, Illuminati, various other secret organisations linking it back to Nazism and a challenging exposé of what illumination actually means and a description of how Schnoebelen when he was in masonry and witchcraft actually invited Demons to take possession of him and he reached the end of the fourth stage in the five-stage process where at the end of the fifth stage he would have been completely controlled and possessed by Demons and actually just to become a human love for a demonic occupier and attributing much of the excess and extremes of Nazism and other extremes of world behaviour to the people who are slowly eliminated that there are taking control by Demons. Very sobering thing, also indicating how behind these things are a variety of sexual practices all of which are designed to bring about fornication, adultery, breaking down of the sanctity of marriage, breaking down of the sanctity of virginity and sexual practices which strengthen the Forces of Darkness and just take people completely out of the will of God and into a course of action, which as we have seen previously in these teachings will keep them from even seeing the Kingdom of God.
I do not intend to go further into those aspects and are not relevant to this teaching, but it is important to understand that there is an enormous amount of darkness out there which has been documented as identified by Christians. In the tape, which I hope God willing, to record next is we will go into Jezebel principality which dominates marriage and seeks to destroy marriage and also some issues of sexual sin and deliverance from Carol Offer's Manual in order to better equip you to work towards getting your marriage healed. But this is a very extensive subject, a subject that certainly cannot be dealt with in one or two tapes within this series. As I said, Carol Offer has a set of 15 tapes on the subject and really even matters from a practical viewpoint is only scratching the surface. You do need ministry from somebody who is knowledgeable and experienced in this field, otherwise as you heard in the tape, you are likely to experience significant problems. They are very distinct skills associated with the Ministry of Deliverance but I must also testify that in my own experience, having walked the road of deliverance since about 1994 where the Lord started to show me there were Demons oppressing me, started to teach me about demonization, over the years brought various people across my path until eventually in four substantial sessions of deliverance, I knew in my spirit that I have been delivered of 500 Demons, many of which had come through the bloodline, others had come from events in my childhood and which made an enormous difference in my life and after my wife had also been through deliverance, it certainly laid the foundation for progress in our marriage. Even today we find that we still encounter Demons that are oppressing our flesh and as we become more sanctified and draw closer to the Lord, more and more of these things are exposed and cast out to a point where we like to believe today that we are moderately close to freedom in that area but acutely aware of the potential to be re-infested if we sink into sin and disobedience.
Father in the name of Jesus I pray that anything that has been uttered in this tape that is not according to your word and your will, will be blown away and not take root in the hearts of the hearers and I pray Father in the name of Jesus that everything that is of you, everything that is according to your word will take root in the hearts of the hearers, will be engrafted and that it will produce abundant fruit in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
04 13 Cleansing the Temple of the Holy Spirit – and Jezebel
Two of the teaching series, 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' Volume 2 being 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage,' and teaching number 13, 'Demons in the Temple of the Holy Spirit and Jezebel.' This teaching is a continuation of the previous teaching on the oppression of the flesh by Demons and deliverance. We saw very clearly in that teaching that Christians can have Demons. We see in Matthew 10:1, "And when He (Jesus) had called His twelve disciples to Him, He gave them power over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease." We read then subsequently in Luke 10:17-20, "Then the seventy returned with joy, saying, 'Lord, even the Demons are subject to us in Your name.'"
So, we see the seventy and the twelve both sent out two by two. We see that Jesus gave them authority over Demons, and we see that he also sent them to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Jesus himself said that He had come only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and even in the case of the Syrophoenician woman, the Canaanite woman who came to Him for deliverance for her daughter, He initially refused to minister to her because she was an unbeliever. So it is important that we understand that Jesus' whole ministry of deliverance was to the believers. It is virtually impossible to minister deliverance to an unbeliever, and an unbeliever is serving Satan. So how on Earth can one minister deliverance to them. They must first come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and then they can be delivered.
Deliverance
As we have seen also, deliverance is a process. It is not something that happens overnight. We need to become progressively more sanctified, we need to renew our minds progressively in the Word of God and come to a place where we have the level of understanding that is opposite and appropriate for a particular Demon to leave. We may be delivered of some Demons today and other Demons, but we may only be delivered in years' time provided we are diligent in progressively drawing closer to God. If we are not, if we backslide, those Demons may easily return and give us even more difficulty than before.
We read in 1 Corinthians 6:15-20, "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?" As we have seen in a previous teaching, Christ means the anointed one, Jesus and His anointing. To continue, "Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For 'the two,' He says, 'shall become one flesh.' But he who is joined to the Lord is one Spirit with Him. Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s."
Temple of God
In 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 we read, "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are." We also know that this Spirit of Jesus comes to dwell in us when we make a decision that Jesus Christ is Lord and invite him into our lives. So, our bodies are the dwelling place of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And they are therefore a temple. We see very clearly in 1 Corinthians 6:15-20 that if a man joins his body to a harlot, he becomes one with her, one flesh with her; the Temple of God is joined to a harlot. By extension, when a man joins himself to his wife in marriage, and we have seen previously that marriage is the act of sexual intercourse, the two of them become one and therefore she becomes part of the Temple of the Holy Spirit, which is her husband. I am not saying that the Holy Spirit does not dwell in her also, but there is an anointing on the two of them, or in the husband and his wives. If there is more than one wife, there is an anointing on them which is very special. It has no parallel in any other area of life and it makes that marriage an entity in the Sight of God. It makes it a spiritual powerhouse and it brings about an anointing on that marriage and an anointing on that couple, provided that the wife is in submission.
If the wife is not in submission, if she is in rebellion, if she is striving and fighting with her husband, or if she is tearing her house down, then that spirit is anti-anointing. It is anti-Christ. It is attacking the anointing on her husband, and it is undermining the entire family. In the same way, a wife that is in submission and lifts her husband up is a pillar in the house of her husband, prays for him, intercedes for him, works with him and is enthusiastic about his ministry and his calling, and does everything she can to help him succeed, for his house, her house and for the family to succeed. She will help him to draw closer to God. She will help him to draw in the fullness of the anointing. As we have seen before, a woman has enormous responsibility in terms of her husband's walk and the walk of her family. She can break down or she can build up her family.
Demons
It is really important that we understand that in the context of this teaching on marriage, there is a very special anointing on marriage of a situation where a husband and wife walk in complete harmony and agreement. In understanding the issues around the Temple of the Holy Spirit and Demons, I would like to refer to 2 Chronicles Chapters 29 and 30, which give us a very interesting parallel. It is a parallel that the Lord had shown me repeatedly over the last few years. We see there that the Temple... Well, before we look at that, as I said, the body is the Temple of God. It is the Temple of the Holy Spirit. It is the Temple of Jesus. Demons on the other hand, as we have seen in the previous teachings, can oppress the flesh. We can have Demons of pride, lust, evil concupiscence, viciousness, and any number of different Demons oppressing our flesh. Those then become resident on and around, and to a point in the Temple of the Holy Spirit, which is our bodies. And before we can come to a place for holiness and sanctification, those Demons need to be cast out.
We also need to realise that in Old Testament times, and even today in areas of Africa, etc., where full-blown idolatry with carved idols is still practiced, frequently through that idolatry Demons gain a legal right to take residents around an idol and so supernatural events can happen around physical idols. Therefore, the idols that were transferred or taken into the Temple in Jerusalem and we are about to read about were effectively an included Demons.
It is also important to understand in this whole context that even though we have Demons oppressing our flesh, this does not mean that we cannot be anointed, that we cannot serve God. It is a deception to believe that unless you are completely free of Demons, you won't manifest the anointing of the Holy Spirit. That is not the case. Very few Christians today are completely free of Demons, but as we see in the Old Testament, it was only after massive apostasy, massive idolatry and massive defilement of the Temple compound, the Temple, and even the holy of holies where they eventually put an idol in there that the Holy Spirit eventually left the Temple of Jerusalem. That is described in some detail, I think, in Ezekiel. By the same token, when we come to salvation, we come to salvation bringing a whole bunch of Demons with us and we must understand it is not possible to minister deliverance to an unbeliever. They do not have any faith. They are serving Satan.
So, to suggest that deliverance is something that only applies to unbelievers is completely mistaken. By the same token, the day that we come to salvation, we come to salvation with a whole bunch of Demons and unless we are radically saved under a massive anointing, in which message massive deliverance takes place, generally deliverance will be a process. Apart from anything else, the day we come to salvation, we do not have enough knowledge of the Word of God, we are not living righteously enough, and we are not insufficiently sanctified to have the capacity to resist Demons that seek to return. And the Word of God says that when Demons are cast out, he will go and seek seven others to come and help take occupation of that house.
So, we have to cast the Demons out of ourselves a little at a time as we grow in Christ. If we do not grow in Christ, we will never get free of the Demons. Conversely when we have grown in Christ to a significant degree, we will eventually, God-willing, get free of most, if not all, of our Demons, but we need to understand the anointing of the Holy Spirit is available to us even while we are demonised. We cannot assume that the manifestation of the Holy Spirit through us even in significant miracles of healing, deliverance, words of knowledge, prophecy is any indication that we are free of Demons. If we believe that for a minute, we are falling into great deception and we are likely to start moving in counterfeit miracles, counterfeit tongues and other false demonic manifestations, the moment we cease to be aware of the fact that we can be demonised. It is my personal opinion that there is probably not a single human being on this Earth today who does not have some Demons and I say that with respect to all Christians.
I think it is highly unlikely that there are very many Christians today who have no Demons. If they were, I think we would be seeing the Spirit moving more powerfully, but I suppose that my comment is not totally true. I think that it is possible that there are a few Christians who are quite possibly very low profile, not known in the public eye, who have really laid down their lives and sanctified themselves and are free of Demons. But given the seemingly relatively limited knowledge in this field today, I would count that as a relatively improbable situation and say it is limited to very few people. That is not to say that in these last days as we are living leading into all truth, that we should not aspire to be free. I certainly aspire to reach a point where my flesh is completely free of Demons, but I know as I speak to you today that that is not the case. My faith is out to be set free, and I pray that it will happen shortly.
But again, I keep finding every time I think that I am free, there is a deeper level of manifestation that keeps coming. Also, we pick stuff up. If we backslide a bit, we are likely to have stuff come back and affect us. It is all interrelated and I think that is the point that I am seeking to make today. And that is what this teaching is about. It is going to be more of these issues around this subject. We turn to 2 Chronicles 29 and just read selected verses. Verses 1-2, "Hezekiah became king when he was twenty-five years old, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abijah, the daughter of Zechariah, and he did what was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father David had done."
Godly parents
It is important to note and it is something that I have not studied out in detail, but if you read through Kings and Chronicles and to a point, Samuel, you will find that in almost all cases where there is a good king, his mother was the daughter of a priest, or a daughter of a godly man, and that she raised him in the ways of the Lord. If you find there is an evil king or a wicked king, almost always you will find that his mother was of the house of Ahab or was an unbeliever, a Canaanite or an Egyptian, and there appears to be a very strong correlation. A godly mother will have godly children, and an ungodly mother will have ungodly children.
A man who marries an ungodly woman, brings a curse on his family. He opens his children up to being instructed in the wrong ways, and led astray and being affected by the Demons. A man who marries a godly woman will find that his children are taught the ways of God or instructed by his wife and they are likely to grow up as godly adults. It is a really important conclusion, and it again reinforces just how absolutely vital it is that a man marries a believing woman who is committed to serving God with all her heart, mind, soul and strength and obviously the reverse applies, but I have stressed that previously. Men do not make the mistake of marrying women because you are attracted to them, or for some other reason, and then discover that there are not committed to serving God. It is vital that you check out any prospective wife and make sure that she is willing to commit herself to serving God to at least the same, or greater extent that you are.
Continuing with verse 3 and before I do that, I just want to make this point. I would ask you to listen and read this particular verse of Scripture from the point of view of, this is a shadow and the type of what we need to do to our own bodies, to get them cleansed of demonic oppression. That is the context of this teaching today to see the principles that are contained and apply this also to marriage. It is part of the journey that is required to reach Heaven on Earth in marriage. Verse 3, "In the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of the Lord and repaired them. Then he brought in the priests and the Levites, and gathered them in the East Square, and said to them: 'Hear me, Levites! Now sanctify yourselves, sanctify the house of the Lord God of your fathers, and carry out the rubbish from the holy place. For our fathers have trespassed and done evil in the eyes of the Lord our God; they have forsaken Him, have turned their faces away from the dwelling place of the Lord, and turned their backs on Him."
Sanctification
If I could paraphrase the fifth verse at the end to say, hear me husbands, now sanctify yourself, sanctify the house of the Holy Spirit and carry out the rubbish from the holy place. I really believe that this is the Word of the Lord for all Christians today, but particularly to men who are married. Sanctify your house, carry out the rubbish, and get rid of all the squalid, carnal, worldly dirt, filth and false doctrine in yourself, in your wife, in your children, and sanctify yourself. If you will sanctify yourself, we have seen that you will draw close to God, you will experience the anointing of God, you will experience the miracles of God and if you will do that with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, you will experience a marriage which is dynamic and actually a blessing to you.
Skipping to verse 9, "For indeed, because of this our fathers have fallen by the sword; and our sons, our daughters, and our wives are in captivity. Now it is in my heart to make a Covenant with the Lord God of Israel, that His fierce wrath may turn away from us. My sons, do not be negligent now, for the Lord has chosen you to stand before Him, to serve Him, and that you should minister to Him and burn incense." And again, to paraphrase, verse 9 in particular, our sons, our daughters, our wives, and in fact ourselves are in captivity to Demons in this age. As I said before, I think virtually every Christians on this planet right now is demonised. If you are experiencing funny feelings, sensations that make you feel uncomfortable as I am giving you this message, I would encourage you to recognise that that is quite possibly demonic manifestation that is seeking you to draw you away from this teaching.
In fact, let’s just pray right now, "Father in the name of Jesus, I speak to every Demon and fallen Angel that can hear this message in the name of Jesus, I bind you now, I command you to go down and be silent until this message has been completed, in the name of Jesus. Father in the name of Jesus, I ask You to send your mighty warring Angels to blind and silence every Demon and fallen Angel that is within hearing distance of this message. Father, I ask You to instruct your Angels to close the eyes of those Demons and to close the ears of those Demons so they will be absolutely ignorant of what is being taught here, and I thank You that those Angels will bind those Demons from any way of tormenting, harassing, misleading, or distracting those people who are listening to this message in the name of Jesus. Father I ask You to cover myself, my wife, my family with the blood of Jesus from the top of our heads to the soles of our feet and to cover every one of the people listening to this message from the top of their heads to the soles of their feet, their husband, their wives, their children, their immediate family with the blood of Jesus that now harm or befall them. Father I thank You from ministering deliverance, I thank You for the revelation on the people who listen to this message in Jesus’ name."
Covenants
To return to the teaching, verse 10, I would encourage every man who listens to this teaching to take to heart this verse, "Now it is in my heart to make a Covenant with the Lord God of Israel, that His fierce wrath may turn away from us." I would encourage you to make a formal Covenant with the Lord God of Israel to sanctify your family to the service of God. In fact, I would like to pray with you right now and if you feel able to agree with me, I would ask you and encourage you to pray with me right now in the name of Jesus. I ask you just to stand, every man listening to this tape, and raise your right hand before God and say, “Father, I come to You in the name of Jesus and before the Angels and all the witnesses of Heaven, I declare my intention to make a Covenant with You, I Covenant with You today, I give You my family, I give You my wife and my children and I declare before God today that we Covenant to do what you have called us to do. We Covenant to come into a place where our marriages are Heaven on Earth. We Covenant before You today Lord God to do what it takes to sanctify our families, to sanctify our houses in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we ask You right now Father, in the name of Jesus by your Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us into all the truth that we require in order to accomplish that which we have declared right now, and we thank You that You will open the doors that need to be opened, that no man may close, and close the doors that need to be closed, that no man may open them, that You will bring the people into our lives that You want in, and take the people that You do not want in our lives out, in such that we may walk in the Covenant that we have just made with You in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” I would encourage you to take communion over that vow after this teaching is over.
So again, "My sons, do not be negligent now, for the Lord has chosen you to stand before Him, to serve Him, and that you should minister to Him and burn incense." I would encourage you, as you listen to this, to realise this is a truth that is only now being revealed in the world. It has been hidden for hundreds of years as you see in the teaching on the history of marriage and the Church. God is calling you to step out and do something for Him in a mighty way. From verse 16-20, "Then the priests went into the inner part of the house of the Lord to cleanse it and brought out all the debris that they found in the temple of the Lord to the court of the house of the Lord. And the Levites took it out and carried it to the Brook Kidron." Husbands are the priests of the family, go into the inner part of your house, seek out those things which are defilement in your heart and your wife's heart and the hearts of your children and carry them out that they may be utterly destroyed.
"Now they began to sanctify on the first day of the first month, and on the eighth day of the month they came to the vestibule of the Lord. So, they sanctified the house of the Lord in eight days, and on the sixteenth day of the first month they finished. Then they went in to King Hezekiah and said, 'We have cleansed all the house of the Lord, the altar of burnt offerings with all its articles, and the table of the showbread with all its articles. Moreover, all the articles which King Ahaz in his reign had cast aside in his transgression we have prepared and sanctified; and there they are, before the altar of the Lord.' Then King Hezekiah rose early, gathered the rulers of the city, and went up to the house of the Lord."
Sacrifice, praise and worship
Verse 22, "So they killed the bulls, and the priests received the blood and sprinkled it on the altar." So, we see that a sacrifice was brought. And Jesus is our sacrifice. We need to take communion over this. We need to really take this seriously. Going to verse 26-31, "The Levites stood with the instruments of David, and the priests with the trumpets. Then Hezekiah commanded them to offer the burnt offering on the altar. And when the burnt offering began, the song of the Lord also began, with the trumpets and with the instruments of David king of Israel. So, all the assembly worshiped, the singers sang, and the trumpeters sounded; all this continued until the burnt offering was finished. And when they had finished offering, the king and all who were present with him, bowed and worshiped. Moreover, King Hezekiah and the leaders commanded the Levites to sing praise to the Lord with the words of David and of Asaph the seer. So, they sang praises with gladness, and they bowed their heads and worshiped.
Then Hezekiah answered and said, 'Now that you have consecrated yourselves to the Lord, come near, and bring sacrifices and thank offerings into the house of the Lord.' So, the assembly brought in sacrifices and thank offerings, and as many as were of a willing heart brought burnt offerings." We need to praise God in our families. We need to bring ourselves to a place where our families are pleasing, where the prayer that comes out of them is sweet incense. We need to see the lovemaking between husband and wife as a sacrifice of worship and praise between husband and wife. This is the most intimate, personal, and it is the most heavenly thing on Earth, and it must be treated accordingly. It must be treated with reverence, but it must be treated with exuberant joy the way the Scriptures tell us to praise and worship, and we should praise God in your lovemaking. Husbands and wives give your all to praising God in your lovemaking. Give all that you have to one another. Lovemaking is not about taking, it is about giving.
Verse 36, "Then Hezekiah and all the people rejoiced that God had prepared the people, since the events took place so suddenly." Subsequently, Hezekiah invites all the people of Israel to attend, some come, some do not come, and they held a Passover feast. 2 Chronicles 30:25-27, "The whole assembly of Judah rejoiced, also the priests and Levites, all the assembly that came from Israel, the sojourners who came from the land of Israel, and those who dwelt in Judah. So, there was great joy in Jerusalem, for since the time of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel, there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem. Then the priests and the Levites arose and blessed the people, and their voice was heard; and their prayer came up to His holy dwelling place, to Heaven."
We have seen previously that Jerusalem is a shadow and a type of the spiritual Spirit-filled obedient Church, the bride of Christ. So, I would suggest to you that there will be great joy in Jerusalem if they will sanctify themselves. I will also suggest to you that if we do not do what we have to do, to bring our marriages into that place of holiness and sanctification, we will be hard put to be in a place where we can serve God fully through the tribulation which is to come.
God’s form of marriage
We turn now to 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 and I just want to give you a few more principles in Scriptures before we go on with the more specific teaching. "And He (Jesus) said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore, most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong." We must be weak to receive the anointing in our lives and our marriages. Our marriages must seem weak to the world. We are not called to compete with the world. Our women are not called to be brazen, outgoing and harlot-like in their dress and their conduct in the way of the world. They are called to be modest and discreet. They are called to submit to their husbands. Their husbands are not called to be arrogant, overweening and overbearing. They are called to be meek, gentle and humble, and to walk in the love of God.
That is something that the world does not understand, it does not find it attractive. So, if you are looking at the picture that I keep alluding to Heaven on Earth in marriage, you have to turn away from any frame of reference that you have out of the world today. I am not aware of anywhere where you can go right now today and see God's form of marriage in all its glory. I have seen glimpses of it in a few people. I have seen some of it in Malawi where the wives are still in gentle submission to their husbands, and where some of the pastors and apostles walk in considerable degree of humility. But overall, I cannot say to you go to such an address and meet such a man and his family, and you will see God's form of marriage. We have a way to go. I do not know what the duration of that is, but we have a way to go. It is a journey, but it is a time still before in my experience and my observation, in terms of what I believe that the Lord is saying to me, that I think that you will be able to see Heaven on Earth in marriage in anybody around you. That does not mean that you should not seek to get there. To love God is to seek to do what He has called us to do and the Word of God says that when the Church comes into unity, then the world will know that Jesus came from the Father.
Until we come into unity in marriage, we will not even begin to understand what is required to come into unity in the Body of Christ, even in the local congregation, let alone in a suburban area where there might be 5 or 10 different denominations. We are currently attending Church at a small congregation in North of Pretoria and within the ambit of a couple of city blocks, there must be somewhere between 6 and 12 different Churches, all of which meet on their own premises with her own building every Sunday morning.
One last Scripture, 2 Corinthians 10:3-7, "For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled. Do you look at things according to the outward appearance? If anyone is convinced in himself that he is Christ’s, let him again consider this in himself, that just as he is Christ’s, even so we are Christ’s."
Heaven on Earth
Absolutely vital - we are told repeatedly in Scripture, do not look to the things that are seen. The picture that I see is powerful and it is a spiritual picture. I made the point repeatedly, sexual lovemaking in marriage is not a physical thing. It happens to have a physical dimension, but it is a powerful spiritual act. A man and a woman who give themselves totally to one another, who unite totally with one another, become totally one with one another, one flesh, one spirit, one heart, in complete unity and harmony, singing the same song, from the same song book, to the same tune, in the same key, in perfect harmony. That is not something you see with your natural eye, it is something that you see in the Spirit. You may ultimately see the manifestation with your natural eye, but you will not see what goes on in the privacy of the bedroom. That is where that One Flesh house is brought in the privacy of the bedroom, in the worship, and reverent, passionate and giving act of lovemaking between a husband and a wife, who are totally committed to one another, who are totally committed to serving God, who have no hang-ups and no religious views on their sexuality, but see it as a gift from God in which they can experience some dimensions of Heaven on Earth.
And please do not hear me say that the sexual act is the Heaven on Earth that I am talking about. It is very definitely a component of the Heaven on Earth. Without it, there will not be Heaven on Earth in your marriage, if you do not build a solid and robust spiritual house, a One Flesh house which can only come about through complete sexual union. You will not have Heaven on Earth in your marriage if you have a religious view of sex. If you think it is something carnal and dirty, then I have to say you, please think again. That is not what it is. It is a beautiful, sublime spiritual act. It is the melding together of the hearts of two people. It is the building of 1 Corinthians 13, love within the marriage, if you will hear me.
Casting down arguments in every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. We have had teachings about words. I would just suggest to you a very simple prayer to deal with vain imaginations and thoughts that keep troubling you. You can speak to your mind as you can speak to anything else in the name of Jesus, and it has to take note of what you say. The name of Jesus is the name above all names. At the end of the day, every knee you will bow, every tongue you will confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord. So, at the name of Jesus, every knee must bow, you can pray, and you can speak to those thoughts, and you can bind up the thoughts.
So, if you are being troubled by thoughts, you can pray a prayer along the following pattern: "Father I come to You in the name of Jesus and I thank You that Your Word says that the name of Jesus is the name above all names. And I speak to You in mind, in the name of Jesus. I speak to those thoughts about whatever the thought may be about. I speak to those thoughts now in the name of Jesus. I bind them in the name of Jesus. I speak to any Demon that is implanting those thoughts in me, I bind you and I command you listening now and go to The Pit for 1000 years in Jesus’ name. And I speak to you mind in the name of Jesus, I command you to bow your knee to the name of Jesus and I command you to cease and desist from thinking those thoughts." You are to give no attention to those thoughts in future in Jesus name. Bow your knee now to the name of Jesus. "Father I thank you by the Spirit of God that dwells in me by the Holy Spirit that dwells in me, those thoughts are brought captive and into subjection to the name of the Lord Jesus Christ."
You may find that you have to pray that prayer on a fairly regular basis to deal with thoughts in certain areas if you are troubled by for argument sake, carnal lust towards a woman who is not your wife, if you are a man, or to a man who is not your husband. It may take some time to bring your mind into full subjection to the Word of God, but you need to keep doing it. You need to keep praying that prayer. If there is demonic activity behind it, you may well not get free just with the simple prayer that I have just prayed with you. You may need to go further. In fact, you probably will need to go further.
We have gone through, in the previous teachings, various things roundabout the flesh, words, and so forth. I would encourage you to realise that is an ongoing process. Realistically, if you truly seek to experience Heaven on Earth in your marriage, you may well find that you need to cycle through this entire set of 40 tapes, maybe once a year with your spouse, over the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years, before you have dealt with all of those things. As I said before, I have been praying into the stuff for nearly 6 years now just to get to a point where I feel able to present, for the first time, a comprehensive teaching on the subject which I believe covers most, if not all, items of significance, but which I realise is still just the framework of the broad structural outline of the teaching which is extremely far-reaching and extremely deep and where every tape in the series can potentially be exploded into 10, 15, 20 further tapes going in-depth into that particular subject. So, I would encourage you to revisit many of the tapes in the series, particularly the more practical ones which deal with fundamental principles.
I am now going to go through some of the headlines out of [inaudible 00:36:39] manual on study of deliverance. I am not going to go into a lot of detail, but I just want to pick up just a few other thoughts and a few other things that come up. As I said, Carol can be contacted at Carol@netactive.co.za, Johannesburg 4761566. We have listened to the tape on the first lesson, “Can Christians have Demons?” The second lesson is entitled ‑ 'Doorways to Demonic Infiltration Inheritance' and it goes through things which are passed down through the generations. It is important to understand if your grandparents have sinned, those things can get passed on to you. We see that because of David's sin with regards to the murder of Uriah, the Hittite, there was violence passed down through his bloodline for many, many generations, and that is a demonic thing. Under the New Covenant, we have a basis to cut these things off. We need to be aware of that. Familial ancestral and familial spirits are passed from generation to generation. These relate to things like ancestor worship and so forth, but they occur just as much in Western society, and in Western Christians.
Freemasonry and witchcraft
Freemasonry a major issue, if you come from any of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant countries, in particular, but also if you come from catholic background as well, freemasonry may be significant. Freemasonry in its more deep-seated, more secretive areas is closely allied with witchcraft and various other things. The oaths that are taken in freemasonry or blood oaths are against Scripture and they bring serious curses on the people who take them, on their families and down through the generations. All sorts of manifestations in your life may be attributable to freemasonry, not necessarily in your generation or your father's generation but going back to 5-10 generations and the same with witchcraft.
In the middle and in the dark ages, witchcraft was extremely prevalent. There are reports and an instance of a woman in her 20s who tried to throw herself off a bridge and commit suicide, and during the exorcism that followed, it was identified that 13 generations ago in a Satanic rite, the firstborn of the 13th generation had been dedicated to Satan at a particular age and she was that person. And this Demon had just walked down the bloodline following the firstborn child until it was her time and he tried to kill her, but because she was a born-again believer, certain things happened which prevented her from being killed, and she was subsequently delivered. We do not understand the magnitude of what can happen with curses and blessings. Words are extremely, extremely powerful. If you curse somebody, if you swear at somebody, if you tell somebody to go to hell, as we have heard in the teaching by Kenneth Copeland, those words have weight and they have authority. If you are born-again believer, they carry more authority. If you are an anointed man of God, they carry more authority. We dare not play games with words. We will be judged for every word that we speak that is an idle, unproductive or a destructive word.
Speak the truth in love, and no more and no less. Let your yes be yes, and your no be no. The world has such a loose attitude to words, and it is another area where Satan has us completely messed up. Recognise these things. Curses can be cut off, bloodline issues can be pronounced, ungodly vows that you may have taken before you knew what you are doing, may be renounced. There was a teaching earlier on some of the issues there. Curses may come on you from God because of sin. It is important to understand that. Understand that agents of Satan, which is [inaudible 00:41:18] and Satanists have lists of anointed people of God and curse them regularly. Those curses can be returned and under certain circumstances they can be returned a thousand-fold, or you can ask the Lord to return in a thousand-fold. There are different views on that, but it is possible.
Lesson 3 deals with doorways to demonic infiltration and occult infiltration
It relates to occult involvement and it may not be in your generation. The occult is that which is hidden, or the act of hiding something. It is not something that’s mystical. The occult gets into all sorts of mystical things. Idolatry - there are various branches of the occult, witchcraft, acupuncture, divination, homoeopathy, alchemy, astrology, kabala, sorcery, and all different forms of the occult. These bring about all sorts of things such as manifestations, violent tempers, anger, hatred, cursing, loose self restrain, nervous disorders, fears, recurring accidents, difficulty in receiving the Gospel, rebellion against all authorities, resistance towards God's word and can all have roots in occult involvement, not necessarily in yours, your parents, or your grandparents. Abnormal sexual behaviour in children, mental problems, and all sorts of things are dealt with in this manual.
Satan is going into the Church of Satan, and so forth. Organised, self-styled occultism, and all sorts of techniques are used. The use of symbols like the pentagram and so forth, inverted crosses, and the ankh, which looks like a T with a loop on the top of it, occurs widely in Egyptian symbology. Many people are administered once in a case where a family had been burgled and the born-again believers and the daughter had been given an Ankh on a chain, and the Lord said I cannot protect her as long as she is in possession of that Ankh. These seem to be trivial things, but they can play absolute havoc in your life. If you have ungodly jewellery which has ungodly signs, a peace sign, pentagrams, all sorts of things and ministered in the case of a family that were going through hell on Earth and they have been given just as little casual gifts, at a wedding celebration that was attended, it was not even their own wedding, two little carved Central African dolls and these were shown by the Holy Spirit to be demonically infested. They battled greatly to burn these things. Eventually they applied the blood that bound the Demons attached to them, bound them and told them to leave. Eventually these artefacts were burnt and immediately their lives turned around. These things are powerful. We do not understand how powerful they are.
Lesson 4 - Doorways to demonic infiltration, rebellion, and witchcraft
Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. We read in 1 Samuel 15:20, King Saul was rejected from being king over Israel because he listened to the people. He did not listen to God and rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and as we have seen rebellion, treachery is the basis for a man to divorce his wife - pornea, treachery, adultery, and betrayal. So, we see this ties into Jezebel, who is associated with witchcraft, women who betray their husbands, and break the marriages, in the same say that when we betray Jesus, in extreme case, we eventually lose our salvation. There are many things that relate to rebellion and can lead to addictions, overeating, stubbornness, and manipulation. There are all sorts of forms of manipulation and many of those forms of manipulation are widely effectively taught and practised by women in the Western world today. Cages and lay lines it is possible for [inaudible 00:45:51] and witches to use symbology to put a family into bondage. Catholicism carries certain things with it. The crucifix is not a Christian symbol.
Wicker, the witches organisation, Jezebel
I just want to read a passage here with regards to Jezebel. The Jezebel spirit is a controlling, manipulative and seducing spirit. Being a power spirit, its aim is to destroy the Prophet of God, emasculate the priests of God and uproot the true worship of the Lord Jesus Christ. It also introduces idolatry in the home, Church, and the nation. The spirit of Jezebel enters a family situational wherever God's order of authority is not known or ignored.
God's order is simple. The authority of man is Christ, the authority of woman is man, and the authority of Christ is God. 1 Corinthians 11:3, Isaiah 3:12, is the result of a woman in control of a chaotic nation [inaudible 00:46:55] Jezebel on the family. Jezebel seeks to usurp the authority of the husband in the marriage and Christ in the family. And that is why these teachings are so important, and that is why the latter part of this teaching refers to Jezebel. Until Jezebel is dethroned in your family, you will not come close to God and you will not experience Heaven on Earth. You will experience Hell on Earth.
The abusive authority is to take authority by illegal means of manipulation or domination, or to function in the realm of authority that God did not delegate. It operates to confuse the proper roles of men and women. 1 Kings 16, Ahab abdicates authority and Jezebel usurps it. Again, the so-called helpless woman who cannot do anything for herself, who needs her husband to help her, and is constantly bristling into tears, that is manipulation, and that is control. Women are designed by God to be helpless to man. They are strong, they are capable of many of the things that men are capable of, and they are capable of things which men are not capable of. They are not second-rate citizens. They are not weak things to be put in a glass case and put on display. They are human beings with capacity to add value.
The Ahab spirit causes a man to forsake his responsibilities as the head of the household. He will refuse to take the spiritual leadership and often will not take responsibility for working to make a living for his wife and children. The man must provide both spiritual and material security for his family. He cannot or will not God be displeased. Men like this are drawn to Jezebel women because they appear tough and hard. When a woman is forced into headship of the family, she is put in a position for which God has not fitted her in body, soul, and Spirit. 1 Peter 3:7 clearly states that she is a weaker vessel. When you have a weak husband, an earthly and natural reaction is to take authority for necessity because she is not designed mentally, physically, or spiritually to wield authority. Her actions soon become sensual. A woman's limitations force her to connive and manipulate to control, so she resorts to tears, anger, parting, or illness. In the area of the disciplining of children, the Jezebel influence is often noticeable. Bribery, manipulation, and trickery are used to obtain obedience.
Proverbs 22:5, take the rod. Strong emotions, fits of rage, storms of weeping - the family comes under a controlled spirit. Days, weeks of cruel violence, [inaudible 00:49:43], children will live in constant tension, stress, insecurity, frustration and fear. They will either become rebellious or turn inward and become nothings and nobodies without character. When their sons marry, they bring this into their hands and will try to suppress their wives personalities, where they develop an Ahab spirit which is passive with the rebellion. Jezebel builds an attitude of derision towards the father. Sons turn to homosexuality and daughters are inclined to take the same Jezebel spirit into their hands when they marry.
Businesses can also be invaded by the spirit of Jezebel. Manipulation, occultic practices, handwriting analysis, and ESP, etc. Entire Church congregations can come under the domination of the few families. They will try to dictate. There will be soul-less prophecies, charismatic fortune telling, and the teacher or pastor will be gaining followers for himself rather than pointing to centring on Jesus. So, Jezebel takes our eyes off Jesus. She takes perverts and upturns the whole godly order in marriage. The person driven by the Jezebel spirit can be recognised, motivated and driven by dominance controlling others with anger, hatred and violence, not meekness and wisdom. They have the inability to delegate responsibility. They interfere and hinder, often doing the work themselves, and successfully demonstrating incompetence in others. They are driven to control. They dominate and wrench the lives of all those close to them. Those around them are on edge and are nervous. She parades under a cover of good [inaudible 00:51:14] and religion. She usually has perversion of some kind and usually suffers from lustful thoughts or desires and passes her sexual oppresses on to her children.
If they cannot control, they will use their husbands as their mouthpiece. The woman does not have to be loud and rowdy. She can appear to be meek and mild, and totally helpless, but under that there is a fist of iron pushing, pulling, and manipulating. If all of this does not work, they fake illness which opens the door to spread of infirmity and they end up with long illnesses. A man who is not controlled by an Ahab spirit, who mistakenly marries a woman of Jezebel spirit, will either find himself being dominated and manipulated by her and eventually becoming a victim of an Ahab spirit, or there would just be ongoing strife and division in that marriage. A man will take whatever protective measures he can to protect himself, but eventually the marriage will fail. This is what happened in my own marriage. Eventually it was a case of an immovable object and the unstoppable force, or whatever is the correct example, is that eventually something has to give. Eventually the woman in this case turned and refused to obey the Lord Jesus Christ to a point where he eventually turned his back on her and walked away. At that point shortly after that, he told me to get out of the marriage. It is a tragic thing to love a woman for 25 years and then see her come to a place where her rebellion causes the Lord Jesus to turn his back on her, and in the process, for the Lord to reveal the treachery beyond anything that you could have possibly thought was happening.
For those who are not married, take care in selecting your marriage partners. Only the Spirit of God knows what is in the heart. Do not choose your partners. Jezebel women are often fiery and they are attractive. The world system tells you that a Jezebel wife is a good wife to have. The effect of an attack by the spirit of a victim under Jezebel, will become crippled, will be dealt confusion, and tormented by fears, and will eventually become so indecisive that they will have difficulty making the simplest decision. They will display doubts and oppression which will keep them immature and weak. Children will need to be set free from the matriarchal spirit. When around these people, you will feel a heaviness and oppression especially in the mind. Discussions or arguments with Jezebel will drain you. Even if you win, you will find that you have lost because you end up empty, broken, and discouraged. The spirit affects men and women, but the worst extremes are found in women. If your husband is not taking his place, be and do rather than talk the way of God. It’s really important for wives who are married to men, who are not what they would like them to be.
Do not resort to the acts of Jezebel to try and control and compensate for your husband. You will open yourself to Jezebel. And Jezebel operates in men in opposition to Christian fellowship, belittles Christian things, derides them, prevents wife from attending Church meetings. Gives no freedom of choice to the wife. Breaks down the wife by [inaudible 00:54:26] she tells him. Belittles the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional capacity. When Jezebel operates over a leadership, unbalanced shepherding doctrine, demanding submission, unbalanced teaching, presenting palatable more present aspects, those [inaudible 00:54:42] to self, self images were important. Seduction, diversions from the full truth of the word. Isaiah 3:12 Jezebel kills the prophets. So, we go. I am not going to read more at this stage, but it is an enormous amount about Jezebel. I will come back to that, God-willing, in a few minutes.
Lesson 5 - Doorways to demonic infiltration and sexual sin
Just a brief extract from that. "Sexual intercourse is not an evil thing in the frame of reference intended by God. It becomes a spiritual and sexual experience and is meant to fulfil both man and woman to the highest degree. Procreation of children is a blessed by-product, but it is by no means the only reason for sex," 1 Corinthians 7:5. A marital act should be overshadowed by a sense of holiness, of wholesome refreshment and fulfilment. It should be a joyous sharing of touch and excitement. God created man and woman to enjoy each other intimately.
Proverbs 5:18, "Let your fountain be blessed." The problem occurs in marriage when one partner asks or demands more from the spouse, then wholesome cherish and love. This usually occurs more in men and women because of society's influences. Man will lust after his wife. This lust will express itself in a strong masculine sex drive with selfishness and a brutal indifference to his wife's [inaudible 00:56:09]. Marriage breaking spirits move in. A woman will sense this lust and be offended by it. She will feel that her husband [inaudible 00:56:19] to be exploited and used entirely for his pleasure. She is left wounded and unsatisfied, often feeling unclean and of no value to her spouse. Eventually, this will lead to a distaste towards any sexual contact with her husband. This in turns frustrates and angers the husband and who feels rejected by his wife's passive or active rejection to his advances.
We need to be aware of this problem. It is better to give than to receive. Lust is when we use another for self gratification. Love gives, lust takes. When a woman has been abused sexually, she can often carry a hatred for men into her marriage. She will be unable to share intimacy or be fulfilled, for fear of condemnation. An understanding husband is needed to bring her through this. Many people today are unaware of or are indifferent to the condemnation God's Word brings against all sexual perversion. It goes on and there is a whole section on the things that comes as a result of sexual sin, adultery, evil concupiscence, pornography, curses, soul ties, all sorts of things. Demonic soul ties, which come about through ungodly sexual intercourse, incubi and succubi spirits, Demons that have sexual intercourse with men and women, all things that affect in the demonic realm.
Rejection, the healing of bruises and wounds
Rejection is a major issue in the world today, and it can produce all sorts of unpredictable behaviour until the roots of rejection are dealt with in a person that have great difficulty walking in a whole and complete relationship. Rejection can come about at birth, it can come about through a child with a failed abortion, and it can come about through a child who is spoken about in certain ways by parents even when they are very young. Words carry enormous impact. Perfection may come out of a desire to avoid being rejected.
Seventh lesson
Fear, pride and mind control in other strong men, we see in Scripture. God has not given us a spirit of fear. Fear is sin. Fear is faith in Satan. We see this clearly in the case of Job. It was Job's fear of what could happen that opened the door for Satan to attack him. Fear is about the flesh. Fear and pride are closely associated. They are both to deal with fear of man, and it brings about pride. Pride is an awareness of what people think rather than what God thinks. This is why they drive people away from God. It was fear of man that lead Saul to disobey God. All of these demonic manifestations are closely allied. Things like yoga, etc., and karate all involve things which open the door to demonic infestation. As a counterpoint to this, we have already seen that Jesus gives his disciples authority to cast out Demons. We need to understand our authority, and we saw that very clearly in the teaching yesterday. To minister deliverance, we need to come into a place where we are close to God and we are doing what God shows us, not leaning to our own understanding.
We need to understand the power and the authority of the name of Jesus and use that effectively. We need to understand the blood of Jesus and use that effectively. We need to cover ourselves with that. We need to understand the power of the Word of God. The Word of God is sharper than the two-edged sword, and we must use it as the offensive aspect of spiritual warfare to cut down and tear down principalities and powers. Agreement brings boldness. Again, we see the context of agreement in every area. A husband and wife in agreement will be in a far better place to tear down principalities, powers and strongholds operating in their lives and demonic infestation.
Love
We keep coming back to that word. It’s so pivotal to marriage succeeding, and in fact, the Christian walk accomplishing what God has called us to do. Prayers are absolutely vital, praise and worship of God and praise within the family. The wife must adore, praise and esteem her husband. Fasting, from our own experience is an absolutely vital thing. Humbling the flesh, weeping before God, laughter and joy before God, music, prayer and intersession true faith, are all aspects of walking in the power and the anointing of God to set our families free, and to set other people free. It is incumbent on every person to seek the gifts to set our families free. We will not come into that high place that I keep referring to, that place of revelation of what God intended marriage to be unless we will lay down our lives, and unless we walk in the fullness of the gifts of the spirit.
Lesson 9 - Spiritual warfare
Note that Satan is extremely cruel and ruthless. He is a deceiver and has skills and a clever use of the lie. We get strategies out of Scripture, basic requirements, and we will need to know exactly where we stand in Christ and what we are called to do. We need to understand the principles. We need to understand that Jesus is interceding. We need to stand in the gap of those who are in bondage for them to be set free. An enormous amount and this is really just a sample as I said. Carol also has a set of 15 tapes on this manual and the manual [inaudible 01:02:39] to over 100 pages. She gives various prayers to deal with the renunciation of sexual sin, and so forth.
Prayer to untangle sexual bondages
I am going to share these prayers, just in case they have some relevance to some of the people listening to this tape. “Lord Jesus, I have been involved in sexual sin and I do now repent and confess to You that I have committed (you name specifically all of the sexual sins you can remember). I claim freedom from my body and mind from the bondage of sexual slavery and claim the promise that whosoever calls upon the Lord shall be delivered.”
Joel 2:32, “Lord you promised that if I confess my sin you will forgive my sin and cleanse me from all unrighteousness. I do now claim and accept your forgiveness and cleansing. Satan, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, and I am notifying you now that in His name, I am reclaiming every area of my mind and body, as formally given over to you and your hosts. Specifically, I claim freedom in cleansing in the areas of sexual sin and as a believer priest, I renounce you and your host and command that they leave me now in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”
There is a lengthy prayer for the renunciation of sexual sin. Space does not permit me to include that on this tape, but I would encourage you, if you have realised and listening to this tape, that you are not fully informed in the area of deliverance, that you consider the possibility that you could, to some extent, have Demons oppressing you. Please understand, when I suggest that a Christian has Demons, I am not trying to be ugly or insulting to them. I have made the point previously in the set of teachings. I am an engineer and engineering is about designing for success by engineering and against failure. Engineers do not learn how to design successful buildings, they learn how to design buildings that do not fail and a building that does not fail, is a successful building. They learn how to design aeroplanes that do not fall out of the sky. An aeroplane that does not fall out of the sky, stays in the sky. In the same way, in applying the principles of Scripture to marriage, it achieves nothing by talking at length about how wonderful we want our marriages to be. We have to focus on the factors that prevent our marriages from getting there. Once we have dealt with all the diagnostics, once we have gotten to the bottom of the real issues and why our marriages are not the way God intended them to be, we will have the marriages God intended us to have, if we systematically eliminate the weak links in the chain length of marriage. We will walk in power and authority and joy in marriage.
Jezebel and Satan
I want to go now back to the subject of Jezebel because Jezebel I believe is the principality that is truly behind a lot of what we have been talking about. It is the most vicious principality. Just to hear a few thoughts, in the sense one could almost say it seems to me certainly that Jezebel is Satan's wife. It is a feminist spirit that, from all that I have experienced, read and heard from others, it is the most vicious and ruthless. Again, refer to Jezebel Ahab in terms of the manner in which Jezebel just ruthlessly secured [inaudible 01:06:13] for Ahab by arranging a false trial and having the [inaudible 01:06:18]. We see in Scripture that even Ahab repented at one stage at the preaching of Elijah, and Ahab stood by while the prophets of Baal were slain after the miracle that God performed on Mount Carmel, and Elijah called down fire from Heaven, and that consumed the sacrifice and the [inaudible 01:06:39] and the prophets of Baal were killed. Yet, the very next day, Jezebel was threatened to take Elijah's life. Jezebel has seemingly no fear for God, and is absolutely ruthless. It would almost seem that Jezebel is to turn and to put her husband, Satan, on the throne of the world and to rule through him.
It is not daunted even by major victory, by man of God, as we saw with Elijah. She seeks to destroy the prophets of God and what better way than attacking them through their wives, marriages and through unmarried women, and general confusion of marriage doctrine. Jezebel knows that if she can attack women, if she can attack marriage, marriage will not succeed, and it really does seem to me that Satan uses Jezebel in the most effective way in marriage. Jezebel hates God's form of marriage. She hates women in submission. She is the principality behind woman's liberation and woman's rights, etc. She responds viciously to anything which threatens her hold on a person. You will never experience Heaven on Earth in your marriage while Jezebel sits on the throne of the heart of either spouse or oppresses their flesh at all. Jezebel and Ahab must be bound and cast out of your marriage. Again, at certain times, I have experienced feelings of anger, revulsion, and other feelings which you realise are not scriptural. While you listen to these teachings, there is a strong likelihood that some were involved in that, and that may be a Jezebel spirit.
Now, I want to turn to a book which is simply entitled Jezebel by [inaudible 01:08:22]. It is a book published by Sword Publications in South Africa, PO Box 735, [inaudible 01:08:28], South Africa. It is written by a husband and wife team, but I think the actual book itself was written by Hendrina. Their phone numbers as of the publication of the book, which was published in 1994, South Africa 0116468001, fax 4861640. Those numbers were valid a year or so ago. I have to confess that I have not checked them now. Again, I just want to go through the headlines of the book in the brief time that I have left for this teaching. Introduction is entitled 'That Whore Jezebel.' And I would ask you to see the correlation between that title, 'That Whore Jezebel' and the whoredoms in marriage that had been exposed in these teachings.
The statement was made in one of the teachings before this, that the Church at the moment, is a sullied whore in the Sight of God. A lot of that is attributable to Jezebel. Let me just read a few paragraphs out of the introduction here. In the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ to John, the Holy Spirit addresses seven Churches pointing out the good and bad in each. Woman of judgement of the evil is not removed and promising rewards of obedience and faithfulness. These are not merely actual historical Churches, but spiritual representations of the state of the Church. That woman Jezebel is not an actual physical person. She represents the spirit of unfathomed viciousness. There is not an area of our present society and life that is untouched by Jezebel. Its influence is devastatingly subtle. It insinuates itself into our thoughts and actions with such cunningness that most people are unaware it even exists, even though they abate suggestions and become instruments in its hands.
Jezebel is a power spirit that lusts for positions of authority. It destroys the prophets and emasculates the priests of God in the home, the Church and the nation. It is preparing the way for the rule of anti-Christ, and its known weapons are control, manipulation and false doctrine brought in the wings of seduction. The fact that the Lord Jesus Christ mentions it by name should alert us. This is no ordinary little Demon. We find it active over the centuries, but in its end times it appears to be unleashed with unprecedented destructive ability. We see the direct correlation between the level to which divorce is prevalent in the Church today and adultery and fornication. Please do not be deceived into thinking that the devil has no power. Satan is the God of this world system. The Holy Spirit established that fact after Jesus had defeated him and had been resurrected by the glory and power of God. Jesus himself told us that he (Satan) has power.
In Luke 10:19 he gives us authority over the power of the enemy. In Matthew 28:18, he states that all authority is given to Him in Heaven and in Earth. Jesus has conquered Satan and that is why we, in His name and by His power and authority, can do the same. However, Satan is still very much of being a power correlates and Acts 26:18 says that the Lord is sending him to turn gentiles from the power of Satan and to God. In [inaudible 01:12:06] the word expressly tells us that in the last days, the anti-Christ will come after working with Satan with all power, signs and lying wonders.
Revelation 13:2 says that the dragon, Satan, gives him his power. If you are allowed into thinking that your enemy is powerless, Satan will destroy you. And then just to pick up a few paragraphs going through the book, if you think that Jezebel is just another Demon with no power and no intelligence, you offer its attack no resistance whatsoever. You will be taken in and overwhelmed by it. In some many cases, submitting to one of the spirit's players seem so innocent and so harmless. Once you are aware of how it operates, you will have to make decisions that will be very hard on your flesh and you will have to undergo crucifying of self that is no longer popular in Church circles. But the Holy Spirit is calling on individuals to commit completely, totally, without reservation of any kind to be part of His end time remnant. Those who do so will be purged in the find. This is never a pleasant and enjoyable experience.
Chapter 1, recognising Jezebel. Jezebel works at many levels. It is impossible to deal thoroughly with all its aspects in a book of this scope. Our lives are directly most affected in two main areas, at home or at work, or where children are concerned at school. And the Lord, first started opening my eyes to the spirit. He began to explain its operation in the family, and first I thought that was the whole scope of its activity. I believe that its purpose was to destroy the husband-wife relationship. This would stop the two from becoming one, as God has purposed and made sure that the man never walks in the fullness of his anointing, about the priest in his home, as well as in his calling to the Church. If the men are not experienced in the fullness of the anointing God intends them to have, the Church is [inaudible 01:13:58]. It is full of holes and breaches and can never fulfil, in the nation, the role God has appointed for it. While this is true, it is only part of the Jezebel strategy and it is by no means the only spirit of activity.
Since we started teaching about this spirit, the Lord has been revealing many more aspects of its operation, some of which I will touch on in this book. It has been said that mothers build the nation. How? Up until recently, women were supposed to dedicate their time to husbands, children and home. How then can they be builders of the nation? The women build the children, who will build and rule the nation. The values which the women instil in their children will permeate in the society. The principles ingrained in the children will dominate the laws and ethics of the nation. The faith and belief inculcated in the children, will guide their actions in politics, business, commerce, industry, sport, culture, education, and so on. What the children are being filled with today, are sedation, rebellion, materialism, self, moral laxity, immorality, and intolerance, which amounts to outright condemning and encouraging them to sin, and uncomfortable truths of [inaudible 01:15:05] comprised to removing inconvenience. The main principle being propagated today itself.
You will find that where selfishness is predominant, the scene is a welcoming one for Jezebel. The spirit will manipulate people in circumstances, in various ways to benefit the self, and self-gratification, self-comfort, self-exaltation, self-advantage everything and anything that panders to the self, the flesh, and emotions of the mind. God's design for the family, when God created Adam, the first thing He did was to give him a calling. Genesis 2:15, he was to dress and keep the garden. Eve was created to be a helpmeet to Adam, that means suitable, appropriate, and adapted to. She was created to help Adam in the fulfilment of his calling. She is supposed to be so, and one with him in spirit, soul, and body that they become one flesh again, just as they were before Eve was taken out of Adam, and husband and wife can live and walk in this God-intended unity. The anointing of God will come upon them in its fullness. The home will be flooded with the presence of God. They will have a measure of God's power and the anointing and the calling such as never before. The Church will grow in strength and power. It will start to bring about the unity our Lord Jesus prayed for in John 17.
Husbands and wives
However, if the woman is not properly submitted first to the Lord, and then to her husband, and if the man is not the priest first, before the Lord, and then to his family that God intended him to be, then both the structure and purpose of the family are undermined. Neither spouse will be fulfilled or genuinely happy. The children will not be brought up according to the true principles of the word. The door is open for strife and we know from the God that that permits confusion and every evil work. Carrying on further in the book - the woman's role - it might seem unfair that Proverbs 31 gives a good insight into what is required from a wife and mother. Her first calling is to God. Above all she must put her daily time with Him. That is where she will draw strength, wisdom, ability, understanding and the anointing to cope with what God requires of her in the family and elsewhere.
She is required to love her husband, intercede for him, support, honour, and respect him and be submitted to his decisions. This does not mean that she cannot discuss issues with him. They can even disagree, but once a final decision has been taken on a matter, then she has to lay aside her disagreement and support his course of action wholeheartedly, not grudgingly, or with manipulative methods to try to make him change his mind. If she believes with all her heart that he has made a wrong decision, then she should go to God, not the neighbours, friends, family, or pastor. She must present the situation to God and ask God to work His will and His purpose in them both. Never is she to pray words to this effect, “God you know that he has made the wrong decision. Make him change his mind. Do not let this thing that he is doing succeed. Make him see that I am right.” That difference is witchcraft. It is a carnal, selfish prayer which the devil uses to great effect for his own interest. It will drive walls and barriers between husband and wife, or in their relationship with God and allow the devil to cause all kinds of disruption in the home.
Another section - the first battlefront. It often pays to consult Genesis as the book of beginning that provides much insight into the plan and purpose of God, as well as the tactics and counter strategy of the devil when he came against God's Creation. Satan attacked the woman first. He attacked with subtle and not so subtle suggestion and doubt. His aim was not to make her question the truth of God's authority and the truth of her husband's authority. The goal is to bring her out from obedience and submission to her husband and God and make her act against his instructions or decisions. Quite bluntly stated, that is rebellion. The word says that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and stubbornness is as inequity and idolatry, even deeper insight into the subject we have been talking about with regards to submission. Tactics and strategies - Jezebel is a power spirit that uses control and manipulation to such an extent that it is being mistaken for a controlling and manipulating spirit. It will use emotions, actions, and words to manipulate people in circumstances in order to get its own will, and to get them to respond to its desires, in other words, to control them.
I used to think that Jezebel was by definition a controlling and manipulating spirit, however, I have come to realise that this is actually one of its best disguises. Jezebel is a power spirit. Its aim is to destroy the prophets of God, emasculate the priests of God, uproot the true worship of the Lord Jesus Christ and introduce idolatry in the home, the Church, and the nation. Under the mistaken impression that Jezebel is a controlling and manipulating spirit, people will deal only with that subservient Demon. Jezebel is left untouched and merely summons another controlling and manipulating spirit when it is ready. Alternatively, people deal only with Jezebel, leaving the controlling and manipulating spirit unhindered, which in turn will simply call for another Jezebel spirit when the time is right. So, the situation does not change and much confusion and anguish is caused in those involved in that particular case.
An important point that listeners should note is, if you are not familiar with the area of deliverance, Demons in a sense are like hyenas, they hunt in packs. So, casting one or two out and leaving some of the other there, achieves very little. They will just bring in others to back them up. Continuing later in the book, spirits of deceit and seduction use actions, words, and suggestions in blinding their target. They are past masters of the art of appearing totally innocent and charmingly sweet. They present their carriers as such nice people, they are so pleasant and easy to go on with. They are friendly, helpful, and have the knack of making others feel so sorry for them when they smile bravely under difficult circumstances. You will find incidentally that most homosexuals carry one or a number of these seducing spirits. They elicit your trust and affection and it is a relatively simple matter to enlist you on their side. A trusting person is easy to manipulate, controlled through submission. This is one of the tactics of a seducing spirit. It is particularly effective when the husband is influenced by a spirit of pride, needs, or desires, and constant eager based. His sweet and charming loving wife will drop seeds into his mind and this seductive spirit will water and cause to germinate by suggestion and flattery. As the husband responds to the flattery, he actually accepts the suggestions as his own ideas and puts them into action. He is being effectively controlled as the husband in the above examples and is blissfully and totally unaware that his wife is running him, the children, and the house by his sweet submission.
In case of failure, when the Jezebel spirit has somehow been caught out, or has blatantly failed in its attack, the person under its influence will make great manifestations of repentance but be warned that this is not true repentance. It is remorse at having been found out. It is not repentance for having sinned against God. I cannot stress this sufficiently. Repentance entails a deep and godly sorrow that causes that person to turn away from sin and evil. Repentance fills you with loathing for the sin committed and makes you change. Remorse is regret and disgust at having been discovered. The pain has been found out. It merely makes [inaudible 01:22:43] of sorrow but prepares to repeat the sin only next time with greater care to avoid discovering.
Chapter 3, rescuing those oppressed by Jezebel. The spirit of Jezebel aims to usurp the authority in the household, the Church, the community, organisations or the body in which it exerts influence. And it goes on in some detail. It will not always be easy to remember that you are dealing, not with a person, but with an evil spirit. It is difficult to be ruthless with a person who seems to be devastated and deeply hurt by your words, unless you realise that it is generally not the person's true reactions and feelings you are seeing, but the seductive and deceptive manipulations of a vicious spirit bent on the destruction of its victims. Here again, it is essential to understand and apply constantly the key of Hebrews 4:12: Do not stand alone. Jesus always sent his disciples out two by two to stand in faith with a mature person and the Lord, preferably one who was used in discerning your spirits, prays and intercedes much. Never discuss the matter with anyone unless you are completely and utterly assured of immaturity in Christ and of the understanding of the operation of spirits. Consider yourself in a deadly war, if you talk to people who are not informed, who are not holy, or dedicated to the Lord, and aware of what is at stake, or who do not really care about you. You could be bringing irreparable harm on yourself.
So, we see again, that division in the home has another dimension. As it is pointed out, Jesus sent the disciples out two by two. If a man and his wife are divided, they are much more vulnerable to Satan's attack here as well. You must learn to pull down carnal prayers on a daily basis. They create confusion and bondage in the spirit, and become weapons of Satan, and now curses and accusations spoken against you. Find unrighteous judgements spoken over you and speak the word to fill up those empty spaces. Speak those things of being not as though they were, basing them on the word of Covenant that the person currently under the influence of that spirit is free and stands fast in the liberty with which Christ has made him free. With the eyes of his understanding are enlightened that he is delivered from the power of darkness and any word which the Holy Spirit leaves you to speak, these prayers will depend on the person, the details of his circumstances is calling his character. Only the Holy Spirit can know which of the weapons you must use.
Next chapter - what about the men? It makes the point that men also can be oppressed by Jezebel. Jezebel is not a spirit that oppresses women. The next chapter deals with spiritual adultery. I have a few things against them because thou suffer that woman Jezebel which call herself a prophetess to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. I gave this space to repent of her fornication and she repented not. Behold, I will cast you into [inaudible 01:25:45] and then that committed adultery with her and to great tribulation, accept the repent of their deeds and I will kill her children with death and all the Churches shall know that I am he which [inaudible 01:25:55] the rains and hearts and I will give unto everyone according to your works, but unto I say and unto the rest and [inaudible 01:26:04] as many have not this doctrine and which have not known the depths of Satan as they speak, I will put upon you none other burden, but that which he has already hold fast to like helm. Revelation 2:20-25, the address of their Lord Jesus Christ to the seven Churches is vital to understanding of the power and influence of the Jezebel spirit in these End Times.
From the Churches [inaudible 01:26:27], the Lord requires no repentance, both are persecuted by the synagogue of Satan and those who came to be Jews and are not. The word of the Lord to them is one of encouragement, strength and persecution, which has obviously refined the Church, so that he has no need to rebuke it and promise of reward. The [inaudible 01:26:45] Church receives no recommendation at all, neither in the short introduction where the Lord mentions the quote and works of the Church, nor anywhere else in the address. It still calls on the Church to repent. It shows the Church that it may still turn as a whole and it may still change. It still has the opportunity to go heart. The promises also given to the individual members who turn even if the Church as a whole refuses to.
Messages to the Church, [inaudible 01:27:19] that is there or are admonished to repent or are encouraged. [inaudible 01:27:34 to 01:28:44]. The theme from these Scriptures that once the spirit of Jezebel has taken root in a Church, it can no longer be asked that why. Part of the answer appears to lie in verse 20 of the Amplified that spirit teaches and seduces the bond servants. Jesus tells us in Matthew 24 that the very last day shall be shortened for the [inaudible 01:29:02] and that false Christ and prophets will show great signs and wonders in so much that if it would be possible, they shall deceive the very elite. The world tells us that many are called but few are chosen, Matthew 20:16, Matthew 22:14. The bond servants whom I believe to be the elect of those who are willingly and consciously giving up everything to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. The bond servant was a freed slave who chose to remain and serve his Master rather than to live a life for freedom. As a token of that decision, his fear was brought through with an awl and he was marked as a servant forever.
How then is it possible that these bond servants who have sacrificed everything to serve Christ, could be deceived. Jezebel seduces them. Do not let us ever underestimate the power of that seduction. We have already seen the effect that Delilah's seduction had on Samson, and the extent of that evil power cannot be denied. Remember that the seduction mentioned here does not refer to sexual seduction as such. The seduction entails a leading astray into doctrines that are not pure. The power of seduction comes from the fact that it presents the doctrines as pure. They come from a reputable and extremely convincing source. They appear filled with authority of the Word, until you take a very close look at the Scriptures which are quoted and connected. It is only then, and only with the action and guidance of the Holy Spirit that the subtle divergence has come to light. A wrong emphasis, a slightly different interpretation, a suggestion that when follows leaves along a road of ever-increasing error and deception, but the differences are so very slight, so very subtle that it is extremely difficult to perceive them at the beginning.
I would hope that as I read that passage, you would see the reality of that in the counter doctrines, and the false doctrines that have been dealt with in the earlier teachings in this series. The book continues a few pages later, yet seduction is not the only reason that the spirit of Jezebel gains control in the Church. God has set a specific order in the Church which is His house, just as much as we, the believers, are His temple. His house is body, God requires the woman to be submitted to the man at home first, and in the Church secondly. For too long people have refused to see how Satan has openly invited them into a Church when God's order is subverted or ignored. Why? Because it all looks so innocent. The ladies are so attractive, they are so nice, and they can be so charming. When the spirit of Jezebel is defeated in spiritual warfare, bound, torn down, and cast out, God's order must be restored. If not, His house has been left empty for Jezebel to return with reinforcements. It is totally useless to bind and cast out the spirits if the original structure of that particular fellowship is left in place.
With women not in their rightful God-ordained relationships to their husbands, children, family, and pastors, this is one of the reasons why it is so difficult, in fact, as it would appear from verses 24 and 25 of Revelation 2, impossible, for that spirit to be asked to leave, once it has taken hold. The next section deals with bed-hopping and fornication. Jezebel prays power. Jezebel's aims and actions - Jezebel aims at destroying the calling of God's people and destroys relationships and people to achieve this. We read in 1 Kings 18 that Jezebel destroyed the prophets of God, and that is her aim and intent. You will also see that she creates eunuchs who ironically are those used by God to cast her down from her high palace walls.
Chapter 6, Church and nation
Jezebel operates in the Church as we have read previously, and Jezebel is an extremely damaging spirit. I hope after these extracts that I have read, that you will see that Jezebel has an enormous role to play in all the false doctrines that have been exposed in this series on teachings on marriage. I will ask you to recognise that it is an extremely violent, vicious and absolutely ruthless spirit. If you start to discuss these truths with people who start to manifest in the most alarmingly violent way, gentlemen of God, who you thought were really Christ-like, suddenly can turn into really vicious and destructive individuals who will seek to destroy you at almost any cost. Be aware and be on your guard. Seek the guidance of God and do not allow Jezebel to intimidate or defeat you. She may well kill you but do not bow the knee to Jezebel.
May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
04 14 Covenant made by Blood -- Hesed - Agape
Kenneth Copeland
...on marriage, understanding God's way in marriage volume two, towards Heaven on earth in marriage, teaching number 14, Covenant made by Blood. We've referred repeatedly in this teaching to be reality of the blood Covenant, cutting the flesh of the virgin as being the marriage Covenant and the teaching that follows is the first in the six part series by Kenneth Copeland entitled Covenant made by Blood, Hesed Agape.
Let's turn in our Bibles to 1 Samuel 18. The Bible is a record of Covenants. Our English terminology is very poor and really is very unfortunate that we have adopted a word that is so old that it lost its strength in common language by using the word testament, Old testament, New testament. I am, you know, I mean I am not dogmatic about it, I say New testament because it is the New testament but we need our minds renewed to the fact and (inaudible (00:01:44)) translations use the word Covenant. The old Covenant, the new Covenant, God made Covenant and a Covenant relationship really, as we'll see later on, is the reason God created the Heavens and without Covenant knowledge, without Covenant relationship, with Covenant awareness, you will never ever understand this book, you cannot understand this book. And without a much deeper understanding and a much deeper involvement in Covenant relationship, we'll never understand it enough to stand on its power and its authority to accomplish what God has told us to accomplish in this day and in this generation. We can't undo it without a firmer grip and a firmer realization, renewing of our minds to what Covenant really means and what certain words really mean. It's not just having a definition of the word, you can understand Hebrew, speak Hebrew, be a Hebrew and not know a thing in the world about God. I mean, you can be a walking Hebrew dictionary and not understand God and it's obvious you can be Greek and not understand God, one of the weakest Churches on earth is the Greek Orthodox Church. So that's not the key to it.
The way that I choose to illustrate this...how many of you have dealt with this idea of changing from the inch system to the metric system? You still don't know what a meter is, you still don't know what a centimeter is, you still don't know what a millimeter is. You could even describe it and give me the definition of it but 40 meters doesn't mean anything to you, 40 yards does, 120 feet does. Without a ruler, without anything, you could probably just about step off 125 feet but 40 meters, ah. You know, you go down town, you've got all of them things standing on the side and 40 of those maybe, no, not 40 parking meters, that's not it. You could take a dictionary and find out how they came to measure with the metric system, which is the only really intelligent measuring system on earth, it don't make any difference, I don't care how intelligent it is, if you don't know what it is. And I will tell you how you're going to learn, you'll never learn it by figuring out how many miles a kilometer is or how many kilometers a mile is. You will never get it with 1.6, it'll never happen. You will never know whether you're hot or cold by trying to convert from centigrade to Fahrenheit, you'll never know. There's only one way you'll ever find out, that's get you a stick one meter long divided into centimeters and millimeters and carry it in your hand everywhere you go and everything you see, find out how many meters it is, everywhere you look, find out how many meters the doorpost, find out how many centimeters, how many millimeters, find out, you're going to have to renew...you can know the dictionary definition and not have any idea what a meter is because there are people in the earth that will say certain things and it doesn't make any difference in what language they say it, you still don't know what they said even though you know what they said.
Okay, now we're this way on Covenant, there are words in the Bible that we read and we think we knew what they said and without a Covenant, a deep Covenant relationship, without a daily measuring everything in the light of Covenant and digging and reaching for it, you will never know what those words mean. There are Covenant phrases all over the Bible, particularly the New Covenant. There are Covenant phrases that the apostle Paul made and the Greeks and most of those people, even though they weren't all that far removed from a Covenant society, they still didn't understand what he meant. A Covenant made by blood is recorded in all ancient civilizations, only the relatively recent civilizations have gone far enough away from Covenant until they have no idea what it means, they can describe it but it is not a hard reality. To be civilized is the most uncivilized thing you can do. The further into the world’s idea of civilization is to go further away from a Covenant of blood and it becomes a Covenant of ink only. Blood Covenant people are never backstabbers, the safest place on earth is in the Muslim/Arab countries of the world because they are blood Covenant minded people and you don't steal in those places because you get killed, that's breaking of a Covenant if you do that. The further away we get from the blood Covenant, the more unreliable we've become. The more blood is exchanged for ink and paper, contracts. Well, you know brother Copeland, contracts made just to be broken, ha-ha. A few hundred years ago they would have killed you for that. It hasn't been all that long.
The further away from blood Covenant we civilize ourselves, the more liars, backstabbers, cheaters and killers we become, Covenant breakers. You'll see where we miss the red man on this continent, he would have been the easiest man to win to Jesus that we have ever come in contact with except the African. You will see where we missed the black man, we missed him, still missing him. Not so much in this country because he's been civilized just as far away from Covenant in this country as everybody else has but he still has close enough relationship to his culture and his background that still the black people all over the world, the black people are the most unchangeable people on earth. They're least likely to be changed by their environment of any race on the earth, other races adapt to their environment and they begin to look like the environment. The black people change the environment to look like them, always, wherever they go. A black guy in Chicago and a black guy in Zimbabwe, they just alike. They speak with different languages but even their surroundings will eventually conform to that culture. It's the strongest bloodline on earth, that's the reason the devil is so deathly afraid of them and he has tried to persecute them out of existence, very much like the Jewish people, it is a people that will praise God. Any people that are demonstrative and have strong Covenant background, the devil is afraid of you. And if he can't annihilate you, he'll civilize you and you'll annihilate yourself because you'll lose your contact with the Covenant.
So we're going to learn some things, we're going to learn some things about evangelism, it's the key to evangelism, Jesus said it himself. Again, Covenant phrases, I won't even get into them till after we get some of this because you wouldn't get it anyway. We're going to have to take that stick and measure every foot of the way until certain words have their definitions changed and they mean what they really mean when we say them, not I had to have the definition of the word salvation changed in my consciousness. Exactly the same word saved means healed, delivered, set free. For a long time I had to do this, I had the salvation in one pigeon hole, I had healing in another pigeon and I said well, which is more important, to be saved or to be healed. But God never heard any difference in either two words, He never knew any different. And the Lord said to me, Kenneth, on what day did I purchase deliverance from sin in your spirit or what day did I buy you a new birth? I said well, the day You went to Calvary, you know, I mean (inaudible (00:12:50)), same day. He said what body did I use? I said what? He said what body did I use to deliver you from sin, what body did I use when I bore your sicknesses and carried your diseases? I said well, it's all the same body, He said well why do you keep dividing it up? As if one was more important or less important than the other, He said I never asked you to choose.
So I had to go through a word process of renewing my mind. So for a long time, I made a rule on myself, if I said the word saved I put the word healed on the back end of it, saved-healed. Now, you see, that sounds silly to you, it did to me when I first started doing it but now I say saved-healed and it thrills my spirit so it sounds good to me, that's all one word to me, it's not hyphenated, it's all one word, saved-healed. And after a while it so formed in my consciousness when I said the word saved, I knew what it meant, when I said the word healed, I knew what it meant, they both meant the same thing. So I have the same mental consciousness and the same mental picture every time I say the same word. When I say the word saved, let me show you something, see this money clip that I had in my pocket here, got a few dollars in it, however far those few dollars will go I'm saved, see what I mean. I am not just born again, I'm not just healed, I am being blessed. Salvation is all of that. When God saved you from the water, He saved you from the sharks in the water, He didn't have to jump back in there and wait till the shark come up so He could jerk you right out before the shark got at you. You got saved from the whole ocean and everything in the ocean. If there ever was going to be a ship come round where you were, you got save from it running over you because God pulled you out of the water. So, we're going into this mind renewing soul process, retrain and redevelopment and to think like men instead of children and that's what you have to do in order to do that.
Alright, Covenant made by blood, blood Covenants are recorded in all ancient civilizations. We, however, are going to be interested...it's interesting to read all of the different blood Covenants and you can do it, I mean you can go to particularly extensive libraries, particularly national libraries where there are records of these things. There are Covenants on record that you can read, you can read the people that made the Covenants, what the agreements were and all of that. And that's interesting but that doesn't have anything to do with what I want to know, I want to know about the Covenants practice in the days of the Old Testament, in the days of what you and I call the Old Covenant because I want to know the practices that surrounded that one and I want to know where they came from and I want to know what God (inaudible (00:16:47)) and what God didn't and I want to know what God originated and what God didn't. And when you see somebody going into a Covenant but drinking chicken blood, you know it wasn't God because God would not allow his people to drink blood, they drank a blood substitute, not the blood.
So we're going to talk about and zero in on, Biblical Covenant and I'm not going into the theological area, I am not a theologian, I don't attempt to be. Theology is fine, we are not going into it however, on that kind of an idea. A Covenant is not something you sit around and philosophize about, a Covenant is action. You don't talk about Covenant, you get in it. You see what I mean by that? Well you will when we get through because that's one of the hardest of the things. I want to say this and you think about this, you may never have thought about this. Religion, I don't care whose religion it is, never talks about Covenant, it never talks about Covenant with your God. There may be Covenants involved in a sort of religion or something but if you question somebody, what do we have to do about getting in touch with your God, they look at you like you're crazy. Get in touch with my God, what do you mean, He don't care nothing about you, you're not going to get to know my God. I was speaking with a young Muslim one evening in a restaurant and do you notice that evangelism never has any problem with atheism, it really doesn't have any problem with communism even though communism is a form of religion but it's a godless religion. The hardest places on earth for evangelism is in Mohammedism among the Muslims, it is in Hinduism among their Gods, it is in Christianism and their God of doctrine and denomination and all that kind of stuff, that's where the trouble is.
But religion, if you really get religious and really spend long enough at religion it will eventually talk you out of a personal relationship with your God. And the thing that you "do" to satisfy your God is the sum of the activity of your religion, you're not in Covenant with him. Theology, it doesn't give me a definition of the word theology, you remember what the definition of it is? Study of God, isn't it? Doesn't have anything to do with commuting with God, it's a study about God, who is He, where is He, where'd He come from, where is He going? It's always abstract, I'm a third party standing out here studying the father in Jesus as if they were standing out here studying me. They're behind one wall and I'm behind another, one of us is in zoo, we just don't know which one it is, depends on which side of the cage you're looking through, you know, what your position in this zoo is. When you get into Covenant, this is something else entirely. I learned my theology from God instead of from somebody else about God, when I get into Covenant, theology becomes something that means little or nothing to you at all when you get into Covenant with God.
In the days of the old Covenant, the things that were practiced in making Covenant, I want to look at these tonight and share them with you because they're going to be the basis in which we travel and move and think for the next couple of days. In the cutting of the Covenant, a blood Covenant demands absolute unwavering loyalty, absolute totally unwavering loyalty, to waiver is to die. So the agreement, the Covenant has to be so powerful as to affect your spirit, your soul, your body and the spirit and soul and body of eight generations. So there are going to be certain things done that affect the spirit, there are going to be certain things done that affect the mind, there are going to be certain things done that affect your body, there's going to be some pain, there's going to be some bloodshed. You don't forget that hurt, you're going to look over your body and find the little old scars on you that you got when you were eight years old, you can tell them blow by blow how you got them.
This one on my hand right here, are you kidding, I not only got my finger cut off, I got a spanking for it because my daddy told me not to play with this knife, I did it anyway and stuck it through my hand, severed whatever leaders tie this little finger and the next finger together, you can't do that with your little finger without pulling down that forefinger at the same time. But that minor cut apart, I had a big old dirt clot in my hand and I'm shaping that dirt clot with my knife and I'm getting it shaped just like I want, I'm fooling around and I got all caught up in this and I stuck it real good and stuck it all the way through my hand, it stuck out the top of my hand. I will enter into eternity remembering that knife sticking out the top of my hand, I will never ever, ever forget it and the blood that squirted, if that had been a Covenant motion I would have been married to the guy today because I can't forget it. I look at that scar and I remember the day.
There's another one on the side, they're all over me but these are just ones...there's another one on my left index finger because I carried a bow and arrow with me all the time, everywhere. And my cousin came to see me and he said he never had seen anybody shoot a bow, when he was just very young they moved to California and he thought Indians were the only ones to shoot a bow but I'm part Indian so why not? I carried a bow with me all the time, I'd carry the thing to school and hide it in the bushes and after school I'd go get it and take it home, shoot everything I could see. And I was feeling pretty good anyway, get to show off in front of my cousin, you know, because if I could see it I could hit it and I picked up a couple of arrows and we walked up behind my dads house there, he said shoot that box and I mean cussed down on her, you know, looking good, I think I'm (inaudible (00:25:30)). I cut loose and that arrow was broken and I was in too big a hurry to check the error and when it went past my left hand it picked up the broken spot and the arrow split in two and a big chunk of it, about 2.5/4 inches long went through my finger, I mean it is sticking out on each side of the finger, I'm standing there with that stick run through my finger. My little cousin liked to pass out, he's standing there looking at it, I'm looking at it, I didn't know what to do so I hollered at my dad. He came out there and looked at that, went back in the house and got a pair of wire pliers, came back out there and pulled it out. I will never ever, if driving a stick through your finger was part of making Covenant, I will be 700 years old before I even think about forgetting, standing there watching that when my dad pulled that stick out of my finger. And my cousin is pastor of a Church in Los Angeles, California today, his name is Larry Taylor and you call him on the phone and you ask him about Kenneth sticking that stick in his finger one day and he'll tell you the exact story that I just told you, he's never forgotten it either. White cut flesh before it bleeds and then blood all over everything.
This is the reason Covenants were cut like they were, to affect remembrance. Remember is a Covenant word, we're going to learn about it before we get through. God remembered his Covenant with Abraham, Isaac and with Jacob, it didn't mean that one day his walking along and said I'd like to let those folk go to hell. (inaudible (00:27:48)). No, that has nothing to do with the word remember, the word remember is a Covenant word and we'll get into that and you'll understand it so that when you read it in the Bible it'll just absolutely explode in your consciousness, hallelujah, good stuff. Alight, in the process and procedure of cutting a Covenant and I might add right here, the Lord just reminded me of this, if you're going to learn this and study it and eat it and live it, you'll stop having divorces in your congregation.
This is the reason Christian marriage hasn't worked because it isn't based on paper and ink, it is based on a blood Covenant and our kids don't have any idea, no idea what it's all about. I don't see what I need with a piece of paper, well they ought to have to cut a ring around your thumb, you'd understand, you'd never forget it. That's where this gold ring came from, it originally was a ring cut in the flesh of the thumb and then festered where it would not go away and you had this raised scar around your thumb that showed that you were in Covenant with a woman and she had right to everything you own and every strength you have and even your very body is not yours, it's hers. And you have every right to everything she owns and every strength she has and even her body is yours and for you to violate her body and mistreat it is to violate that blood covenant. You're sworn to protect her as if she's the weakest (inaudible (00:30:07)) you ever met. Doesn't say she is weak but you're to treat her like she is because you're in Covenant with her. Stuffs already getting stick, isn't it? Amen.
Alright, in the day of the Old Covenant, when a Covenant was to be cut, it was not based on common things, it was not based on what we have in common. There is a Bible truth here, there is a civil truth here. It will answer the problems of the body of Christ, it answers racial prejudice, it answers cultural differences and because of no knowledge of Covenant is the reason why we have opened the door to the devil and to give us denominational problems and differences, have there been any knowledge of what I'm about to share with you, there never would have been any such thing as abomination. Never would have been such thing as a race riot, it could not have occurred. Covenants were not based on what we have in common, family number one desires to go into Covenant with family number two, they do not go in Covenant based on what they have in common, why do it, who needs you, we're just alike. God leads men and women into marriage Covenant with one another that are opposites, most of the time. You have to develop in certain areas in order to have anything in common. It's a refusal to yield and develop that causes trouble.
Now the reason that God did this is a very basic and fundamental reason based on His wisdom and knowledge of the entire family of man, the race of man and which is now the body of Christ. Jesus Christ raised from the dead became the author of a new race of man, no longer gentile, Jew, Greek, Arab but the new birth, the only thing that avails in Him. There is a new race of man, man is a species, there is a male man and a female man. Now the male man is superior to the female man and the female man is superior to the male man but they are not superior in the same areas, they are both inferior to one another, consequently they need one another, we don't need women that think they're men, we don't need men that think they're women, we need men that are men and women that are women and get them together so there are no weaknesses left. We don't need a white race, we don't need a black race, we don't need one or the other. Every race created by God is superior to all other races in some area. If major and gathered together around our strengths, there will be nothing to save us from our weaknesses and we will continue to develop our weaknesses as well as our strengths because while you're working on your strengths and ignoring the weakness, the weakness is developing along with the strength.
The black man, the white man, the red man, the different cultures and the different backgrounds that have been bred into each one of these colors and so forth over the years has developed certain things in our lives. I don't want to try to go hunting with a Doberman pincher, he's not bred to hunt (inaudible (00:35:04)), you get out trying to make him hunt rabbits, you'll never get the rabbit, he'll eat them before you ever get them and what he don't eat he'll run off, he's bred to run stuff off, he's bred to run off people and he don't care which people, rabbits or other dogs, what difference does it make to him. I don't want to try to make a CNI dog out of a pitbull though, he'll kill everything he sees, I'll get the blame for it. Every one of those dogs are superior to the other one in some way, he's got certain breeding, he's got certain culture behind him that's bred into him. A golden retriever don't know why he runs and gets everything he sees, he just wants to. A black guy don't know why he claps on the second beat, he don't know why he does that. The white guy don't know why he's one, two, three, he don't know why he does that, that's just the way he is but if you've got a white guy and a black guy, you get a clap on every beat, praise God, see what I mean.
It follows right on down through Gods eternal scheme of things, He didn't give apostles period, He gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. One man majored in faith and another man majored in righteousness, 25/30 years development in the righteousness of God, don't know beans about faith. Another guy over here has developed the laying on the hands, another fellow works over in the word of knowledge, they don't know one another, don't believe in one another, don't have nothing to do with one another, (inaudible (00:36:59)). Well, there are certain things that you are not going to reach with the word of knowledge and there's certain things you're not going to reach just with faith, it's going to take intercession to reach something, it’s going to take faith woven throughout the whole (inaudible (00:37:15)), why don't you get together and learn from one another, you'll have 80 years of experience and it only took you 20 years to get it. It is a basic fundamental principle but in order to make it work without prejudice, there has to be an element somewhere that runs more deeply than culture, runs more deeply than the blood or the water of my mother’s wounds.
When someone said well, you know, bloods thicker than water, you didn't know he was talking Covenant talk, you thought he meant kin folk blood is thicker than water, well what water. I never thought about that. I'm not talking about faucet water and he wasn't talking about blood kin, he was talking about Covenant blood is thicker than the water of the mother’s womb. The Arabs say it like this, blood is thicker than milk, talking about two kin born brothers nursing the same mother, two kin born brothers being born of the same womb water, having the same mother. Covenant blood is thicker than that. The word of God says in the book of Proverbs, there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. The word friend is a Covenant word, we are going to get in there, it doesn't mean anything, forget everything you ever heard about friend.
Alright, the families come together, the need for the Covenant is based on weaknesses. Consequently, it is inadvertently based on strengths but the strengths are never the same ones, that's not the basis for the Covenant, there may be a lot of things we have in common but those are not the basis for the Covenant. The basis for the Covenant is you're strong in an area that I need and I'm strong in an area you need, now it would be smart if we get together and we're going to have to get together on a basis that is so deep, prejudice cannot tear us apart because where you're strong has a tendency to make me look bad. I don't have nothing to do with you, after all I don't believe in whatever you're doing. You really do, it's the fact you're embarrassed the guys better at it than you are. You know, I mean don't bring in people over here, if you just were really smart, you'll realize already if you line up several different races of people and you show them the same thing, you're going to get ten different ideas of what they saw.
Well, did you hear what that stupid Irishman said that he saw, there was no way he saw that. Now see, you're separating from him when you ought to go to him and find out what he saw because he saw something you didn't see. And if you will put together what everybody saw, you will find out what actually happened from every detail. And all of you be smarter than you were when you got there, you know, let the German guy engineer it, let the Jewish guy finance it, let the Irish guy protect it, amen, let the black guy do the music, let the brown guy paint it and let us Indians tear it down when you get through with it, it'll work. We come together and pool our strengths and yield to one another in weaknesses, there's been a lot of men that have destroyed a household because their daddy told them they had to keep the books in that family and he had a bookkeeper for a wife and he can't put two and two together and make it make four. Bless God, I'm the man of this house. No, you're the fool in that house. You ought to find out where your strengths and your weaknesses are and divide up the responsibilities so the children can obey their parents and not just their mama, amen.
Families cut the Covenant based on strength and weakness, not things in common. Now, the second thing that happened, when families realized that we needed to cut Covenant here, something needed to be done here. Because it is based on differences there had to be very great discussions, lengthy intelligent prayerful discussions. There are going to be the bringing together of congregations, we would do a whole lot of good if we only had about 10% of the Churches we've got. If we had 10 out of 1000 mega Churches, we would affect every social environment in this country and around the world. Yes but bless God, who's going to be the high pastor. In one sentence I just told you why we don't do that and if you come together to discuss it about who's going to be the boss, nobody will ever be the boss but when you come together and discuss how we can serve you, you be the boss. The only argument you'll ever have is a good one, you can serve. I lay down my right to have my name out there on the sign. (inaudible (00:43:59)), I'm not the first Baptist Church anyway, there's bound to be one before this one. And I'm not telling you what to do or what not to do but I'll tell you what, that is real mark of vanity. We're the first Church, no you're not, you may wind up last Church until you get rid of that "we got here first", amen.
We begin to serve, come together on the discussion of serving. I want to tell you what our strengths are, what we're called to do, what God has given us to do with, how can I help you? One of the things that has been such a difficult thing and has cost the body of Christ so financially is by duplicating ourselves on every corner. Billions of dollars spent on buildings that are only used three times a week and Churches and schools going without gymnasiums. One ministry finally got nerve enough and faith enough to get an airplane and there's another one across town did the same thing and so they're both struggling to buy the same airplane. Neither one of them are using it all the time. Yeah but bless God, when I want to go, I want to go. Well go on the airline then and limit yourself to about 15% of what you could be doing. Maybe you ought to go buy that other pastor an airplane and give it to him, that's the difference in the two attitudes. And these two families kept coming together and spent great amounts of time in discussion and loving one another and talking to one another and ironing out these weaknesses and differences and forming the promises of this Covenant, forming the terms of the Covenant. Never entered into in a light matter, never entered into because bless God, if I could get old big shot over there to be Covenant with me I'm going to have it made. You can't do it that way, you're equally as responsible as he is, amen. That may be a valid reason for doing it but that's not a valid motive because he's stronger, more capable than you are, particularly financially is a valid reason.
What's wrong here? Just because he's born with it. No, he's smart, somebody was. Bless God, I bet he inherited the whole lot. Well then his daddy was smarter than yours. Now you have to get rid of prejudices in order to function in a Covenant environment and the Covenant itself, once it's cut, will protect you forever from prejudice, you know, if it is maintained properly. Now, this thing has two elements about it, these two elements are part of all this discussion and the reason behind it. One, it's not only going to just last and encompass your children, it's going to encompass your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, this thing is going to go at least eight generations, that's roughly 300 years. Unborn children in a different time and age are going to be affected. This is serious. The second thing that affects it is there is no way out but death.
Once you are in, you're in, this is where we miss the American Indian, he's a Covenant minded man, he saw great people, had more ideas than he ever dreamed of, lived in a way far beyond anything he ever saw, his weapons were mighty and powerful and he wanted them, he wanted to know what he was like and where he came from and how he thought. Never dreamed that the guy didn't know what a Covenant was and he Covenanted with the white man, the white man broke it anytime he got ready. That Indian went into that figuring there's no way out of this but to die and then you go off and break the Covenant, he's sworn to kill you. Whether he wants to or not doesn't make any difference, it doesn't make any difference that it'll annihilate my race eventually, I'm sworn by Covenant to kill you, I have to. If we lose the blood depth of Covenant, we lost our lives and our reason for existing, we'll die. I've got to kill you, standing out there knowing there's no way I can win but I lose either way I go. If I don't exercise it, exercise the curse of the Covenant, without Covenant we're going to die.
They prophesized the death of the white civilsed race and it's dying and you're in my generation, it's sick to its guts, it's got diseases that destroy the physical body to the point that it doesn't even have any natural resistance to disease anymore. It is so filthy and such a truce breaker and such an adulterated generation, it's dying because it has no depth, it has no word, it has no truth, it has no blood in its Covenants. The red men died with the sword, the reason he died that way is because witchcraft was the base of his Covenants instead of the gospel of Jesus so he had no strength against (inaudible (00:51:19)). Had that been a blood Covenant sworn in God, wouldn't have been any US Calvary. You hearing what I'm saying to you? It was a form of God's Covenant perverted through a lack of knowledge of the word. And, of course, we brought our missionaries over here instead of teaching them Covenant, we taught them how to eat with a knife and fork, that's where we lost the black man.
Communism has no chance with the black race, not in Africa they don't, that's the most spiritual continent on earth and you don't come in there and tell an African man there is no God, you came too late for him, he's already run across him. Whether he thinks it's the devil or whether he thinks it's Jesus, he knows there is a spirit world and you don't tell him there isn't. That's the reason we can still win the red man, he knows there's a spirit world. If we go in there with this Covenant, we can win him overnight. Bless God Almighty, you had better be willing to die for it or let him alone, amen. Alright, blood Covenant is forever, whether we get along with one another or not, there is an element of blood Covenant, part of that element is "I don't have any choice who else was born in my mother’s womb, I don't have any pick or choice about natural blood, natural kin but bless God, I've got a choice on who I enter into blood Covenant with." And this thing goes further than that, it goes deeper than that.
So whether I like you or not has absolutely no bearing on whether I keep the Covenant or not. Whether you keep your part of the Covenant or not has no bearing on whether I keep mine. Now I just said something that's terribly important and terribly deep. We could park right there and preach the rest of the three days but I'm not going to do it, you're going to have to track it for yourself. Whether you keep your part of the Covenant or not has no bearing on whether I do. Whether I like you, whether I enjoy you, whether you do anything I like, you can be breaking my heart in two and I'm standing there with tears running down my cheeks but when the dirt settles I will never leave, nor forsake you, even to the end of the earth or we die here together. Settle down, you know, I thought you was going to kill me if I broke the Covenant. In order to keep the Covenant I made, I'll kill you.
Do you want me to say it again? There's not only a blessing, there's a curse. I promise to keep this thing but if you violate the blood, it goes further than just making a mistake. You break our Covenant with one of them, you violate the blood of this thing then I'm still in Covenant, you're going to die. Now this is the Covenant practice of Old Testament times. The next thing that happened, the Covenant partners are chosen, the representatives of the two families. This is someone that every member of the family sees the very character of the family in this person. This person sums up all that our family is, if we're known for our body strength and battle this is the most ferocious warrior of our whole tribe, of all of our ferocious warriors, this is our chief. If we are known for our great intellectual prowess and our wisdom, great learning then this is the smartest guy with the highest IQ of the whole family. If we're noted for our great business ability, then this guy is the banker of the family. I mean, this representative and that representative, we all identify with them, we don't argue with the fact that's my brother. All of us have the same blood flowing in our veins as this representative does, that's important, note that because it's going to come up later.
All in family one have the same blood running in their veins as the representative of family one. All the folks in family two have in their blood flowing the same great grandma and pas blood that you're not representative blood, he represents this family and whatever he says goes. We see ourselves in him. Now, the phrase in Christ is a Covenant phrase. Our Covenant brother, we see in him all that we are and anything he says goes, we're in him. He went to Calvary, we went to Calvary. He was raised up, we were raised up, he is made to sit at the right end of the father, we've been made to sit at the right end of the father, he is our Covenant representative, hallelujah, glory to God.
Now, the next thing that comes about, the Covenant site is chosen. It has to be a place where both families can gather and all of them can see what's going on, preferably a low spot with a couple of hills on each side, we can build us a grand stand, we had this thing in an amphitheater, it's a big bunch of people. It may not be but two people there as was in what we're going to read now, in a moment or so from the 18th Chapter of (inaudible (00:58:39)), you thought I forgot about that, didn't you? David and Jonathan cut a Covenant with one another and they were the only two involved in it but their families in the future were involved, there wasn't anybody there but the two of them and God.
The site is chosen so everybody can see it, the next step, the animal is selected. The animal that God selected was a heifer. Now, He selected two animals, a heifer and what King James says is a goat. The animal is usually a large animal so we'll just stay with heifers since that's what God chose, I don't see any use in fooling around with the rest of them. Then the Covenant sacrifice is made or the Covenant cut was made on the animal but it's a different form of killing, it's a different form of cut than any other animal sacrifice that's made. The animal is split, it's parted right down the backbone, it's not cut in two like cutting the head off or cut in the middle, he's cut right down the spine. This cut down the spine is made, the two halves then are made to fall lying opposite of each other.
Now if there's more than one animal done, then the next animal is done right behind that one or right in front of that one. In the case between God and Abraham, both these animals were cut like that and the halves fall open, before they fall there is an alleyway full of blood, this alleyway that's created between those two halves has they fall opposite to one another becomes a walkway. A walkway of blood, an alleyway of blood between two walls of blood. You've got these two halves that have fallen opposite to one another and all this blood that's drained out in between. Now, everything is in place, the Covenant representatives have been chosen and they're all, the agreement has been made. The terms have been agreed to, everybody knows...really, you know, that you and I get into a contract, that's far as we ever go. We agree to the terms and put it on paper and that's it. Brother, that's when they got started. That wasn't the end of it, that's when it all started.
The Covenant ceremony then begins, the first thing that happens, each man takes off his coat and gives it to the other representative. The coat, in ancient times, and even today, same thing is true, stands for what I am and who I am. Who I am is the authority that I have, what I am is what I do with that authority. We still use this today, I mean, we use it openly like the coat of a soldier. It not only tells you what he is, he is a soldier in the military armed forces so you immediately know what he is, you know where he belongs, you know where he fits. But the coat carries the rank so you know what his authority is and each rank has a different authority, each area has a different authority, where his rank lies. We've got a general here that's a signal officer, he's in the signal core. We've got a colonel that's in the infantry, we've got another general that's in the air force, we've got a captain standing over here that is battalion leader in the artillery. The only thing they have in common is they're all in the military.
You may have a sergeant standing over here that's an MP. In certain situations that sergeant has more rank than anybody out there because of the branch that he is in. When he puts his coat on, he has the authority, if the general breaks the law, to knock him in the head with a stick. Are you hearing what I'm saying to you? But now when he walks up in front of this man, they all come up there together, each one of them has rank and authority in a different realm, you get them all together and brother, they've got all the bases covered. Now all of them have a representative, it's called a general staff. Air force has got a representative, navy has got a representative, army has got a representative, marine core has got a representative, all of them in there together. Each service is represented there.
So you begin to see what's happening here. Here's this representative of this family, this representative of this family, he takes off his coat and he hands it to him, the coat stands for who I am and all that I am and he gives it to the others saying "All that I am I give to you and all of my authority, I give to you, here's my coat." And the other representative takes his coat and puts it on. Now I'm you and you're me. You have my authority and I have yours. Then each representative takes off his belt of weapons, his girdle as the King James says, it's a belt. When he hands him this belt, the one which hangs his sword, his dagger, his kit...when he hands him his belt he says I'm giving you my strength, your enemies are now mine even if I die, I stand with you, I lend you my sword.
Now the sixth chapter of the book of Ephesians is a Covenant chapter, be strong in the Lord and as you stand in that Covenant place and God hands you His helmet and He hands you His breastplate and He hands you the sword and He hands you the shield of faith, what else does He hand you? The girth that goes about your loin is His weapon belt, God is saying now that's my belt and my armor, you put it on, I've given you my coat of righteousness, now you put on my armor. Your enemy comes against you one way, he'll have to deal with me. Now you see, you read that before it don't mean a thing. Well hallelujah, yes, we're putting on the armor of God, whatever, write 25 silly songs about it and you're not even strong when you got through than you were when you started because you don't know anything about Covenant but when you stand ankle deep in blood and you smell the warm blood and carcass, you smelling guts, you're smelling fresh digested hay in the bowels of the heifer, you're standing in it up to your ankles, you don't forget that very soon, that smell will be in your nostrils forever. And then the God Almighty comes on the scene and says "Here is my weaponry belt", you (inaudible (01:08:44)), does He mean this.
I remember when I was just a kid, my dad travelled for a living and my greatest joy was to get to go some place with him and we went out to Fortstockton, Texas. If you've never been to Fortstockton, if you like to go somewhere that's nowhere, that's the place to go. And I don't mean there's anything wrong with Fortstockton, I kind of like it out there but the thing that I'm telling you, you will know when you get there that you have arrived at nowhere, that's as close to nowhere as you're ever going to get. And we checked into the hotel and I'm a kid of 12, I have never seen in my life a shuffle board, the kind that stands up on legs and got the little steel pucks, I've never seen one of those. And there's one right in the little room right off of the lobby of this 1.98 hotel that we're staying in and my dad’s registering and I walk over there to see what that thing is and these guys are standing around, I didn't pay any attention to them, I looked over the edge, it was just eyeball height and I looked over in there and here's all this (inaudible (01:10:03)) on top of that hardwood table in there, you know, inside that shuffle board and it just looked too slick to leave alone and I just had to touch that board and I (inaudible (01:10:13)) and suddenly this guy said "Get your hands off that table boy", I jumped back like he scared me out of my wits and I'm standing there frozen to the floor, you know, I figured this guy is going to eat me for lunch, big West Texas cowboy, you know, I mean they're going to get me. About that time I feel this big hand on my shoulder and just as I am unfrozen from the floor by my dad’s big hand, he pulls me around behind himself and says "You got something to say to this boy, by God, you say it to me", that's word for word what he said. And I'm standing over here behind my dad and my head stuck around (inaudible (01:11:13)). All of a sudden, I'm the bull of the woods here. We can take him, can't we pop. A lot of good I'm going to do but I had all the strength of my dad going for it.
Now one of the things that we're going to get into later, shine some light on this because it carries the same meaning as a parents love and loyalty to the child. Now even though I needed correcting, it was not that other mans place to correct me and even though when we got up to that hotel room, I think by the time we got upstairs I was feeling pretty sassy. We walked in there and I want you to know the wrath of AWC come down on me and I repeat word for word once again, "Keep your (inaudible (01:12:22)) hands off of other peoples stuff." My champion has just chewed me down to nothing but still in my heart, he's my champion and I know however hard he gets on my case, he's not against me, he's for me. Amen, amen. Still (inaudible (01:12:54)). He has taken off his, he's taken off the belt of his weapons, giving his strength, I will stand with you even if it means that I must die. Then comes the walk of blood, the two representatives walk through the path or the alleyway between the two halves, twice through. All the way through this way, all the way through this way and then they stop together in the middle of the two halves. They're standing in blood, they're standing between blood. If you've ever dressed an animal in the field you have some idea of what this thing is like. I mean, if you've never walked around in blood, never been bloody up to your elbows and dressing an animal, particularly a large animal, an elk or a moose or a bull.
If you've ever done that you have some idea what this is about, blood has something awesome about it. I don't care if it ain't nothing but the blood of a pigeon, it's blood and you don't want it on you. If it gets on you, you want it off, you want to be clean from it, it has an everlasting affect, first blood has an unforgettable affect, human blood is an awesome, awesome thing. They stop after making the walk of blood, stopping together in the middle saying "Even as this animal has died, I will stand with you even in the midst of death", this is forever. You and I stand here, I stand with you, standing in blood I make promises I can never ever break. Then the promises are made by each one to the other. Another way to say this, they recite the blessing of the Covenant, what I will do for you, what my family does for your family, we give you our weapons, we give you our strength, now here are the terms of this Covenant. Here's what we agreed on, here's what we worked on, here's what we came up with and standing here in blood I swear...now listen to this carefully, I'm talking about old Covenant blood...each representative swears the blessing, he swears the promises by God to keep his promise, making God the third party and the witness to the Covenant, bringing God in on this thing.
Now everybody else does this too but they do it to their God, we're talking about our God, we're talking about Biblical stuff. Then comes, by the next step, the cutting of the flesh, either the wrist or the hand is cut. Now I told you this would come up and become important and here it is. The life blood of each family is now being shed. Your uncle Charlie and your brother Joe and your cousin Leo, you're all sitting there and you've been taught all your life about blood, the importance of blood. Boy, it is not a light thing with you and you know, from Leviticus 17 that the life is in the blood, the life of the body is in the blood. You've been taught that, you've been taught to reverence blood and you see, as your family representative is cut, either in the wrist or in the hand, and you see the Copeland family blood is flowing and our representative holds his hand up and as our family blood, that's my blood, same as your blood brother, that's the blood that flowed in our fathers veins. You catch onto that now? See, the blood that's flowing down my arm is the same blood flowing in your veins, as old grandpa Copeland blood brother, we've got the same seed in us and now suddenly we're all in this together. Up until now it's just been the animals blood but now that Copeland blood is flowing, that Johnson blood is flowing, that Williams blood is flowing.
The blood (inaudible (01:18:48)) is flowing down David's arm, with the family blood flowing down each one another’s arms, the hand is lifted as the oath is sworn with family blood running down the arm to keep the terms of the Covenant so help me God and the blood is mingled. I don't care how civilized you get, you can't get away from it even if there's no blood. You do it married, you do it in a court of law, stick your hand up, you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God, I do. Well, the only thing that ain't there is the blood but since there's not any blood that's the last time you thought about telling the truth. You still think I'm trying to remember the lie that you worked up to tell when you got (inaudible (01:19:53)) but even in a court of law today and as civilized as we are today, there’s something about that oath that takes holt and a guy that came in there to lie, a lot of time, can't do it on that stand. Why? Because God is involved whether they like it or not, so help me God invoked God.
A friend of mine, sitting over there praying in tongues, while his enemies lawyer bought another enemy on the stand to lie and take all his business away from him, invoke the power of God when that person said that and that person sat there and got themselves into a situation by saying words out their mouth before they could stop. Finally stop them, lift your own hand over their mouth and said aah, the judge said what did you say, I mean he like come off the bench, made him so mad, he said somebody is going to penitentiary here and it ain't going to be that man over there. When you said so help me God and my friends said yes, amen and so God helped.
As previously mentioned, this is the first tape of a series of six which are available from Kenneth Copeland ministries, PO Box 830, Randburg, 2125, South Africa or telephone number 011 792 4626. Kenneth Copeland ministries, Fortworth, Texas, 76192-0001, website www.kcn.org. There's another series of six tapes also from Kenneth Copeland on the blood Covenant which go into other details. It's apparent from this teaching that the blood Covenant is something extremely important in the sight of God and it's also apparent why virginity and the taking of virginity is so sacred. This teaching is absolutely vital to understanding the marriage Covenant and the importance of virginity. The true blood Covenant swears absolute unwavering loyalty, to waiver is to die. Important to note that in this teaching series by Kenneth Copeland, the blood Covenant is synonymous, it's equivalent to Agape. You will recall that the point has been made on several occasions that making love, sexual intercourse within marriage, is the making of the love of 1 Corinthians 13, you now understand that by the cutting of the marriage Covenant and the blood of the virgin bride, it is making Agape love, it is loving kindness, it is charity, Hesed in the Hebrew, Agape in the Greek, it is Gods kind of love, it is unwavering, it is unswerving, it never turns.
This makes clear why divorce is so unacceptable in the sight of God, the incision, the cutting is a Covenant motion, it is painful and the parties will never forget it. The virgin bride will never forget the taking of her virginity, she will never stray if she's given her virginity to a man in Covenant and not just some casual act on the backseat of a car when they've both had a bit too much to drink. Both parties in Covenant will tell exactly the same story, they cut Covenant in the flesh to effect or bring about remembrance. There can be no doubt that a man and a woman who celebrate their marriage as the cutting of Covenant in the virgin flesh of the woman and where the man comes in that woman or climaxes in that woman at the same time, neither of them will forget that. The act of first ejaculation on the part of the male sheds cells which contain all the ingredients for the human being and therefore for the blood.
So the blood of the virgin is shed and, in a sense, blood is shed by the man in the ejaculation that takes place immediately after first penetration. With that Covenant, all that you own, all that the man owns he gives to his wife, all his strength he gives to his wife. His body is not his, it is hers. She gives all she owns and all her strength to her husband, her body is not hers, it is her husband’s. Covenant marriage is about giving, not taking. Covenants are not based on what we have in common, you don't need a Covenant is you're the same. Men and women are both superior in different areas and men and women are both inferior in different areas, they need each other, they need both. If we major on our strengths, there's nothing to cover our weaknesses, we just degenerate into pride and competitiveness. Pride emphasizes our strengths and despises others weaknesses and that is one reason why God hates pride, why He resists the pride. Learn from each other, help each other, pool your strengths and cover your weaknesses. It's not about being the boss, it's about serving. Make your strengths available to serve the other party, there is no way out of a blood Covenant but death.
A blood Covenant you're sworn to kill the person who breaks the Covenant, that is the curse of the Covenant, that is why in the Bible decrees death for an adulterous, that is why there is so little basis for divorce. The reality is that a wife who betrays her husband should be put to death for breaking the Covenant. I'm not advocating in our present society that that should be applied, it would almost seem that God instituted divorce recognizing that it would not always be possible for the curse of the Covenant to be put into effect but the point here is divorce is a measure, a step of last resort. Whether I like you or not has no bearing on whether I keep the Covenant I have with you. Whether you keep your part of the Covenant or not has no bearing on whether I keep the Covenant, the Covenant says I will never leave you or forsake you. If you violate the blood of the Covenant, I'm still in Covenant, you must die.
A few interesting side observations, the Covenant site, both families can gather where all members of both families can see what happens. I've touched on previously, there are indications that the consummation of marriage in days gone by took place in a public location in the presence of all the people at the wedding feast. There are even wood engraving prints which indicate all the guests at a Victorian wedding gathered around the bed, watching the consummation of the marriage. The point was made with regard to Deuteronomy 22, the father of the bride cannot bring the linen cloth, the evidence of virginity to the elders when the husband lays a charge of uncleanness unless he was a personal witness to the fact that that blood came from his daughter. There have to be at least two or three witnesses to testify that the woman is not a virgin otherwise she cannot be put to death.
Remember also that in Adam and Eves day there was no privacy. I am not seeking to be contentious but we need to bite the bullet here and we need to recognize that there is historical information which indicates a very, very different view of how marriage Covenant may have been cut. Each man takes off their coat and gives it to the other, what I am and who I am, all that I am. It would seem that in marriage, the husband only gives his coat. In fact, he doesn't give his coat, he draws his wife under his coat, gives her his authority, that is the covering of the man, he extends his cloak or his coat over his wife, he protects her. All that I am I give to you, all of my authority I give to you, the husband to the wife. She takes his name, she becomes part of him, that is not something which puts the woman down, it is something that gives the woman enormous power and authority, not in the way we understand power and authority today as a dictatorial thing but she has the confidence to go forth with her husband’s name, under his covering to do the work that she's sent to do.
It takes off the girdle, belt of weapons and hands it to the other. I'm giving you my strength, your enemies are my enemies, even if I die I will stand with you. How many men would say that to their wives today? In the walk of blood, the two representatives walk all the way through twice and then stop in the middle. They then recite the terms of the Covenant, I swear the blessing in promises by God, making God the third party and the witness to the Covenant. A very, very different picture to that which we have generally, in the Western world, concerning Covenant and an even more drastically different picture regarding marriage. The picture that one has to see here is of the man and the woman consummating the marriage in front of witnesses and in the process of consummation stopping to recite the terms of the Covenant.
Now whether in seeking to return to all truth in this area, in our society today, one would go so far as to say that it should be done in front of witnesses. That is a matter of personal preference, there certainly appears to be a basis to say that. Deuteronomy 22 by implication gives a basis to say there should and must be witnesses and the teaching that follows, tape 15, cutting the marriage Covenant, I will seek to share with you my impressions of what I believe the Lord has shown me around that area. As the starting pointing to returning to pure Covenant in marriage and we have to address in considering these things the reality that the Covenant is the shedding of blood. One last thought, we have reference in the area of Covenant to the water and the blood with regard to Jesus Covenant. It could perhaps be argued that in the act of the marriage Covenant, the blood of the virgin together with the semen and the lubricants which are water like, in the act of sexual intercourse represent the water and the blood of the marriage Covenant. Father, in the name of Jesus, I ask that anything that I've uttered or has been uttered in this teaching that is not of You, that You will blow it away and it will find no root in the hearts of the hearers. I ask equally father that everything that is of You according to Your will and Your word, will find deep root in the hearers and produce much fruit in Jesus name. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
04 15 Cutting the Marriage Covenant
James Robertson
Of the teaching series on marriage, 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' Volume 2, 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage,' and teaching number 15 is entitled 'Cutting the Marriage Covenant.' Before I start, I would like to pray over those who are listening to this and over this teaching that is an extremely critical teaching in this whole series, and a teaching that Satan would dearly like to interfere with. Please will you just close your eyes and agree with me and pray.
"Father, we come to You in the name of Jesus. We ask You Lord to guide us in this teaching around a very sensitive subject, the cutting of the marriage Covenant according to Your Word. I pray Lord that everything that is spoken that is according to Your Word will find deep root and produce much fruit in the hearts of the hearers, but that every word that is not according to Your will, will be blown away. I speak to every Demon and fallen Angel that is within hearing of this teaching, in the name of Jesus I bind you and I command you to go down now and be silent for the duration of this teaching. I command your ears to be closed that you will hear nothing of this teaching. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Father, I ask that You will send your mighty warring Angels to bind every fallen Angel and every Demon that is within hearing distance of this teaching, and that You will bind them that they will bind them and silence them and block their ears that they will not be able to interfere with somebody from receiving the truths contained in this teaching, in Jesus’ name. And Father, I thank You for revelation knowledge. I thank You that You open our eyes and open our ears and open our hearts to hear Your Word and close them to anything that is not of You, in the name of Yahooshua. Amen."
I would like to take this subject of cutting the marriage Covenant into a level of depth which goes beyond that which we have covered so far. We have heard in the preceding tape on the Covenant made by blood by Kenneth Copeland of the immense significance of Covenant. We have seen how the basic principles of Covenant go right to the heart of what we have been teaching with regards to marriage in this whole series. We see just how important it is that in bringing marriage to pass in the Body of Christ today, that we understand the form of, and practice, that God intended, and recognise that there are different social norms and practices today to those that we are enforcing in biblical times, and that some degree of adjustment may be required. It is vital that we seek to get to the heart of what really is important. What I am going to share with you in this teaching is truth that I believe that the Lord has been revealing to me over many years in which I have prayed over to some considerable extent, before concluding that this message should in fact be included in this tape series.
Taking account of that, I would ask that you give most careful consideration to what is contained here. There will almost certainly be elements which you may find jarring, you may find offensive, and you might even find highly offensive depending upon your perspective on some of the aspects of marriage that are going to be dealt with in this teaching. I would urge you to listen patiently and openly and, in the areas, where you do perhaps experience discomfort, ask yourself whether in fact this is your flesh, or something else rising up against something that you just choose not to receive, and to really seek to see what God is saying to us in this teaching.
That’s how Jesus loves me
I would like to refer you back to the first teaching of the first series where we had the transcript of the article 'Wow! So that's how Jesus loves me!' This is quoted at some length in part 1 of this series, and just a few headlines out of that, just to recap. "The Lord began speaking to us recently about marriage and giving us, some understand of why so many marriages are in a mess or out of order, and even why so few Christian marriages are what they could be. Something that God purposed to be one of His greatest sources of joy and blessing to people, often ends up as a curse and a misery. The Lord began to reveal that the reason why marriages are under such incredible attack is because of what He meant it to be. We see God purposed marriage to be a prophetic sign and wonder."
It goes on and describes in some length what marriage is intended to be. It goes into God's purpose for marriage. It stresses the importance of virginity. It makes the point, that if you look at the average wedding ceremonies today, much of what goes on has its roots in the occult. And in that statement we find the basis for why this teaching today is included in this series. If much of the average wedding ceremonies today has its roots in the occult, we need to find out what God intended marriage to be. They go on and they go through the process of betrothal, the speech that the bridegroom would make as he was leaving, after the betrothal have been finalised. “In My Father's house there are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me, that you will also be where I am.” Now, make the point that those words were used by Jesus in John 14:2-3, and they build a whole case for many of the terms used by Jesus coming straight out of the Jewish marriage practices at the time of Jesus.
We make the point, the bride must spend her time preparing to leave [inaudible 00:07:19] Israel the days of waiting for her wedding are spent in learning how to please her husband. Implication there is that her mother is instructing her in the art of marriage, and I would suggest you that that includes learning specifically and being instructed as to how to make love to her husband in a way that is pleasing to him. It goes on, Israel, the father had to be satisfied that every preparation had been made by his son before he gave him permission to go and get his bride. Jesus spoke these same words on his wedding day. And it goes through the whole wedding ritual as understood from Jewish rite. And that is potentially relevant to this teaching. I am not going to go into it in more detail. My objective in this teaching is not to start building a whole case for hypothetical rite and form. It is to establish a scriptural basis on which others can go further, and others can seek God and discern what God wants them to do, recognising there are very different marriages portrayed in Scripture. We have the case of Isaac and Rebecca, where the Scriptures indicate quite clearly that Rebecca [inaudible 00:08:49] and met Isaac and seemingly the marriage was consummated the same day without any particular celebration or any other ritual or whatever.
The other cases where Jacob worked seven years and was given Leah, and seven-day celebrations and consummation took place and then he was given Rachel for another seven days, followed by working seven years. So there is great diversity. Another comment out of this article, "God wants us to pull down and smash man-made myths and perceptions of marriage. He wants us to throw out all the [inaudible 00:09:29] and bold and beautiful junk and begin to come to a biblical understanding of what marriage is all about." And so we see a very strong teaching there around the idea that marriage is not what God intended it to be and the practice of marriage and the celebration should be something quite different. That particular teaching has formed a useful foundation for this entire series and I refer you back to that tape should you require further information. Or I would suggest that you perhaps get the entire article, God-willing, we might even include a reading of that article at the end of the series.
Cutting the Covenant
Right now, I want to come back to the specific issue of cutting Covenant. We have seen repeatedly that marriage is the act of sexual intercourse with a virgin bride, and we need to come back to understanding what is the absolute minimum requirement for marriage, and what are the basics of cutting Covenant as God intended it, in order to develop the full understanding. I bring you back to Hebrews 13:4, "Marriage is honourable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers, God will judge." We see that sexual intercourse between a husband and wife is honourable, and that nothing that they do in the marriage bed is unclean. The fornicators and adulteresses will be judged, in other words, women who have sexual intercourse with more than one man, and men who have sexual intercourse with women, who have already had sex with another man.
Remembering 1 Corinthians 12:23-24 stating "And those members of the body which we think to be less honourable, on these we bestow greater honour; and our unpresentable parts have greater modesty, but our presentable parts have no need. But God composed the body, having given greater honour to that part which lacks it." And we saw very dramatically in the second teaching of the first series that this referred to the enormously significant role played by the male and female sexual organs in the cutting of Covenant. I think it is important to recap that in the light of the teaching that we have just had, by Kenneth Copeland, in the Covenant cutting blood, and I would like to take you back full circle through this teaching so you can just see exactly how this all ties together, and how absolutely crystal clear it is that the act of sexual intercourse with a virgin is the act of marriage Covenant. From there we can go back to some postulation of procedure and ritual around the cutting of Covenant. We can deal with some of the spiritual issues relating to consummation, and we can deal with a few of the challenges recognising that virginity is a scarce commodity in the world today.
So, just to run through some of the points that we have made in the second teaching of the first volume, under the heading virginity, what is marriage? We read, in order to define marriage, let us see what the Bible says. Deuteronomy 22:13-21 states "If any man takes a wife, and goes in to her, and detests her, and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings a bad name on her, and says, 'I took this woman, and when I came to her I found she was not a virgin,' then the father and mother of the young woman shall take and bring out the evidence of the young woman’s virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. And the young woman’s father shall say to the elders, 'I gave my daughter to this man as wife, and he detests her. Now he has charged her with shameful conduct, saying, 'I found your daughter was not a virgin,' and yet these are the evidences of my daughter’s virginity.' And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take that man and punish him; and they shall fine him one hundred shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name on a virgin of Israel. And she shall be his wife; he cannot divorce her all his days. But if the thing is true, and evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house. So you shall put away the evil from among you."
Deuteronomy 22:14 in [inaudible 00:14:21] translation states "And given occasion of speech against her, charging her with adultery and bring an evil name upon her and say 'I took this woman and when I lay with her I found her not a virgin.'" This translation clearly equates the lack of virginity with evidence of adultery. Deuteronomy 22:14 in the New International Version, "And slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, 'I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity." This translational more clearly indicates that the man approached the young woman to consummate the marriage, but presumably on inspection found her not to be a virgin.
Deuteronomy 22:19 states, "And they shall amerce him in a hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days." There are a couple of key things that come out of that passage of Scripture, the evidence of virginity, and a cloth collecting the blood when her virginity is taken. The implication of calling that evidence and implication of a court being able to sentence the young woman to death indicating a requirement that the evidence should have statutory or legal standing in court with the inference that perhaps there should be witnesses present to witness the shedding of blood in the consummation. Further supported by the remarks made in the previous teaching, to the effect that Covenant was typically cut in some sort of an amphitheatre where everybody could observe the cutting of the Covenant.
It has some significance if virginity is going to become a critical component of the way we view marriage. It’s challenging in today's age and I will come back to that a bit later. From that teaching we concluded that virginity was a prerequisite for a godly marriage and that virginity was sacred, and that sexual intercourse with a virgin was marriage. We then went on to discuss what the answer of the question is - what is the marriage Covenant? This is particularly relevant in the context of the current teaching. We saw that the Covenant requires the shedding of blood. Hebrews 9:18-20 states, "Therefore not even the first Covenant was dedicated without blood. For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water, scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, 'This is the blood of the Covenant which God has commanded you.'"
We saw very clearly that a Covenant could not be dedicated without blood. This was made very clear in the preceding teaching by Kenneth Copeland. We also saw that Covenant requires the splitting, cleaving or cutting of some living creature. We referred to Genesis 15:4-21, which was also referred to in the previous teaching where the animals were cleaved, or cut in half, and God walked through the halves of the animal. Also, we saw in Jeremiah 34:18, "And I will give the men who have transgressed My Covenant, who have not performed the words of the Covenant which they made before Me, when they cut the calf in two and passed between the parts of it." And it was clear in that case that the Covenant made with God, by the princess of Judah and others, involve cutting a calf into two and passing between the parts of it. The same actions we see in Genesis 15:10-18 is described in depth by Kenneth Copeland.
The teaching went further, and we saw that the Living Torah, a modern Jewish translation by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, published by Moznaim Publishing Corporation in New York and Jerusalem, translated Genesis 15:10 as follows: "Abraham brought all these to Him (God), he split them in half and placed one half opposite the other." Here we saw that the word translated ‘cut’, in the New King James Version, is translated ‘split’. The footnote to Genesis 15:10 in the Living Torah states, split them, this was the way of making a Covenant, [inaudible 00:19:00] Covenant and Betha split appeared to be closely related. It symbolised that just as the two halves of the animal were really one, so were the two people making the Covenant. Moreover, just as one side cannot live without the other, so you cannot live without each other. It is also seen as a malediction, when one violating the oath will be torn asunder like the animals. In this one note, we began to see the deeper meaning in body in Deuteronomy 22:13-30, which had been discussed previously. We saw firstly that Covenant is made by splitting or cutting some living thing and shedding blood, that people who make a blood Covenant become one and cannot live without one another, and that a person who breaks Covenant is to be put to death. We went on and cited the teaching that was included in the previous tape.
We then went further and saw that the Oxford English dictionary defines split as break forcibly, be broken into parts, especially, longitudinally or with the grain or plane of cleavage. We should consider also the physical reality of the [inaudible 00:20:11] whereas something that cleaves will cut [inaudible 00:20:13]. We then saw that the marriage Covenant is cut when a man cleaves into his virgin wife, referring to Genesis 2:21-25 in the King James translation, "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be One Flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
Thus, we see the man cleaving, or splitting his wife, forcibly breaking apart her hymen on the plane of cleavage shedding blood. He then proceeds to walk or pass between the two halves completing the Covenant act. If you listen to that in the context of the previous teaching, you will see just how dramatic, forceful and how powerful that is. We went on previously and said the imagery is vivid and powerful, if we put aside our prudery for a moment, and wonder that the physical appearance of the external female sexual organ, we should be even further amazed that the imagery which our God has encapsulated in what superficially is an organ whose structure and design makes no earthly sense it is not intended to. It faithfully recreates the two halves of the Covenant animal, even to the hair covering the animal. Surely, we must conclude that God knew the end from the beginning, and designed women to be symbolic of His Covenant with man.
Sexual act
Taking it further, He symbolically recreates the cutting of the Covenant every time a wife who truly loves her husband and gives herself totally to him, and expresses sexual orgasm, coupled with the flood of blood into the labia minora. How can we conclude other than with the sexual act is the most sublimely holy representation of the act of Covenant? How can it be other than appalled at how this symbolism has been lost and distorted? The sexual act is an act of such enormous spiritual significance. Is it any wonder that Satan has expended the energy that he has to deceive us for so long? How can we for a moment suggest that there is another purpose for virginity? It went on and stated that the female sexual organ is the symbol of the marriage Covenant, and that every time a Covenant reminded man sees his wife's sexual organ, he is instinctively reminded of his Covenant with her. Clearly it is an abomination for any other man to have sight of the outward symbol of that Covenant, let alone to penetrate it, thus breaking the Covenant.
An important point to note, the immense power of the marriage Covenant in any other Covenant, the Covenant is cut once and that is the end of the ceremony. It remains in force in perpetuity. However, in marriage, every time the man and woman make love, the cutting of the Covenant is symbolically re-enacted and once one begins to understand just how important Covenant is, it is absolutely awesome that God has created man and woman in such a way that an act which is necessary for procreation, an act which is instinctively something that men and women in marriage seek to do on a regular basis, actually re-enacts the cutting of Covenant every time it is performed. So, the Covenant significance of sexual intercourse in marriage is phenomenal. It is absolutely beyond what the Western mindset can initially comprehend, and from this, we see how wonderfully powerful this symbolism of marriage is, and by implication how wonderfully powerful the bonds of marriage are intended to be.
We must ask ourselves whether it is possible that the harlot man seeks for this Covenant purity with women, and because of the wrong teaching of this age, turns to pornography and lust as the only substitute that offers a recognition of the deep desire for Covenant through the sexual act. That statement is a challenging one, but there is so much teaching in the world today which leads to a syndrome which might be turned. Close your eyes and think of England, which is epitomised by an attitude which is attributed to Victorian England, in which young women about to be married, were told by their mothers to grit their teeth and tolerate the sexual act as a necessary evil in marriage.
There is still a legacy of that in certainly the Western World today where prudery exists with regards to marriage and based on the information that certainly has come to my attention, it appears that the vast majority of Christians do not have a full understanding and revelation of the joy of sexual lovemaking. They very seldom experience the full potential of what God intended to be an absolutely sublime and heavenly act on Earth. Because of that, we end up with situations where women regard sexual lovemaking as a chore and make no effort to please their husbands. Their husbands get jaded and bored and seek release elsewhere, whether it be through an extramarital affair so-called, through pornography or fantasy, but whatever it is, it is wrong, and it breaks down the marriage further and we get into a vicious circle because of people's wrong understanding of what marriage is intended to be.
In the subsequent teaching in this series, we will address some of these aspects in more detail. We must also recognise that the symbolic portrayal of the female sexual organ aroused, and provocatively displayed in the form of the blood red heart used on Valentine's Day cards, and many other cards and other artefacts to say I love you, is a seemingly innocuous symbol of love throughout our society, and represents one of the most effective devices that Satan has used to distract us totally from the true meaning of love. [Inaudible 00:26:56 to 00:27:22]. I must stress that love in the world associated with that red heart, which is nothing more than a caricature of the female sexual organ, is lust. It is not love. It is dependent on the appearance and the behaviour of the object of that lust and is totally contrary to the Covenant love, the agape, the hesed that was discussed in detail by Kenneth Copeland.
Nudity
Remember that 1 Corinthians 12:23-24 states, "And those members of the body which we think to be less honourable, on these we bestow greater honour; and our unpresentable parts have greater modesty, but our presentable parts have no need. But God composed the body, having given greater honour to that part which lacks it." We see very clearly that the male and female sexual organs have the greatest honour in the body. They have the honour of being the instruments whereby the Covenant is cut and celebrated and whereby the One Flesh Bond is formed, maintained, and built. They are not dirty, and they are not shameful. The only shame associated with the male and female sexual organs is if they are seen by others. The Word of God tells us in Genesis 2 that the man and the woman were naked and unashamed. We read a moment ago that Scripture says that the marriage is honourable and the bed undefiled. There is nothing wrong with a husband and wife being naked together, seeing each other naked together and touching one another intimately. The problem comes in when that happens outside of marriage and that is where the private parts of the man or the woman are seen publicly, and that is shame, because it is the shame of the harlot.
The awareness of nudity is the absolute essence of the realisation of the sinful nature and the carnality of mankind which came about as a result of Adam and Eve's sin. To guard the parts of the body which the Scriptures show to be most honourable, has been dirty and so forth, and is an absolute abomination in the Sight of God. We saw also that there was a close correlation between the Christian Covenant and the marriage Covenant. Throughout the series, we referred repeatedly to Ephesians 5:22-33, "For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the Church; and He is the Savior of the body." Verse 31, "And shall be joined on to his wife, and they two shall be One Flesh." Verse 32, "This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church." So, the comment was made previously. We see here one of the most perfect examples of God's infinite attention to detail, His wonder and His majesty. We see the blood Covenant between Christ and his bride, the Church, neatly tied in to the blood Covenant between a man and his wife, both demonstrated symbolically by the Covenant cut, by walking between the halves of the animal that has been cleaved.
Marriage
All of this reinforces the teaching in tape 14 of this series and I really, really would urge you to pray into this until you get a real revelation of how the word marriage equates to sexual intercourse in marriage, and the marriage Covenant equates to the first act of sexual intercourse in marriage. Once you understand that, many, many things which do not make sense about marriage, fall into place. We saw in the last teaching on hesed, agape, Covenant love, a number of points, and I just want to lift out some key headlines out of that to lay a foundation for this teaching that we are now engaged in.
We saw that the blood Covenant equated with agape in the New Testament, the Greek hesed in the Old Testament. Those Scriptures relate to the charity in the King James for agape, and to love and kindness for hesed in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament. We saw that a true blood Covenant represented a commitment to absolutely unwavering loyalty, that to waiver was to die. We saw that the Covenant required a Covenant motion which we would never forget. It is apparent from the discussion of virginity a moment ago, that if a young woman gives her virginity as an act of sacrificial love to her new husband, there is pairing, there is shedding of blood, and she will never forget that moment, and if her husband goes out of his way to make that a beautiful and lovely experience, then so much more she will never forget it. Proverbs 30:18-19 says, "There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yes, four which I do not understand: The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the way of a man with a virgin."
That is the consummation of marriage that has been talked about there. The consummation should be a beautiful event in the life of both husband and wife. In the case of a man who is marrying his first wife and taking account of the points raised in the teaching entitled 'Marriage Matters for Men,' if he is marrying at the appointed which he is sexually ready and she is sexually ready, there has been no messing around with dating and courting and petting, they are not being forced to endure years of sexual frustration. At the moment that they reach full ripeness sexually, they are brought into a place where they are married. They are married in the husband's father's house, they are not subject to many of the cares of the world at that stage and that marriage is consummated. It is a beautiful act in the full vibrancy of the dynamic youth of the marriage partners. It is something that they will never forget, it is beautiful, and it is an act of Covenant. In Covenant, both parties will tell exactly the same story. The Covenant cutting flesh has the effect to bring about remembrance, and that is absolutely vital. It is an experience which they will never forget, and because they will never forget it, they will never forget the obligations to one another and will never forget the Covenant.
Part of the Covenant is all that the man owns he gives to his wife. All his strength he gives to his wife. All that she owns she gives to her husband. And her body she gives to her husband. There is no holding back. Her body is for him, and his body is for her. Covenants are not based on what we have in common. You do not need a Covenant if you are the same. Covenants are based on differences and weaknesses. Men and women are both superior in different areas, and men and women are both inferior in different areas. Marriage is about covering one another's weaknesses. Marriage requires man and woman to pool strengths in marriage, and in Covenant, and to cover weaknesses. It is not about being the boss. It is about serving. There has to be direction, but that is a responsibility and a duty. It is not a right and a privilege of lordship and dictatorial behaviour. The point was made whether I like you or not, has no bearing on whether I keep the Covenant. The Covenant is in place. It does not matter if subsequently I decide I do not like you, I still have the Covenant, I still honour the Covenant, and I still walk according to the Covenant, so I might just as well decide that I am not going to get to a place where I do not like you.
Whether you keep your part of the Covenant or not, has no bearing on whether I keep my part of the Covenant. That gives rise to the continual scriptural cross-linking relating to Covenant. I would never leave you or forsake you. If you violate the blood of the Covenant, I am still in Covenant and you must die because the Covenant says you should die. Some extremely important points are coming out of that. We deduced from the ritual that there were some differences in marriage. The Scriptures clearly indicate that the husband is the head, and the wife is the body, and it was inferred from that, that rather than husband and wife exchanging quotes, the husband would in fact give his coat, or maybe not even give his coat but extend his coat, and take his wife under his coat under the covering of his cloak. The picture that I see is a man with a flung cloak, who puts his arm around his new bride and takes the cloak with his arm, and wraps it around her so that she is now under his covering. This ties back so beautifully to the teaching on covering in the first series of tapes. So the man extends his covering to his wife. There is a degree of very different approach in terms of what the man gives the wife, in terms of covering and she in turn gives the husband in terms of childbearing. All that I am, I give to you, and all of my authority I give to you. A statement from the husband to the wife that was just very evident out of the previous teaching that goes with the man, I am giving you my strength, your enemies and my enemies, even if I die, I will stand with you.
By giving the woman this man, she gives him his authority, and she is able to go in the name of her husband. She is no longer operating independently. She goes in the name of her husband. She has the full mandate and authority of her husband to transact business, to supervise employees, and to conduct the family business. She goes as the agent of her husband with full authority in his name. She is Mrs. James Robertson, and as Mrs. James Robertson, she carries all the contractual abilities and authority of James Robertson himself, in conducting the business of the family. The Covenant means, I will stand with you even if I must die. With that we see that the curse of the Covenant, even as this animal has died, as the general Covenant. I will stand with you even in the midst of death standing in the blood. I make promises I can never ever break. There is a symbolism there associated with the death of the woman's virginity, and that virginity can never be restored to life. It is a sacrifice that she has given willingly and lovingly to her husband. It is an absolute abomination to put her out, to put her away, to divorce her, unless she has been consistently treacherous over a sustained period as we have seen in previous teachings.
While standing in the blood, they should recite the terms of the Covenant. It is where the blessing and the promises by God are, making God the third party in witnesses. Now there is no particular scriptural basis for that, but it does seem that it is something that one could certainly consider in consummating a marriage, whether the woman is a virgin or not, to actually declare an oath of allegiance which picks out the key points of the terms of the Covenant that are being referred to. But again, I must make the point that has been made in previous teachings. There is absolutely no scriptural basis which says that any vows or oaths are necessary for marriage to come into effect. They are simply a reinforcement. I would suggest to you that it is perfectly arguable that simply by declaring by husband and wife, declaring that they are Bible-believing Christians, it is taken as a given that the implied terms of Covenant of the marriage Covenant contained in Scripture are applicable. It is not necessary to take any other vows. You can love according to 1 Corinthians 13 and the other Scriptures, which deal with the conduct of man and woman in marriage, in Ephesians 5 and so forth.
It is ipso facto applicable you do not need to take vows that the wife will submit. She understands according to the fact that the marriage was undertaken in terms of Scripture, that this applies. However, we need to recognise that today those are little understood and little practiced disciplines and therefore there is a case to be made out of what is being presented here to formulate a formal or semi-formal marriage ceremony, and marriage rite with some vows, etc., that are performed according to the scriptural basis which has been identified. Again, I make the point, it is tenuous in the sense that there is no clear definition from Scripture, but performing a rite in some pseudo-altar, in front of a congregation before an officiating official or priest, exchanging rings, throwing confetti and so forth, is entirely and completely pagan and contrary to Scripture. The marriage comes into effect when it is consummated. Everything else are just trappings.
Oaths, the cloth and the evidence of virginity
There are three major factors to consider with regards to this teaching. There are a number of procedural issues with regard to oaths, the cloth, and the evidence of virginity, etc. Secondly, there are a number of spiritual issues relating to consummation being an intimate sexual process, and thirdly, there are a number of challenges with regards to virginity. I would like to just touch on those first. We have a number of categories of virgin, and all categories of women who can potentially participate legitimately in the Sight of God, in some instances and others not legitimately, in an act of marriage. True virgins, virgins in their early teens, normally as we have seen somewhere about 12 and a half to 13, 14, 15, and in that age group according to the information at my disposal, the hymen is almost certain to rupture with a significance flow of blood. That is the context in which the Scriptures have been written. It was God's intention for women to marry at that ages we have seen before, and with that consummation, there will be a flow of blood.
However if a virgin marries in her late teens or early 20s, the indications are that in many cases the hymen has hardened and toughened to a point where even though considerable pain may be experienced, it may not tear or rupture, and it may not even be possible to penetrate without surgical intervention to actually nick the hymen with a scalpel, or scissors to cut it in order for penetration to take place. Because of the hardening, there may be little or no bloodshed and therefore we get to a place where virginity starts to look to be unimportant, because now there is no real blood and there is therefore on the face of it, no real blood Covenant.
We then have a further dilemma, and that is true virgins whose hymens have been ruptured in some legitimate way. There are indications that virgins who are athletically active can damage their hymens through their athletic activity. Obviously, any young girl or young woman who makes use of sanitary tampons inserted into the vagina has a potential to damage the hymen and rupture the hymen. So, we have a group of legitimate virgins, where the virginity may be obvious unprovable at the time of marriage, but where there may be no shedding of blood in terms of the Covenant. We have another group of true virgins whose hymens have been ruptured accidentally in some fashion, because they have not married at the appointed age, and where it becomes difficult for the man to know whether he is truly marrying a virgin or not, unless he has absolutely clear leading from the Spirit of God, and clearly there is no blood for the Covenant.
There are obviously false virgins. There are women who knowingly must represent their marital state for any number of reasons in order to get the man they want, and they are taking that man into adultery as we have seen in previous teachings. Again, it is absolute foolishness to consummate marriage with any woman unless you are absolutely sure that God has appointed her as your wife, specifically and particularly if she does not have evidence of virginity. Then there can be unknowing false virgins. I cited the case previously of a woman who was seduced and lost her virginity under hypnosis, and 30 years later discovered by process of revelation by the Holy Spirit, that this had happened, and she had in fact been living in adultery for 30 years.
There are admitted non-virgins, those who had been sexually abused, raped, etc., where there is an enormous dilemma given the magnitude of the ungodly sexual acts that take place in the world today. We have ministered in a number of occasions [inaudible 00:46:54] molested and their virginity taken by cousins and uncles in their father's houses, in places which should have been safe, and who are emotionally and severely damaged. There is no real comprehension amongst many Christians of the magnitude of the sexual molestation of young girls roundabout the age of 14 that takes place by fathers, stepfathers, uncles, cousins, brothers in the world today. A substantial proportion of the world's women lose they virginity involuntarily, or semi-voluntarily to close male relatives. It is an abomination in the Sight of God, and it is a by-product of the false doctrines that we are talking about.
We then have the case of self-acknowledged harlots, women who have been sleeping around, either in prostitution or just through loose living. Some of those may just have come to salvation and repented. Others may have done it after salvation, because they did not really understand the full magnitude of how wrong it was. They need to come to repentance. They need to be spiritually cleansed of the ungodly One Flesh Bonds and before they can be married, God must show very clearly that it is His will. Women who have been divorced, put away, or who have deserted their husbands, all may profess to be available to marry. Again, the same challenge applies. Then finally widows, and again, a woman who purports to be a widow, is not necessarily always telling the truth. So, the minute one moves into the realms where there is not a physical seal of virginity on a woman, a man marrying her requires great discernment of the Will of God in this situation, and also considerable spiritual knowledge in order to set that woman free to the extent that is necessary.
In terms of cutting Covenant, this leaves us with an apparent problem in the sense that it is no blood that can be shared through the act of the first sexual intercourse. Now, the easy answer to that, is to take communion, one, and to apply that liberally to the place of union at the time of the first union, and to declare over it that it is the blood of Jesus. That blood sanctifies and consecrates the Covenant, and is the blood of the Covenant. Clearly it is not the same significance in the eyes of the participants as the shedding of the young woman's blood. It is important to understand that, as indicated a few minutes ago, the marriage Covenant is replicated every time sexual intercourse takes place. So it is perhaps more or less correct to suggest that God accommodates such situation to a point in which the woman becomes highly aroused sexually, there is a flood of blood into her sexual organs, and when the first ejaculation takes place, and a One Flesh Bond is formed, the marriage is consummated spiritually. It can be inferred from Scripture that that is a viable and valid form of consummation, but it is not first prize. First prize is the consummation in marriage with a virgin, with the right age structure, etc., as taught previously.
Unfortunately, as indicated in this day and age, it is going to be pretty seldom that that happens to the majority of people. We should seek to return to that standard of morality, ethics, integrity and Covenant mindedness. There is no reason why the daughters of the present generation cannot move towards being married in that fashion. In such a situation, the taking of an oath becomes more important, but I think it is really important that both parties understand what they are doing. The oath is still, I believe, before God simply, a confirmation of the act of Covenant of sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse with a woman who is available to marry, whether a widow, or someone that God has released to marry as a consequence of releasing her from past debt and obligations, through a previous fornication or whatever, is sexual intercourse. The consummation is marriage. Even in the cases where there is a seal of virginity, but it is hardened and there is no blood, then the only basis in which that has some real significance, is in terms of evidence of virginity, which requires close inspection to see that it is there which again is scriptural. I have taught, some time back, on the situation in Judges 19 to 21. Clearly several groups of women were inspected to confirm their virginity when the men took them as wives.
If we look at some of the procedural issues raised by the previous teachings, this issue of evidence is challenging. The point I made in the previous teaching is that families watch the cutting of Covenant. This comment has been made in several instances that there books and other records, which indicate that even as recently as the 18th century, it was not uncommon for wedding guests to watch the consummation of a marriage and see the evidence of virginity firsthand. It is not something that could be done very easily in present society, but it does suggest that some measures are required, at the very least, where there is evidence of virginity. It would seemingly be appropriate for the cloth to be placed under the young woman at the appropriate location on the bed before penetration, and immediately after penetration and the shedding of blood, for that blood to be mopped up perhaps immediately for the friends of the bridegroom referred to in the article, 'So that's how Jesus loves me', might be summoned and with both bride and groom under the bed close handed to them with a declaration before witnesses that this was the evidence of virginity and the young girl had been found to be a virgin on the basis that as long as the groom beforehand, satisfies himself before penetration of the young woman's virginity and then penetrates her, that is sufficient evidence that she was a virgin.
If he inspects and finds that she is not a virgin, then he would need to call witnesses and possibly call the young woman's mother and father to cancel the wedding, if she had purported to be a virgin and he could find no evidence. So, these are needs for some contemplation. It seems to me that there is no really significant basis for consummation in front of witnesses. Consummation will take place in any way before God, the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. So, there are in fact witnesses before God. If the parties have been led by the Spirit and are committed Christians, that should be sufficient. It’s certainly not a case anyway of legal standing before courts. It is a question of standing before the Court of Heaven and before the judgement seat.
The piece then needs to be discussed and resolved between the parties beforehand, so that there are no surprises. A reference was also made to taking vows of the oath while standing in the blood of the Covenant animal. It is not unreasonable for a man and woman to pertain an oath over it in marriage after the initial act of consummation, while their bodies are joined together, and the blood is flowing around them. And this can apply equally well in a situation where there is no hymen and no bleeding, simply by the application of generous quantity of communion wine to the point of intercourse, and taking oaths before God with the appropriate prayers, obviously done reverently. This is not done in some sort of carnal... I cannot think of words to describe it, but I see this as a highly significant holy act of dedication and consecration. I would urge anybody who hears it, as being something different to consider in their hearts. We are talking about the things of God, and we are talking about things of holiness. We are not talking about things of the unclean world.
Other marriage ceremonies
So those are a couple of key procedural issues. Other things round about marriage ceremonies, there really does not appear to be any particular scriptural basis to lay anything down. I will come to one or two other points in a moment. The main issue is the spiritual dimension of cutting the Covenant, and we must not get into Pharisaism in terms of the overall right. The main thing is that the Covenant must be cut through consummation of marriage. All the rest of that is essentially incidental. Once that has been established, that the bride is free to marry in the Sight of God, that is really the point that I hope to get to in a minute. So, if we can go on to the spiritual issues in terms of consummation, which to me are the most significant factors in terms of this particular subject, we read in Scripture in various places of the sound of the voice of the bride and groom, and the inference that there is the sound of a joyous outcry in some fashion.
I want to stress, in my own experience, and in terms of much prayer, contemplation and pondering this whole subject over many years, I am profoundly convinced that the act of consummation in marriage can have, in modern worldly carnal terms, a make or break influence on the marriage. If that first episode of lovemaking is powerful, is dramatic, and if a strong One Flesh Bond is formed by the completion of that first period of lovemaking, the marriage has a much higher probability of success than others. It is necessary that we talk about these things. Church people as a whole, seem reluctant to speak of sex, but the whole Bible speaks of sex. Words like virgin, marry, adultery, circumcision, etc., all speak of sexual imagery, imagery which relates to specific physical conditions, relating to man and woman's most holy organs. If we are to consider all aspects of what makes godly marriage so wonderful, we must speak of sex, else we fall into the devil's trap of regarding that which is holy is unclean.
We have read previously that those parts are the most honourable, and we have read that marriage is honourable and the bed undefiled, and by implication nothing that happens between husband and wife in the marriage bed is unclean in the Sight of God. It does not matter how they touch one another, and it does not matter what they do to one other. I am clearly not talking about some of the perversions of sadomasochisms, whips and bondage, etc. which the world purports to be sexually stimulating. I am talking about gentle, tender making love between a man and his wife where each gives themselves totally to the other, seeks to please the other, and gives no thought to their own needs and their own desires. Lovemaking in marriage is indeed intended to be Heaven on Earth. It is a significant component of bringing Heaven to Earth in marriage. If the ultimate scriptural act in marriage, sexual lovemaking is not fulfilled to the extent that God intended it to be, none of the rest of the marriage will be fulfilled.
I would like to describe in a moment of what I think might be a godly form of cutting the marriage Covenant in a practical sense of the generation in which we live. But before I do that, let me just bring this back into modern context. Let me talk for a moment about the way marriages are typically consummated. If you can use that word in the context where 60% of people who get married are not virgins on the wedding night, typically marriages associated with... and this is not peculiar just to the world. It happens to a greater or lesser extent to people in the Church, as well where the things may be a little bit less excessive, but that pattern on the world. Typically, there will be a stag party of some sort for the man where jokes may be made, all sorts of pranks, doctored drinks, doctored cars, and even doctored cars after the wedding, are thought to be cool in those hunting. Wild parties with too much drink that go on late into the night, at Church service, and ultimately the bride and groom fall into bed late at night, absolutely exhausted.
If they were indeed not sexually experienced before that event, that first occasion of lovemaking is unlikely to be fulfilling. They are too tired, they are not focused on it, and they have had a wild party and it is likely to hurt. He is likely to be in a hurry and generally it is just going to be, if you forgive me for being blunt, a mess. They are not going to have much release. It is going to end up as a carnal lustful act. It is not going to be a godly celebration of the act of marriage because they think they got married in front of the priest at 11 o'clock that morning, and they have been partying and drinking, and she has been dancing with half the men at the wedding celebration, and he has been dancing with half the women. They have been lusting after all these other people and their desire is not even for each other at the time that they fall into bed and normally consummate the marriage.
In many other cases, they are just consummating adultery if they are not just carrying on with the adultery that they have been practising for months or years. Even if they are married in the Sight of God, they have probably got married months or years ago when they first had sex. All of this is designed by Satan to make marriage fail. I cannot stress that enough - this messed up, muddled up typical consummation of marriage that characterises the world today and much of the Church. Even if they do not get drunk, even if they do not serve alcohol, they go on until late and they are not geared up to enjoy that first act of lovemaking. That is not an absolute generality that applies in all cases, but certainly in my life of nearly 50 years, I am not aware of any instance of a marriage which has not followed that pattern.
I want to go on and talk a little bit about what seems to me, after considerable prayer, consideration and pondering to be an appropriate form of marriage. I need to stress that it is based on my own experience. I believe it is fundamentally found, and I believe that it can work, but I will also need to say to you that if you have hang-ups about what I have said so far, in terms of being moderately to the point regarding sexual terminology, what follows will be a little bit more so. If you are feeling offended at this point, perhaps you should refrain from listening to the rest of this tape. I would also say to you that at this point, if you have not listened to the preceding 34 odd tapes before listening to this tape, I would encourage you to go back and fill in the gaps. You need to see what I am about to say in a very broad context. You need to understand the kingdom context. You need to understand the Demonic Satanic attacks that have been happening on marriages to some reasonably significant degree, and to understand why what I am about to say is appropriate and godly in the context of marriage.
Consummation of marriage
Let me just go ahead and outline just a brief process as it occurred to me, as I have been praying about it. It seems to me that the marriage ceremony would involve a feast of some sort. Very early on in the feast, the bride and groom would leave the guests to go and consummate the marriage. In other words, the consummation of the marriage is the heart of the whole celebration. Therefore, it is something that takes place very early on in the event. The bride and groom are anticipating the consummation and they have been prepared. In particular, the bride and groom have been prepared for some time beforehand and have been educated. The father instructs his son to be gentle and give love. This is a spirit-to-spirit communication .Take the lead but you can do nothing if she does not desire you and does not give herself to you, so be sensitive. Touch, stroke, kiss, caress. They need to talk about every aspect of the sensitivities of woman's body, the various types of caress, the various types of kissing, the various types of stroking of all areas of her body, and building up her arousal to a point where she is ready to be penetrated and ready to give everything. Opening his spirit to give her everything, focusing on her pleasure, not thinking of self, and if she does the same, she will do what the man desires. Guide her gently and instruct her what to do and when to do it.
She will come to a place of high arousal. When she comes to that place of high arousal, the penetration will be much easier. The pain would be much more bearable and the whole moment of consummation through the cleaving of the hymen, will be much more ecstatic. She will be able to take it. It will not be something that is so totally uncomfortable and painful that it will discourage her, and that she will be unable to press through it. She will experience the joy of consummating marriage with her husband. In the same time, leading up to the marriage, the mother instructs her daughter, your desire must be for your husband that is scriptural. Think about him and anticipate making love to him. Your whole function in lovemaking is to bring pleasure to him, and to give yourself to him totally to meet his needs, and so forth. With that type of instruction, so that the expectations are high, their willingness to give this is at an absolute peak and they go into the bridal chamber expecting to give totally and expecting to experience. They are being dressed accordingly. The bride is dressed in satin, silky garments, not necessarily designed the way modern marriage garments are designed, to prepare her spiritually and emotionally, just to be absolutely desirable and attractive to her new husband.
Once they are alone in the bridal chamber, they make love in a gentle slow manner in which the husband leads her and guides her, even if this is his first experience which is generally should be in the context of current society, until they reach the point where they both agree that it is time for that first penetration. I would suggest that they could then put the linen cloth under the appropriate area when the young woman lies down on the bed and then as they go forward, the penetration takes place, and assuming that she was a virgin young enough for blood to flow, blood flows and it is collected on the cloth. It does seem to me that the mucous emissions from both man and woman with high arousal, constitute water, and so we have water and blood collected with regards to the consummation of the marriage. The semen of the first ejaculation containing as it does, all the vital elements to create another human being when merged with the cell of the woman, arguably contains the elements of blood. The life is in that semen as it is in the blood, and therefore we get the mingling of the metaphorically, the blood of both partners.
At that moment, with the covers over them they can call the witnesses who have been waiting at the door, the friends of the bridegroom, the parents of bride and groom or whoever, and hand over the cloth, and declare that the blood is the blood of her virginity. At that time, they could declare the Covenant vows, exchange their weaknesses and strengths and so on and so forth, in line with the points we were making earlier.
Prior to that, possibly before going into the marriage chamber, they could have a little ceremony in which the husband takes his cloak and extends it over his new wife. Or alternatively, once the consummation has taken place, a similar ceremony could take place that they come out before the guests, he extends his cloak over and he declares the Covenant vows in front of the people giving her strength, protection, and giving his name, giving his authority and extending his covering. The finer points are things that individual people need to resolve but does not have to become some sort of a traditional rite, but I believe the principles are there.
There needs to be the acknowledgement that the Covenant carries the penalty of death for breaking it, according to Scripture. There are various other elements of Scripture which might be introduced to it, but we are departing in this completely from any form of officiating priest. We are departing from any form of written contract. If you want to write the vows down of the oath, for your own frame of reference, well and good, but those vows are simple vows. They are scriptural vows, and they are an exchange of strengths, protection, name and so forth. There is no need for rings. If you want to wear rings because you are bound by tradition, that is your prerogative. Understand that it is simply to make your conformance with the norms of the present society more comfortable. It has no significance before God. Realise that rings can become a sign of bondage. If you get into a situation where a husband or wife forgets to put their ring on one morning, the next thing is a drama, where the other partner thinks they are trying to tell them that they want a divorce, as they do not love them anymore, then you have missed the point of the ring. Destroy it become an idol in your life.
One Flesh Bond
Coming back to the celebration, once consummation has taken place, the bride and groom could come out. There could be a celebration, there could be a toast, and there could be a few speeches, but then they should withdraw again. The way I read Scripture, the bride and groom, for the seven days, spent seven days in the marriage chamber. It is really important to understand why that is. Sexual lovemaking is a process of raising both parties to ever increasing levels of ecstatic experience in the sexual act. The first time they climax it is a relatively mundane experience, even if it is the first time in a virgin state. As they spend time together, as they make love and are touched in more detail in the teaching, God willing, on building the One Flesh Bond on some specific points here, but as they make love, as they spend time together, they need to spend time together.
They need to spend at least half a day, immediately following the consummation just making love, caressing, talking, stroking, focusing totally on each other and each time they take the act of marriage further, each time there is a further orgasmic climax, this One Flesh Bond will be strengthened. In an ideal situation, they should spend a day, or at least half a day making love to a point where they have made love and climaxed together three, four, five, six times during the course of the afternoon, where they have both been well instructed, are sensitive and are giving themselves to one another by the time that afternoon is finished. The final plateau that is reached and the final orgasm that is experienced by both partners will be of such magnitude that the wife will look back and say that that is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to her. She will look at her husband with new eyes. She will be filled with love and she will have an absolute conviction that he is her head and that she adores him. The husband will come out of that, able to make a declaration that he is a man. He will know that he has satisfied his wife. He will know that he is one with her and that is taken to the full power that God intended it to be.
By the end of that day, there will be a substantial One Flesh Bond. They will look at each other with new eyes, and they will know things have changed. People who see them will know they are changed. They do not need a wedding ring for people to see that they are married. People will be able to see that they are married simply by virtue of the unity and the harmony between these two people. I share this with you in confidence, in the hope that it will help you to understand what I am saying. Part of what I have shared with you, I have personally experienced, sadly, and in an ungodly and adulterous situation. But at the end of one afternoon, our lives have been changed forever and [inaudible 01:17:28] of dismembering and cutting out the One Flesh Bond, and the love that resulted and grew out of that first afternoon.
I have to say to you that unless we understand what that entails, the Word of God says all things work together for the good of those that love God and are called according to His purpose. I have to look back on the method I made in my life when I had backslid and went away from God and dallied in adultery. The one good thing that came out of that, is that I experienced a level and a dimension of sexuality that is generally not available to those who rely on the Church for their instruction. As much as everything else that came out of that was evil and bad, and that the whole situation is sinful, I saw with dramatic effect the power of the One Flesh Bond after one day, and how that built and built and built over the ensuing two years to something that was virtually indestructible except by the mercy and the grace of God.
So I would urge you to take very seriously what I have said in the last few minutes. It is extremely important. Gentle, giving, sensitive lovemaking with no holds barred over a period of half a day, or a day, as the first sexual experience for a couple who have not been messing around with petting, dating, courting and all the other stuff that the devil would have us believe is acceptable today, who have not spread their souls and hearts around each other in dissolute and unfocused ways in an extremely, extremely powerful spiritual force. It will change your life. It will bring you to a place where you will say without even thinking, I will never leave you or forsake you, I will stand by you no matter what comes, and I will die rather than leave you.
It was that very reality that brought me back to Christ, having walked for two years in a relationship where not once was the word ‘love’ used, where all the criteria of agape, hesed in 1 Corinthians 13, was lived out simply because that was the way it worked out. At the end of that time, I spent the night in a hotel determining how best I could kill myself, because I had lost the woman that I had become one with over two years. I have to tell you, it nearly destroyed me, and 18 months later after the Church had failed in any demonstrable fashion to assist me to deal with that One Flesh Bond, it nearly destroyed me again. That was how I came to a revelation of the One Flesh Bond and the prayer that was necessary to break it. I spent three hours arguing with a pastor to get him to come into agreement with me and to pray the prayer that I knew had to be prayed to break that One Flesh Bond, on the basis that if I left him, I would blow my brains out. Eventually when we prayed and that One Flesh Bond was broken, I smacked back together in a way that you will never understand if you have never experienced it.
The One Flesh Bond is the power of God in marriage. It is absolutely phenomenal, and it is absolutely beautiful in the right context, and it is totally destructive in the wrong context. With that, it builds agape, it builds hesed, it builds Covenant every time that Covenant act is repeated in a fashion without holding back, total giving, total loving. Without the word ‘love’ having been used once in two years, seven years later, I still found myself with a substantial part of my heart doing somersaults when I saw that woman in a shop again. God has created marriage to work. If you receive nothing else out of this teaching, nothing else out of this entire series of 40 something tapes, please hear me, God has created marriage to work if you will do it His way. Put aside all the other baggage that you been taught and turn to the Word of God. It is more blessed to give than receive. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church, lay down your life. Wives desire your husbands, wives submit to your husbands. They are very simple rules, but they are powerful beyond the comprehension of the natural mind.
To return to the context of the cutting of the Covenant the marriage ceremony, we have a number of scriptural references to a seven-day period, starting on the day of the marriage ceremony as being the total marriage ceremony. We see it with Jacob, Leah and Rachel. We see it even with Samson and his first wife, the Timnah woman. The point there, is that if a man and his wife spend seven days in the bridal chamber, and they spend most of their time in each other's company talking, touching, kissing, caressing, making love with appropriate light food and just from time to time joining the party with rejoicing and goodwill, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, at the end of seven days of focused attention on one another, there will be an absolutely phenomenal marital bond. The One Flesh Bond at the end of seven days will be enormously strong.
If they again apply the provision in Scripture that in the first year after marriage, a man should not go out to war and so forth, and the husband and wife devote substantial attention to one another, if they are living in the father's house, and therefore the man is not preoccupied with career and everything else to the extent that it distracts him unduly from his wife, if he is working for his father, if he is working in the father's businesses, he has been groomed to that over many years, he can cope with it easily. He is not stressed, and he gives great attention to his new wife.
At the end of the year that One Flesh Bond will be so strong that nothing will rock that marriage. The gates of hell will not prevail against that marriage. That man and that woman will be welded together in the Spirit. They will be talking to each other in that fashion spirit to spirit. I have experienced a small degree of that. I have experienced a situation of being 1000 miles away from the other party and being able to communicate to a small degree, picking up the phone and both parties saying almost exactly the same words at almost the same moment. Picking up the phone and saying ABC and the other party says I was about to say that to you. That is the power of the One Flesh Bond, and that is why the cutting of the marriage Covenant as an act of profound intimacy between husband and wife in the first few hours, the first seven days, and the first year is of absolute immense importance. A marriage built on that foundation, together with the Lord Jesus Christ as the absolute core and focus of that marriage, will be a marriage that nothing will break. It will be a marriage of power and unity and harmony. It will be a marriage where prayers are answered, and it will be a light to the world.
"Father in the name of Jesus I pray that anything that I have uttered that is not according to Your Word and Your will, that it will be blown away and find no root in the heart of the hearers. Likewise I pray Father in the name of Jesus that all that has been spoken that is according to Your Word and Your will, will be planted and engrafted in the hearts of the hearers that will be watered by your Spirit, that will grow and flourish and produce abundant fruit in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, amen."
This message has been recorded by a Church Without Walls, a ministry of End Time Issue Ministries, PO Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at james@endtimeissues.org.za. Our phone numbers, international dialling code, normally 0027, but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline is 0027117912327 or when in South Africa 0117912327. My mobile number is 0027832516644 and in South Africa 0832516644. Our fax number internationally 0027117915004 and locally 0117915004. All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the work.
04 16 Faith and Implementing Change
Kenneth Hagan Junior
This is tape number 16, volume 2 of the series understanding God's way in marriage, volume 2, dealing with towards Heaven on earth in marriage. Teaching number 16, implementing change. We're talking in this series about moving towards Heaven on earth in marriage, we're talking about excellence in marriage. We've determined an objective and we're walking a broad path, we've talked about facilitating change and preparing to change and in this teaching we'll endeavor to address a number of aspects of the actual implementation process of change. The preparing to change teaching is being followed by a whole series of teaching dealing with things such as the power of the tongue, renewing your mind, etc. All of which deal with spiritual skills, spiritual knowledge which is a requirement to help bring about change. We've spoken about the anointing as a vital gift from God to bring about change. We've spoken about praying in tongues as an essential component of praying mysteries in the spirit. We're not talking here about some carnal striving in your own strength to change your marriage, to change yourself, to change your spouse, we're talking here about powerful spiritual matters, we are talking about spiritual warfare, we're talking about casting down vain imaginations, binding and casting out demons and much more.
Implementation must be undertaken a step at a time, we need to identify the outcome of that step, we need to gain the knowledge and experience and the practice and the training in that step and go forward, then take the next step and the next step. We will make mistakes but provided we are focused on serving God and we are being lead by His Spirit, we will converge on a solution but in order to get there we have to choose to change, we have to decide that there is something that is not desirable about our present state and that we desire a new state. We refer you to the typing and horse riding examples in the previous teachings, it's a hard slog to learn to type well, accurately and fast or to ride a horse well and fast, it requires repetition and progressive improvement. It's like school, repetition, train, test, repeat, train, test, build the next step, those are the principles of basic training in education and the management of change. But realize that different people have different cognitive and personality and reasoning and analytical skills and styles, some will change rapidly, others will take a long time to change. Some will be receptive to change, some will be opposed to change. We need to be able to deal with all of those situations and we need to be aware of them.
The things that you've heard in these teachings, you need to decide to act on, you can't act on all of them simultaneously and I believe that if you listen to this tape series from 1 - 40, whatever the final number is, as the Lord leads progressively over a period of time, don't try and cram it in, you will get revelation in different areas and I believe there is a particular reason why the Lord has followed the sequence He has so I would encourage you to work through this tape series in sequence. But if you iterate through this entire set of tapes over a period of several years, iterating maybe once a year or a couple of times a year, depending on how you feel lead and pulling things into practice, absorbing them, meditating on them, contemplating them, praying on them and going the next step, there's an enormous amount in this series of teachings. As I've mentioned before, some of the tapes are just one tape out of a series of another 6 or 12 or 18 tapes, many of the subjects are very deep and very diverse and so while you might listen to all the tapes quite rapidly over a period of a few weeks. Thereafter I would suggest to you that there would be real merit in going through them iteratively on a slower basis.
Keep moving forward and upward, pass your trials and go onto the next one. What's really important is to pray the right prayers, I've previously given you prayers about asking God to bring people into your lives and take people out, to open your eyes and close your eyes, open doors and close doors, open ears and close ears, judge severely, correct harshly, show you the level of your present deception. Prayers like that are the prayers which will determine whether you move forward or not, ask questions of God the whole time, don't just slavishly say I can't understand it, I'll just accept it. Sometimes you need to do that with faith but in the sort of change we're talking about. If it's not clear to you why you should change, why you should do it, pray, ask God to show and if you're obedient, if you sanctified, if you hearing Him, He will show you why you need to change and what the benefits of change are. Listen to every word of your teacher and your teacher is first and foremost the Holy Spirit and as far as the husband is instructing the wife, she must listen to him and the husband must listen to Jesus.
Let the word of God capture your thinking, there is so much in this series of tapes which is straight out of the word of God, I would strongly encourage you to contemplate and meditate and pray about it, feast on it and get a picture of the things that you may have believed that were not correct, that you need to let go of and get an understanding of what God's picture for marriage really is. Identify the things in your flesh and your life that need to be changed, words that are spoken, thoughts, actions, repent and do what's necessary, what's indicated in the teachings. A vital thing with regard to any aspect of the faith walk and particularly with regard to the sort of change that's necessary to bring your marriage to the point where God wants it to be. First of all, recognize that you will only get there by faith and make faith confessions, seek to grow in faith and understand what your faith is about so that you can walk by faith. Constantly make confession, declare that your marriage is healed, declare that your relationship with your husband and wife is healed, declare that your marriage is Heaven on earth and believe it, believe it in your heart, confess it with your mouth and you will have what you say as long as you're consistent and you say it without doubting. Pray and tear down vain imaginations, tell them to bow the knee, I've given the prayer on that.
The wife should want to help, to support, to be vitally interested and invested in her husband’s ministry, his business, every aspect of his life and in so doing she becomes part of his life and he becomes actively invested in hers. Husband and wife should not be seeking to build different careers, they should be seeking to work together. In this age that can be problematic and understand that if your wife is working for an employer different to your own, it is going to present challenges in terms of the fullness of what is presented in this series, the ideal is for her to work alongside you as your help meet. Important to understand that in dealing with these things, don't argue or debate with pride or with demons, be hard on deception and demons, don't show sympathy with deception. You can't rationalize with a demon, a demon has only one object and that is to deceive you and confuse you so because there is no reason for them to deal rationally, they will deal irrationally, they will make statements which sound very profound but are absolute nonsense. For example, one of the common arguments used to demonstrate the Bible permits a man to have only one wife, is to cite Genesis 2:24 which is for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and the two shall become One Flesh. And they say the fact that it says two shall become One Flesh, not three clearly indicates that a man can only have one wife but one plus one equals one doesn't mean anything like that.
If one plus one equals one and one plus one plus one equals one and one plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one equals one, so Genesis 2:24 in actual fact demonstrates quite clearly that any number of women can become One Flesh with one man and yet the spirits behind monogamy will seek to argue ad infinitum that that Scripture says exactly the opposite. There are numerous instances but just realize it doesn't help to debate or argue once you get involved with that sort of thing, state your case, present it, make the point that the other party has a prerogative before God to choose and that they will be accountable before God for the choice that they make on the Day of Judgment. Your responsibility is simple to tell them the truth, once you've told them the truth you're not under an obligation to argue and strive with them but do it in love. We've talked at length or we've talked to some extent about jokes and tale bearing secrets and surprises, all of these introduce spiritual things which can undermine change, give the devil an opportunity to attack you.
In areas of these teachings where you don't have any experience, don't judge, condemn or resist. Pray and ask God to open up your eyes and seek Him to lead you into the appropriate revelation and practice. I'd like to talk a little bit about a few other things. Renew your mind with the word of God, understand that if you neglect reading of the Scriptures your mind will not be in the place where it can change and your spirit also. So you need to read the word of God on a daily basis, don't neglect reading the word of God because you have some project trying to save your marriage. If you've stopped feeding your spirit with the word of God you will be malnourished and you won't be able to cope. You need to cast down vain imaginations as I said but at the same time, as you've moved forward in a step wise basis, you'll find that this becomes easier and easier, those vain imaginations will go away and maybe new ones will come and you will have to tear them down.
But as you get established on each step, climb the next step. Regularly reread the visions, know where you're going and how to get there, talk about it, solve problems, don't talk about problems without a solution, don't let the problems get you down. Believe that where you're going is going to be good and walk there by faith. Vital that husband and wife come to a place where they see the same picture and they're going in the same direction. Understand that change is about communication, you need to communicate with your spouse, with your family, with whoever else is involved in the change process. But the change process is something that essentially must be managed by the husband out of a fervent desire to see his family serving God more fully than to experience the fullness of God in marriage and the power of God and the power of love in marriage.
Where practical, provide real word examples of the changed state. So if you seeking to change in a particular area, for example, the area (inaudible (00:14:16)), perhaps you've gained a revelation that the Sabbath is in fact Saturday, it always has been and always will be and instead of observing Sundays, your day of rest and worship and service to the Lord, you decide to make it Saturday. There are plenty of people around who have already taken that decision, it's relatively easy then to consult with them and find out how they deal with some of the difficulties of living in a society where Saturdays increasingly regarded as almost a normal working day and certainly a day in which shopping, etc is done and Sunday is regarded as the day of rest. In many others, in the area of lovemaking, there are potentially serious difficulties and I would endeavor, God willing, to address some of these in the teaching on building the One Flesh House.
A few other notes that I've made with regard to change. And these points relate primarily to the wife. It seems to me from the way I read Scripture that while the husband is going to come under substantial pressure to change from the Lord Jesus Christ to conform and that that is part of his Christian walk. The wife is going to find herself by virtue of the fact that she's required to submit in everything and even in areas of unjustness, etc, she has to learn this skill because it is not a skill that she's likely to have been raised up with in most families. She must choose to be one with her husband, she must choose to submit to her husband, she must choose to come into agreement with her husband, she must recognize that she was created to help and not to lead, to act on what her husband tells her and not try and analyze and problem solve and set direction for her husband. The wife is not called to analyze and problem solve, not to set direction for the family.
We saw in the teaching on Jezebel that this can be extremely dangerous if she does try. It's a potentially major problem with today’s insistence on training and teaching women the same way as men. She needs to renounce those aspects of her education and upbringing and accept her husband as her head and covering, choose to take his word and his direction and to relinquish her own independent thoughts. If these are contrary, she must recognize that such thoughts are vain imaginations, they must torn down as we taught in a grievous lesson. Satan has implanted pride in the form of I, self, etc, in women through the education system. A wife needs to recognize that and choose to change in that area. A wife must choose to renounce independent thought and opinions and choose to align her thoughts and opinions with those of her husband and Scripture. She must choose to see her husband as the master of her destiny, the captain of her ship, her platoon, her regimental commander and choose to give him her unquestioning obedience and questioning does not mean she should not ask for clarification, I don't think that it means that she should not express concerns but it does mean that she should not always be thinking her husband is in error and finding fault with him. If she truly adores and reverences her husband it will not occur to her that he is in error.
Note that the age at which marriage is appointed by God, has a big impact here. A girl of 12.5/13/14 will not have much difficulty in doing these things with regards to husband age 20+ but if she is of the order of greater than about 20 or he is much less than 20, it is likely that she will experience immense difficulty. There are a number of key Scriptures which can be used and referred to constantly during the change process. Philippians 4:13 "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me", Zachariah 4:6 "So he answered and said to me this is the word of the Lord (inaudible (00:18:44)) says the Lord of hosts. 2 Timothy 1:7 "For God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of sound mind." Proverb 3:5&6 "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths." Hebrews 12:1&2 "Therefore we also, since we're surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and every sin which so easily ensnares us and let us run with endurance, the race that is set before us. Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross despising the shame and then sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
These and a number of other Scriptures are relevant to the process of change. We need to read the word of God, we need to identify these Scriptures, we need to commit them to our hearts and we need to walk them and where appropriate, we need to confess them over our lives. God is well able to do the miracle that you're looking for in your marriage, He can do all things well, He can do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that you can ask or imagine, His angels will then camp around you to protect you, should you fear Him and should you claim it. You can cover yourself and your family with the blood of Jesus on a regular basis and that will protect them. As we saw in an earlier teaching, Godly women produce Godly children, ungodly women produce ungodly children. Wives, you have an extreme responsibility to live Godly lives and to show the example to your children.
You need to take your eyes off yourself, you need to learn not to your own understanding, you need to look to your husband and your husband needs to look to Jesus. The husband must be the channel of Jesus love, anointing, etc to his wife, she should not seek it independently of her husband. Wives, you need to seek to lift your husband up to God, see yourself as a pillar in his house. Where appropriate, seek the Scriptures for verses which describe how we should relate towards Jesus and how Jesus relates to us, it will be different in each situation, you need to seek God for guidance, there are Scriptures which deal with your particular set up. Important to understand that what's just been said with regard to wives relative to husbands applies to husbands relative to Jesus. The husband must supply all of this in his relationship towards Jesus as bride and master. The husband must supply all of this towards his wife in the role of head, like Jesus head of the Church. This is not as a ruler but a gentle leading or shepherding.
The husband must learn to follow Jesus without questioning, in the same way the wife must learn to follow her husband without questioning. In both cases, the critical challenge is coming to a place where we can clearly see and hear what is required of us and what our conduct should be. Obedient submission, agreement, harmony are a choice that cannot be forced, bought, demanded, lectured, love does none of these things. Spell out the alternatives, let your wife choose and then continue based on the choices she makes. Only do not compromise the word of God in your own life if she makes the wrong ungodly choice. You're not carnal, we're still carnal, God's ways are not our ways, they're much higher than our ways.
If you read Matthew 5:3-20 and contrasted with 1 Corinthians 13, you'll see much the same. These are all guidelines in Scripture for change. Matthew 7:1-5 Do not judge as distinct from correcting, teaching, disciplining, if you're in that position. Matthew 7:7-12 Ask and keep on asking. All of these Scriptures provide aspects of the faith walk associated with this change. Faith is an enormous aspect of walking this road. Just to recap, the teachings that have preceded, the tape on preparing for change in marriage lays a foundation, the tape on faithfulness introduces some disciplines which are absolutely vital in marriage, the teaching before the judgment seat of Christ lays a foundation for the whole process of Holiness and sanctification. If things are going wrong, understand that Satan is attacking you because you've given him a legal right through sin or something that's wrong in your life. If you go before the Lord and ask the Holy Spirit to show you the problem and how to fix it, that can be turned around. As mentioned, there's a whole set of teachings on that subject. The realm of exceedingly hidden answers by the Holy Spirit are an extremely important teaching. In order to give effectivous change, you need to pray in the Holy Ghost at least half an hour, an hour, two hours a day, whenever you get the opportunity. When you get up in the morning, when you're shaving, when you're driving to and from work, every other opportunity pray, pray in the Holy Ghost, claim the manifestation of that which has been prayed by your most Holy faith in the secret language of the Spirit.
Disciplining your flesh, lesson 8, vital, vital thing. Most of us allow flesh to dominate us, most of the time we get hurt and assaulted by what people say when they're actually sinning against themselves. We can't walk in love and walk in (inaudible (00:25:08)) so we need to discipline our flesh, renewing our own minds, key aspect. If our minds remain unregenerate we're unlikely to walk in the anointing and the fullness of what God has appointed for us. The power of the tongue, an extremely important teaching, the vast majority of Christians that I know speak words which ought never to be spoken and sometimes they speak them in public forums. I, at one stage, heard a very prominent Christian leader preaching from the pulpit on several occasions, make jokes that the only time that he gets his wife on her knees is when she's on her knees telling him to get out from under the bed, where he is hiding from her. That sort of thing eventually opens the door wide for Satan to take your part and in that particular instance the man’s wife left him, allegedly that the press stating that she was tired of having to lead her life in...effectively she didn't use the word submission but in submission to her husband, she wanted to have her own identity and that was a Jezebelic spirit just taking over in that particular Church.
But a lot was done to allow that spirit to take over by foolish words spoken by that particular Pastor. The anointing and the four officers of Jesus (inaudible (00:26:45)), we saw clearly the anointing, something which is absolutely vital to change. With the anointing of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is our helper, teacher, councilor and friend and guide changes relatively easy. We try and do it ourselves, it's another story. Demonic oppression of the flesh and deliverance, we saw that it is possible for Christians to be demonized and various principles of demonization were discussed at some length. We then discussed demons in the temple of the Holy Spirit and the Jezebel spirit and pointed out that the vast majority of Christians, if not virtually all Christians, have demons but they can be dealt with. Deliverance itself is a whole process, we have a 15 tape series from somebody which is...and we have a manual and there are numerous books published and we find it a challenge.
But deliverance is a key thing, if your flesh needs to be set free of demons, you can either struggle on waging a carnal battle against the demons that are oppressing your flesh, be it lust, lasciviousness, covertness, anger, hurt, pride, bitterness, etc. Or you can choose to recognize them for what they are and do what needs to be done spiritually to bind them and to cast them out and at least it gets set free and to get the wounds healed. And there are people with ministries that can help you. We also saw that Jezebel is an extremely vicious spirit. Those are the tapes which deal primarily with the implementation of change, that portfolio together provides a fairly solid basis to understanding the principles of change and the Scriptural basis of change in different areas of your life. Those need to be put into practice and they will take time from our own experience, you will apply them, you will be set free in certain areas, you will think that you're free, a few months later you'll fall in some other area. Life's like that, the Bible tells us that we will stumble and fall, we need to be picked up and dusted off and we need to cry out to Jesus to pick us up and dust us off.
So those are our various principles, the last aspect of what one might need to know that it comes to mind at this stage in this area, is the subject of faith. The following teaching entitled calling those things that are not as though they were by Kenneth Hagan Jnr addresses some of the principles of faith that are relevant to implementing change in this context.
It stands for the uncompromised word of God and belief in His word and it stands for the power and the anointing of God and without that we're nothing. Faith in God is, in His words, will deliver you, will set you free, will bring you from the brink of despair and destruction to the streets of joy and happiness and prosperity and healing and all the other things that go with the package. It's not something that you do occasionally, it's not something that you run to when you're in trouble but faith is a way of life every day. Romans 4:17 will be the central Scripture that we will use, we will probably read a good portion of Scripture but that will be the central theme of what we will have to say today. Is this clock counting me down? No, I want to know so I can keep an eye on it. Thank you.
Starting with verse 16 "Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring—not only to those who are of the law but also to those who have the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all. As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were." If you don't have that underlined in your Bible, I want you to underline that. And calls things that are not as though they were, now who is it that's calling things that are not as though they were? God. "Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully" say that to somebody, fully what? "persuaded that God had the power to do what he had promised."
That is the very basis, that is the very essence of faith. Believing that God is able to do what He has promised in His word. I don't care what He looks like, I don't care what He feels like, I don't care what you see, if God said it you can have it. That is the essence of faith. People tell me that I am simple and I say fine, leave me alone, I'm having a good time being simple, I believe what God says. God said it, I believe it, that settles it, period, there's no if and but's about it. So many people want to say well, you know, but this and if this, if I had been born at the right place, if, if, if, there's no such thing. God said that all of us were His children and we have a promise, that promise is ours, belongs to us and we can claim it. When we begin to look at this, He called those things that be not as though they were. Hebrews 11:1 and all of you know what that is, probably know the Scripture by heart. King James says "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.", NIV says "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."
You see, when I pray for healings, when I pray for finances, when I pray for whatever it is that I need, even though I do not see it, I am certain that its happening. Just because I do not see it immediately in the natural does not mean that something is going on. God will minister to you at your point of need if you will dare to stand on His word in the faith of every obstacle in the faith of every circumstance, God will answer your needs, whatever it may be. Now, let's go to Galatians 3, verse 7 it says "Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham." Those who believe are the children of Abraham. How many of you have believed upon the Lord Jesus Christ and become born again by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. You have become the children of Abraham. Not only are they natural descendants of Abraham but they are spiritual descendants of Abraham and thank God, we have become a part of the spiritual descendants of Abraham and in Galatians 3:13 & 14 it said "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who hung on a tree.” He redeemed us in order that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit." You understand that the promise that He made to Abraham was to Abrahams offspring and everybody is quick to point that out but here Jesus said we which believe through Jesus Christ, through his blood, have become the descendants of Abraham, the gentile and it says that we are heirs to the promise and the blessing of Abraham, it belongs to us.
Someone that is an heir to something means that someone has left them something, is that correct? Do you know that there are thousands and even millions of dollars in the US, and I'm sure it's the same here in South Africa, that is put up in trust, has been left for someone that is an heir but because they don't know about it they are living in poverty. Yet, in an account somewhere in some bank is thousands and thousands of dollars that has been drawing interest and it belongs to them and all they have to do when they find out about it is to prove that they are that heir and it's all given to them. You and I are heirs of the promise of God that was given to Abraham and that promise was redemption from spiritual death. In other words, we could be born again. It was redemption from sickness and disease and it was redemption from poverty. That is what that promise was. It is ours but I'm going to tell you what, you're going to have to do like any other heir, you're going to have to go in and claim what belongs to you. It's not going to fall on you like (inaudible (00:40:00)).
I mean, in America we have pecan trees, I don't know whether you have them over here or not, do you? Pecan we call it, pecan you call it, same thing, P E C A N. Do you all have those kinds of trees over here? How many of you, at the right season of the year, have ever stood under one of those trees? Anybody ever stood under one of those trees? I have, do you know what happens? It will begin to fall on you, hit you on the head. Why? Because at the right time the wind blows a little bit, those pecans are ready to harvest and they come off of the tree but I'm going to tell you what, the things of God are laying there for you, they're not going to fall on you, you're going to have to go there and claim what belongs to you. God set a choice, some people say well, I'm going to have it one day, somewhere sometimes somehow. I'll tell you what, the sometime is now, the somewhere is here, the somehow is now, hallelujah. And it's up to you to reach out and grab a hold of what belongs to you, hallelujah.
You can't keep saying it's going to, you have to begin to say it's mine, I have it now. 1 Corinthians 5:7 says we walk by faith and not beside it, that walk there means live. We live by faith and not beside it, I do not live by what I see, if I live by what I see I wouldn't be here today but I live in a faith in God. I claim the 91st Psalm every time I leave my house, every time I get in an airplane, every time I get in a car, every time I do anything I claim the 91st Psalm. No plague shall come near me, no harm shall overtake me. Hallelujah. You see, you need to learn how to claim that and to believe Yah, Jesus got into the ship with the disciples on the sea of Galileo, he said let us go to the other side, He went back in the ship and laid down and went to sleep. Why then could He lay down and go to sleep, He said let us go to the other side and it didn't matter what comes, whether a storm came or what else came His way, they were going to the other side. And when you really believe that, you'll claim God's word and you will go on about your life believing God to protect you.
Now that does not rule out being a little cautious. Well, maybe the word wouldn't be cautious but being sensible. The word of God tells us to be as wise as (inaudible (00:43:30)) and harmless as dust. We do need to take some natural precautions but I'm going to tell you what, those natural precautions can't guarantee anything, that's just a precaution. But I'm going to tell you something today friend, that the word of God guarantees you and if you will believe it you can have it. Hallelujah, God is still God and He has never changed. Malachi 3 says I'm the Lord and I change nothing. Hebrews 13:8 says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Lord God Jehovah delivered Abraham back there years ago and it says that he believes God and it was countered onto him for righteousness. We believe God and it countered onto us for righteousness. Abraham back there then left his home, left his country, he didn't know where he was going but God said go. He picked up everything and he said let's go. But I'm going to tell you what, when he obeyed God and on the way to the city that he was looking for, on the way there God made him rich as he did what God told him to do. It was not because of who he was but it's because of who God was. God said Abraham go here, he went, he left there and they gave him all kinds of goods and monies and animals and everything he left there.
You learn how to do what God tells you to do and people will come up and start giving you stuff without you even claiming it. Now thank God we can do confession of faith and through confession of Gods words, claim some things that belong to us but (inaudible (00:45:31)), I'm talking about receiving from God what belongs to us. And I'm going to tell you what, you do what God told you to do, you go where God told you to go, you say what God tells you to say and people will come up and start giving unto you. Matthew 6:33 says Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. Now you go back up in that sixth chapter of Matthew and you get the whole context of what He was preaching about and when you get the whole context of what He was preaching about, He was talking about house, he was talking about land, he was talking about clothing and then He said speak first, put God first, put the things of God first, do what God says and all of these things that I have been talking about previously, you'll have to fast and pray for, you'll have to call prayer meetings for, you will have to confess for five years for.
...but take this word and stand on it, I've taken it many times, put it on the ground and stood on it. And I want to tell you something Mr. devil, I'm standing on God’s word and it said that Heaven and earth would pass away but Gods way will never pass the word away, God said it, I believe it, that settles it. I've done that when I didn't have a penny to buy a cup of tea or a cup of coffee with, my pocket was empty as that (inaudible (00:47:37)) but I still stood on God’s word and I said thank God Almighty, He's a man according to his riches and glory. I couldn't buy coke, I couldn't buy nothing, I didn't have one penny (inaudible (00:47:56)), God you're going to do it, I kept confessing God's word, walking, preaching, praising God, I want to tell you what, I went through a few hard times and you may too. Any one of the men of faith in the word of God, Paul that wrote more about faith than anybody else and the whole word of God, the apostle Paul went through some tough times but he said I thank my God that through faith I always triumph. I want you to know I come out on the other side and I come out on the other side and when I did I got a money clip with money in it, I can go buy me something if I want to and I've been there.
When (inaudible (00:48:36)) first started, I left the house every morning, went to Rhema Bible training center without a penny in my pocket. If I wanted to eat lunch, if I wanted to have a cup of coffee or get a cold drink I had to believe God, I would go in and teach class, come back in my office and there'd be decent money laying in my office on my desk. I still did that whenever I was...when (inaudible (00:49:06)) was at school, I was still doing that. I'm going to tell you what, I still practice faith, even though I don't have to, I got the money in the bank, I can go back but my son and I, we got to riding enduro motor cycles out through the woods and stuff and then we just started riding off-road, the four wheel Suzuki 500's and riding out on the sand dunes and so forth and so on. And you know what, I believed God for the money to buy those things with. Now I could have went and bought them, I had the money but what I want you to understand is, you've got to use your faith or you're going to lose it. You need to try to believe God for something every day, like a cup of coffee, something that can be accomplished that day. Keep your faith strong.
When you work out in the gym, you can't build up to lifting so many pounds and (inaudible (00:50:05)) out of the gym for six weeks and go back in there and start out where you were when you left the gym. You try to do that and you may stretch a muscle, you may blow a muscle, you may pull a ligament or tendon and be laid up for a long time. Why? Because those muscles lose their muscle tone, they lose their ability and their power to lift. You still have a muscle alright, but it is not what it was six weeks ago when you were in there doing curls and power lifts and all of that sort of thing, faith is the same way. You've got to exercise it every day to keep it strong, it's a way of life, you live it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, you live faith. God said it, I believe it, by faith. Hebrews 11:7 said "Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to save his house; by which he condemned the world, and became the heir of the righteousness which is by faith." Noah, was told to build a boat and if there's going to be a flood, there ain't never been rain much less a flood, go study it. God talked to Noah about things not seen yet. If there'd been a lot of us when he (inaudible (00:52:08)) but Lord, I don't have no power saw, I don't have no crane, I don't have this and besides that it never rained in my entire (inaudible (00:52:18)), what difference does that make. God said, our problem is when God says we want to analyze, we want to figure out what about this. No, our responsibility is to do the same as Noah, he went out, got him a hammer and started to work, they ridiculed him, they laughed at him.
And some of you were here all the way back in the beginning when I came in 77 preaching the faith message, anybody here this morning that was here in 77 when I came to preach all over out here down to first message search and all that, there's one right there, there's some more back there, praise God, hallelujah. I'm going to tell you, as you started to believe God and get a hold of the faith message and believe God, I'm sure that people said what's the matter with you, they begin to tell you that you're crazy and everything else but look at where you are today and look at where they are. Look what God's done for you and look, they're still over there saying well, God will do it someday. Now, you know, He saw Vernon and He can do what he wants to, yes. God is (inaudible (00:53:44)), I grant you that and He can do what He wants to but also He has commanded in His word that we believe Him and stand on the word of God and walk free and walk in victory. (inaudible (00:53:58)), she didn't ask any questions, too many times today when God says something, whenever we begin to go out and to do something God says something to us, we begin to ask questions. Now wait a minute, let's think this one through Lord. Do you think that He would be dumb enough to speak without analyzing it beforehand?
I suggest you need to get a hold of that and realize, when God speaks He's already thought the whole thing out. When He speaks and tells you about it, He already knows what the finished product is. He just hasn't told you about it because if He did you'd be walking by sight, not by faith and the Bible says we have got to walk by faith. Hallelujah, see, I want you to understand this morning that all you have to do is begin to realize that those things that you desire, those things you need, those things that belong to you, you can begin to call those into existence. Somebody said well, I'm not going to start lying, it's not lying. This one lady, the preacher and the evangelist in the parish, we went over to their house, she had been sick for 8 years, they talked to her about the promises of God, they quoted Mark 11:23&24 to them. When you say (inaudible (00:55:46)). I didn't paraphrase it, I quoted it, didn't I? Say and you shall have, they quoted (inaudible (00:56:11)) and they told the man, they said now you begin to say I'm healed, I'm whole from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. As a brother, I'm going to tell you something, my wife and I have not started lying and we're not going to start lying now because it looked like she was still sick. See, that's where it is calling the things you don't see into existence, it looked like she was still sick, it looked like there was still a problem. He said to the man when are you going to start believing that she's healed, he said after I see the results, he said it wouldn't be believing then. It's not believing after you see the results, it's knowing.
Believing is what? Calling those things that be not as though they were, believing is, that is the faith, faith is the substance of praying (inaudible (00:57:17)), the evidence, faith is the evidence, when you don't see it in (inaudible (00:57:22)), it's the evidence (inaudible (00:57:23)). When you pray for finances, when you pray for disease, when you pray when you're in the midst of despair and depression or whatever else it is and it still looks like it's still there, your evidence that it's not is your faith in God's word and your belief is not in the natural but in the faith of God's word. Matthew 8:17 says "He took up our infirmities and he bare sicknesses" I like the way the NIV reads, it says this was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah in (inaudible (00:58:15)), He took their infirmities, (inaudible (00:58:21)) and carried our diseases. If He took your infirmities and He carried your diseases, why do you need to carry them? Come on, I got to hurry, I want us to look into the word of God. I want us to look at 2 Corinthians 4:18 "Fix your eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, for what is seen is temporary but what is unseen is eternal."
You see the deficit, you see the sickness, you see the disease, you see the despair, you see the depression but the Bible, Paul writing, the man that wrote more about faith than anybody as I said a while ago, he said don't look at these, these are temporary, why are they temporary? Because the eternal things of God will come and (inaudible (00:59:59)), God's eternal love, God's eternal word, never, never, never, never changes. The bank account changes, how you feel changes, sickness and disease change but God's word, (inaudible (01:00:26)) never changes. He bore our infirmities and carried our diseases never changes. I am the Lord, I change not, never changes. As I quoted a while ago, Hebrews 13:8, we ought to look and see what God's word has to say about it then we are to operate, we are to talk, we are to walk, we are to live in line with God's word. No, we are not to live and talk and be moved by what is temporal but what is seen but we are to be moved only by what the word of God says because it is eternal, get your eyes off of your problem, get your eyes off of your trouble, get your eyes off of your sickness, get your eyes off of everything else and put your eyes on the word of God, put your eyes on Jesus, look to that that is eternal and begin to call those things that be not as though they were.
They may look like they are not but because of the word of God they are and only you can keep them from coming into existence in your life, nobody else can. They can't put no spells on you, somebody come in one day and said well, there's a spirits list and they put a spell on you. Down in Texas we've got a saying, I double dog dare you. I mean that's serious, when you're double dogging somebody. When you're a kid and you get in an argument with another kid, put a piece of brick or rock or wood on yourself, I double dog dare you to knock it off. Draw a line around, I double dog dare you to step across it and when they do...not me, I don't draw another line. My uncle Doug, how many of you have ever read the Hagan’s books about his brother, Doug. You mean the rest of you people haven't read brother Hagan’s books? Something the matter with you, you better get a hold of them, there’s no other books that will set you free like those books will, especially the authority of the believer. You know, uncle Doug was the black sheep of the family for many, many years, uncle Doug is 6"5' and in his prime he had a 32" waist and wore a size 52 coat, he taught all of nephews if you're going to hit somebody, hit them, don't tell them you're going to hit them. He said if you get the first blow in you probably won't have to do no more. You know, I found that to be true most of the time and I've used that same thing. I mean, he even said draw a line, tell them to step across, when they step across it and they've got their chin stuck out let them have it.
I've found that to be useful with the devil. I come up, I say hey Mr. devil, I just drew a line with God’s word, double dog dare you step across it, when he does I take the sword of the Spirit, that's Gods word, and I put the Rhema to it. Rhema means spoken word, see there, I'm speaking words, that's Rhema but correct pronunciation in the Greek is (inaudible (01:04:29)), got those marks over the top of it. I put it to work, I begin to speak the low goss, I begin to speak, Rhema begins low goss, I begin to speak the written word, I don't wait for him to bring another try, I get in right then. A lot of people, they're afraid of the devil, I'm just so afraid that I'm going to catch this, I'm just so afraid that this is going to happen, I'm so afraid that I'm going to be a casualty. You act like that and the devil will take advantage of you. A lot of people go down the street, they see the devil, I'm going to tell you what, you get Gods word inside of you, you become so saturated with the word of God, you begin to walk down the street looking for it and when he sees you coming down the street instead of you hiding behind your coat, it will be the devil that will be trying to stick by you because he knows if you see him you're going to give him another wallop with the word of God.
We are not defeated, God's Church is not a defeated (inaudible (01:06:03)), God's Church is victorious, the word of God says that we can be what His word says we can be, what is that? Born again, spiritual, living a life that is free from sin, sickness, poverty and disease because the word says it. I'm not talking about some oooohh, something or another, I'm talking about God's word. I believe this Bible, I believe in the faith of God, that emblem of faith has built 21 buildings on 110 acres, that belief in God's word has sent 55 million copies of books to tell people that they've been set free by the power of God around the world and I don't even know how many languages because we only know of a few of them. We find them all the time, all over the world.
That shield of death has what? Built this ministry, when Ray came back and started and I'm going to tell you what, that emblem of faith is what repeated what it is, you can never turn from it. There was a time in the US because they wrote so many of those crazy books against the faith message and so forth and so on, that I myself began to pull back a little bit, I began to not preach as hard in faith as I did. And it was just probably a year ago or so that God began to deal with me and He said son, wake up, understand without you realizing it, you pulled back from the anointing, you've pulled back from preaching uncompromised word of God with strong emphasis on deliverance from sickness and disease, financial peril or poverty so to speak. And I said Oh God, forgive me, that's the thing, people getting a hold of that book, authority of the believer getting hold of that book, redeem from the sickness, redeem from the curse of poverty that brother Hagan wrote, those two books have probably set more people free than anyone of them that we have.
And I came out strong, my wife will tell you I came out on that platform at Rhema Bible Church and I began to preach stronger than I ever preached before. I ought to (inaudible (01:09:15)) in the pews and we can add chairs and get 7000 in there. Up until that time I got sat in the balcony, there's 4500 on the first floor and then the balcony seats 2000 and I got 7 sections of curtains that we open up and we would only have in the open a couple of sections of curtains. I went back, I went back to the under compromised stand of faith, God said it, I believed it, preaching, healing, deliverance from poverty and that don't mean you don't work. Yes, you work, in fact the word of God says what you put your hand to He will prosper, it's a business of sitting down and saying well, I'm going to live by faith, you're going to die by faith too and I don't have time to teach that, that's a different story, I don't have time to teach it but I'm going to tell you what, when I went back to preaching and teaching it hard and fast and strong like that, I'm going to tell you what, it was only a matter of 4 weeks and we started opening every curtain on Sunday morning in that balcony and have been ever since then.
I'm going to tell you something people, you've got to go back, you that have been in this for a long time and you that are just getting into the word of faith and faith message, I'm going to tell you what, you that have been in it for a while, you've got to stay with it, you can't let anything deter you, I don't care who didn't get what, it still does not make God's word not true. I had to stand in my own Church and preach the funeral of a 34 year old, one of my top evangelists out of Rhema, Rudi Bertoshnic, I had to stand and preach that mans funeral. I had to stand and preach one of my missionaries funerals, Luann Wallace and people said to me what about it? And I got right back on the platform and I said God's word says it, they shouldn't have died, I don't know why they did but I'm going to tell you what, because they died does not undo God's word, God's word still says I heal, God's word still says I deliver, God's word still says I (inaudible (01:11:47)) and I got on my platform and I preached to my people, I sent the message to all of our Rhema pastors because they were having a problem with this and I said it still boils down to this, are you going to look at what's seen or are you going to look at the unseen? You've got to make up your mind, you either believe the word of God or you believe everything else that's going around, I said I choose to believe God's word. I prayed for hundreds of people and probably thousands by now and I've seen many of them healed but there's a lot that didn't get healed but I'm not going to quit preaching, just like I'm not going to quit eating steak because I saw one that was bad. That's what's happening, just because some person didn't get delivered, just because some person that said they was believing for financial blessings and it didn't come, everybody else turns against it, wait a minute, you don't know what they were doing, you don't know the inner workings of their hearts. They may have been saying with their mouth they believe but on the inside they may not be believing at all.
You've got to go back to God's word and I challenge you this morning to grab hold of God's word and begin to call those things in your life that you need, begin to call those things in your life that are not there, begin to call those things as though they were and you'll see something happen. It's time that we realize that God's word is still God's word, the power of God is still the same, the anointing of God is still the same and I want you to understand that we have to keep the anointing and the power of the Holy and the fire, of the Holy Spirit in their midst. If we don't we will die in the smoke. Some of you, your flames may have died down and they may just be smoking with a few embers now, get the bellows of the Holy Spirit, woosh, and begin to stir yourself up and fan the embers until once again it's a glowing flame of the power of God, believe in God, for what belongs to you and I tell you this morning, you can have, whatever you need from God. Not because I said it but because the Bible, God's word, said it.
Everybody here, hold up your word. Say this with me, God said it, I believe it, that settles it, healing is my prosperity of mind, the good life is mine, not because of who I am but because of who He is and what His word says, it makes no difference what anybody else says, it makes no difference what anybody else believes, I choose this day to believe God's word, I choose to accept all of the benefits that's in His word for me, by faith I take them now. Hallelujah, put your other hand up and praise God, stand on your feet and praise God, stand on your feet and praise God. Whatever your need is this morning, whatever it is you need from God, take it now, take it now. You need finances, take them now, hallelujah. You need healing, take it now. You need the anointing stirred in your life, take it now. (inaudible (01:16:18)). Hallelujah to Jesus, Glory to God. I simply deliver to you this morning what I live every day, I want you to live it too. I want you to enjoy the good life because God said it's ours, we can have it, amen. Bow your heads please.
Kenneth Hagan Ministries can be contacted at PO Box 50126, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 74150. The message of faith and calling things that are not as though they were is a fundamental component of the Christian walk. It must be joined with Holiness and sanctification as otherwise we end up claiming the blessings of God in presumption when we're still trapped in sin. However, like so many other things, it is a parallel and it should have action as we walk in faith and as we claim healing and deliverance and salvation. As we claim prosperity and blessings. As we claim our marriage is healed by faith in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we will be lead into greater Holiness and sanctification. I will encourage you to pray with me right now.
Father, in the name of Jesus, we declare that our marriages are healed, we declare that our marriages are Heaven on earth, that we experience the fullness of what you intended mankind to know in marriage, in our present marriage, in the days to come, in Jesus name. We thank you Father, that you do whatever is necessary to bring our marriages into the place you want them to be. We see us walking in the fullness of marriage, beyond what we can ask or imagine, exceedingly abundantly. Marriage is filled with love and unity and harmony and peace and joy. Marriages in which the anointing of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are powerful upon husband and wife and on the children. Marriages in which prayers are answered. Marriages in which mighty works are done for the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Marriages which move in unity and harmony to bring change to a hurting world, to break down principalities, powers, thrones and dominions and to build up the people of God, to spread the Gospel, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ we thank you, amen.
That concludes this message about implementing change. It must be joined with faith, it must be joined with prayer, it must be joined with Holiness and sanctification. And in this series of teachings so far, we've provided an overview of many of the principals that apply. There are numerous teachings on faith available from Kenneth Hagan Rhema Ministries, from Kenneth Copeland, Jerry Savelle, Creflo Dollar, many other faith oriented ministries around the world which will assist you to grow in the faith walk. I would urge you, if you're not familiar with that aspect then practice with a Christian life to obtain additional teaching in that area.
This message has been recorded by a Church without walls, a ministry of end time issue ministries, Po Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg, 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at james@end-time-issues.org.za. Our phone numbers international dialing code, normally 0027 but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline 0027 11 791 2327 or in South Africa 011 791 2327. My mobile number 0027 83 251 6644 and in South Africa 083 251 6644. Our fax number internationally 0027 11 791 5004 and locally 011 791 5004. All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the word.
Please feel free to copy any of our materials in part or in full as the Lord leads you. Understanding that the manner in which you utilize those materials and the manner in which you cite them and quote them is for your account on the Day of Judgment. So we would ask you to use the materials widely, but please feel free to copy them however you see fit and to share these truths with anybody as the Lord leads. I would urge those of you who received copies of these tapes at no charge that once you've listened to them that you consider passing them on and blessing others with them. Our heart's desire is that they should not become an artifact sitting on a bookshelf and gathering dust but that the word of God contained in these teachings should be spread as far and as widely as possible. Should you be lead by the Lord to sow into this Ministry, our bank account is end time issue ministries, the account number is 042 752 7805, the branch is the Standard Bank of South Africa, Randburg branch and the branch code is 018 005.
You've been listening to these messages, you've realized that you do not have a personal saving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that if you were to die right now, you would not spend Eternity in Heaven with him. I would urge you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to pray the prayer of salvation. The steps to salvation are as follows. Firstly admit and recognize that you are a sinner. Romans 3 verse 23 says "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Secondly, accept and believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that he came to Earth as a man, that he was crucified and died on the cross, that on the third day, he rose again and is now seated at the right hand of the Father and that by his death and resurrection he took your sons for Eternity. Romans 5:8 says, "but God demonstrates his own love towards us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Thirdly, confess your sins, repent of your sins and turn around. Repentance means turning around, it means ceasing to do what you now realize is wrong. 1 John 19 says, "if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness for confess your faith that Jesus Christ is Lord, that you believe this and receive his salvation and invite him to dwell in your heart." Romans 10: 9 and 10 says, "if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved, for with the heart one believes unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. Give thanks to God for your salvation, pray and cry out to God and give thanks to him for saving you. Work out your salvation by the Spirit of God." Philippians 2:12 says, "therefore, my beloved, as you've always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."
Salvation is a process. You are saved the moment you pray the sinner's prayer, the prayer of salvation and invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart and be Lord of your life. But Salvation is also a process whereby your mind is renewed and you come to have a personal and deep relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is your choice how far you go in that relationship. He desires a wonderful and a deep and intimate relationship with you, but it is your choice whether you will do what is necessary to come to that place through reading your Bible, praying, seeking counsel, seeking guidance. You should be water baptized at the first possible opportunity. Matthew 3:6 says "And were baptized by him in the Jordan confessing their sins." Encourage you to ask the Lord to lead you to somebody who has some knowledge of the basic ordinance of water baptism who can water baptize you, which leads you to a Church where they can water baptize you.
There's no reason why you cannot be water baptized today as a symbolic cleansing and washing of your sins. In fact, the minute you have prayed the sinners prayer it would be preferable for you to be water baptized. Choose to be obedient to the word of God, accept the Bible in its original Hebrew as given by the Spirit of God and choose to live your life according to that. 1John 5:3 says "For this is the love of God that we keep his Commandments and his Commandments are not burdensome." I encourage you to read the word of God daily and to put into practice everything that you encounter. As a principle which I believe will bear fruit in your life, I would encourage you to make an effort right now, after you've prayed this prayer, start reading your Bible from the book of John through to the book of Revelation.
And then make a discipline of reading the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation at least two, three, four times a year. And read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi at least once a year. And I would encourage you to do that using different translations. Ask God to lead you to the Church where he wants you to be at this time where they will teach you, they will guide you, they will pray for you and they will help you to walk in the fullness of what God has called you to be. Be aware that God may move you from Church to Church over time to teach you new things. And you should not be reluctant to do this. The service of God is a personal choice. It's a wonderful choice. And if you will step out by faith today and pray the sinner's prayer and follow Him, you will reap a rich harvest if that is your desire to be found faithful on the Day of Judgment. Should you have listened to this and have decided that you and I are ready to make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, I would ask you to pray the following prayer with me in Jesus' name.
Father, I come to You in the name of Jesus and I confess that I'm a sinner. I confess that I don't have a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and I recognize that without Jesus, if I were to die right now, I would spend Eternity in hell and not with You. I confess that I've sinned and I repented those sins and I turned around. I choose to turn my back on sin and to serve God. I confess that Jesus Christ came to Earth as a man, that he was crucified, that he died and was buried and that he was resurrected on the third day and that he sits on the right hand of the father. I confess by faith that he died to take all of my sins and I thank You Jesus for taking my sin and I give You my sin right now in Jesus' name.
I confess by faith that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and I choose now Lord Jesus to make You the Lord of my life. I invite You to come and dwell in my heart. I invite You to take charge of my life. I invite You to start leading and guiding me and directing me and I give You my life and everything that I have and I commit myself to serving You now. Lord Jesus, I thank You that You've heard me and I thank You that You have now come to live in me and I thank You for saving me. I thank You that I'm now a child of the most high God. I thank You that I'm now a servant of the most high God and that You will lead me and guide me into the paths that You want me to walk, I ask You Lord to lead me to the Church where You want me to be.
I ask You in the name of Jesus to bring the people that You want in my life, into my life by Your Spirit, and to remove the people that You don't want in my life by Your Spirit, in Jesus name. I ask You to close all doors in my life that You do not want to open, that no man may open them and I ask You to open every door in my life that You want opened, that no man may close it in Jesus' name. Father, I ask You to teach me to be led by Your Spirit. I ask You to open my eyes, to have a revelation of the word of God. I ask You to give me a hunger for the word of God and for Your Spirit and I ask you to teach me to pray, in Jesus name. I thank you Father and I thank you Jesus for saving me and I declare that I'm now a child of God and I praise you and I worship you and I glorify your Holy name and I thank you for changing me and saving me and delivering me, in Jesus name, amen.
Now that you've prayed that prayer and you're born again into the body of Christ, realize that the Christian walk is a journey. The apostle Paul likens it to a marathon race. You need guidance, you need assistance. If you have no one to help you, pray and ask the Holy Spirit of God to come into your life and to help you. If you need to contact somebody, contact any of the major ministries. If you're not sure who to contact, contact this ministry through the address and telephone and email details that were supplied earlier. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Amen.
04 17 The Power of Negativity -- Preventing Change
Brian Houston
This message #17 in the series on marriage entitled ‑ "Understanding God's way in marriage," Volume 2 entitled ‑ "Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage" message #17 ‑ "The Power of Negativity." As I completed the message last night, I felt impressed by the Spirit of God to add into the series this message entitled "The Power of Negativity" by Brian Houston, which was preached at the [inaudible 0:00:41] celebration in 1994. It is a tape that had been just lying around repeatedly coming across my notice in the days recently passed, and just suddenly I felt impressed to add that and one or two other tapes which had been lying around with it into this series. So I have not heard this message for years and quite honestly, I will be blessed to see what it is that the Lord has to say to us through this message at this time.
Brian Houston: It is always an honour to be here and have a chance to speak and this morning I want to speak about the importance of overcoming the destructive force of negativity in our lives. I think that negativity is one of change's greatest enemies. And this conference is all about the challenge to change. There are so many people who are ruled by negative thinking, a defeated attitude, it binds people up by, deal a lot with pastors and speak a lot to leaders and I find so many leaders are limited because of negativity in their own lives, so I want to challenge some of those things this morning and really allow you to see that if you can overcome negativity it is one of the great keys to be able to change in all that God has got for you and fulfil your purpose and fulfil your destiny and be the person God has called you to be. So we turn to James chapter 1. I come from Sydney in Australia, the world's most beautiful city and God is blessing us there. A church actually this month is 10 years old. We had a great 10 years. It has been a great adventure and in the next 10 years it is going to be even greater adventure.
All right, James 1:21: "Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls." Which is able to save your souls. Some think Christianity has been built around change in the outward things, change in what we do, but the word says being engrafted or implanted word, changes our souls. It says our souls which is of course you are thinking, your ability to make decisions, your emotions, that's where I believe our salvation needs to begin. The book of Proverbs chapter 19 says the testimonies of the Lord appear converting the souls and hear the engrafted word when a tree or true trees are engrafted, they literally become one. And when the word becomes one with you, it changes your soul. So then you do not need to be as it is said in verse 22, just a hearer of the word but you can be a doer of the word, not hearers only. Because so many people the change in them does not start right in the person. That they hear about God wanting to bless them but they never get to do it. They hear about God healing but they never get to do it, they hear about God having a plan for their lives but never get to do it. They hear that God wants to bring change, but never get to do it. Because it does not start right on the inside and because negativity reflects a defeated soul. And so many people in church life still fight it.
In verse 23 it says: "For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does." You see so many people, they can look into the Word of God even in a conference like this and as they look into the light of God's word, they begin to see themselves as they really are. They begin to see who God wants them to be. They begin to get an understanding of their potential and the opportunity that God has for them and the things that need to happen in their lives for them to enter into the fullness of God. Yet so often people go away, never make the changes. They hear it, but they do not do it. So often we can hear, we can even see, yet go away and do not do it. And negativity will never allow you to fulfil God's purposes in your life. That's why we have to overcome it and it is such a big path of the old, unredeemed, human nature. The human nature always sees the worst. It is amazing how...I was thinking this morning, in our country there is 10% unemployment and we have so much about the 10% who are unemployed but perfectly we never hear anything about the 90% who have got jobs and are doing well and they are employed.
When it comes to our Christian life, we concentrate so much on the 10% that God's and what about the 90% that He gives the opportunity to be huge over. The human nature will always look at some pastors who fall or who blow it morally or who fall by the wayside and see that quicker than the Lord applies thousands of leaders and ministers and pastors around the world who are faithful to God and the calling on their lives and keep going continually. Pastors will see the people who are not in church on Sunday morning often quicker than the ones they see "Who are they?" Because that is the human nature. Some of you this morning who are negative will look at me and see how much hair I am losing, quicker than you see how much I have still got. I used to have waves, not I got the beach! But negativity builds so easily on what might happen, on what could happen, on what we cannot afford. It is like a wife coming home to a husband and like, "I saw a great dress." And he says, "Why don’t you go back and get it?" The human nature says, "Oh, it will probably be gone!" It is easy to expect the worst than the best. "The store will probably be closed." And I just want to have a look for a moment at what negativity does to you. The way it stops you, limits your ability to change, and be who God called you to be, get out her pen, paper, notepad, Greek lexicon, Bible dictionary, laptop computer and get ready for this.
First thing that negativity will do to you, the first thing that negativity shows, it reflects inner defeat. Negativity reflects inner defeat. In other words, it is not about the church or people or the pastor or the future or those outward things, your father or your background, it is about you. We are talking about a person's outlook in life. Think about this, your outlook relates to what you are looking out from. If you are looking out from defeat, it is going to affect everything that you see. Negativity, no matter where it is pointed, no matter what it is aimed at, is actually not about everything else or everybody else, all the church, all your job, it is about you. And the Scripture backs that up over and over and over again. Look with me real quick at Proverbs 16:9 which says: "A man’s heart plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps." It is an interesting thing that your heart plans your course. The word goes on and says the Lord directs his steps. Your heart plans the course the direction of your life, and God directs our steps. Now if you have negativity in your life, the plans your heart makes will never ever be able to take the steps that God has directed for you, because negativity cannot take big enough steps. So many people no matter what God's plan is for them, their heart is planning their course and because their heart is still defeated, is narrow, is not enlarged, then it limits your potential. So negativity when it is in your heart will limit your ability to take the steps that God directs because your heart which is built with a negative thinking is still planning your course.
Let me remind you that Scriptures like Proverbs 23:7 says: "As the person thinks in their heart, so are they." Proverbs 4 says: "Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life." You see, your life and a circumstance and things that surround you and your potential are not so much to do with what might happen in South Africa after next month or what might happen to you outwardly, your life comes out of what is in you. Your potential comes out of what is in you, not what is around you. Keep your heart, look after it, take time to build the purposes of God into your heart so that the plans that your heart has for your future can line up with the steps that God directs. Sadly, that is not seeming to be what so many people do. Matthew 12 says if the tree is bad, the fruit will be bad. The tree is good, the fruit will be good. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. It goes on and says, a good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil, the negative man out of the negativity his heart brings forth negative things. The defeated person out of the defeat in their heart brings forth defeated things. It is what in us that comes out of us. No wonder the Scripture says when man looks out the outward appearance, God looks at the heart, because what is in you that determines how far you go in life. So many in life going to live according to what is around them, but it is all to do with what is in you and negativity, no matter where it is pointed, reflects inner defeat.
Second thing about negativity is it always justifies its existence; always. There is another Scripture, Proverbs 16:2 says all the ways of a man are right in his own eyes, but God is concerned about your spirit, about your heart, about who you really are. All of the person's ways are justified in their own eyes. I can justify the way I think, the way I speak, the way I feel because of what has happened to me, what my background was, the way my parents treated me, all the ways of a person are right in their own eyes. They justify in their own eyes but God is concerned about your spirit. I grew up of Australian pastors, prominently there are pastors in Australia, one of these guys I have known for a long time and the days gone by, full of faith, had a ministry that was going and growing and as I listened to him talking, he was talking about different people and pointing the finger and kept saying this person and talking about hypofaith here and hypofaith there and hypofaith over there and it just occurred to me that as long as he is pointing to someone else and talking about hypofaith, he is justifying the lack of faith in his own life and his own ministry. How the people will start to point the finger at church's growth or a growing churches and begin to criticise and make comment about that but usually they are justifying the lack of growth in their own life or their own ministry or their own church because negativity always justifies its existence. It always does it. In other words, you never do. Or very rarely, they do. Here anyone will say, "Well look, my problem is that I am just negative." I justify the way they feel.
Some people justify, they say why cannot we just be real? All this positive confession and why cannot we just be real? In other words, why cannot we just get down and grizzle and whine and complain and get defeated and get negative. But negativity always justifies its existence. One guy say in that same meeting, he says, "You know, a lot of people will call me negative. He says that I always call you negative when I disagree with you. But the truth is he was being negative." People call you negative when you are negative. But negativity always justifies. Some people justify their negativity by saying "Well, I have got a prophet mantle." So that gives them the right to be negative. In the new covenant, in the New Testament, prophesy is all about exhortation, edification, and comfort. It is all about building up, it is all about strengthening, it is all about encouraging, but some people think that because may be they have got they feel that they have got the calling of a prophet on their life, it gives them a right to be negative, but negativity always justifies its existence. Somebody who perhaps has difficulty believing God to be blessed into pastor will begin to find someone who maybe with a good person believes God was a great giver and when broke and that experience is justified. The lack of blessing in their own life. Someone else who finds it difficult to believe that God will heal them today and do great things in them will quickly find somebody that they can point at who would believe God gave healing and died and so what about that? Because negativity always justifies its existence. You see, no matter what the facts are, it is the truth that sets this free. It is the perfect law of liberty and looking into that as the Scripture said bring blessing into our lives, continuing in the perfect law of liberty, but negativity is limited by the fact and cannot rise up to what the truth is when the church is opposed to the facts, because no matter what the facts are, this is the truth. Negativity justifies. It is bound by facts. So quickly point and find a reason, but being the way it is, believing what it believes. I refuse to bring the level of my believe down to what my experience might be. I am determined to change my experience into what my belief is. Because this is the truth that sets me free, not the facts.
What I experience might be the fact but I am going to change the fact that line up with the truth rather than change the truth to line up with the facts that negativity always justifies and cannot get past the facts. Third thing about negativity. First thing was it reflects in a defeat. Second thing it always justifies its existence. Third thing, listen to this, negativity would choose your friends for you. Let me say that one more time, negativity will choose your friends for you. Turn with me to Proverbs 13:20. What a great crap! Turn to someone next to you and say "What is that perfume you are wearing? It is beautiful." Listen to it, Proverbs 13:20: "He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will be destroyed." Now, it is not that God is going to destroy you if you have the companion of fools, but the foolishness will destroy you. Whether you like it or not, negativity is foolishness because it is opposed to what God says and what God says about you and so negativity chooses your friends. If you are going to be wise, then you are going to be with wise people and wise people speak lies, speak up opportunity, speak blessing, speak potential, speak the purposes of God, see good no matter what the circumstances are, but the companion of negative people, I believe the Scripture says, is destructive. They will bring destruction in your life.
Let me just give you some examples of how negativity will choose your friend. Number one, negative people cannot spend a lot of time around positive people. Because positive people rarely bag negative people. Why cannot we just be real? Why cannot we just be honest? And when I hear people are always speaking words of life, see the best in everything, they get them angry, get some agitated and so they do not turn to have a whole lot of positive friends because that positive influence is such a threat to their lives. Already they have limited their friends to other negative people, remembering that the companion of fools, the Scripture says, will be destroyed. The other thing about negativity calling a familiar spirit to call what you like, but it is amazing how even a big crowd of negative people find each other. And so negative person will always say, "Everybody same. Everybody same, the music is too loud." So as pastor you say, "Who is saying?" "Well, I don’t want to tell you who." "How many people?" Two, three. On a good day, there is about four. But they really believe it is everybody, because everybody around them might be saying it because negativity has a way of finding itself. Like finds like and it is amazing how in a big crowd, negative people can still find each other.
If you are a person who hears a lot of negativity, I really think you should ask yourself why. Positive people threaten the life out of negative people. And so negative people do not tend to get negative around positive people. So if you hear a lot of negativity, a barrage of negativity, I think the first question to ask yourself is why you are hearing it. Why is it about you that makes a negative person feel comfortable about sharing the things they got to share with you? Now, that is a fairly confronting question, but it is a good question because most negative people do not see the negativity in themselves because they are too busy justifying it. If you are hearing a lot of it, there is a good chance that there is negativity in your life. I like Paul, the apostle Paul. In 2 Thessalonians 3:6, he says withdraw from those who are in different tradition. Withdraw from those who are disorderly. It literally means those who are out of step, it draws the picture of a military column and the person who is out of step just cannot keep step. Paul says withdraw from there. I want to challenge to understand the importance of getting the input in your life from people who are going to take you towards your destiny, because he who walks with wise people will be wise. And if you are already struggling with a negative self image or negative thoughts about yourself, there are times when you literally have to cut some influences off in your life. There are times when you have to determine if you are not going to listen to certain voices, there might be nice people, there might be good people, there might be church-going people but what they are speaking in your life is undermining your faith or undermining or they got the continual strain of negativity, sometimes you need to withdraw from there, because it will affect you.
Another reason why negativity chooses your friend. Listen, here is another reason why negativity chooses your friend is because negative people tend to be so self-indulging. They do not invest anything in to their friendships. So if they do not invest anything in there, I have got nothing in the bank, if I start to withdraw, I go into overdrive and it is not long before I am bankrupt. They are negative people that is what they do with their friendship. They do not invest anything in. They are not putting anything in their relationship with people. And so it is not too long before all their friendship is going to overdrive because there is nothing in the bank, so they bankrupt so many of their friendships, one by one cut people off, become isolated. Proverbs 18 says the man who isolates himself rages against all wise judgement. What does that mean? Rages against all wise judgement? Here is the modern translation, he is an idiot. The man who isolates himself rages against all wise judgement, what else could that mean? He is an idiot. He is not thinking straight. And yet negativity will do that to you and it will isolate you, because one by one people drop off and so many people even pastors, leaders, ministers, I wonder why they cannot build great relationship, why they are not building good friendship, why they feel like they are all alone, and yet so much of their attitude in trying to build friendship is related to what people do to them, or what they want or what they feel is owed to them.
The Scripture says faithful of the wounds of a friend but if you feel deal with negativity, you never feel like any wounds from anybody is painful. You just think, no, people are dumping me all over again. Why does everyone want to dump on me? You just feel here we go again and you just feel like the victim. In every relationship you do not get close enough to people or you certainly do not let people get close enough to you. They give you the kind of input what the Scripture calls faithful. Faithful are the wounds of friends. You certainly do not feel the opportunity to change. You just feel like you have been hurt and you are the victim. So negativity tends to choose your friends. Fourth thing about negativity and that is one of the most important things of all is that it distorts the truth. It so distorts the truth. Think about this. Have a look with me at the Scripture. Proverbs 12: "Anxiety in the heart of man causes depression, But a good word makes it glad." Now anxiety is build on what might happen. If your kids are late at home at night, what if they have had an accident? Anxiety about the future, what if. It is build on what might happen. It is good to say that anxiety leads to depression. Now, anxiety comes from negativity because it is build on what could happen. It is build on the worst scenario and so you get negativity which builds anxiety, which builds depression and anybody who is depressed is not seeing straight.
When somebody is distressed, everything becomes distorted. What could normally would look to be such a small issue becomes a massive mountain. Now you see a depressed person, snap out of it, because they cannot snap out of it, naturally speaking even if they try. They need the Holy Spirit or something supernatural to happen, else it takes time, because negativity is such a real issue with a depressed person and I begin to see things right out of perspective. But let me say that perceptions are powerful as what is true. And so that's what somebody is seeing is power over their life is a powerful as what is true. You see, negativity distorts. It builds perceptions that may seem very real to you but it is not the truth. It may as well be because the hold it has over your life. A photo negative literally reverses what is shade and what is light. That is what a photo negative does and so it affects clarity, it affects colour, it affects perception. That is what negativity does to a person. It takes all the clarity out of your life, out of your ability to see it, takes all the colour out, it takes all the definition out and so many people love to turn to negative way of thinking. So it affects their ability to see right. It affects their perceptions. When they are dealing with people, they will see what is in them, their outlook. Remember it is related to what they are looking at and so may be one day somebody here sees me and they think I am looking at them and they get excited because they are pleased to see me again, they have not seen me for a long time and they know how much they are longing to spend time with me, they look at me, they are waiting for me to greet them and perhaps one inadvertently I do not even notice them and I am looking at the person right behind him. And so they go, Brian, and I happen just not to see them, see the person right behind them and talk to them and this person feels, he did it on purpose. He never did like me. He is anti-South African, he always wash. He has got an attitude about the cricket. He thinks he is too good for me.
And so whether or not that is true, they believe it and so the power has over their life is as powerful as what is true. And that happens with negative people all the time. They are bound up by what they perceive. It is not what is true. You see, anxiety leads to depression. A person who is depressed does not see straight, and a person who is negative it is the same thing. They are not seeing straight, and yet what they do see rules their life and has such a hold over them. It binds them up. It happens with the way you see Scripture even in a positive personal purpose, I will never leave the righteousness, no my children begging bread, what a product. I will never leave my children begging bread. A negative person might see the same Scripture. I will never leave the righteous. [inaudible 0:27:53] never leave me that way. I believe I may be forsaken for a while. You are going to forsake me for sure. [inaudible 0:28:05]. May be you come to my eyes. Even you see Scripture relates to what is in you. That is why we have got a Heaven in life because it is all about what is happening in the inside. It is all about what is happening in your heart. So many people get what is true. The story by what they see it, negativity does it to them, it binds them up. They are just not seeing straight. A negative person would take another person's words, but when they repeat them, it is coloured by their spirit. As a leader one of the things you learn is to be slow to speak because you become very quotable. But if somebody with a negative spirit takes my word and quotes them as their spirit, all of a sudden my words are coloured with their spirit. And so it distorts what I was actually saying. What they are saying is true I really said that and yet with that spirit somehow it takes on a whole different meaning, a whole different thinking than what I was actually saying. You know, negative distorts the truth. That is one of the great reasons why we have got to get rid of it out of our life. Because you are seeing straight and yet perceptions of what are ruling in your life are as powerful hold over you as what the truth is.
The next thing about negativity is that it makes sweeping judgements, unfair judgements. David danced before the Lord. The Scripture told you about David dancing, the Hebrew word literally means that David swirled about wildly. This is not just some gentle little dance. This is not just a little Pentecostal hop, this is not just some ballet. When David danced before the Lord, he got down. He danced, he swirled about wildly and his wife Michal looked at him and says "How inglorious was the king of Israel to David." She began to judge you. But it was not really all that much to do with David. It was about Michal. It was about her. She could never be free to worship by that. She could never let her go down like that. She was just more concerned about her image. It does not look good. And the king's wife and her husband was making a fool of themselves like that. It was not about David at all. It was about her and she began to make these judgements. Negative people become very speck conscious. Jesus said, do not look at the speck in your brother's eyes, you have seen the jacaranda tree in your own eyes and negative people become very speck conscious. You love watching television. There is so many things negative. It is just pit holes. The acting is awful. Horrible hear. You are sitting with someone in a restaurant who just systematically pulls apart everybody at all the other tables. And negativity just makes the sweeping judgements, unfair judgements. In church life, people will sit back. They are ruled by negativity and they just make sweeping judgements. They become speck conscious. What about the speaker or about the people on the other side or the way the young people are behaving or about the musical, about some other things and while they are sitting there, judging specks, everybody in the row in front of them has to duck all the time because of the great tree hanging out of their own eye. I love the picture Jesus paints.
Jesus talks about a judgemental person as having a tree out of their eye. It is not like that when someone is judgemental, everyone else has to duck because everywhere they turn... What a sad thing that some people write books judging stakes in other people's life and ministries, pulling down other ministries. What a great ministry to be here. I mean in Rome be an apostle, or prophet, or pastor or teacher, they are in the ministry of pulling down other ministry. How wonderful, inspiring ministry that is. Just judging, pointing the finger, negativity does that. Just makes sweeping statements. It is an amazing thing how negative person can listen to a message and hear just one thing. You got to be careful when you are in another nation, what words mean or what they do not mean, but in [inaudible 0:32:57] if you call your behind your bum that is right here, in that country you can get away with it, it is okay. The reason they are speaking in church and somehow got talking about sitting or falling on the bum and one of the ushers called me out with a lady because I said bum. I could not help it tomorrow because I thought that all the great things I said that morning, all the brilliant things, all the revelation, all the right [inaudible 0:33:28] she wanted to go home remembering just one word ‑ bum, that's all. All the things that I said that could have changed their life and turn her around and made a difference, what she heard was bum. And no doubt anyone that church, that's all should tell them. It is amazing how negativity does that. You can look to a message and I just pick that one thing and that is all I hear, I did not hear anything else. Sweeping statements, unfair judgements, negativity builds on that all the time. Keeps doing that, it judges you. Negative people tend to have a heart, but down and out now of course that is a good thing because we need to have an interesting justice and we need to care for people and love people. but oftentimes the reason why they feel comfortable with the down and out is that people going somewhere are too much of a threat to them.
And the other things as often with the negative person, the way they look is indiscriminate. It does not always make a lot of sense. For example, I was watching on TV in Australia where one of our rock stars, a guy called Angry Anderson, he is a little short guy with no hair and tattoos everywhere, but he loves young people and loves kids and he does a lot of charity work and he organised in a deaf and blind school for them to put a whole playground with a monorail and pergolas and all sorts of things and 50 hours into the school. He rang up businesses and got people to donate concrete and other people to donate all the various parts and put it all together and it was all filmed on television like a documentary and I watched this whole thing. I began to think about the [inaudible 0:35:15] donated literally tons of concrete. For a man to be able to do that, he must have been a wealthy man. And we begin to think how negative person thinks because maybe he will drove to home his Mercedes Benz. After work that day Angry Anderson had rung him up and he said, yeah I will get involved and given literally thousands of dollars worth of concrete. [inaudible 0:35:40] driving by in Mercedes Benz and a negative person has got a heart for the [inaudible 0:35:44] and make a judgement on what he is driving. They would not even consider, it would not even crossed their mind that he that day has spent thousands of dollars helping needy people, they just judge on what they see. It is indiscriminate and I think straight and so many Christians are bound by negativity which is affecting the way they see which is affecting their ability to change which is affecting their ability to fulfil God's purpose in their life because the man's heart lands their cross, the God directs the step and we need to allow the plans in our heart to be able to line up with the steps that God has which means our heart needs to be enlarged, which means there is no room for negativity.
One other thing about negativity is it in the gates the Holy Spirit work. You know, [inaudible 0:36:31] you receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you as [inaudible 0:36:34]. It is the same root word from which we get our words dynamite or dynamic or dynamo which generates the power on a bicycle. It is explosive power. You want to negate that power, negativity will do it. Because it is just like a photo negative which reverses light and shade, negativity turns around and contradicts God's purposes for your life. It contradicts the way the God sees you. And so if you are negative, you literally will negate and to negate means you nullify. You are going to take all that explosiveness out of the power of the holy spirit in your life, negativity will do it. Negativity negates the Holy Spirit's work.
Another thing about negativity is that it pollutes your environment. It contaminates and pollutes your environment, I already spoke about relationships. One good example is your family. Listen, we have a responsibility to overcome negativity because negativity does through generations and if you have negativity in your home, you literally are affecting the future of your children. The work is bring up a child in the way they should go and they will not depart from it. It is amazing how so many people see things they could not dare in their parents. And I felt I would never be like that. Now if the father was a drunk, they say I will never be like that or the mother nagged, and they say I will never be like that. I will never ever when I get the chance nag while my mother does and yet history repeats itself and people take on the very things they despise in their parents. Maybe one of the reasons for that as the Bible says bring up a child in the way they should go, they would not depart from it, the way a child is trained is what they do not depart from. And so often the things that kids see in their parents, they cannot stand it, they hate it, but they are trained and so they cannot depart from it. That is why the power of God's word is needed to bring change in our lives. And we have got a responsibility to overcome negativity because it pollutes the people around us. So many people live their life with the way they are thinking and negativity just absolutely holy in them because they are spoken into them by the generations that went before them and I do not want to do that to my kids. I would rather err on the side of telling my kids how brilliant they are, how good looking they are, how blessed they are to be my children, I would rather err on the side of building them up because life has plenty of pulling them down. I want to have a positive environment in my family and I want to encourage you to understand how much negativity pollutes the environment. It contaminates anything and everything that you touch. It discourages others, it is caustic, it is cynical, it lets trust to pull down. That is why we have to overcome it.
Another thing about negativity, it limits the present in your life and sabotages your future. Limits the present and sabotages your future. When I was a kid, I remember one time getting up on the top of a huge slide and I got to the top and all the other kids are sliding down the slide, I got up there and looked and decided I could not do it. I really wanted to do it. And I looked fool not doing it and all the other kids were calling me names because I would not do it but I decided it was too dangerous to slide down that slide and I sat up there for hours looking, hoping, getting classes, pulling back, until one day one of the other kids got so sick of me being in their way, they just pushed me and down I went and it was great, it was easy. After that you could not keep me off that slide but as long as I believed I could not do it, it ruled me. So many people are limited by their perceptions, by what they believe. It sabotages your future. You cannot take the steps that God planned for you if you are heart is limited by negativity, that is why we have to overcome it. And negativity is all about the condition of your soul. As a person thinks in their heart, so are they. We are told to keep our heart with all diligent because out of that comes the issues of life. So many they hear about what God wants to do for them, but they never get to doing it because of the condition of their heart. Now, what we got to do is we get a spirit that will overcome in our soul. Real quick, before I finish, let me just give you today some of things you can do for your soul that will help you to overcome negativity and be the person that God has called you to be. The first thing you need to do for your soul is to shut it up, right there. I need to shut up my soul. In Jeremiah 4:19, Jeremiah said: "O my soul, my soul! I am pained in my very heart! My heart makes a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace." Jeremiah was pained in his heart about the state of his nation. His soul was making a noise, his heart was making a noise, he is saying, my heart makes a noise within me. There were people here this morning and your heart makes a noise within you. Negativity cries out in the inside. Defeat cries out in the inside, or rejection or loneliness or inferiority or some other things on the inside is crying out. And we need to learn how to shut that voice out.
Listen to this, Psalm 62:5: "My soul, wait silently for God alone, For my expectation is from Him." If your expectation is coming from anywhere else, you need to shut it up. Truly my soul waits silently for God alone. Jeremiah said my soul makes a noise within me. If your soul is making a noise within you, listen one more time to the Scripture, my soul waits silently for God alone. My expectations come from Him. So many people's expectation comes from the economy or from what other people have spoken into their life or from what might happen for the elections next month, their expectation comes from so many other places but the Scripture says, truly my soul waits silently for God alone and my expectation comes from Him. Negativity tries to rule your thinking, you shut it up, and take authority over it the Psalm spoke to his soul, he said blessed the Lord O my soul and everything that is in me blessed His holy name. So you are going to bless God. Negativity, you are going to bless God. Inferiority, you are going to bless God. Everything that is in me is going to bless his holy name. If there is other voices making a noise in you, I want to challenge you to take authority over and shut it up and tell your soul it has got to bless God and tell everything that is in you is going to bless His holy name. Amen. Shut it up.
Second thing you can do for your soul to overcome negativity is get it educated. Teach it. Proverbs 19:2: "It is not good for a soul to be without knowledge." Now, remember, it is the truth that sets you free or knowing the truth that sets you free. Is not amazing that a person can have a doctorate in communications and still in life go through three or four divorces. Is it not amazing how a person can have masters in psychology and still needs treatment for depression. It is incredible how people can have a degree in theology and still never be able to build a church or be affective and fruitful in ministry, because they may have knowledge but they need to get into a new school. They need to get into the school that teaches their soul and their heart what God has to say about them, because the word says it is not good for your soul to be without knowledge. Listen, Psalm 139:14: "I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvellous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well." That is an educated soul. Listen to it one more time, it says: "I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; And that my soul knows very well." You need to get your soul educated. Maybe today you say well I know the word tells me that I am fearfully and wonderfully made, but you know whether you know it very well when the other things start to make a noise on the inside, then negativity starts to rear its ugly head. We need not just to know that we are fearfully and wonderfully made but we need to be like the Psalm who said that my soul knows my inner person, my thinking, my emotion, my ability to make decisions, this my soul knows very well, I am fearfully and wonderfully made. God built me, God likes me, God loves me, God made me the way, He wants me to be, and this my soul knows very well. Praise God. Educate yourself. Get it educated. It will help you to overcome negativity.
Third thing is get your soul anchored. Hebrews 6:19 says: "This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast." If the enemy can build hopelessness in your life, you become unanchored. So you are all over the place. Your emotions are everywhere. Your thinking is all over the place. One moment you are depressed and defeated and your mind in the gutter and in the next moment you are up and down and around. We need to be people who understand the power of the Scripture. This hope we have as an anchor of your soul. That soul needs to be anchored. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. When there is a lack of hope in a person, on the inside we feel hopeless, even outwardly they have all the outward appearance of being together, but on the inside there is a sense of hopelessness. You are unanchored, you need to get your soul anchored.
I really believe, we need to understand who God is and who God is in us. I need to have an understanding of who my God is in me who can give me the kind of confidence to be able to look at any person, anything, any circumstance and know that that I am the child of God. My soul boast in the Lord. The humble shall hereof and be glad that negativity tries to rule you, stop boasting in the Lord. The Psalm said, he said the Lord is my life and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked, my enemies, and my foes stand up against me to eat up my flesh, they sombre and fell. They were hosts [inaudible 0:47:47] my heart will not fear. The war shall rise against me of this will I be confident, one thing have I desired of the Lord and that will I seek out that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to [inaudible 0:48:00] in His tabernacle, [inaudible 0:48:02] hide me in His tabernacle and the secret of His tabernacle He will hide me. He says sit me up upon a rock and now [inaudible 0:48:09] be lifted up above my enemies, therefore will I sing in His tabernacle, songs of joy, praise God. My soul shall make a boast in the Lord and negativity tries to rule you. Give boasting of who God is in you. Get rid of all the false humility and understand you are a child of God.
Thousand peasants taught last night and they can rise up the ground and get a rise on to the destiny that God has given you, in Jesus name. My soul shall make boast in the Lord. We need to get our souls accountable, make it accountable because negativity always blinds. One of the greatest diseases in the church is blinding a [inaudible 0:48:52]. It started with the early church. Adam braved that he will rather in the beginning of time, Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed a serpent and it passed on by the same nature and in the church, it is a crippling disease. So many people are blaming. Ezekiel 18:4 says: "All souls are Mine; The soul of the father As well as the soul of the son is Mine." Listen to verse 20, it says: "The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself." If we are going to overcome negativity, it is no pointing the finger, blaming, looking for reason for feeling the way you feel, all the ways of a person are right in their own eyes, but God is concerned about your spirit. You need to be accountable as a pastor. If one day I look at the person in the back row and in the worshipping not lifting their hands and worshipping, so I get angry with him. I am not going to make much difference but if I, as a leader, take on accountability and decide that I need to look at what my leadership needs to as to why the person in the back row to lift their hands, I am going to be a far more affective leader. But negativity tends not to be accountable. It tends to just keep on blaming.
Maybe one other thing I will teach you. It relates to overcoming negativity. One more you can do for yourself is forget not His [inaudible 0:50:26]. Psalm 103: "Bless the Lord, O my soul; forget not all His benefits." It is amazing how quickly we can forget the greatness of God in our lives. The early church, the people of Israel, Psalm 106 says, "They soon forgot His works; They did not wait for His counsel." It is amazing how quickly the human nature forgets. Negativity soon turns from the goodness of God and the promises of God and begins to see the circumstance all over again. Listen, I am going to read one more Scripture to you. Exodus chapter 14... you okay? You alive? Great, good to be alive. Much better than the alternative. Exodus 15:1: "Then Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the Lord," then they were feeling positive, they said, "We will sing to the Lord, He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider He has thrown into the sea!" He has become my salvation. They are the very same people. Look at Exodus 14:11, these are the same people. "They said to Moses, 'Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you so dealt with us, to bring us up out of Egypt?' Is this not the word that we told you in Egypt, saying, 'Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians?' It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness." It is amazing that the same people...here is the difference between leadership and a real leader and all this. This is Moses' spirit. Moses in verse 13 says that people do not be afraid, stand still, see the salvation of the Lord what He will accomplish for you today but the Egyptians say you see the day you will see again no more forever. If the leadership was positive even on the wrong side of the miracle. Leadership was positive even when confronted with the sea and from behind and enemy coming. People they are positive when God is doing it but when they are confronted with a real situation, defeat, negativity, we got to be the people who decide. Our soul is not going to forget all who benefits. Bless the Lord O my soul. We need to be people who overcome these things that want to defeat us, negativity holds so many people from the promises and purposes of God, we need to overcome it and enter into all that God has got for us. If you believe it, say Amen.
Just before I hand back, just be in prayer for one moment because I know in my heart that if you are on this morning, there are a lot of people here and negativity is a real issue in your life. So often when it comes time for you to overcome, and enter into what God has got for you, it is like these things, these thought patterns. Negativity just tries to clamp you. The word says, listen to it one more time, a man's heart plans its course, but the Lord directs the steps and if negativity is in your heart, it limits the plans of your heart and the plans of your heart cannot line up with the steps that God has for you that is predetermined, predestined steps that God has for you. I want to encourage you to die to make a decision, a decision that says my soul is going to overcome negativity, it is going to overcome the things that try to rule it so that I can enter into the world that God has got for me. If that is where you are at, just stand up all over this place, I want to pray a prayer and believe that God will give you the courage to overcome and enter into the world that He has for you. So many people, just keep standing. Those of you who are aware that there is a need for you to overcome the defeat of negativity in your life, just keep standing. Maybe you lift both your hands towards the Lord and I want you to start take an authority over your soul, soul you are going to bless God, bless the Lord O my soul, get that negativity and take authority over it and determine it is going to have no hold over your life, everything that is in me, bless His holy name. Let us start taking authority over those things in the name of Jesus.
Father I come against every negative thought, every [inaudible 0:54:39] to hold the people of God, I pray that these people may rise up above it in Jesus name and take a hold of the victory you have given us, so we may enter into the purpose of God. No weapon formed against this can prosper. Lord, we thank you for the truth of your word, for the power of your word, help us not just to hear about the blessing, just to hear about the purposes of God, but to be able to do it as we allow you to make change in our heart and our soul and our inner person. I ask you now in the name of Jesus, in Jesus mighty name, and we thank you for it Father. Just take authority over your soul, get aggressive in Jesus name, take authority over it in the name of the Lord. HalleluYah. Jesus, Jesus, thank you Lord. Thank you Jesus. Praise God. Praise God. Just stay standing for a moment. People standing in this building and what you see you really believe it is true, but the outlook that you have is coming from defeat. You are looking out from defeat. And so what you are seeing is distorted and I want to encourage you to understand that we build around what the truth is, not what the facts are. We build around what God's word says, that is the perfect law of liberty. It sets us free. They bring the purposes of God.
I want you to understand that if you have been an overcoming spirit, no matter what the circumstance, it is amazing how a person who has built confidence on the inside, who has got the spirit of an overcomes, who has learned to be positive through the Word of God, it is amazing how no matter what life is trying to do to them, they still rise up and overcome. In Joseph, the perfect example, [inaudible 0:56:34] he still rose up and overcame and became victorious. The circumstances could rule him because what was in Joseph always took him to the top. So do not get the kind of perception that your life to defeat and makes you feel like there is no harm that begin to see who God is in you. It will change what you see, your outlook will change. God is much more concerned about your heart than the outward appearance because it is your heart that determines the condition of your life. Praise God. Let us build the kind of heart that will bring blessing to God in the name of Jesus. Amen. God bless you.
James Robertson: The opening statement of that teaching, negativity is one of change's greatest enemies, that message certainly caused me to take a further look at some of the aspects that affect the implementation of change that we have just been talking about. Just after completing listening to that tape as it was being copied, the Lord said to me that negativity towards sexual lovemaking is one of the most serious cancers in marriage in the Body of Christ today and that is why the message that is to follow this, is so vital and that is why so few Christians would be able to receive the message that follows unless they take this message about negativity to the heart. The next message is about building the one flesh house and building the one flesh bond. It is about sexual lovemaking in marriage. It will go into territory which is not traditionally addressed by Christians and within the Body of Christ. It will challenge the ability of many to understand what God is saying to the church today with regard to marriage, with regard to the full truth of what marriage was created to be and that was reinforced further with regard to the example that was cited by Brian Houston in terms of David and his wife. The statement: Be free to worship like David worshipped without inhibition, completely exuberant towards his God, not holding back in anyway, not caring what other people thought of him, only concerned about his passionate love for God. That is the way praise and worship is intended to be, without inhibition. It is the way that sexual lovemaking in marriage between husband and wife is supposed to be and in particular, it is the way the wife is expected and was created to be towards her husband within the marriage chamber.
This message was recorded by [inaudible 0:59:45] ministries, [inaudible 0:59:47] Randburg 2125, Republic of South Africa. Telephone numbers South Africa, 117923815. Unfortunately I have no further details concerning the preacher of that message, Brian Houston, but should you want to contact him directly, you could contact him through [inaudible 1:00:16] ministries. A few headlines out of this message in the context of our subject which is "Heaven on Earth in Marriage," negativity is one of the change's greatest enemies. There is so much in the series which confronts people's paradise, presents Scriptures which have never been seen in the fullness of their context, challenges, doctrines which are shown to be pagan and false. It is potentially very easy for anyone listening to these messages to become negative, pessimistic, critical but that is not God's will. God's will is to restore marriage to what He intended it to be. God's will is to bring divorce and putting away to an end. God's will is to bring healing on the Earth. God's will is to prepare a spotless bride for the Lord Jesus Christ.
There are some other quotes: If you see weakness in someone, it is only to strengthen, overcome, compensate for or to cover. Again, we see the context of the covenant coming through. God shows us weaknesses in others for us to compensate for them to help them to work together with them that divided we may stand and become strong. That applies particularly in marriage. We need to understand that the weaknesses we see in our spouses are there because we have strengths and not we have not created the weaknesses, although sometimes perhaps we have, but God shows us those weaknesses because we have the strengths to overcome them. It is vital for somebody who sees that they have strength, a wife who sees that she is weak relative to her husband to understand that it is not necessarily her responsibility to become strong in that area, God is able to do something else.
It comes in also to this subject of a man having more than one wife. One man and one woman cannot adequately fulfil all the functions that God may give to them in many cases. In such cases, it is reasonable to expect that the wife and the husband will both have weaknesses which require an additional wife to cover. If the single monogamous wife seeks to be all things to her husband to cover or her weaknesses, she will be emotionally and psychologically destroyed because she was never created to be that way. Another quote: Speak life potential opportunity. We need to speak life into our marriages and into our partners. To reiterate, in the message that follows on building the one flesh bond and building the one flesh house, there will be statements, words, and concepts which have the potential to offend. If they do, I apologise that is not my intention, but I ask you to listen to the heart of the message and seek not to be offended, seek not to criticise, seek not to find fault. The message is from God, I have wrestled for weeks now over whether the very detailed content that will be contained in next message is truly God's will and I say to you without reservation today that that message is of God. Prepare your heart before you start listening for God to give you revelation and knowledge in an area which may be holding you in desperate bondage.
Another quote: Negativity pollutes your environment, including your family, your home, your children. It is absolutely vital in terms of marriage being Heaven on Earth. We have to bring positive life into our marriages. We have to speak life into our marriages. We have to believe the best of all people. We have to stop criticising and finding fault. We need to give encouragement and the world is so desperately short of understanding that. Certainly for myself, the more I seek to put the teachings on love into practice in my life, the more I realise how little I know about God's love in the way of walking in God's love. I quote also: Error on the side of encouragement, the positive, etc. Rather be too positive towards your family and your children than to be to negative. A further quote: As long as I believed I could not do it, it limited me. An underlying deep thread in this teaching, God is able to heal your marriage. God created marriage to work. There is not a marriage on this planet that cannot be healed, if the husband and the wife both choose for it to be healed. A marriage will only die if either neither party cares and just negligently allows it to die or one party actively, consciously, and deliberately sets out to destroy it. Marriage is intended to work and if you will trust God, it will work.
A further quote: Get your eyes on your destiny. If you have listened to this tape series thus far, see the destiny that God has for you. It is a destiny of a beautiful land, a land of promise, a land flowing with rock and honey, a land of a blessed marriage which is Heaven on Earth. Yes, there are many giants to be fought, cities to be conquered, strongholds to be torn down, but God's form of marriage is Heaven on Earth for those who lay down their lives to seek it in Jesus name. Another quote: Negativity always blames. Accept accountability. This is a remark that I made while listening to the tape. We must accept accountability to seek all truth guided by the Holy Spirit. John 16:13-15 Jesus speaking, he says: "However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you."
I cannot stress enough, this teaching is about profound truth, this entire series. We are now on something like the 37th tape in this series, and almost in every tape, the Lord has given us revelation of profound truths of the Christian walk, profound truths about marriage. He has exposed all sorts of things which would not be so but He has shown us how they ought to be and as we move forward into the last few tapes of this series, I believe that the Lord is going to give us the most beautiful and the most wonderful revelation of how He intended marriage to be in all its dimensions and all its facets. Please understand, we have so little truth in the world today. We have so little truth in the church today. I do not say that to condemn, I need to put in context that which is contained in the messages that remain, once you understand that Satan has stolen so much from the church and so much from each one of us personally and individually, if you can become hungry for the truth of the Word of God, the Will of God, the Spirit of God, hungry to see your marriage healed, hungry to experience Heaven on Earth in your marriage, I believe that you will find the remaining teachings in this series, a beautiful, wonderful and a warming revelation. If you choose to be negative towards the teachings that follow, you will be offended, you will stumble on the rock, which is Christ and on his truths and you will not experience the joy that awaits those who have crossed over into the promised land.
A comment was made, you need to be accountable to inspire and I would suggest to you, the husband needs to be accountable to inspire his wife. The wife needs to be accountable to inspire her husband in different areas. I really believe that it is the wife who is called to inspire her husband in sexual lovemaking if the husband is available and ready and willing to make love at any time. The wife is imparted with the beauty and the skills to minister to her husband to inspire him, to lift him up, that he may come to that place where he can know that he is a man because the nature of this relationship with his wife lets him know that she esteems him above all men, that she esteems him as a man, that she gives herself totally to him. And the husband must inspire his wife to go where Jesus calls him to go, not with a whip, but with love, with gentleness, with meekness, and humility and tenderness.
A further quote: Leadership is positive even when confronted with an obstacle. Build around the truth of God's word not the facts are, become an overcomer. Again, husbands understand you are called to be leaders, understand that leadership is positive even when confronted with an obstacle. It is not for you to get miserable and downcast and dump on your wife. It is your responsibility to lead your family wherever it has to go. This is not to say that husbands will not get downcast and discouraged from time to time. It is his wife's responsibility to encourage him to uplift him to minister to him that he can go up back into the field of battle, be it physical war type battle, be it spiritual warfare, be it the daily hurly-burly of life and he must build his wife like that.
To close, I want to restate the word the Lord gave me on the conclusion of Brian Houston's message on negativity. The Lord says that negativity towards sexual lovemaking is one of the most serious cancers in marriage in the Body of Christ today. And He says that that is why the message of these teachings is so vital and particularly why the next teaching is so vital and even the teachings after that and why so few Christians would be willing to receive those teachings unless they take this message on negativity to heart. I urge you before you put the next tape in, pray, seek God, ask Him to confirm that that which follows is of Him, asking to open your eyes to see what He would have you see and to close your eyes to that which He does not want you to see. I ask Him to open your ears to hear what He would have you hear and to close your ears not to hear what He does not want you to hear. And to open your heart to receive the good seed that He has appointed for you in the teachings that follow. Go before God, seek His face, seek His voice before you move on to the next tape, so that you can go in there positive. Do not be like the children of Israel who [inaudible 1:13:38] his colleagues came back from spying up the land were negative and turned away from the promised land. Be like Caleb and say we are well able to overcome the giants and the demons and the deception and all our wrong knowledge. We will overcome and we will take back the land that Satan has stolen from the church.
Father, in the name of Yahooshua I ask you to blow away everything that has been said on this tape that is not according to your word and according to your will in Jesus name. I pray to you Father that whatever has been spoken, all that is being spoken that is according to your word, according to your will, according to your spirit will find deep root in the hearts of the hearers that by your spirit, you will water it and nourish it and it will produce abundant fruit, a hundredfold return in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Lord of Lords and King of Kings. Amen.
This message has been recorded by a church without walls, a ministry of End Time Issue Ministries, PO Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at James@End-Time-Issues.org.za. Our phone numbers, international dialling code normally 0027 but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline 0027-11791-2327 or when South Africa, 011-791-2327. My mobile number 0027-83251-6644 and in South Africa 083-251-6644. Our fax number internationally 0027-11791-5004 and locally 011-791-5004. All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the work.
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I would urge those of you who receive copies of these tapes at no charge that once you have listened to them that you consider passing them on and blessing others with them. Our hearts' desire is that they should not become artefacts sitting on a bookshelf and gathering dust that the Word of God contained in these teachings should be spread as far and as widely as possible.
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If in listening to these messages, you have realised that you do not have a personal serving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that if you were to die right now, you would not spend eternity in Heaven with him, I would urge you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and saviour and to pray the prayer of salvation. These steps to salvation are as follows. Firstly, admit and recognise that you are a sinner. Romans 3:23 says "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Secondly, accept and believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that he came to Earth as a man, that he crucified and died on the cross, that on the third day he rose again. He is now seated at the right hand of the Father, and that by his death and resurrection, he took your sins for eternity. Romans 5:8 says: "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Thirdly confess your sins, repent of your sins, and turn around. Repentance means turning around. It means ceasing to do what you now realise is wrong.
1 John 1:9 says: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Four, confess your faith that Jesus Christ is Lord that you believe this and receive his salvation and invite him to dwell in your heart. Romans 10:9-10 says: "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." Give thanks to God for your salvation. Pray and cry out to God and give thanks to Him for saving you. Sixthly, work out your salvation by the Spirit of God. Philippians 2:12 says: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Salvation is a process. You are saved the moment you pray the sinners' prayer, the prayer of salvation and invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart and be Lord of your life. But salvation is also a process whereby your mind is renewed and you come to have a personal and deep relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is your choice how far you go in that relationship. He desires a wonderful and a deep and an intimate relationship with you, but it is your choice whether you will do what is necessary to come to that place through reading your Bible, praying, seeking counsel, seeking guidance.
You should be water baptised at the first possible opportunity. Matthew 3:6 says: "And were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." I encourage you to ask the Lord to lead you to somebody who has some knowledge of the basic ordinance of water baptism who can water baptise you or to lead you to a church where they can water baptise you. There is no reason why you cannot be water baptised today as a symbolic cleansing and washing of your sins. In fact, the minute you pray the sinners' prayer, it would be preferable for you to be water baptised.
Choose to be obedient to the Word of God, accept the Bible in its original Hebrew as given by the Spirit of God and choose to live your life according to that. 1 John 5:3 says: "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome." I encourage you to read the Word of God daily and to put into practice everything that you encounter. As a principle which I believe will bear fruit in your life, I would encourage you to make an effort right now after you have prayed this prayer, start reading your Bible from the Book of John through to the Book of Revelation and then make a discipline of reading the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation at least two, three, four times a year and read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi at least once a year. And I would encourage you to do that using different translations.
Ask God to lead you to the church where He wants you to be at this time, where they will teach you, they will guide you, they will pray for you and they will help you to walk in the fullness of what God has called you to be. Be aware that He may move you, God may move you from church to church over time to teach you new things and you should not be reluctant to do this. The service of God is a personal choice. It is a wonderful choice and if you will step out by faith today and pray the sinners' prayer and follow Him, you will reap a rich harvest if that is your desire to be found faithful on the Day of Judgement. Should you have listened to this and have decided that you are now ready to make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, I would ask you to pray the following prayer with me, in Jesus name.
"Father, I come to you in the name of Jesus and I confess that I am a sinner. I confess that I don't have a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and I recognise that without Jesus if I were to die right now, I would spend eternity in hell and not with you. I confess that I have sinned and I repent of those sins and I turn around, I choose to turn my back on sin and to serve God. I confess that Jesus Christ came to Earth as a man that he was crucified that he died and was buried and that he was resurrected on the third day, and that he sits on the right hand of the Father. I confess by faith that he died to take all of my sins, and I thank you Jesus for taking my sin and I give you my sin right now in Jesus name.
I confess by faith that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and I choose now Lord Jesus to make you the Lord of my life. I invite you to come and dwell in my heart. I invite you to take charge of my life. I invite you to start leading and guiding me and directing me and I give you my life and everything that I have and I commit myself to serving you now, Lord Jesus. I thank you that you have heard me and I thank you that you have now come to live in me, and I thank you for saving me. I thank you that I am now child of the most High God. I thank you that I am now a servant of the most High God and that you will lead me and guide me into the paths that you want me to walk. I ask you Lord to lead me to the church where you want me to be. I ask you in the name of Jesus to bring the people that you want in my life into my life by your spirit and to remove the people that you don't want in my life by your spirit, in Jesus name.
I ask you to close all doors in my life that you do not want opened that no man may open and I ask you to open every door in my life that you want opened that no man may close it, in Jesus name. Father, I ask you to teach me to be lead by your spirit. I ask you to open my eyes to have a revelation of the Word of God. I ask you to give me a hunger for the Word of God and for your spirit and I ask you to teach me to pray, in Jesus name. I thank you Father and I thank you Jesus for saving me and I declare that I am now child of God and I praise you and I worship you and I glorify your holy name and I thank you for changing me and saving me and delivering me, in Jesus name. Amen."
Now that you have prayed that prayer and you are born-again into the Body of Christ, realise that the Christian walk is a journey, which Apostle Paul likens it to a marathon race. You need guidance, you need assistance. If you have no one to help you, pray and ask the Holy Spirit of God to come into your life and to help you. If you need to contact somebody, contact any of the major ministries. If you are not sure who to contact, contact this ministry through the address and telephone and email, details that was supplied earlier. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
04 18 Building the House - the One Flesh Bond
Volume 2 of the teaching, 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage.' Volume 2 deals with the subject 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage' and teaching 18 is entitled 'Building the House ‑ the One Flesh Bond.' Proverbs 14:1 states "The wise woman builds her house, but the foolish pulls it down with her hands." We need to understand more about how the house is built. We have touched on this in previous teachings. We have said that the wife builds the house through her support and her love for her husband, in submission for her husband and through the spiritual dimension. We have seen that the physical body builds the physical house for the head, and we therefore deduce that the spiritual body also builds the spiritual house. Therefore, the wife builds the spiritual house. So, we see again with the parallel of the Body of Christ and the body of the husband, that the Body of Christ builds physical buildings for the worship of the Lord, and the wife who is in the spiritual sense builds the spiritual house.
We see in Hebrews 13:4 "Marriage is honourable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge." So, we see the clear distinction that any form of sexual intercourse outside of marriage will be judged. Within marriage, marriage which we see as sexual intercourse with a virgin and the relationship that is honourable among all, and the marriage bed is undefiled indicating that bonding takes place between a husband and wife in the sexual realm or effectively in all other realms is between them and whatever they do sexually together is acceptable in the Sight of God. There is no defilement within marriage. The defilement comes by going out of marriage.
We saw also in 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 "Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control." So, we see that again in lovemaking, it is the wife's prerogative to experience her husband's body as she chooses, and in the same way for the husband to experience his wife's body as she chooses. Clearly, we are talking about godly loving and considerate, giving sexual contact. We are not talking about the perversions practised in the world today and practiced in the days of Moses. We have referred to, in some depth the repeated references to One Flesh.
Genesis 2:24 states "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." The King James says, "shall cleave to his wife." And we studied that out, and we have seen that that is the basis of the marriage Covenant, the cutting of Covenant in the virgin flesh of the bride with the shedding of blood. We have seen that the female sexual organ is a shadow and a type of the Covenant animal, and that everything to do with the act of sexual lovemaking in marriage is holy and has a deep Covenant significance. We have referred previously to the Scriptures which indicate that the sexual organs of the male and the female have the greatest honour, and we have referred to them as the most holy parts of the man and the woman respectively.
A Spiritual act
So, we understand clearly that the act of sexual intercourse is a spiritual act which happens to have a related physical manifestation. It is not the carnal, dirty, unnecessary act that many have believed it to be. The reference to One Flesh in Genesis 2:24 goes into Matthew 19:5-6, Mark 10:8, 1 Corinthians 6:16, which refers to a person becoming One Flesh with a harlot. It demonstrates clearly that sexual intercourse produces One Flesh Bonds and then the pivotal Scriptures used in this series, Ephesians 5:31 "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." And the next verse gives us the broader context. If we read through from Ephesians 5:29-33: "For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the Church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. 'For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined (cleaved) to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church. Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband."
This Scripture has given us great insight into the whole subject of marriage. It resolves around the question as to why there is so little ambiguous and explicit guidance with regards to marriage in the holy Scriptures, simply because the entire Bible is preparing the Bride of Christ for the marriage supper of the lamb. Therefore, throughout the Bible we find references to a relationship between God and man, which give us a shadow and a type of the Covenant between man and woman, and the marriage Covenant. Conversely what we are told about marriage in the Scriptures reinforces our understanding of the relationship between man and God. By virtue of this very explicit and very clear parallel which is stated absolutely categorically in Ephesians 5:32 "This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church" and yet the preceding verse which refers is "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." And that is exactly the same verses of Genesis 2:24 as quoted by Jesus himself in Matthew 5, Matthew 19, and Mark 10, in the context of marriage. So, there can be absolutely no doubt that there is a direct parallel. Therefore, we can learn an enormous amount about marriage from the relationship that is set out concerning Christ and the Church, and we have used that throughout the series of teachings.
We also see in the context of building the house that 1 Peter 2:4-5 says "Coming to Him (Jesus) as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." So, basing our interpretation on Ephesians 5:30-32 that we just quoted, we see that the wives of a man are living stones in his spiritual house, just as we the Body of Christ are living stones in the spiritual house of the Lord Jesus Christ. In that, we have travelled a long road in these teachings to get to this point, in fact, approximately 38 tapes. I urge any listener who has come directly to this tape and has not travelled the whole journey with us to consider undertaking all the steps in the journey. We are close to a wonderful destination, a destination that has been defiled by Satan with false teachings for hundreds, if not thousands of years. If you have not beheld the ever-increasing revelation of the beauty of godly marriage that has been unfolding as we have climbed the mountain of truth and cut our way through the jungles of deception and false doctrine, it is quite possible that you will not behold the beauty that is being progressively unfolded in this tape with an uninvolved face. If that happens, you may well see an ugliness that is not present, but which is an illusion created by Satan over thousands of years.
Spirit of Truth
We touched on in the last teaching John 16:13-15 which says, "However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore, I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you." We see the intimate revelations here that all things that the Father has, Jesus and the Holy Spirit will declare all things, but our Jesus and declare it to us and marriage is a vital and intimate part of who Jesus is to us. We cannot understand fully Jesus and our relationship to Jesus without understanding marriage. To the extent that we do not understand marriage, we will not understand Jesus, and to extent that we do not understand Jesus, we will not understand marriage. So again, we see a close loop of revelation being revealed in wonderful iterations. But the important point here is that the Spirit of truth will come and guide us into all truth. It is really important to understand, as was said in the previous teaching, this teaching on building the One Flesh Bond which deals with some extremely sensitive issues, is part of the process of the Holy Spirit leading us into all truths.
So the Holy Spirit is leading us towards all truth in the area of marriage. He has rolled back much wrong teaching by revealing enormous truths in the series. It is incumbent on all who have taken this journey with me to press on towards the goal and not to think to go weary. All will be offended at this point in the journey. Accordingly, please agree with me now in prayer.
“Father I come to You in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the name of Jesus I speak to any Demon or fallen Angel or cohort to Satan that is hearing this teaching, in the name of Jesus I bind you now in Jesus’ name. I command you to go down and be silent in Jesus’ name. I command your ears to be closed in Jesus name until completion of this teaching. Father I ask in the name of Jesus that You will send your mighty warring Angels to bind and silence every Demon that is within hearing distance of this message and to block the ears of every Demon that is within hearing distance of this message. Father I pray that You will assist those listening to this tape to hear clearly what is being said by your Spirit and not to be distracted by any other influence. I ask You to open their eyes to see what You would have them see and close the eyes that they do not see what You do not want them to see. I ask You to open their ears to hear that You would have them hear and close the ears that they do not hear what You do not want them to hear. I ask You Father in the name of Jesus to give them revelation of the truths in these teachings and whatsoever might be in this teaching that is not of You. Father, I ask You will blow it away so that it never existed, that it will find no root in the hearts of the hearers, but all in this teaching Father, which is of You, which is according to Your Word and Your will and by Your Spirit, I ask Father that it will take root in the hearts of the hearers that You will nurture it by Your Spirit and that it will produce abundant fruit to the glory of God. We ask You Father, in the name of Jesus to speak to us by Your Spirit as we continue with this teaching. Amen.”
One Flesh House
As we commence the next stage of our journey and discuss building the One Flesh house and the one flesh bond, allow me to remind you of the previous teaching on negativity and the Word of the Lord that was received at the end of that teaching. I would just like to revisit that. It is really important that we understand what the Lord is saying regarding the subject of this particular teaching. The Lord said to me at the end of the teaching on negativity by Brian Houston, which was a tape that I had for years and not listened to for years. I was impressed by the Spirit to introduce it into this series immediately prior to the teaching on the One Flesh Bond, and at the end of that tape in which the Lord clearly showed us a number of issues which needed to be taken account, the Lord gave me the following word for all who would listen to this message with an open heart. He said negativity towards sexual lovemaking is one of the most serious cancers in marriage in the Body of Christ today. He said that this was why this message in this series was so vital and also it was why so few Christians would be willing to receive the message, unless they took the message regarding negativity to heart.
I would really urge you, if you have not listened to that message of Brian Houston on negativity, please turn this tape off now and put in the preceding tape in this series and listen to it. If you do not have access to it, please contact this Ministry. If you do go ahead without listening to that tape, please accept your accountability before God for how you respond to what follows. There are a number of key points which came out of that teaching and I would just like to pick those up for the sake of completeness and recap. If you see weakness in your marriage partner, it is only to strengthen and overcome, compensate for and cover. It is not a source of derision or criticism. We have just seen this whole concept of Covenant and what Covenant is truly about, coming through in the last few teachings very strongly.
There would be statements and words in the next message or in this message, which have the potential to offend. If so, I apologise, but I ask you to listen to the heart of this message and seek not to be offended. The message is vital, and it is of God. A further point from the previous tape, negativity pollutes your environment, including your family, your home, and your children. Negativity limits the present and sabotages the future. A statement was made on that tape, as long as I believe I could not do it, it limited me. I would really implore anybody listening to this tape, there is a strong possibility in that which follows in this tape, your mind will tell you I cannot do that. If you are negative, it will limit you. If you say, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, I see clearly that the Word of God says that marriage is honourable, and the marriage bed is undefiled. Therefore, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I can be the wife that my husband needs me to be according to Scripture. I can be the husband that my wife needs me to be according to Scripture.
Further comment quotes out of that teaching, get your eyes on your destiny. We need to look to this vision of Heaven on Earth in marriage, and we need to seek to come there. Negativity always blames. A comment I deduced from that teaching is we must accept accountability to seek all truth guided by the Holy Spirit. I would really urge you if you have got so far in this series. I truly believe you are seeking all truth, otherwise you would not have hung in with an extremely long teaching series. We are coming into the potentially most challenging tapes in this entire series. They are built on an enormous foundation that is being laid, but they are going to challenge you almost certainly more than you have been challenged already. Please, for your sake and for the sake of the millions and the billions out there who are in bondage, do not faint, do not go weary, do not be offended, and do not give up. Press on to the end. We are nearing the crest of the mountain. It is our accountability before God to go on, to press on, to reach the top for the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Taking accountability
Each of us needs to be accountable to inspire. The husband is accountable to inspire his wife. The leadership is positive even when confronted with obstacles. We must build around the truth of God's Word, not the facts as we see them. The facts, being the facts of the world. We must become overcomers. A last point out of that tape on negativity, which for me was a very important confirmation of message that we are believers now. We cited the example of David and his wife, and I would just like to read the relative passage out of 2 Samuel 6:15-23. I will read selected verses. "So, David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet. Now as the ark of the Lord came into the City of David, Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through a window and saw King David leaping and whirling before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart. So they brought the ark of the Lord, and set it in its place in the midst of the tabernacle that David had erected for it. Then David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the Lord.
Then David returned to bless his household. And Michal, the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, 'How glorious was the king of Israel today, uncovering himself today in the eyes of the maids of his servants, as one of the base fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!'" So, we see that David's dancing before God was totally uninhibited. So much so, that it would appear that his robes were flying in the air, flying around his head and even his nakedness beneath his robes was seen by those around him. "So, David said to Michal, 'It was before the Lord, who chose me instead of your father and all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel. Therefore I will play music before the Lord. And I will be even more undignified than this, and will be humble in my own sight. But as for the maidservants of whom you have spoken, by them I will be held in honour.' Therefore Michal, the daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death."
Spiritual bond
Coming to his maid, in the tape on negativity that we should be free to worship the way David worshipped. It truly is my understanding of Scripture that that passage of the manner in which David worshipped God with all his heart, all his mind, all his soul and all his strength with absolutely no regard for what people thought of him. Here we see the King of Israel dancing in such an uninhibited fashion that even his nakedness is exposed before the servants of his servants, and yet he is completely unperturbed. The only thing that’s of relevance to David as he danced, was that he pleased God and that he worshipped God. I believe this is a profoundly important Scripture in understanding the message that follows. We have to understand that a wife should adore and make love to her husband with absolutely no inhibition, and with no holding back. The parallel between praise and worship is absolutely clear as you pray into it, as you see what God is showing us about the ecstatic experience of true worship which brings us into the very presence of God, which brings us into the fullness of the anointing, in the same way, the absolutely uninhibited lovemaking of a wife towards her husband brings her into the fullness of her husband, of his present and into the fullness of the One Flesh Bond. If she is dry and inhibited and gives nothing to him, she will never build her house.
By making love in a dynamic and a powerful way to her husband, the strength of the spiritual bond is reinforced. To digress for a moment, the point that has to be stressed, is, some people, when discussing the subject, have asserted to me that what I have just said is unscriptural on the basis that they cannot find any Scripture to prove them that I am right, but they cannot find any Scripture to prove that I am wrong. If you put together everything that has been taught so far and what will be taught in this lesson, you will see that this is truth. But the bottom line is I have been there. I have had an extremely powerful relationship over a period of two years in adultery. I give myself no glory for that. I was backslidden and I was innocent. For two years I experienced the potential, or something close to the potential of what sexual lovemaking could be. Then it ended, and it nearly destroyed me. Ultimately it was only the Grace of God that delivered me, and it was only a profound revelation of the truths that I am sharing in these tapes with regards to the One Flesh Bond, that prevented me coming to a place where it finally did utterly destroy me.
I have experienced the One Flesh Bond of a magnitude, not certainly the fullness of what is available to us, but certainly greater than most people I know have experienced. So, I urge you to accept the message that is here, from the basis of somebody who has been there. It is wonderful. It is powerful and yet there is much more when Jesus Christ is at the head of the family. It is not taking place in the circumstances that it happened in my life. My desire is to come to a place where I experience that fullness again, but I have also discovered that it was a remarkable quote of circumstances that permitted me to experience it when I did. There is so much in this world that Satan has put in place to hinder you the minute you become married. It is possible to experience the fullness of what God created sex to be, in certain respects, in adultery and fornication, because then the devil is not worried about you. He knows you are going to hell. But the day you turn around and seek God and seek that fulfilment, that same fulfilment in godly marriage, all the forces of hell are unleashed to stop you getting there because the devil knows that when a man and a woman get to that level of unity and harmony within the Body of Christ, in right standing with God, then Satan's days on this Earth truly will be numbered.
Building the house
So, we have seen that the wife builds the house and we see that sexual lovemaking is a key component of that, perhaps the key component. The wife must build her home, her business, and her husband's ministry. This is exemplified in Proverbs 31, which we have looked at before, but it is apposite to revisit those Scriptures today. Proverbs 31 from verse 10 to 31, "Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her; So, he will have no lack of gain." Here immediately we see the house being built. "She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeks wool and flax, and willingly works with her hands. She is like the merchant ships, she brings her food from afar. She also rises while it is yet night, and provides food for her household, and a portion for her maidservants. She considers a field and buys it; From her profits she plants a vineyard." So she engages in commerce. "She girds herself with strength, and strengthens her arms. She perceives that her merchandise is good, and her lamp does not go out by night. She stretches out her hands to the distaff, and her hand holds the spindle. She extends her hand to the poor, yes, she reaches out her hands to the needy."
So, she is involved in community service. "She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household is clothed with scarlet. She makes tapestry for herself; Her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known in the gates, when he sits among the elders of the land." So her husband is esteemed and plays key role in the government of the community. "She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies sashes for the merchants. Strength and honour are her clothing; She shall rejoice in time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and on her tongue is the law of kindness. She watches over the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; Her husband also, and he praises her. So she builds her family, she raises her children. Husband praises her. Many daughters have done well, but you excel them all. Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised." So we see the key verse that she fears God. So she does everything that is required of her. She submits to her husband. She adores her husband, she supports her husband. She builds her husband up. She perceives no doubt for her husband. "Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her own works praise her in the gates."
So we see that she is praised in the gate which is where her husband is by her works and as we continue with this teaching, it just becomes more and more apparent. She is her husband's, and her husband in a sense, is hers. He has taken her under his wing. She has his full authority to conduct every aspect of the family business. So I do not think that this is saying that she engages in her own commerce independent of her husband. She is engaged in the commerce, which is the business of the family. She is one with her husband and therefore she is his most trusted agent in the conduct of the family business, in the management of the family estate, in the management of the raising of the children, and in every aspect of their day-to-day life while he devotes himself to the ministry to which he is called, and to the leadership of the family.
A godly woman is a strong woman, a woman who is imbued with talent, and a willingness to serve with her husband. By submission and adoration, she provides a pillar in the house of her husband, and therefore lifts her husband towards Heaven. She lifts him towards a position of leadership in the community and she lifts him towards Heaven. By encouraging, honouring, treating gently, loving, etc. his wife, the husband draws her to him and together they draw near to Jesus. There is much to be learnt about husband and wife working together to build their dwelling, their business, their family, their children, and especially their Ministry. All involves submission, harmony, and agreement. All are primarily activities in the natural realm. There is considerable experiential precedent which it currently seems to me can be readily adapted in the light of our lessons today, and a point that I would make there is that I have repeatedly observed that a woman who is of the right spirit in a work situation will submit to her employer in ways that are similar to the way she should be submitting to her husband if she was working for him. This produces a number of aspects that produces attention in the sense, that if she conducts herself in a godly way as an employee, she will automatically become attractive to her employer, because she will be behaving towards him as a helpmate in the role that God intended, as that man's wife to play.
It is therefore no wonder that many secretaries and personal assistants end up having relationships with their employers. They were not intended to be there. God intended that man have his wife working, but through these experiences and through careful observation, I have seen that it is possible to gain a good insight as to what is required in the crux there, for a wife working in the family business is simply to say how would you conduct yourself towards another man who was your employer and then in the professional context of running the family business, conduct yourself towards your husband in a similar fashion to the same or higher standards of respect, integrity, submission, and so forth.
One Flesh Bond
There is possibly a need for further teachings on that, but I do not feel impressed to do that in this series. However, all of this is underpinned by the spiritual dimension. First and foremost, we are spirit. And we see again referring back to Genesis 2:24 "For this reason, a man shall cleave onto his wife and they shall become one flesh." And again, we see that the "Woman is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh," paraphrasing Genesis 2:23. We have seen repeatedly in this series that One Flesh is an unbreakable spiritual link between any two human beings who have sexual intercourse. It is intended by Yahweh, the Lord God, clearly for marriage, and it is sacred and holy. I have briefly shared my own, very painful personal experience of the true strength of the bond, and I urge you to recognise the validity of this testimony.
It is an abomination for women to form such bonds with more than one man and for a man to form such a bond with a woman, who is already joined to another man. That is adultery and fornication. It is an abomination in the sight of a holy God, of our holy God, which will prevent the offender from inheriting the Kingdom of God. 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God." Such people will be insured a part in the lake of fire of brimstone unless there is sincere repentance and turning around in this life. Revelation 21:8 says that the sexually immoral and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
The One Flesh Bond comes about through sexual lovemaking. It produces a link which, in full strength, gives rise to what in modern computer terms would be described as an online real-time spirit-to-spirit bond, which in its full manifestation permits husband and wife to communicate across thousands of miles, as though they were in the same room. At this level of strength, it effectively guarantees unity and harmony when it is fully developed. A fully developed One Flesh Bond brings about perfect unity, perfect agreement, perfect harmony as two hearts resonate in perfect synchrony, in praise and worship, in ministry to the Saviour, in intercession and prayer, in heart-to-heart communication with Jesus Christ, in the work of the ministry and calling, in the raising of their children, in the management and operation of the household, in the family business, in recreation, and in fact, in all things.
How is it attained? Firstly, by mutual respect, esteem, and hesed, agape, Covenant love according to 1 Corinthians 13, as discussed in the previous teaching, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of Angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will fail; where there are tongues, they will cease; where there is knowledge, it will vanish away." The love spoken of this, the agape hesed, love of God, Covenant love, as we heard in the teaching a few tapes back.
My experience tells me that if a man and woman walk in that love, amazing things will happen. That is the way God intended it to be. In fact, love brings about respect, esteem and giving. It puts the other party first. It seeks to please, not to be pleased. The second factor in obtaining the vision that was set out a moment ago, is by totally unreserved giving of the husband to his wife, and by the wife to her husband. No holding back, no strings, and no conditions. They give because God has told them to give. They give because they love. They give love because they have been commanded by God to give love. The wife gives submission willingly, because she desires to give it. This marriage is about choice. The woman has a choice to submit to her husband, or not to submit to her husband and to break her house down. It is not for her husband to force her. We have gone through a number of teachings around the spiritual principles in terms of how husbands deal with a rebellious and treacherous wife. But the party who chooses to break Covenant must do so knowing that there is certain death associated with it, not necessarily death in this life, but death in the life to come. We see that again and again.
Heaven on Earth
True divorce in Sight of God, is something that happens when one party is hell-bent on going to hell. The third component of how this perfect unity and harmony is accomplished, and how this house is built is by passionate desire and uninhibited lovemaking in the marriage bed, that is the most important focus of the balance of this particular teaching. We have dealt in length with 1 Corinthians 13, agape, hesed love, and I pray that by now you are seeking to walk in agape, hesed love with your spouse. With regards to the second point, we have touched on giving in the relationship. It flows from agape, hesed, Covenant love. It is the essence of Covenant as we have already seen. There is certainly much more that could be said, but that is not the objective of this particular teaching. And thirdly, we have repeatedly alluded to the sexual lovemaking aspect, but have repeatedly, consciously skirted the issue in recognition of its extreme sensitivity.
However, we are now required by Yahweh to confront head-on, that most precious gift that He has given, to distinguish marriage from every other form of human relationship, that gift which creates and builds the One Flesh Bond, that gift which is central to the statement that is being repeatedly made that Yahweh created marriage to work, and which is the vital cornerstone of marriage. It is a cornerstone which is required to bring Heaven to Earth in every facet of marriage. I am speaking of sexual lovemaking in marriage, or as it is referred to in the carnal, secular world and the Church alike, sex. That word, sex, has no use in Scripture. It is raw and crude. It does not glorify that which is so holy. That is why the term sexual lovemaking has been used for much of the series of teachings. At this point, I need to make an appeal. If you have not listened to all the preceding tapes, which is about 38 tapes at this point, please go back to the first tape you skipped and take the full journey to this point. If you are resolved not to do this, I urge you to, at the very least listen to tapes 2 and 3 in Volume 1, tape 2 "How the Scripture defines the marriage Covenant" and tape 3 "The One Flesh Bond and submission" and I also urge you to listen to tapes 13, 14, 15 and 17 in Volume 2. Tape 13, "Cleansing the Temple of the Holy Spirit and Jezebel," tape 14 "Covenant made by blood: Hesed, agape," tape 15 "Cutting the marriage Covenant," and tape 17 "The power of negativity ‑ preventing change."
If even that is not acceptable to you, please at the very least, I urge you to listen to tape 17 on negativity in Volume 2, the tape immediately preceding this. Irrespective of which route you followed to this point, please accept that I have a profound assurance that what follows is right, acceptable, and pleasing in the sight of Father God Yahweh, our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit of God. Accordingly, should you find yourself becoming offended or negative, rather turn the tape off than continue, and put the matter before the throne of the living God and request His guidance before you take action. Remember that since I claim that this message is from God, if you reject it and I am correct, you will be subject to a stricter judgement because you say that you see. Remember also that if I am telling you the truth and this message is from God, and you reject it, then you reject the one who sent me, the Lord Jesus Christ himself.
I urge you again, if you have not listened to all the preceding tapes, to have the full spiritual context of that which follows, please go back. If you do go on and you are offended, please take time to go before God before you take any action. And by action, I mean words, I mean judgements. Please, with utmost sincerity, the tape on judgement in this life provides insight into why it is so important that we cease and desist from speaking out about the things of God and speaking out against the things of God and things that are in His Word, just because we are offended, and just because they are contrary to our paradigms.
Let us consider what Scripture has to say directly about lovemaking in marriage and the related topics. Proverbs 5:15-20, "Drink water from your own cistern, and running water from your own well. Should your fountains be dispersed abroad, streams of water in the streets? Let them be only your own, and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth. As a loving deer and a graceful doe, Let her breasts satisfy you at all times; And always be enraptured with her love. For why should you, my son, be enraptured by an immoral woman, and be embraced in the arms of a seductress?"
The last verse gives us the key to this passage. We see that it is dealing with sexual lovemaking. The cistern and well are a reference to the female sexual organ, and the fountains are reference to the male sexual organs, the male ejaculation. Song of Solomon 1:13, "A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me, that lies all night between my breasts." [inaudible 00:47:01] Song of Solomon 4:5, "Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, which feed among the lilies." Chapter 7:3 "Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle."
Song of Solomon 7:4-10 "Your neck is like an ivory tower, your eyes like the pools in Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looks toward Damascus. Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel, and the hair of your head is like purple; A king is held captive by your tresses." Referring to Solomon who is in love with her. "How fair and how pleasant you are, O love, with your delights! This stature of yours is like a palm tree, And your breasts like its clusters. I said, 'I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its branches.' Let now your breasts be like clusters of the vine, The fragrance of your breath like apples, and the roof of your mouth like the best wine.
The Shulamite says, the wine goes down smoothly for my beloved, moving gently the lips of sleepers. I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me." The imagery is quite graphic and it certainly involves the man making love to the woman, caressing her breasts and touching her intimately and all over her body. Song of Songs 8:5-8, "Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I awakened you under the apple tree. There your mother brought you forth; There she who bore you, brought you forth. The Shulamite to her Beloved Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; For love is as strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave; Its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it. If a man would give for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly despised. The Shulamite’s Brothers - we have a little sister, and she has no breasts. What shall we do for our sister in the day when she is spoken for?"
The last verse clearly speaks of a young girl who is late to puberty and yet is ready for marriage and deals with the state of her breasts. Clearly that is something that was viewed as being important. Verses 6-7 are very passionate, for love is as strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave, its flames are flames of fire almost vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it. If a man would give for love all the wealth of his house it would be utterly despised. Love is intensely passionate. When a man and woman are truly passionately in love and have given all to one another, nothing can stop it. Wealth is of nothing compared to that love. Floods cannot drown it, waters cannot quench it. It is like a vehement flame. That is the love that God intended a husband and wife to have for one another. It is not a dirty foul thing. It is a beautiful thing. By the same token, we are expected to be passionately in love with Jesus. We are expected to have a fire burning in our hearts for the Lord Jesus Christ, instead of this insipid half-hearted worship that we generally offer to Him.
The beginning of verse 6: "Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm." We have discussed previously that, what I term the most holy organs of a man and woman, are the doorways to their hearts. They become united heart-to-heart through the act of sexual lovemaking, through the spiritual emission which takes place with orgasm between the two of them. So to speak of a seal upon her husband's heart, it would seem that she is referring to a very direct reference to being implanted upon him and upon his heart. When she speaks of being the seal upon his arm, she is referring to being part of his strength.
Ezekiel 16:7-14: "I made you thrive like a plant in the field," and this is the Lord God speaking through Ezekiel, "And you grew, matured, and became very beautiful. Your breasts were formed, your hair grew, but you were naked and bare. 'When I passed by you again and looked upon you, indeed your time was the time of love; so, I spread My wing over you and covered your nakedness. Yes, I swore an oath to you and entered into a Covenant with you, and you became Mine,' says the Lord God. 'Then I washed you in water; yes, I thoroughly washed off your blood, and I anointed you with oil. I clothed you in embroidered cloth and gave you sandals of badger skin; I clothed you with fine linen and covered you with silk. I adorned you with ornaments, put bracelets on your wrists, and a chain on your neck. And I put a jewel in your nose, earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen, silk, and embroidered cloth. You ate pastry of fine flour, honey, and oil. You were exceedingly beautiful, and succeeded to royalty. Your fame went out among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through My splendour which I had bestowed on you,' says the Lord God."
Harlotry
And this is dealing with Israel [inaudible 00:52:46] pleasant girl found destitute without clothing and brought in to the house of the king and made a queen. And from there God goes on to speak of Israel's unfaithfulness and fornication. It carries a marriage metaphor. He took her in, he made a Covenant with her, she became his wife. He gave her beautiful gifts for her to be beautiful and appealing in the sight. And again, it is explicit. It talks about breasts. Ezekiel 23:2-5: "Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother. They committed harlotry in Egypt, they committed harlotry in their youth; Their breasts were there embraced, their virgin bosom was there pressed. Their names: Oholah, the elder and Oholibah, her sister; They were Mine, and they bore sons and daughters. As for their names, Samaria is Oholah, and Jerusalem is Oholibah. The Older Sister, Samaria Oholah played the harlot even though she was Mine; And she lusted for her lovers, the neighbouring Assyrians,"
Again harlotry. Their breasts were embraced, their bosoms were pressed. It is explicit. The imagery is clear. It is sexual. Ezekiel 23:20-21: "For she lusted for her paramours, whose flesh is like the flesh of donkeys, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. Thus, you called to remembrance the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians pressed your bosom because of your youthful breasts." Ezekiel 23:19-21, in NIV the same passage is even more explicit, "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So, you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed, and your young breasts fondled."
Ezekiel 23:20 in the Revised Standard Version, "And doted upon her paramours there, whose members were like those of asses, and whose issue was like that of horses." There can be no doubt, God is referring to very sexual metaphors here of spiritual adultery on the part of His people. Song of Songs 2:4-7: "He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Sustain me with cakes of raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am lovesick. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me. I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or by the doe’s of the field, do not stir up nor awaken love until it pleases."
"His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me", speaks of a man and woman lying, embracing in bed. Song of Songs 8:1-4: "Oh, that you were like my brother, who nursed at my mother’s breasts! If I should find you outside, I would kiss you; I would not be despised." We see clearly here this young woman is taking the initiative in kissing her husband and going to seek her husband. "I would lead you and bring you into the house of my mother." In other words, she would bring her inside. The implication is that they would make love. "She, who used to instruct me," and we have talked previously to the effect that the mother should instruct the daughter in detail with regard to sexual lovemaking in marriage, and to prepare her for the wedding day. It continues, "I would cause you to drink of spiced wine, of the juice of my pomegranate." It is unclear what the reference is to the juice of her pomegranate, but one can speculate it seems to be consistent with the rest of this discussion "To the Daughters of Jerusalem, His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me." Again, we see a man and a woman lying in bed almost certainly making love in the context of this passage of Scripture. "I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, do not stir up nor awaken love until it pleases."
Consummation
In a slightly different context, if we turn to Deuteronomy 22:15-17, which we have looked at in some depth in previous teachings, "Then the father and mother of the young woman shall take and bring out the evidence of the young woman’s virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. And the young woman’s father shall say to the elders, 'I gave my daughter to this man as wife, and he detests her. Now he has charged her with shameful conduct, saying, 'I found your daughter was not a virgin,' and yet these are the evidences of my daughter’s virginity.' And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city." We have touched on this in a number of teachings, but the reality is if that evidence is not acceptable, that young woman will be put to death as a harlot. The Word of God requires that no person is put to death, except on the evidences of two or three witnesses.
Consequently, there needed to be two or three witnesses with regards to that evidence and producing a bloodstained cloth, without the evidence of witnesses to certify where that blood came from, cannot have any sort of legal basis. So, one has to conclude that two or three witnesses were present when the defloration or consummation took place and they witnessed that. They witnessed that the girl was a virgin and they witnessed where the blood came from.
I have indicated previously that there is quite a large body of evidence which indicates that at one period in Jewish history, up to four Friends of the bridegroom were present in the bridal chamber as witnesses when the consummation took place to certify that the girl was a virgin. In other words, they looked. There are other secular evidences which indicate that up to the middle of the 18th century, it was commonplace for consummation to take place in front of the wedding guests to certify that the girl was a virgin. I am not mentioning these things in order to offend you. It just happens that there is a lot of evidence which supports the view that witnesses were present at the consummation of marriage.
Now the point in raising that again, is not to be offensive. If that is the way God intended it to be, if that is what God has appointed, and the inference from Deuteronomy 22:15-17 seems to be that it must be what He had in mind with those Scriptures, and if that is the case, it is not nearly as offensive to God as we would like to think today, for there to be witnesses present at the consummation of a marriage. If that is the case, then God has a different view on some of these things than we have, and at the same time, we have to recognise, as we have seen repeatedly in these teachings, the Church has winked, and has closed its eyes quite frankly at adultery and fornication in the world and the Church today.
Another passage of Scripture which we have looked at previously also, Judges 21:6-13, with regards to finding wives for the children of Benjamin. Verse 6: "And the children of Israel grieved for Benjamin their brother, and said, 'One tribe is cut off from Israel today. What shall we do for wives for those who remain.”? And so, they go to Jabesh-Gilead because they did not come up and they kill the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead except for the virgins. Verse 12: "So they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead four hundred young virgins who had not known a man intimately; and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan. Then the whole congregation sent word to the children of Benjamin who were at the rock of Rimmon, and announced peace to them." In order to find those four hundred young girls, somebody had to check. Somebody had to inspect. Again, as offensive as that may be today, that is what the Word of God says and we need to revisit our attitude and our opinion to these things. I am not advocating that things like this should be done in this age. I am just saying these are things that have happened in the past. Please consider the possibility that there is a whole lot of stuff that the Church today regards differently to the way God regards it, and if we are going to talk about these things, we need to focus our attention on the way God sees it, not the way man sees it.
Circumcision
Another example, Joshua 5:1-5, when the Israelites crossed over to Jordan and come into the Promised Land, verse 2: "At that time the Lord said to Joshua, 'Make flint knives for yourself, and circumcise the sons of Israel again the second time.' So, Joshua made flint knives for himself, and circumcised the sons of Israel at the hill of the foreskins." The imagery again, is important to understand. Six hundred thousand men were circumcised, and had their foreskins cut off their most holy organ. This is a very specifically focused act. Acts 16:1-3: "Then he (Paul) came to Derbe and Lystra. And behold, a certain disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a certain Jewish woman who believed, but his father was Greek. He was well spoken of by the brethren who were at Lystra and Iconium. Paul wanted to have him go on with him. And he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in that region, for they all knew that his father was Greek." So we see even in so-called New Testament times with Paul, he circumcised Timothy because of the Jews. Now the point we need to notice is that by that stage, Paul knew it was not necessary for Timothy to be circumcised in order to have a Covenant with God. He needed to be born again and accept Jesus Christ as Lord in order to have a Covenant with God. Circumcision of the flesh was no longer required by God.
Accordingly, Paul was circumcising Timothy, because he expected men to see Timothy's sexual organ in a fashion which would enable them to determine he was not circumcised. Song of Songs 5:2-6: "I sleep, but my heart is awake; It is the voice of my beloved! He knocks, saying, 'open for me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one; For my head is covered with dew, my locks with the drops of the night.' I have taken off my robe; How can I put it on again? I have washed my feet; How can I defile them? My beloved put his hand by the latch of the door, and my heart yearned for him. I arose to open for my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, on the handles of the lock. I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had turned away and was gone. My heart leaped up when he spoke. I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer."
There are Christian books which analysed this passage and conclude that myrrh refers to the shiny viscous liquid which is excreted by woman's genitals when she is highly aroused. The implication is that she was so aroused, that when she went to the door, her hands had been touching her genitals, and this lubricant was placed on the door handle. That is not my interpretation; it is an interpretation that I presented in a published Christian book on the subject of love. It is very difficult to figure out what else is meant by myrrh in the context of her heart yearning for him.
The Word of God
So, we see that the Bible is a very sexually explicit book and there is no reason why we should not in a sensitive fashion and to the extent it is necessary for this message also be reasonably sexually explicit. God says His people perish for lack of knowledge and therefore knowledge must be shared and imparted in this area. Refer to Hosea 4:6. In this case, after decades of bondage of the world system and undertaking far-reaching research and surveys of writings on the subject of sex and lovemaking, and widespread reading of the publications of those who regard themselves as sexually liberated in so-called men's magazines, followed by several years of practical experience, all of which happen when I was backslidden and away from God, I found myself with knowledge and experience which Yahweh has refined and structured through His word and by His Spirit over the past 7-1/2 years which He now requires that I share with you. The Word of God says all things work together for the good for those that love God and are called according to His purpose. Certainly in my youth, I did have a love of God. It was certainly not the love that I would desire to have, but it was a love of God that saw me urgently attending Church, seeking His presence and serving Him in the ways that were available to me in those days.
Lessons to be learned
I then backslid for some decades. I turned my back on God even though I was praying every night. I was in deception and I fell into adultery. I fell at an early stage of my life, bondage to pornography. I married out of the faith to a woman who used sex as a manipulative weapon. I went to enormous lengths to seek to please her and to find out how to woo her and to bring her to a place where there could be something meaningful in our marriage. I never succeeded, because she was deliberately betraying me, but in the process, I read extremely widely into the subject that we are discussing right now. And then as I shared previously, an event happened, in actual fact, machinated by my ex-wife, in which I found myself in an adulterous relationship with my secretary for two years. Out of all that, when God brought me back to Him, when I was at the very point of taking my life because of what the One Flesh Bond was doing to me after the relationship was ended, He has been restoring me, He has been healing me. In the processes, He has been teaching me and He has been showing me that the lessons that I learnt in those years are not to be wasted.
I have debated with Him long and hard ever since I started a series of teachings, as to whether the subject that I am now covering should be dealt with in something public, as a set of teaching tapes, and subsequently transcripts and a book. I am absolutely clear that He requires this of me and He requires that of me for your sake, and for the sake of all those who will hear these tapes.
There are wonderful truths that God has preserved amongst those who are in bondage to sexual sin. There was nobody else to preserve them because the Church was certainly not going to preserve them. He is now seeking to restore those truths to the Church, and because until we have those truths restored to the Church, marriage will not be what God appointed it to be. The bride will not be spotless, and the Lord Jesus Christ is not going to return for the current sullied whore of adulteress, spiritually insensitive and generally disobedient Christians that we are. I put myself in that same category. I have shared several times in these teachings. I have been on the carpet before God a number of occasions in the last couple of months, for failing to do the things that He has called me to do.
We do not understand the ministry of the message of the Christian walk. Very, very few of us are laying down our lives. We need to return to the truth of the Gospel and we need to return to the truth of what the Word of God says concerning marriage, sexual lovemaking and so forth. So, some of what I have learnt and what the Lord has refined has been contained in the teaching on cutting the Covenant, and also in the teaching on the One Flesh Bond in tape 3 of the first series. Some more is contained in this tape and God-willing, more will be presented in the tape reaching for the heights, and the pinnacles of marriage. It is also possible that a further teaching may follow as a sequel to this, which will go into more specific detail. It is not my intention to be more specific and more explicit than seemed absolutely necessary for the purpose of this message. So, having said that, let us consider the practical steps that are necessary to build the house, to develop the One Flesh Bond.
Esther
If we turn to the book of Esther 2:12-18: "Each young woman’s turn came to go in to King Ahasuerus after she had completed twelve months’ preparation, according to the regulations for the women, for thus were the days of their preparation apportioned: six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with perfumes and preparations for beautifying women. Thus prepared, each young woman went to the king, and she was given whatever she desired to take with her from the women’s quarters to the king’s palace. In the evening she went, and in the morning she returned to the second house of the women, to the custody of Shaashgaz, the king’s eunuch who kept the concubines. She would not go in to the king again unless the king delighted in her and called for her by name. Now when the turn came for Esther the daughter of Abihail, the uncle of Mordecai, who had taken her as his daughter, to go in to the king, she requested nothing but what Hegai the king’s eunuch, the custodian of the women, advised. And Esther obtained favour in the sight of all who saw her. So Esther was taken to King Ahasuerus, into his royal palace, in the tenth month, which is the month of Tebeth, in the seventh year of his reign. The king loved Esther more than all the other women, and she obtained grace and favour in his sight more than all the virgins; so he set the royal crown upon her head and made her queen instead of Vashti. Then the king made a great feast, the Feast of Esther, for all his officials and servants; and he proclaimed a holiday in the provinces and gave gifts according to the generosity of a king."
So, we see quite clearly that this young woman prepared, and in fact all those who went before her, prepared for their marriage night with the king. They sought to establish what would be pleasing to the king and they took it with them. One must assume that they were instructed in the art of sexual lovemaking, so they would be ready to do what was pleasing to the king. It is really vital that we understand that Esther got to be Queen of Assyria because of the manner in which she made love to Ahasuerus was exceptionally pleasing to him, and the manner in which she presented herself to him in terms of her dress, her submission, and everything else about her, was pleasing to him. But at the end of the day, she went to his palace for him to make love to her, and God used Esther.
We read that she came to the kingdom for that time. God put her there. God arranged the events which lead to her being in that place. It was not some strange quirky coincidence that she just happened to be in that place. God had His hand on Esther. He put her there very deliberately, and He used means which was acceptable in His sight to get her there. We need to understand that God thinks differently about these things. So, we see some symbology in that particular story in terms of which it is the woman who goes to the man, not the man who goes looking for the woman.
Serving God
If we read a few verses of Scripture on the parallel, we see that there is a parallel between praise and worship of God, and lovemaking of the husband and wife. Psalm 95:1-2 says: "Oh come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving; Let us shout joyfully to Him with Psalms." Psalm 95:6: "Oh come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker." Psalm 96:8: "Give to the Lord the glory due His name; Bring an offering and come into His courts." Psalm 100:2: "Serve the Lord with gladness; Come before His presence with singing." Psalm 119:170: "Let my supplication come before You; Deliver me according to Your Word."
Anybody who has been serving the Lord Jesus Christ for any period of time, will not agree with me that Jesus does not come looking for us in the area of praise and worship. Yes, the Lord God brings us to salvation, He leads us to salvation, but once we have made that decision, Jesus is not running around saying to us, please worship me. It is a free choice on our part. The more intimately that we worship, the less inhibited we are, the more we focus on him and give our praise to him, the more we will experience his presence and the presence of the anointing in praise and worship. If we do not do any of that, we experience nothing in praise and worship except a song singing fashion. So, we see very clearly that it is up to us, the bride, to determine how intimate we are with Jesus, and how lovingly we praise him. It is not His job, it is our job. The more I read the Scriptures, the more I pray about this. I have to say to you, it is the wife's responsibility to stir up love, to initiate lovemaking, to be uninhibited in lovemaking. It is not the husband's job to come courting and to try and get his wife to be aroused. She is not created that way. It is a perversion the way things are done in the world today.
If we contract this with Proverbs 7:18-19, we read regarding the harlot who seduces the young man, "Come, let us take our fill of love until morning; Let us delight ourselves with love. For my husband is not at home; He has gone on a long journey." Here we see the woman taking the lead with the wrong man. So, she is saying to the man, come, instead of coming to the man who is her husband. There is another dynamic to this. We have seen clearly that the female sexual organ, the pubic mound, the mons pubis, the inner and the outer labia of the vulva, provide a very graphic representation of the Covenant animal, cleaved into half with the blood flowing, with the husband's sexual organ walking in that blood, cutting the Covenant of marriage. We have seen very clearly that every time a man and woman have sexual intercourse, they re-enact the Covenant act, particularly when the wife is aroused and blood flows into her labia minora. Symbolically the Covenant is cut again every time, or not cut again, but it is re-enacted, it is re-visited. Therefore, when the husband looks at his wife's most holy part, he sees a reminder of the Covenant. When she is aroused, that reminder is even more graphic.
The Covenant
By the same token, when she looks at her husband and he is aroused, she sees a reminder of the organ that walked in the blood and cut the Covenant. So, the act of lovemaking is sublimely holy, sublimely symbolic of Covenant, and not to be defiled in any way. By recognising that the woman's genitals are a shadow and a type of the Covenant animal, it takes on a new significance because the Covenant animal is sacrificed. So, in essence, the woman sacrifices her virginity and she is a living sacrifice in the act of Covenant with her husband.
So, if we read Romans 12:1 speaking of the Body of Christ, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service." By the extension of Ephesians 5, that we have referred to earlier, the wife is required to present her body to her husband as a living sacrifice, holding acceptable to him, which is her reasonable service to him. In Genesis 3:16: "To the woman He said: 'I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you." We have seen previously that the "your desire shall" is a Commandment. It is a statement of fact. A woman will desire her husband. She will not desire another man. If she desires another man, there is something seriously wrong. It is sin. She is told to desire her husband.
We are told in Ezekiel and elsewhere that the husband desires his wife, but he is not commanded to desire her. So, the whole modern view that men must court women, that men must go out of their way to prepare their wives for lovemaking, is completely false. The wife is required to take the initiative there. She is required to adore her husband and to praise him and to bring both of them into a place where lovemaking is possible.
The principle that I have just shared with you is graphically evident for those who would look in the world. So-called men's magazines, Penthouse, Playboy, etc. all report primarily letters and incidents in which the woman takes the initiative in seeking to make love or have sex with a man. The fact that it is defiled, or it is adulterous, that it is fornication, and that everything else is wrong with it, does not alter the fact that millions of people around the world are spending millions, if not billions of dollars every year purchasing magazines, which contain pictures, stories, and letters, the vast majority of which relates to women who, without inhibition, without prompting, initiate sexual intercourse with men. By the same token, strip clubs, and so forth offer the same picture as do prostitutes. Women who give themselves to men, who initiate sexual intercourse without the men having to go through some ungodly courting ritual, the net effect to that is that the Church is driving men away from godly sex in marriage. The Church is telling them that they have to behave towards their wives in ways that bring about arousal in their wives, court their wives, wine and dine their wives and generally bribe their wives to have sex with them. At least in that small point, those who are in bondage to pornography and so forth, have some truth, and that piece of truth is a math truth to drag millions and millions of men around the world into bondage or pornography. I speak from my own experience. We have to understand the truth about these things. We cannot keep denying what Scripture says. A series of Scriptures have just being read which clearly show that the woman shall desire her husband, not the other way around.
I would like to move on and consider more specifically some factors here. There are a number of very important dynamics in sexual relationship between the husband and his wife. And again, these have a very clear scriptural parallel. The husband is always ready and willing to make love to his wife. In the world today, that is seen as something terrible. Men are slated for always wanting sex. But that is not the point. The point is that whenever the woman desires to show her love and appreciation for her husband, and to join herself to him, he can respond. She on the other hand, needs to do some emotional and spiritual work before she can make love. When she comes to him, he will give her his attention. He will utilise his skill. He will guide her, and he will make love to her and he will bring her to a place of ecstatic pleasure, if she will permit that, and if he is experienced enough and skilled enough to do it.
In the same way, Jesus is always ready for us to worship Him. It does not matter what time of the day or night. If we suddenly wake up and decide to worship Him, He will receive us. He will never send us away. But we have to decide to worship Him. We need to do the work to get to a place where we can offer Him some small token of reverence and worship, in order to experience His presence. It is not to bribe, it is just a reality. Until we bring ourselves into a place to receive from Him, it does not matter how much love He has got from us, we cannot receive it. In the same way, that if a man loves his wife and is seeking to pour out love to her, but she closes all the doors, she would not receive the love, even though the love is there for the taking.
Submissive wives
So, we see that the wife is responsible for desiring her husband and for initiating lovemaking. So contrary to the Jezebel world view, which requires the husbands to seduce and court the wife, the wife is required to do that, but not in a brash, brazen prostitute type of way; just by gentle submission. We read in 1 Peter 3: "Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the Word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear. Do not let your adornment be merely outward—arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on fine apparel—rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God. For in this manner, in former times, the holy women who trusted in God also adorned themselves, being submissive to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, whose daughters you are if you do good and are not afraid with any terror."
We see there not just outward adornment, but the hidden person of the heart with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the Sight of God. I am not saying that there is a sexual undertone to that. I am just saying that the wife is commanded to be of a gentle and a quiet spirit, and that her beauty should be in her heart. And that it certainly must be something that every man desires, a woman who has beautiful inside, not just outside with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. So when I say that a wife should initiate sexual lovemaking with her husband, I am not suggesting she should behave like a tart; I am just saying that she should have desire, a godly desire and love for her husband, and she should gently come to him when she perceives that he has a need, but it should not work that way. It is not a case of sex being a meeting of carnal needs. It is a desire to be united and to be one with one another, and as the One Flesh Bond gets strong, and as one experiences the fullness of the joy and the pleasure that can be present in lovemaking, then the lead aspect goes away. It is replaced with just a passionate desire to be united to the one you love.
It is important that we recognise that the husband cannot arouse his wife. Only she can choose to become aroused by desiring her husband. Her desire will then arouse her husband by her desire in the arousal. Also by the way she dresses, by her make-up, by dancing and by other actions. If she is skilled in the art of being a wife to her husband without any extravagant conduct, she will be able to offer her love to her husband in way that will be profoundly moving to him. Men need to be desired by their wives. God created them to be desired by their wives. And when their wives do not desire them and seek to manipulate them and use sex as some sordid bargaining tool in the game of Jezebel manipulation, it is no wonder that men turn to pornography and prostitution. I am not trying to justify it. I am just saying we need to understand why it happens because if we do not understand why it happens, we cannot fix it.
The key, or one of the keys to dealing with prostitution, adultery and fornication is for wives to change the way they respond sexually to their husbands, the way they look at their husbands, the way they make love to their husbands, and the way they submit to their husbands. A wife who loves, desires and submits to her husband more frequently, and possibly even always is aroused in the presence of her husband, or when speaking to him telephonically, or when thinking of him, is important. Once the One Flesh Bond has reached a reasonable strength, they are able to make love spirit-to-spirit over any distance with manual stimulation if they so choose. And they will experience a release that is not otherwise possible simply by virtue of the fact that they are focusing their love on one another through time and space, because they are truly one body.
The wife should always care for and prepare her body for her husband, trimming or shaving her pubic hair and armpits according to his preference, using or avoiding perfumes as he prefers. There are some men who really do not like perfumes. It is important to understand that when a woman is aroused, she gives off her own perfume which can be wonderful and highly stimulating, in which case the wearing of deodorants and man-made perfumes is absolutely counter-productive. She should cut her hair and dress according to his preference, really understanding that dress should be modest in accordance with Scripture. She should not dress as a man. In other words, she should preferably wear loose flowing dresses which do not reveal her body to other men, but which leave her with freedom to move underneath it, and to be the woman God created her to be, and to be available to her husband when the opportunity presents itself, not in some carnal lustful thing, but just because she wants to demonstrate her love to her husband.
When she knows that she will be constantly in his presence, she should wear underwear which is especially chosen for him. Or in some instances, she might choose to wear no underwear where that can be managed without sacrificing modesty or causing her to become unduly aroused in situations where this might be discerned by the men. There are instances where a woman wearing a loose flowing dress can go without underwear with her husband's knowledge and both of them would be highly aroused by that and it opens opportunities for lovemaking in situations which might not otherwise be possible. We read of Isaac and Rebecca coveting in a public place where Abimelech saw it and realised that they were not brother and sister, but husband and wife. I am not saying they were making love, but they were caressing, they were kissing as the inference of that passage of Scripture. There is nothing wrong with a husband and wife wanting to make love to each other when an opportunity presents itself. This message continues on the next tape.
04 19 Building the House Continued
Continuation of the message ‑ 'Building the House, the One Flesh Bond,' which is tape 18 of Volume 2 of this series ‑ 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' Volume 2 being 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage.' This tape is about two-thirds of the way through the message, and therefore I would encourage you to listen to the first tape before picking up here. We are talking about the building of the One Flesh Bond.
Wife and Husband
A wife should be totally open and responsive to her husband and constantly seeking opportunities to express her love and desire to him with touches, looks, notes, etc. Clearly, he should be open to expressing his love and desire to her with looks, touches, and notes, and so forth. The conclusion that I have reached over the years and praying about it, is that primarily it is the woman who sets the tone. She creates the climate. All of this should happen while the husband and wife are getting on with the routine of their day. I am not talking here about overt, brazen, whorish, Jezebel-like sexual action, but gentle love and submission, combined with adoration and desire. She is going about her day-to-day tasks in a responsible and professional fashion as we have seen in Proverbs 31, but while she is doing that, she desires her husband. She lives to desire her husband. It does not occur to her not to desire her husband. She wakes in the morning and she desires her husband and when she goes to bed at night, she still desires her husband. When she decides what to wear in the morning, she does it taking account of her desire for her husband and what will appeal to him.
When she is alone with her husband, she comes boldly to seize the opportunity, to kiss him, to caress him, even if the opportunity presents itself to make love, wherever that may be. God created us to be natural and uninhibited with one another, not to be hung up with a list of do's and don’ts as long as our arms. The husband must be attentive and responsive to her overtures. It is her responsibility to build the emotional, psychological and sexual environment for lovemaking. It is his responsibility to respond by gently leading and guiding her through the acts of foreplay and intercourse, guided by and responding to her arousal and the peaks, valleys, and plateaus of her orgasmic climaxes, gently bringing her to the place of total release and union with him. A woman is capable of much more diverse sexual response than man. She is capable of far more intense orgasms. She is capable of far more orgasms of much longer duration. A woman in love is a fine instrument to be played tenderly and delicately by the man who loves her and who is loved by her.
Sexual lovemaking is not some coarse, clumsy, carnal act. It is the most amazing act of spiritual praise and worship. It is beautiful beyond my ability to describe that in words. It is something that God has created for us to better understand Him, and the beauty of our relationship with Him, and the love that He has for us. I appeal to you to hear what I am saying. Please discard anything that causes you to question and challenge what I am saying to you. God has given us a beautiful gift and it has been so terribly defiled. It really is time that we restore the truth.
Orgasm in lovemaking, both male and female, is a physical and spiritual release and discharge in both the man and the woman. In the man, there is a discharge of semen, which is a routine and generally known event. I have talked at length previously about the spiritual discharge which takes place at the same time. In the woman, wherein she is really aroused, there is a discharge of fluid which can be copious when a woman is highly aroused, and there is also a spiritual discharge. So when a woman experiences a full blown orgasm, her spirit is emitted in some fashion towards her husband in the same way that his spirit is emitted towards her, just in a much stronger fashion. His spirit is embedded and implanted in her spirit and draws her close to him. His spirit reaches out in orgasm to draw him into her.
Lovemaking
Let's talk now about the various aspects of lovemaking. We are talking now about an act of the most profound beauty. I used the parallel a moment ago of musical instruments. The husband is also a musical instrument to be played, but perhaps a less sensitive, less responsive and more predictable instrument than the wife. There is a great responsibility on the husband to learn how to minister to his wife in lovemaking, but it is an equally important responsibility that the wife be open and receptive. People need to understand the full dimensions of the erogenous zones. The nape of the neck, the throat, the ears, the lips, every piece of skin from the top of the head to the toes, the navel and the fingers are all sensitive to various degrees in different people. They are all sensitive to stroking, kissing, ticking, gentle blowing, sucking, even gentle biting certain areas of the body, not designed to hurt, just to stimulate. The breasts and nipples in both men and women are sensitive. In many women, stimulation of the breasts and nipples alone can bring them to orgasm, certainly if they are highly aroused. This is over and above the genitals.
The genitals are actually a relatively small component of the total erotic surface area of both the male and the female body. The sights, the sounds, and the smells are all vital components. A woman who prepares herself to make love by washing and appropriate gently perfuming herself to ensure that she is ready and aroused for her husband at the time that they come together, gives her husband the most wonderful gift, and he will respond accordingly. We have read previously that no part is unclean or to be withheld or avoided. Each couple must find their own repertoire, but it requires a process of learning. I have absolutely no doubt that if we were able to go back in time to the days of the early believers, Moses’ day or to Adam and Eve's day, or maybe a bit after Adam and Eve, we would find that the father would sit down with his son at some length over a fairly lengthy period of time before marriage, and instruct him on the skills of making love to his wife. In the same way, the mother would sit down with her girl and instruct her. She would explain to her the elements of her body and how to make love to her husband, so that by the time the marriage came to be consummated, both of them would be well instructed in the theory of lovemaking. Both of them would be prepared to go through the necessary learning process to become skilled in it in practice. We have gone through, in the series of discussions of facilitating change, preparing for change, and implementing change. All of those things apply.
The first time a man makes love to a woman, he is not going to be competent at the level of a concert violinist, but over time if he is committed and if she is responsive, they will come to a place where they can play sweet music together in the area of lovemaking. During the process of lovemaking, there should be continuous stroking, caressing, and stimulating. Kissing, deep giving of the tongue of the wife to the husband and the husband to the wife, nibbling of lips, kissing all over the body, kissing and sucking of nipples and fingers, etc. The Lord has imparted to us an absolutely awesome variety of erotic sensations distributed all over our bodies, if we will just learn to use them. Depending on the level of arousal, they will each respond in different ways. This is more pronounced in the wife. If she is not aroused at all, her vulva will be dry, her nipples and clitoris will be limp, she will not respond to any form of stimulation and she may find stimulation to be very uncomfortable or even painful. If she chooses not to be aroused, it does not matter what her husband does to her, he is not going to get her around because she is the one that Scripture commands to desire her husband, not the other way around. He will respond, but he will not get her to respond. She may enjoy it, but she will not get what she would get if she chose to desire her husband.
If she is highly aroused, she will lubricate strongly with a lubricant that is viscous and capable of accommodating all stimulation. Her nipples and clitoris will be firm and rigid, and she will enjoy a firm stimulation and will be highly sexually sensitive, but will not experience discomfort, even after sustained stimulation in many cases with many women. That is only going to happen if she really is desiring her husband, and if she is really aroused. This requires that she moves from a mindset which says that it is her husband's job to get her to that place. Once she accepts, she has a choice, that she has a free will choice to become aroused or not to become aroused to desire her husband, or not to desire her husband, to experience sexual pleasure or not to experience sexual pleasure, she must do with that information what she will. But she must understand that if she does not use it productively to build her house, then the house is falling down.
Coming back to the question of arousal. At the time of penetration, if the wife is not open and aroused and spiritually receptive to her husband, he will climax quickly. He will not be fulfilled. He will feel as though he is making love to and through a wall and there will be no spiritual release because her spirit and her heart is closed to him. He will then become very sensitive and generally be unable to manage a further reaction. At that point, we are dealing with plain old, dirty, carnal sex. We are no longer talking about intimate spiritual lovemaking in marriage the way God intended it to be.
It might occur to you to recognise that for as long as women think their husbands have to get them aroused, their husbands are going to fail, and so sex is going to be dirty because there is no giving and receiving. God's laws are not being applied in the marriage relationship. The moment the wife's spirit is open and receptive to her husband, and she is aroused, then lovemaking will be varied and exciting. The husband will take time to his first climax and will be ready for further lovemaking as long as his wife is open to him, as long as circumstances permit or until they both reach the crescendo of their mutual climaxes and are now completely fulfilled. At no time will either become too sensitive in any part of their bodies in the sense of oneness, harmony, and completeness will build and build and build in steps with relaxed decline to a plateau of gentle companionship and intimacy after each orgasm followed after a period of a return to full arousal and urgency for giving a pleasure, giving rise to another cycle of kissing, caressing, manual and other stimulation and intercourse culminating in another climax.
One Flesh Bond
Progressively if they take four, five or six hours a day to make love, they will move to higher planes of intimacy, love and harmony, and the One Flesh Bond will get stronger and stronger. That is why it seems so profoundly important to me in the context of cutting the marriage Covenant, the marriage ceremony, that the wedding feast should probably be fairly early in the day. Young couples should go off no later than about 12, 1 o'clock at lunchtime to consummate the marriage. If there is a need to have some sort of celebration once the marriage is officially consummated, they might even start that a little bit earlier.
Typically, the time that a marriage ceremony is held, is at 10 o'clock in the morning, in the present dispensation, but they should spend the rest of the day making love. They should spend the next seven days making love. If they do that and they have four, five, six or seven simultaneous orgasms every day for seven days, they will have an awesome One Flesh Bond at the end of the seven days. They will be truly married in the Sight of God. They will be truly joined to one another, but the current dispensation in terms of which they party until 11, 12, 1, 2 o'clock in the morning, they then have to often drive a car on which people have played practical jokes on, and go to a hotel. They fall into bed, probably having too much celebration and possibly too much to drink, because even though they are believers, and don’t normally drink, they have had champagne. Early in the morning they get up and travel off on some sightseeing tour that they call a honeymoon. They do not have much of a One Flesh Bond at the end of that. All the initial desire and excitement that could have and should have been there will have been dissipated and wasted, and that is unlikely ever to be regained. There is something very special about those first few days. It is not something that can be easily regained. So, the stronger the One Flesh Bond can be built immediately after the consummation of marriage, the stronger, more robust and sustainable that marriage will be.
This discussion brings us to the question of what forms of stimulation are permitted. We have seen that Hebrews 13:4 states that the marriage bed is undefiled. In other words, there are no restrictions on love and stimulation. Truly, a list does not extend to the sorts of sadomasochistic things which are advocated and reported by some in the world. We are not talking about that. We are talking about godly sensitive lovemaking in marriage. 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 states that the husband's body is the preserve of the wife and vice versa. In other words, anything the wife desires to do to her husband, she is free to do. And anything the husband desires to do to his wife, he is free to do. Clearly if it causes pain or discomfort, they should be sensitive, and it is not a legal thing, it is just a statement of what it is about. If we give totally to one another and do not hold anything back, that is God's way of doing things.
Logically, this includes oral and manual stimulation of the husband's penis by his wife and manual and oral stimulation of the wife's vulva, clitoris, and vagina, including the so-called G spot, the highly sensitive zone on the inside front wall of the vagina. By logical extension, the wife is at liberty to stimulate and if desired, bring her husband to climax with her hands or with her mouth, and many men and women find fellatio a particularly fulfilling experience. There is a level of intimacy and adoration associated with fellatio, the oral stimulation of the man, which is not experienced in any other form of lovemaking and stimulation. Likewise, the husband is at liberty to stimulate and if desired, bring his wife to a climax by manual or oral stimulation of her clitoris, vulva, and vagina Many find cunnilingus a very intimate form of expressing love and desire, and giving pleasure. The act of both partners simultaneously stimulating one another's sexual organs manual or orally is regarded as a vital part of the sexual repertoire amongst most experienced and uninhibited couples and affords a particular intimacy.
With this repertoire and any other act of caring, touching, or stimulation directed at bringing the person receiving it towards the fullest possible climax, the outcome will be a series of erotic experiences leading to a progression of orgasmic climaxes, each of which is accompanied with the emission of semen and spirit by the man, and orgasmic secretion and spirit by the woman. The first orgasm of the marriage is outlined in the teaching on cutting Covenant. It gives rise to what I understand to be a form of spiritual emission which I see in the spirit as a sort of infinitely elastic thread which joins spirit to spirit. Every subsequent orgasm enlarges and strengthens the capacity of this living conduit. If the receiving party is closed towards the party climaxing, and this occurs particularly in a woman towards her man, lest so the other way around, the bond will be weak and will go very little, if at all.
At the same time, I must say, if the man is making love to his wife and thinking of another woman, then the level of spiritual release will be very limited, and the same comment applies. If there is treachery and betrayal, over time the bond will be dissipated and grow weak, but that is the only basis in which the bond will grow weak, if there is pornea, adultery, and fornication, either sexual or spiritual. If lovemaking is passionate, intense, and totally giving with complete openness to receive on the part of both parties, and is accompanied by climatic simultaneous orgasm, an enormous amount of spiritual energy is released. Both parties experience enormous spiritual, emotional, and physical release, and there is a quantum jump in the strengthen and capacity of the conduit joining them, the One Flesh Bond.
If this experience is regularly repeated, the strength and size of the One Flesh Bond will increase to a point where from a spiritual perspective they are no longer two spirits joined by fine and fragile, the two spirits joined by massive spiritual duct as large as they are and through which husband and wife communicate openly and transparently. Reviewed from any perspective in the spirit realm, they will be seen as one, and not two. And that is what Genesis 2:24 is saying. They are no longer two, but one flesh. In other words, their spirits are so intimately and tightly bound together that they cease to operate as two independent entities. They operate as one house.
At this point, the house that is the man and his wife, is complete. This takes place in a framework of 1 Corinthians 13, agape, chesed, Covenant love, then truly they are making, if you like, building Covenant love and building their house. It seems to me it will probably take any man and woman their entire lives to reach a point where the One Flesh Bond has reached its absolute ultimate maximum capacity, but at the same time, I am confident that they can reach a significant capacity in a short space of time. A very strong One Flesh Bond can be formed the day that the marriage is consummated, if they have half a day, or a day, and are properly educated, prepared and oriented. Remember that every time they make love, they re-enact the act of Covenant, and with the arousal of the labia minora, even blood flows. So, they are building the Covenant, they are building love, they are building the One Flesh Bond, it will get stronger and stronger, and it will become more and more difficult for them to separate.
If a woman commits adultery, her husband's love and spirit is poured out through the conduit of the One Flesh Bond into the heart of another man, which is an abomination in the Sight of God. At the same time, it causes enormous spiritual trauma to the husband which manifests as biblical #5, jealousy. I need to make a point there, that a woman who has a strong One Flesh Bond with her husband is highly unlikely to even think of committing adultery. She is so tightly bound to him and so close to him, that she probably cannot even think of doing it without him knowing about it. She would not want to do it because the intimacy and the love that she had that has brought her to that point would be too precious to her.
That begins to give us a deeper dimension into what the Lord said to us after the teaching on negativity in which He said negativity towards sexual lovemaking is one of the most serious cancers in marriage in the Body of Christ today. So we see that insipid half-hearted, hard, unresponsive, ungiving, unreceiving lovemaking gives rise to a situation in which it is easy for a woman to be unfaithful to her husband and it is easy for the marriage to break up. The sort of lovemaking we have been talking about so far in this teaching on the other hand, brings about a state where a phenomenally powerful bond comes into existence, and that bond itself is almost the guarantee against adultery and fornication, and if the one party, nevertheless with a bond like that, commits adultery, one has to say that then surely the level of treachery does warrant what Scripture imposes in a case like that, which is the death penalty. It is just to the husband or it is just to the party that has been betrayed.
More than one wife
It is important to understand there that there is nothing in Scripture which prevents a man from taking more than one wife. Therefore this whole thing of men cheating on their wives has very little scriptural basis. We will talk about that a bit more in a latter teaching, but just in the context of this point, a man taking another wife is not a scriptural sin. He promised his wife he would not do it or he took traditional monogamous vows which said forsake all others and keeping myself only to you or words to that effect, if he breaks the vow, he has broken the vow. That needs to be dealt with as a breaking of a vow. It is not breaking of the Covenant, because the Covenant is laid out in Scripture and it does not provide for a woman to limit her husband to one wife. Therefore, this sin of cheating on one's wife has no scriptural basis. Adultery is a woman having sex with more than one man. If a man has sex with a woman who is a virgin, he marries her. If he has sex with a woman who is already married, he is committing adultery. Both of them should die according to the Word of God, unless they repent, turn around, and stop doing it.
Persistent treachery on the part of the wife will progressively attack and weaken the One Flesh Bond. In extreme cases, she murders the One Flesh Bond, and the spiritual state known as divorce comes to pass. We have read in 1 Corinthians 13 that agape love never dies. We have read elsewhere in Mark 10, that which God has joined together, which is the One Flesh Bond, let not man put asunder, which can also be interpreted as saying man is incapable of putting asunder. It does not matter what he does, once he has got that One Flesh Bond, he will be drawn back to that person. It does seem to me, from my own experience and much prayer around these things, that the One Flesh Bond can be murdered if the wife is persistently, utterly treacherous. Eventually the One Flesh Bond will die and that brings about, in true terms, the state known as divorce.
Divorce
Divorce is the death of the One Flesh Bond, where the level of treachery has become so great that there is no longer any scriptural basis on which the One Flesh Bond can be maintained. It dies. They are then divorced. They are cut off from one another. It is not putting away, because he does not like the way she does something. She has cut herself off from him. And so, we see that, as with adultery and fornication, divorce is first and foremost a spiritual state, not a legal state. It is a reality. It is either there, or it is not. You do not have to get legalistic over determining how you determine how you get divorced. It is either there or it is not there. If it is just there, it is still there.
From consideration of all the above, it is apparent that men cannot respond to women who are cold, hard, brazen and demanding, or who are reticent and expect to be rude. There is no scriptural basis for this sort of fairy-tale. It is important to note that fairies are Demons, such as fairy-tale courtships portrayed in romantic novels and fairy stories. The most notable man in Scripture, who went courting and pursuing women in lust, was Samson, who was destroyed by Delilah.
Consider a few passages of Scripture, Judges 14:1-2: "Now Samson went down to Timnah and saw a woman in Timnah of the daughters of the Philistines. So he went up and told his father and mother, saying, 'I have seen a woman in Timnah of the daughters of the Philistines; now therefore, get her for me as a wife.'" Judges 16:1-2: "Now Samson went to Gaza and saw a harlot there, and went in to her." Samson went looking for a woman. Again, Judges 16:4: "Afterward it happened that he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah." So again, Samson went looking for women. That is not the way it is meant to be. A woman should come to the man. She needs the covering of the man.
Marriage is not about trophy hunting. It is about accepting the responsibility of the man to provide a covering to those women who need it. Another example, 2 Samuel 11:3-4, this is after David has seen Bathsheba bathing. "So David sent and inquired about the woman. And someone said, 'Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?' Then David sent messengers, and took her; and she came to him, and he lay with her, for she was cleansed from her impurity; and she returned to her house." So every time a man goes looking for a woman, courting a woman if you like, he gets into trouble. He does the wrong thing. He sins, and he jeopardises his life. In contrast, if we read in Genesis 29:22-23: "And Laban gathered together all the men of the place and made a feast. Now it came to pass in the evening, that he took Leah his daughter and brought her to Jacob; and he went in to her." We see the father bringing the daughter to the husband. Genesis 29:27-28: "'Fulfil her week, and we will give you this one also for the service which you will serve with me still another seven years.'" This is Laban to Jacob with regards to Rachel. "Then Jacob did so and fulfilled her week. So he gave him his daughter Rachel as wife also."
Women to seek husbands
Also, Genesis 24:64-67: "Then Rebekah lifted her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she dismounted from her camel; for she had said to the servant, 'Who is this man walking in the field to meet us?' The servant said, 'It is my master.' So, she took a veil and covered herself. And the servant told Isaac all the things that he had done. Then Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent; and he took Rebekah and she became his wife, and he loved her. So, Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death." We see again, the woman comes to the man and if we relate that back to the Psalm, etc., that we read a few minutes ago, where we are told to come to God, we go to God in praise and worship, we take ourselves, and we move to Him. The woman should move to the man, the man should not go pursuing the woman. God did not create man to go trophy hunting. He did not create man to have to go looking for wives. He created woman to need a covering and for their fathers to seek that covering for them.
The Scriptures say it is a shame for a woman to be without a husband. So, reproach, Isaiah 4:1 says. So again, we see another instance where Satan has corrupted the Word of God. We have generally believed in the world today that it is men's job to go looking for women. It is not. Contrast also with Esther going to the King. So, we see the pagan in this case, Jezebel roots, of modern courtship practice and we see that the man is seeking to draw close to Jesus, worshipping and reverencing Jesus, while the woman seeks to draw close to him, and adores and reverences her husband, and lifts him up in prayer towards the Lord Jesus. We see the man taking his eyes off Jesus to worship his wife. That is a widely, widely taught philosophy if you like, in the modern Church. Men are told to idolise their wives. I have even heard it significantly widely distributed and read it, where the teaching says that because women are the weaker vessels, they must be put up on something like a China display cabinet, and treated very gently, and esteemed, and so forth. The teaching which was widely distributed was effectively turning men to worship their wives. It is not an isolated thing. I have heard it in several instances.
A wife is told to adore and reverence her husband, which is similar words to the way we are told to conduct ourselves towards the Lord Jesus Christ. The husband is told to love the wife as Christ so loved the Church and gave His life for her. Once we understand that it is the husband's job to draw close to God, and it is the wife's job to draw close to her husband, and as the husband draws closer to Jesus and becomes more Christ-like, it becomes that much more easy for the wife to submit and become more like her husband. At the end of the day, whatever her husband does, we have seen that she is instructed by Scripture to submit to him in everything. Once we understand this principle that man was created for woman to draw close to him, and not the other way around, it is easy to appreciate why pornography, strip shows, and prostitutes are so common in the world today. Men are seeking women who will give themselves to their men and seek to please them.
Building the house
This is in stark contrast to the widespread teaching and the demands that the husband is responsible to arouse and please his wife. It is not possible. Either she desires him as a matter of personal choice and obedience to Scripture. Genesis 3:16, she manipulates and controls them and becomes aroused through her desire to be worshipped, which is inspired by Satan and is quite likely to be demonic. This is the tendency of the world today. Even a God-fearing woman who comes into marriage with the understanding that it is his husband's job to minister to her, and bring her to a state of arousal, is going to find herself potentially open to demonic infestation and potentially the Jezebel spirit. In conclusion, sexual lovemaking is the act of marriage. It is the act of building the spiritual house. It is the act of building agape, hesed, Covenant love. It is the most wonderful, most sublime, most Heavenly gift that God has given to mankind in this life after the born-again experience. We must treasure it, nurture it, and seek God with a holy desire to teach us to walk in the fullness of it. Notice also that with a strong and a well-established One Flesh Bond or conduit, as the husband draws closer to Jesus, the anointing is poured out on the husband. It will pour through to his wife as well. Truly we serve an awesome God.
We have covered an enormous amount of ground in these two tapes with regards to the One Flesh Bond and building the house, and we have covered a lot of things which are very contrary to the teachings of the world today. But I ask you to pray about this, to meditate on it and to think about it in the light of your own life experiences. We see the validity of what the Lord has shown us in this teaching. He has given us the most awesome and wonderful gift in the One Flesh Bond in its fullness of development. It is at the very heart of making marriage succeed. It is at the very heart of making adultery something which is absolutely beyond the bounds of conscience and reason. It is a gift which makes the fulfilment of Covenant agape love absolutely achievable. It is the gift which gives us the guarantee that every marriage will work provided that both husband and wife give all to themselves in lovemaking. The other things will follow.
The closer they come to each other, the more like-minded they will become, and the easier it will be for the wife to do things that she perhaps might not have been able to do otherwise, because she is strengthened by her husband. We need to see that Scriptures, like “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens”, me have a parallel in marriage. A wife can legitimately say, I can do all things through my husband who strengthens me. So we can come boldly before the Throne of Grace. The wife must be able to come boldly before her husband.
There are numerous other Scriptures with similar input. We say that we have the mind of Christ. Surely we can say that with a fully developed One Flesh Bond, a wife has the mind of her husband. She has a spiritual hotline to him, and therefore she has access to what he is thinking to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how strong the bond is, depending on how adept they have become and how sensitive they have become to hearing the spirit between one another.
Father I ask in the name of Jesus that anything that has been uttered on these two tapes that is not according to Your Word or according to Your will, or by Your Spirit, that You will blow it away and it will find no roots in the hearts of the hearers. Father in the name of Jesus, I ask that everything on these tapes that is of You, will find deep root in the hearts of the hearers, that You will nurture and water and nourish it by Your Spirit, and that it will grow up and produce abundant fruit for the work of Your kingdom, for the deliverance of those who are in bondage, that they might speak and spread the good news regarding Your plan for marriage, that marriage can be Heaven on Earth to those around them in Jesus name. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, Saviour of the world, amen.
This message has been recorded by a Church without Walls and Ministry of End Time Issue Ministries, P.O. Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at James@End-Time-Issues.org.za. Our phone numbers, international dialling code normally 0027 but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline 0027-117912327 or in South Africa 011-7912327. My mobile number 0027-832516644 and in South Africa, 0832516644. Our fax number internationally 0027-117915004 and locally 011-7915004. All materials produced by this Ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the work.
Please feel free to copy any of our materials in part, or in full as the Lord leads you, understanding that the manner in which you utilise these materials, and the manner in which you cite them and quote them, is for your account on the Day of Judgement. So, we would ask you to use the materials widely, but please feel free to copy them however you see fit and to share these truths with anybody as the Lord leads. I would urge those of you who receive copies of these tapes at no charge, that once you have listened to them, that you consider passing them on and blessing others with them. Our hearts' desire is that they should not become artefacts sitting on a bookshelf and gathering dust, but the Word of God contained in these teachings should be spread as far and as widely as possible.
Should you be led by the Lord to sow into this Ministry, our bank account is End Time Issue Ministries. The account number is 0427527805. The branch is the Standard Bank of South Africa, Randburg Branch, and the branch code is [inaudible 00:46:57] and that if you were to die right now would not spend Eternity in Heaven with Him, I would urge you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and to pray the prayer of salvation. These steps to salvation are as follows. Firstly, admit and recognise that you are a sinner. Romans 3:23 says: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Secondly, accept and believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He came to Earth as a Man, that He was crucified and died on the Cross, that on the third day He rose again. He is now seated at the right hand of the Father and that by His death and resurrection, He took your sins for eternity.
Romans 5:8 says: "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Thirdly, confess your sins, repent of your sins, and turn around. Repentance means turning around. It remains ceasing to do what you now realise is wrong. 1 John 1:9 says: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Four, confess your faith, that Jesus Christ is Lord, that you believe this and receive His salvation and invite Him to dwell in your heart. Romans 10:9-10 says: "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." Give thanks to God for your salvation. Pray and cry out to God and give thanks to Him for saving you. Sixthly, work out your salvation by the Spirit of God. Philippians 2:12 says: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in My presence only, but now much more in My absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."
Salvation
Salvation is a process. You are saved the moment you pray the sinner's prayer, the prayer of salvation and invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart and be Lord of your life. That salvation is also a process whereby your mind is renewed and you come to have a personal and deep relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is your choice how far you go in that relationship. He desires a wonderful and a deep and an intimate relationship with you, but it is your choice whether you will do what is necessary to come to that place through reading your Bible, praying, seeking counsel, and seeking guidance. You should be water baptised at the first possible opportunity. Matthew 3:6 says: "And were baptized by Him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." I encourage you to ask the Lord to lead you to somebody who has some knowledge of the basic ordinance of water baptism, who can water baptise you, or to lead you to a Church where they can water baptise you.
There is no reason why you cannot be water baptised today as a symbolic cleansing and washing of your sins. In fact, the minute you pray the sinner's prayer, it would be preferable for you to be water baptised. Choose to be obedient to the Word of God, accept the Bible in its original Hebrew as given by the Spirit of God and choose to live your life according to that. 1 John 5:3 says: "For this is the love of God, that we keep His Commandments. And His Commandments are not burdensome." I encourage you to read the Word of God daily, and to put into practice everything that you encounter as a principle which I believe will bear fruit in your life. I would encourage you to make an effort to write now after you have prayed this prayer. Start reading your Bible, from the Book of John through to the Book of Revelation and then make a discipline of reading the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation at least two, three, four times a year. Read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi at least once a year, and I would encourage you to do that using different translations.
Ask God to lead you to the Church where He wants you to be at this time where they will teach you, they will guide you, they will pray for you, and they will help you to walk in the fullness of what God has called you to be. Be aware that He may move you. God may move you from Church to Church over time to teach you new things, and you should not be reluctant to do this. The service of God is a personal choice. It is a wonderful choice and if you will step out by faith today and pray the sinner's prayer and follow Him, you will reap a rich harvest, if that is your desire to be found faithful on the Day of Judgement. Should you have listened to this and have decided that you are now ready to make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, I would ask you to pray the following prayer with me, in Jesus’ name.
Father, I come to You in the name of Jesus and I confess that I am a sinner. I confess that I do not have a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and I recognise that without Jesus, if I were to die right now, I will spend Eternity in hell and not with You. I confess that I have sinned and I repent of those sins and I turn around. I choose to turn my back on sin and to serve God. I confess that Jesus Christ came to Earth as a man, that He was crucified, that He died, and was buried, and that He was resurrected on the third day. He sits on the right-hand of the Father. I confess by faith that He died to take all of my sins. I thank You Jesus for taking my sin and I give You my sin right now in Jesus’ name.
I confess by faith that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and I choose now, Lord Jesus, to make You the Lord of my life. I invite You to come and dwell in my heart. I invite You to take charge of my life. I invite You to start leading and guiding me and directing me, and I give You my life and everything that I have, and I commit myself to serving You now, Lord Jesus. I thank You that You have heard me and I thank You that You have now come to live in me, and I thank you for saving me. I thank You that I am now a child of the most high God. I thank You that I am now a servant of the most high God, and that You will lead me and guide me into the paths that You want me to walk. I ask You Lord to lead me to the Church where You want me to be. I ask You in the name of Jesus to bring the people that You want in my life into my life by Your Spirit and to remove the people that You do not want in my life by Your Spirit, in Jesus’ name. I ask You to close all doors in my life that You do not want open, that no man may open, and I ask You to open every door in my life that You want opened, that no man may close it, in Jesus’ name.
Father I ask You to teach me to be led by Your Spirit. I ask You to open my eyes to have a revelation of the Word of God. I ask You to give me a hunger for the Word of God and for Your Spirit, and I ask You to teach me to pray, in Jesus’ name. I thank You Father and I thank You Jesus for saving me. I declare that I am now a child of God and I praise You and I worship You and I glorify Your holy name. I thank You for changing me and saving me and delivering me, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Now that you have prayed that prayer and you are born again into the Body of Christ, realise that the Christian walk is a journey. The apostle Paul likens it to a marathon race. You need guidance, and you need assistance. If you have no one to help you, pray and ask the Holy Spirit of God to come into your life and to help you. If you need to contact somebody, contact any of the major ministries. If you are not sure who to contact, contact this Ministry through the address and telephone and email, details that were supplied earlier. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Amen.
04 20 The World -- the Church and Marriage from 4000 BC to 2000 AD
Tape #19, in the series 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' Volume 2 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage.' This teaching is entitled the 'The World -- the Church and Marriage from 4000 BC to 2000 AD.'
As I was preparing this message, I felt impressed to lead into it with a track of song from an album by Don Francisco entitled 'High Praise' published by Star Song. The track is entitled 'I will praise you.'
[00:06:58]
As I was listening to that track, I felt impressed to introduce this teaching with verses from Revelation 2:4-5: "Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place—unless you repent." In many respects, the content of the teaching that follows relates to perhaps not remembering since generally we do not know to remember in our generation, but it is to make you aware of how far mankind has fallen from the creation because until we understand that mankind is not today at the pinnacle of its "evolution," but in fact is at the lowest ebb in many respects of an ongoing decline from creation with perhaps a slight turning around relative to where mankind was at the end of the dark ages 500 years ago, but not as dramatic as certainly I believed until very recently. And it is my prayer that out of the teachings that have preceded this, the revelation will be dawning that the church is in a far worse state than generally is expected and understood.
When reading the Bible, if one has come to a real quality decision that the Bible is the living word of God in its original Hebrew or Aramaic, it was absolutely accurate and is without error, then one encounters a variety of passages and verses of Scripture which are challenging. I just want to lift out a couple of them. I have not by any means sought to be comprehensive, Genesis 6:15: "And this is how you shall make it: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits." In other words, the length is 150 metres which is more than the length of a rugby field. It is about one and a half to two times the length of a rugby field. This is a very substantial boat and just from a technology point of view, to build a boat of that magnitude, supposedly a man and his three sons and three daughters and one his wife represents a number of dilemmas. I doubt there are many men today who could build a boat of that magnitude even in a space of hundred years, which is what Noah apparently had. Perhaps in a hundred years it could be done. It is a very substantial boat. Noah's ark has been discovered on Ararat in Turkey and the limited excavation that has been permitted so far has revealed a fairly sophisticated structure. They have undertaken ground radar surveys and various other things. There are large water storage vessels, three decks, everything according to what the Bible says and the length is precisely 300 cubits, 150 metres. The timbers are formed, laminated timbers using techniques which have only been known supposedly for the last few decades. The bolts or rivets which hold the timbers together at the joints have been found to be a sophisticated alloy of aluminium and aluminium can only be produced to the knowledge of modern man with a substantial quantities of high-voltage and high current electricity. The implication there is that Noah had access to high-voltage high-current electricity or somebody did in those days to fabricate the metal alloy that is used in bolting the Ark together.
1 Kings 7:15-16: "And he (Solomon and Solomon's servants) cast two pillars of bronze, each one eighteen cubits high, and a line of twelve cubits measured the circumference of each. Then he made two capitals of cast bronze, to set on the tops of the pillars. The height of one capital was five cubits, and the height of the other capital was five cubits." Now cubit is about half a metre, so this columns were about nine metres tall and about four metres in circumference which means that they were about 1.2 metres in diameter. I think you would be hard-pressed today to find a bronze foundry capable of casting in one piece, hollow bronze columns 9 metres high and 1.2 metres in diameter. I am not saying that it cannot be done, I am simply stating that even today not many people have the capability of casting bronze columns of that magnitude. It certainly seems unlikely that in those days with the simplistic technology that we are inclined to believe that they had that would be possible. Furthermore, bronze column of that magnitude weighs a substantial amount and would be extremely difficult to manoeuvre without the sort of cranes, etc., that we have today.
Daniel 3:1: "Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was sixty cubits and its width six cubits. He set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon." We are looking at an image of 30 metres high and 3 metres across made out of gold. Now whether that was fabricated gold or cast gold is not particular material but it is a very, very substantial piece of work. And again, we would be hard-pressed today to find people who could fabricate an image of gold 30 metres high and we would have some difficulty given that gold is amongst the densest of metals, lifting such a structure into the vertical position. Implication is that some fairly substantial equipment was available. Consider a few other scriptures, Job 26:7-10: "He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing. He binds up the water in His thick clouds, Yet the clouds are not broken under it. He covers the face of His throne, And spreads His cloud over it. He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, At the boundary of light and darkness." Firstly in Job's day according to our current understanding, there was absolutely no way that Job knew that the Earth hang on nothing, but it stood free in space. He might have been making that statement by divine inspiration, but anybody who has any experience of the prophetic will know that it is very, very difficult to hear God say anything to one when one cannot conceive that it is possible. If we are to believe that Job was a primitive man living in relatively basic surroundings by today's standards, there is something here. And also supposedly until relatively recently men did not know that the Earth was a sphere, and therefore verse 10 which refers to a circular horizon is also challenging. Supposedly, somebody living in the area of Israel or the surrounding territories, Babylon or wherever which is presumably where Job lived would not have had the opportunity to see the horizon, and infinity and discern that it was circular. Even if we can look at the horizon over the sea, and see that there is slight curvature, there is no basis there for any human being to discern that the Earth is a sphere unless by divine revelation again. It is very difficult for one in the prophetic to hear God on something which one's entire intellect and experience base says it is impossible. It is more readily possible for us to hear God if He speaks of something which is totally beyond the realms of our experience. But if we are firmly convinced that the Earth is flat and this word of God refers to a circular horizon, there are not many who will actually hear that and communicate it accurately.
In Daniel 3:19-26, just picking out a few verses relating to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego who refused to bow to the gold idol we read about a moment ago, in verse 19: "Then Nebuchadnezzar was full of fury, and the expression on his face changed toward Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego. He spoke and commanded that they heat the furnace seven times more than it was usually heated. And he commanded certain mighty men of valour who were in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego, and cast them into the burning fiery furnace. Then these men were bound in their coats, their trousers, their turbans, and their other garments, and were cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace. Therefore, because the king’s command was urgent, and the furnace exceedingly hot, the flame of the fire killed those men who took up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego." And so it goes on. So we see this is a really hot furnace. Now if you think about it, if this was a relatively primitive furnace that was heated by the burning of coals or whatever, it is technically almost impossible to raise the temperature of such a furnace by a factor of 7. Seven fold increase in the heat of the furnace is a technically significant increase in heat, assuming that in the first place, it was just not a little coal fire burning in a brasier and that the implication is that they could have been slowly incinerated in the fire before it was heated seven fold.
One has to consider the possibility that in modern experience, the only way that one could heat a furnace seven fold is if one was using an electric blast furnace of the type that is used for smelting iron and similar, in which case, one is again looking at consuming massive quantities of electricity. There is really to my knowledge no other way that a furnace could be heated seven times hotter than normal. And to reach a point where the temperature is so hot that men are killed, one is looking at a furnace which potentially is running at the temperature of a blast furnace. The furnace has got to be extremely hot indeed before one is going to be killed at the mouth of the furnace. If one looks at the fires, the coal fires that are used to heat boilers in ships and in power stations in the early part of the 20th century, those boilers were stoked by men shovelling coal into those furnaces and today you can go into an electric power station and stand in front of the burners and you will get extremely uncomfortable, but you certainly would not be killed. If you go and stand right at the mouth of an electric arc furnace, when it is being charged or discharged smelting iron that is a different matter. It is conceivable that if that furnace was heated to absolute runaway temperatures, you will get killed standing in the mouth of the furnace or coming close enough to throw people into the furnace.
So again, we have a paragon dilemma in terms of the mindset which tells us that the people of Babylon were relatively primitive by our standards and we are not technologically capable of producing a furnace of that capability, let alone the idol. There are many other dilemmas and I do not propose to go into all of them, but they raise innumerable questions roundabout our understanding of where the world, the church and therefore by implication, marriages come from. We have already seen that the church's current teachings with regard to marriage leave much to be desired in terms of what Scripture clearly indicates and it raises the questions to how did we get there and how do we interpret our current dispensation in terms of the age of the world and so forth.
The objective of this teaching is to raise some extremely challenging issues which have really only come to my attention in the last few months, but which put a whole new perspective on the interpretation of Scripture and understanding the realities regarding where we find ourselves in the world today in terms of where we have come from. To address first of all the developments of the world from 4000 BC to 2000 AD and to make the point that time selected on the basis that there seemed to be solid scriptural reasons to believe that the creation of Adam and Eve took place 4000 BC, and we know we are at 2000 AD today. So really the 6000-year period, I believe, corresponds to the six days of man's activity on the Earth with the seventh day being the seventh millennium, which has just dawned or is about to dawn or may have dawned a few years ago depending on the eras and calendars, etc., but that is a discussion which is not pertinent right now.
In discussing the picture in the world, my thinking has been significantly informed by the work of Jonathan Gray, a professional archaeologist who has reported the discoveries of Ron Wyatt, an amateur archaeologist in the United States who has discovered Noah's ark. He has discovered the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple Furniture. He has discovered the Red Sea crossing with the chariot wheels on the floor of the ocean in the eastern arm of the Red Sea near [inaudible 00:23:41]. He has discovered the true Mount Sinai and the split rock at Horeb where the water flowed out. He has discovered Sodom and Gomorrah with the whole town turned to ash and impregnated with sulphur balls which are brimstone; some dramatic discoveries which prove very convincingly that the Bible is accurate and can be relied on. Jonathan Gray has gone further. He has done further research and identified that the entire gospel story is told in the stars and discovered the ground pits in Egypt and other things which confirm the biblical story of Joseph in Egypt. They presented all sorts of information confirming the fulfilment of biblical prophecy over Egypt. Jonathan Gray has gone a lot further, challenged by the apparent nonconformities in Scripture that I have pointed out and many others and challenged by many archaeological findings, which he has been involved in which have come to his notice and which have been suppressed in many other quarters. He has written a book entitled 'Dead Men's Secrets' by Jonathan Gray, which is published by Jonathan Gray, PO Box 3370, Rundle Mall, South Australia, postal code 5000. It can be obtained from [inaudible 00:25:23] and also can be obtained from Ministries in the United States and End Time Issue Ministries also distribute both the book and the videos of the Ark of the Covenant, the Noah's Ark, the Red Sea Crossing and so on and so forth.
But the book 'Dead Men's Secrets' presents a thousand items of information, all of which are underpinned by documentary evidence regarding findings around the world which are not generally known and we need to see this in the context of God created the Heavens and the Earth and God created man as we see in Genesis 1. If you are a Bible believing Christian, you take creation as an absolute nonnegotiable given. But we have grown up in a world which teaches evolution everywhere. I would venture to suggest that there is not a person who will listen to this tape unless they have been educated at home by Christian parents or not to some extent have been taught evolution, be it in biology, be it in geomorphology, be it in geography, be it in history. We make the assumption in the world, or the assumption is made in the world that man has evolved from apes and that over time he has become more sophisticated and more competent. When we apply or certainly from my own experience, when one applies the thinking about creation to the world today, it is filtered through this model of evolution, because we do not take a long enough and hard enough look at the anomaly of applying some of the teachings if I may call that of evolution to creation. So we assume that cavemen really existed in the way as it is portrayed thousands of years ago and we kind of uncomfortably ignore the fact that supposedly cavemen existed 20,000 years ago but we understand the Bible to indicate that man was only created 6000 years ago. The only other intellectual compromises that we make roundabout our belief in creation but our coexistence of evolution. In what I have come to realise in the last few months is that we cannot afford that compromise as Christians. If we make that compromise with Christians we go in fundamentally wrong directions in a number of areas. I will seek to share with you without going into great detail what has happened as best I can determine it from the sources that I have at my disposal which I believe the Lord has brought to my hand, the journey that the world, the church, and marriage have gone through from creation to the present, which has been a progressive distraction, reduction in quality, reduction in learning, reduction in knowledge of God, reduction in spirituality, reduction in technical competence, reduction in true social skills. And as you go through this, I believe that you will not have too much difficulty in seeing this truth. It is what I have termed in the business world blinding glimpse of the obvious when you actually consider the facts.
Let us start out with some of the absolutely fundamental principles. Genesis 1:26-27 says: "Then God said, 'Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.' So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." God created man in His own image. Now, if we stop and just consider that one statement for a moment, then we have to ask ourselves how we can believe that 6000 years ago man was relatively primitive, had been created over an evolutionary process and was not much beyond wearing animal skins in a very primitive fashion. Surely, that does not sound like the image of God. If we consider that man was created in the image of God and we postulate that man was of significant stature, Jonathan Gray and Wyatt have both found archaeological evidence which indicates that Adam and Eve were of the order of 15 feet high and that even Noah was of the order of 15 feet high, in other words, a giant, 15 feet, that is 5 metres, nearly 2.5 times the height of the average man today with this stature to match, that man had an amazing intellect that man had enormous intellectual knowledge imparted to him by God that man had the ability to solve problems. Had a knowledge of mathematics and science and engineering, which far surpasses anything we know today. That had an intimate personal knowledge with God at the beginning and imbedded in their spirits a full revelation of the knowledge of God and the love of God.
As you think about it, it becomes very, very plausible, God was not confused when He says in Genesis 1:26-27 that God created man in God's own image. If we carry on, we have looked at the Ark, but let's consider it a little bit more. We have talked about the size, we have talked about the sophisticated technology, the laminated wood, the aluminium alloy which required electricity to manufacture. There were folk tales in just about every culture in the world of every society concerning a flood and eight people who came out of a large boat. Then let's consider the flood itself. Genesis 7:10-12 states: "And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were on the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights." If we go and stop and think rationally about those three verses of Scripture, in 40 days and 40 nights the entire Earth was covered to a depth of 50 cubits, that is 7.5 metres above the highest point on the Earth's surface. Even assuming that the Earth was much flatter in those days, which Jonathan Gray postulates that is a phenomenal amount of water to be poured out on the Earth in 40 days. Even when we have massive downpours on the Earth today, the days at the end, all we see is localised flooding on the floodplains of major rivers.
This is an absolute tidal wave if you like, it is a wrong word, but an absolute tidal wave of water engulfing the Earth. It has to be associated with cataclysmic Earth-shattering opening of the fountains of the great deep. It has to be associated with downpours of water from the sky such as we cannot even imagine and associated with that there will be massive destruction. Apparently, major fossil reserves have been found where skeletons are piled up hundreds of feet deep indicating that waves engulfed valleys and swept everything alive into a dead end or whatever. Trees were found embedded vertically through coal seams indicating that the coal seams were not, as we are told, created over hundreds of thousands of years but the massive quantities of vegetation were jumbled together and dumped in multiple layers in a very short space of time.
That Earth was truly [inaudible 00:35:15] in the flood and the shape and the form of the surface of the Earth was dramatically changed, Gray postulates volcanic and other events associated with it. If I can just read a passage out of Dead Men's Secrets, "Something like this was occurring on that final night of the antediluvian era. If we are to believe later traditions, that is. As for the worldwide greenhouse environment, geology would one day attest to it-as well as to its sudden demise. Traditions would later describe survivors of the Deluge who were like gods-that is, they were members of a superior civilization, which ceased to exist after the Great Flood. Egyptian records would contend that the reign of the 'gods' before the First Dynasty was one of superior and miraculous powers. After the Deluge, the Popol Vuh (the sacred book of the Quiche Indians of Guatemala) would record: 'The first race of men before the Flood possessed all knowledge; they studied the four quarters of heaven and the round surface of the earth.' Understood in this light, even Greek mythology begins to make some sense. We see it as the recollection by a degenerate race, of a vast, mighty and highly civilized empire, which in a remote past covered the world. Pause for reflection. Can we possibly imagine that all of the peoples of all continents independently invented such a story? Did they all speak of an original Golden Age by chance, without any foundation? Indeed, I am tempted to ask, if man evolved from beasts, then why is it that there existed a long tradition of a Golden Age instead of that of a savage past? Will anyone explain that? Even where there was lack of writing in conditions of savagery imposed by catastrophe, the same memory of the Golden Age was passed from mouth to ear. You may want to ask at this point, can we really place much credence in ancient legends? Surprisingly, a great deal. Too often, I’m afraid, we have been prone to dismiss folklore and mythology out of hand. But is this not unscientific, especially since traditions have often led us to discover physical remains?" An interesting and challenging set of statements.
Another passage of Scripture which is challenging, Genesis 10:25: "To Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan." What does that mean that the Earth was divided? We understand the Earth to be in its present geographical form for millions of years. However, Gray and his colleagues have recently uncovered considerable evidence which suggests that sometime after the flood, the density of the core of the Earth changed and that the Earth expanded by factor which means that the original Earth was only about 60% of its current diameter and as it expanded the Earth was divided. The continents were put apart. They have done some fairly apparently precise calculations which show that prior to that, all the continents were one mass of land on a planet of about 60% of the current diameter and the Earth expanded. The boundaries between the continents, nation fit perfectly and everything gels. So it seems quite possible that in the time of Peleg, the Earth was literally physically divided, and men who had all been on one contiguous continental mass was separated. There are great challenges for us all in terms of these facts and if it interests you, I would encourage you to read the book 'Dead Men's Secrets.'
They have also identified evidence of a worldwide nuclear holocaust roundabout 2000 to 2300 BC. In other words, shortly before the time of Abram, there were radioactive remains of cities on just about every continent and the indication seems to be that there was a massive world war in which nuclear armaments were used, in which all the major seats of civilisation were utterly destroyed, and in which the survivors resorted temporarily to living in caves and living in other primitive surroundings while they re-establish themselves in an agricultural environment whereas previously they had lived in a much more sophisticated technological environment, more akin to the environment that we know today than the more basic lifestyle that seemingly may have existed after this nuclear event. It appears that Abram lived at more or less this time. That is some period of time shortly after the nuclear event. But there is quite a lot of uncertainty from what I can see here and these are fairly tentative dates and correlations.
The important point is that from creation all the way down the line, the level of sophistication and civilisation was steadily deteriorating as man became more corrupt as his intellectual and physical capacity was diminished through ever-increasing sinfulness. Since then it would seem that there was some degree of social recovery and that the Greek and Roman civilisations and later Egyptian civilisations were probably a lot more technologically sophisticated than we have given them credit for. If one applies this thinking to the old Roman empire to the Colosseum and other ancient structures, one begins to understand that they took place in a significantly different context to that which we have understood previously. It is also interesting to note, Gray has identified a number of locations around the world where there were massive stone structures, in one case, in Carnic with a series of stone blocks, which had been machined into precise rectangular shape where the stone had come from Corrie's considerable distance as an hundreds of miles away the nearest source of that stone and where the size of the stone is such a magnitude that if that stone was to be placed on any known transport piece of machinery on the Earth today, it would be utterly crushed, and we have absolutely no way of possibly lifting a stone of that magnitude. It speaks of sophisticated powerful technology, A, to corrie the rock and cut it that precisely and B, to transport it and C, to place it on the structure. And there were many of these instances around the world if we apply our minds to it.
What is also relevant to that is to recognise that there is a fundamental law in physics referred to the Law of Entropy or I think it is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which basically says that everything will deteriorate to the state of least energy. It takes energy to maintain civilisation. It takes energy to maintain a house. If you just leave it, it will decay over a period of time. We see that contrary to the theory of evolution, which would have us believe that when we leave things alone, they actually magically move towards states of higher and higher order, the progression that has been outlined here is more consistent with our experience. It says very simply, if you leave a house and you do not maintain it, and you do not look after the garden, it will eventually deteriorate and degenerate until in a few hundred years time the place will be completely wrecked, probably not even a few hundred years.
There are a few other points there. We see with the world today, increasing lawlessness and a few Scriptures, Matthew 24:37-39: "But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be." And we read in 2 Peter 2:4-6: "For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly."
We see that we are coming to a place of judgement and that Noah is a type and a shadow of that. It is interesting to note Ezekiel 14:20: "Even though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, says the Lord God, 'they would deliver neither son nor daughter; they would deliver only themselves by their righteousness.'" Implication being that Noah, Daniel, and Job were men of remarkable righteousness. And we need to see the parallel between Noah and the flood and what is going on in the world today and for that which is about to come. There are scriptures which speak of the increasing lawlessness at the end of the age and certainly lawlessness is something which is endemic in the world today. So [inaudible 00:46:55 - 00:47:06] over the past 6000 years. If we look at the church and I am not giving precise dates, my objective is just to give you a thumbnail sketch. I have a large collection of books and reference documents if those are of interest, but it is not really central to this whole discussion to know the finer points. What is relevant is to consider a very different perspective of how the world, the church, and therefore marriage have been conducted over the last 6000 years.
We have seen that we are created in the image of God and trained in God's laws. We see in Genesis that God fellowshipped with Adam on a very personal, very intimate basis. We see through Scripture a steady decline with man being less and less willing to speak to God. There was a steady decline to the flood and it seems that Noah preserved God's truths and other people did not. We see the decline to the nuclear holocaust and some truths retained and some righteousness retained by Abram. We see Israel raised up by Moses by which stage the level of the knowledge of the things of God had deteriorated to such an extent that it was now necessary for God to formally record His laws in the Torah, the Books of Moses, which had largely been forgotten by that stage. But with the understanding that we have obtained so far, this is not a case that God was now coming to these primitive savages who would have no knowledge of Him and giving them a sudden, dramatic revelation of His law, it is a case of that knowing the Lord that walked in the law that the world was so degenerate by the time that He brought Israel out of Egypt that His law was to all intents and purposes forgotten and He had to send Moses to re-establish the basic principles of covenant law and God's laws of conduct and marriage, etc.
We see that in the church, Israel the decline continues and it is necessary for God to constantly send prophets to seek to arrest the decline but with very limited success. There are small outbreaks of revival, small returns to righteousness, but overall through the centuries Israel degenerates more and more into the ways of Satan. After the exile to Babylon, they returned to Israel. They have a revelation of the fact that they have to observe Torah, but they do not have a revelation of the Spirit, so in a very legalistic pharisaic basis they attempt to live the Torah but without the spirit of Torah. And again, this is just a case that they are going further and further away from the knowledge of God. It is not a case of they are slowly being raised up in some fashion. Finally, it becomes necessary for God to come to Earth as a man to restore the Spirit of Torah and to provide a new sacrifice to provide the animal sacrifices that men had failed to make with the right spirit as we saw in Malachi. So again, in the area of Jesus ministry and the Ministry of the Apostles, there is a momentary revival of perhaps 50 or 100 years, but by the year 100 AD, 67 years or so after Jesus' death, we find in history books that the decline had resumed. The church was just declining along with everything else. By about 315 AD the Council of Trent, the Roman Church took active steps to cut its Jewish heritage and cut ties that changed the Sabbath from Saturday to the day of the Sun, Sunday. They introduced many other deviations from Torah law and from Jesus and the apostles teaching and they introduced a doctrine of convert or die. It became acceptable to kill a person who refuse to convert to Christianity. That was regarded as a legitimate approach to spreading the gospel. It gave rise to the crusades. It gave rise ultimately to the Holocaust in the Second World War where many of the people involved actually considered themselves to be Christians and used that label.
It is important also to understand that the vast majority of what Jesus taught was not new principles. He was restating Torah and he was correcting the perversions of Torah that were being practised by the Pharisees. We have seen that in the series of teachings that Jesus was not introducing new laws with regard to divorce and putting away. He was simply confirming what had been said all along. He did not introduce anything new. He just pointed out to them that there was very little basis for a man to put away his wife or divorce her and that was pornea, fornication, which was exactly the same as uncleanness and if we did not have the added complication of people believing that the New Testament had been written in Greek when it was written in Aramaic, it seems likely that the word pornea is translated from in the New Testament is probably the same word as used in Deuteronomy. If we understand that, we will see a lot of these distinctions going away. The whole sermon on the mount as we know it, can be found in various places in Torah. The principles were there. It is just that because we do not understand that because we think that Jesus was bringing some higher revelation to supersede some jaded and inadequate and second rate revelation, we completely miss the point.
Mankind have slipped so far from the knowledge of God by the time Jesus came to Earth that he had to re-introduce and re-instruct the people in the absolute basic principles of God's covenant law and man had generated to such an extent that they were no longer able or willing in the right spirit to keep the covenant their side of the covenant. It became necessary for God to bring to an end the animal sacrifices, etc., because man was no longer able to maintain them.
As we move closer to the present age from 300 AD, we see that the church moved further and further away from both Torah and from Jesus and the apostles teaching. Ultimately the Crusades where enormous numbers of people were murdered because they refused to accept that Jesus Christ is Lord and the absolute abominations performed in the name of Jesus. So we see that the church going from the relative passivity with which Israel went into bondage and certainly not going around killing people to convert to Judaism to a point where the church becomes aggressive and offensive in a militaristic sense but also in a spiritual sense, murdering people who won't accept the gospel of Jesus Christ which is fundamentally that God is love. And we wonder why there is so little revelation of love from the church today. So that lead into the dark ages where certainly by the 1500s it would appear that the social structure on the Earth had degenerated to a primitive feudal structure. The technology had degenerated perhaps to the lowest point that it ever attained. And the church was in such apostasy that it would seem that very, very few people were serving God in any meaningful way and those who did were doing so to a very limited extent. Then in early 1500s we see Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others bringing about Reformation giving rise to the Protestant Churches and breaking away from the Catholic Church. We also see that first translations of Scripture to languages other than Latin meeting with great opposition and many like William Tyndale were burned at the stake as heretics for daring to translate the Bible into a language which the common people could read.
Since then there has been a progressive restoration of truth with regards like the Saturday Sabbath, water baptism, tongues, and healing following through to the present age, where most believe that this is the most advanced civilisation that has ever existed on the Earth that the church is now in some sort of or approaching some sort of Golden Age where there is enormous revelation and experience and that the church is bigger and greater than it has ever been. We also have the same view with regard to our science, technology, government, etc., and with regard to our knowledge of God. We have really seen if one observes and pays attention to what is being said that we regard ourselves today or mankind today and the church today regard themselves for the most part as being really superior being the ultimate progression of mankind. Sadly, it is far from that. Yes, there has been restoration of truth, but again it seems that if one considers a lot of what has been taught in this series, one has to draw the conclusion that at the time of Jesus first coming, there was an increased awareness of the need to return to God but that return to God had taken place with serious distortion of Scripture and with the Spirit of Torah, Spirit of Jesus teaching is completely absent.
If we take this teaching on marriage as a reasonable indicator of the state of the church, please seriously consider that that is the case. We are in a pharisaic condition today not far removed from the pharisaic condition that prevailed when Jesus walked the Earth. That also tends to support a view which says the second coming of Christ must be close at hand and certainly the great tribulation must be close at hand. We also saw in mid 20th century World War II and other events which included massive destruction of the Jews by people who claim the name of Christ. Martin Luther is alleged to have said that the only good Jew was a dead Jew and that is allegedly an underpinning principle that was behind the Holocaust of the Second World War. People felt that they were doing God a favour by destroying the Jews. The reality of the church today is that we are spiritually destitute, trapped in Pharisaism and with a very limited understanding of Torah as evidenced by the scriptural analysis presented in this teaching series. So we see that we think we see, but we are blind.
Just a couple of scriptures on that subject: John 9:39-41: "And Jesus said, 'For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.' Then some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these words, and said to Him, 'Are we blind also?' Jesus said to them, 'If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, 'We see.' Therefore your sin remains." So we see the alarming prospect that many of the people, men and women of God around the world who say that they see today and yet they do not see certainly in the areas that have been covered in this teaching must ask themselves what about the coming judgement. This is not something to be proud about. It is not something to judge people about. It is something for us to cry out to God for compassionately for people's eyes to be opened and to turn from sin that they do not even realise their sin, but they will find a sin on the Day of Judgement if they are not correctly informed. The same applies to adulterers not inheriting the Kingdom of God. There are millions, probably billions of people on the planet today who are scripturally adulterers and do not know because nobody is telling them the truth about adultery.
Revelation 3:17-18: "Because you say, 'I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing'—and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked— I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see." Surely that passage addressed to the loudest in church must have direct relevance to most of the Western Christian Church and perhaps most of the church on this planet right now.
2 Thessalonians 2:3 says: "Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition." We certainly have a massive falling away. 2 Peter 2:1-6: "But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction." The wrong teaching with regard to virginity, adultery, and divorce alone of what has been covered in this series must be seen to be destructive heresies. Many will follow the destructive ways because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed. Again, we see today that many of the truths that are shared in this series of teachings are rejected by the majority of people in the Body of Christ. Verse 3: "By covetousness they will exploit you with deceptive words; for a long time their judgment has not been idle, and their destruction does not slumber. For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly." We have to see the close correlation of the first few verses of this passage in describing the situation which has been dealt with in these teachings.
2 Timothy 4:3-4: "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables." We have recently seen that many people have been turned aside to the fable of fairy tale of monogamous marriages. We have certainly seen that people do not want to hear or certainly from my experience, the majority of people do not want to hear the true definition of adultery, the true role of virginity and the church is telling people they may get divorced and remarry. They are telling people that one night stands are things that happen. 1 Timothy 4:1-3: "Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry." We have seen that repeatedly in the series of teachings.
Ephesians 5:25-28: "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself." Again we see there is a correlation between a spotless church and marriage and the church today as we see is anything but spotless. In one of the visions that Joyner reports in the book 'The Final Quest' it was said to him that the hordes of hell have been released on the Earth and he also saw in his visions massive demonic oppression on the world and particularly on the believers and as we have seen in the teaching on deliverance, the indications are that most if not all the human race and most Christians are demonised to some extent.
There is a group prevailing or operating in the Earth today called the Illuminati. Nobody knows too much about them or says they know too much about them, but in a book called 'Masonry: Beyond the Light' by William Schnoebelen who was a mason and also involved in witchcraft and who went through the process of illumination to close to the final stage. Illumination involves people committing their lives to Satan and inviting Demons to come and dwell in their bodies and take control of their bodies and hading their lives over to Satan. And Schnoebelen alleges that the Nazi SS and others responsible for the most heinous atrocities in the world over the last few centuries have been illuminati, people who have given their lives, their bodies over to the possession of Demons.
So overall we have seen in this discussion of the church that the church is desperately far removed from being a spotless bride, a miracle is required and the church must understand the miracle of marriage and walk in the miracle of marriage before she can come into unity. The Word of God says that by this the world will know that Jesus says he is when the believers come into unity. The church has to come to a place of being a spotless bride before Jesus can return and there is an enormous amount of work that has to be done in the spirit realm before the church will be a spotless bride based on what we have seen in these teachings. This set of tapes is a stepping stone to this objective of cleansing the church and preparing the bride of Christ. We also need to recognise speaking of this age that Isaiah 4:1-6 gives us something to really think about. Reading backwards as before because it gives us a better understanding of what is being spoken about: "And there will be a tabernacle for shade in the daytime from the heat, for a place of refuge, and for a shelter from storm and rain." Verse 5: "Then the Lord will create above every dwelling place of Mount Zion, and above her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day and the shining of a flaming fire by night. For over all the glory there will be a covering." Verse 4: "When the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and purged the blood of Jerusalem from her midst, by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning." Again, we see judgment coming on the church, Zion, and Jerusalem. "And it shall come to pass that he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy—everyone who is recorded among the living in Jerusalem." So this is after the tribulation and the judgement on this Earth before the Day of Judgement. In that day, the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious and the fruit of the Earth should be excellent and appealing for those of Israel who has escaped.
This is speaking of the second coming of the Lord of the messiah of the branch and in that day, the same day, seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, we will eat our own food and wear our own apparel and let us be called by your name to take away our reproach. So we see very clearly that in the days that are coming, there will be seven times as many women in the Body of Christ in the true church, the spiritual church, as there are men. This ties in to this whole teaching on marriage and the whole subject of this spotless bride. We need to recognise that and we need to adjust our thinking accordingly, because to the extent that we do not many, many women will continue to suffer unnecessary because of the false doctrine, the heresy of monogamy.
Let's look at the progression through marriage and I just want to walk through basically the same thread in terms of the historical analysis, the information that is available to me. Again, I am not going to cite all the references that are available, should you need them, but that it is really not the point. It is just to see in broad brush strokes how the developments and the degradation of mankind, the world, and the church has a bearing on what we are talking about the subject of marriage, Heaven on Earth. We need to see the parallel. The healing of marriage is necessary to bring Heaven to Earth in marriage for Heaven comes to Earth in the wedding supper of the land before the church is caught up into the air to meet with the Lord Jesus and before the new Jerusalem comes down out of Heaven as a bride prepared. They are absolutely intimately and indivisibly linked.
So again to recap with regard to marriage, man was created in the likeness and image of God. He knew God's laws and he was deeply covenant-minded, highly spiritual and his marriage worked. In those days, it would seem that a man with one wife was quite strong enough spiritually to stand against the onslaught of Satan, and there was not all the distraction taking place and the fallen away, so there was no need for a man to have more than one wife. There was sufficient men to go around. Then Satan began to realise the power of the One Flesh Bond and of marriage, and started to make a concerted effort to destroy it. Satan also realised that the messiah had to be born of a pure woman and therefore he sent his angels to defy woman. We read in Genesis 6:1-5: "Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. And the Lord said, 'My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.' There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."
So we see that before the flood, Satan's Angels were consummating marriage with women and they were bearing them children. 2 Peter 2:4-5: "For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly." We see reference of this also in Jude 1:5-8. So perhaps Noah was the last pure man before the flood. He has survived the flood with one wife each possibly because they were still spiritually strong enough to only require one wife or because they were the only moderately pure women remaining after the majority of women have been defiled through inbreeding, etc., with the progeny of Satan's fallen angels. After the flood, plural marriage became increasingly commonplace, until we see at about 1000 BC. David as king who is repeatedly referred to as a man after God's own heart in 1 Samuel 13:14 and again in Acts 13:22 and where we are repeatedly told that he did right in the Sight of God in all matters except regarding Uriah the Hittite who had about 11 wives and 10 concubines. So plural marriage, polygyny was well established as a practise amongst man of God, man that God speaks of very highly and says that he was a man after God's own heart.
Subsequently, Solomon went too far and married many foreign wives and that was the cause of his downfall. About 440 BC, Malachi was speaking against putting away as marriage was declining, people were no longer practising God's standards in marriage and it was becoming degenerate even within the people of Israel. At about the same time, the exiles have returned in Israel speaks against marriage to pagans and forces a number of men to put away their pagan wives. As this was all happening and these things were developing in Israel about 100 years before Christ, the Greeks have moved into a fairly generally accepted social practice where man would have a wife who was locked away at home to make sure that she only bore his children. He would have a mistress who was sort of consort who went with him to social functions and what have you and who was a source of sexual intimacy and in many cases, the Greek men would also have a young boy for homosexual sex as well. That was a measure of the absolute dissolute and immoral behaviour in Greece at that time. Round about the same time, monogamy was first practised in Rome. The indications seem to be that monogamy as a formal legislative style of life first came into existence in Rome about 100 BC. By about AD 37, Caligula was emperor in Rome and by that stage, you may have heard of the movie Caligula, which was popular overseas and advertised with most garish and explicit posters in London and elsewhere about 20-30 years ago. By that stage, divorce, mistresses, murder, prostitution, adultery, etc., were rife in Rome. Caligula went through four wives, in some cases, murdering as I recall because he decided he wanted to marry them. During that period in AD 30-33 or in fact, probably AD 27 to 30, because there is an error in the calendar, Jesus Christ was teaching against putting away in Matthew 5:31-32, Matthew 19:3-10, Mark 10:2-12, and yet putting away was exactly what was happening in the Roman world and in fact why it is dealt with so repeatedly appears to be that the Roman practice of monogamy was creeping in to the people of Israel and those form of serial polygamy, men marrying or getting tired of their wives, putting them away and marrying another one instead of keeping all the wives that they had taken and looking after them was becoming prevalent.
So there is an upsurge by Jesus time of dissolute morals that was pervading the Roman Empire in association with monogamy. Roundabout that time and certainly starting in the centuries immediately following Jesus death, within the church and within the world, virginity was idolised through the idolisation of the so-called Virgin Mary, which ignored the fact that Mary had at least five children over and above Jesus. In Matthew 13:55 we read "Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary? And His brothers James, Joses, Simon, and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us?" So we see that he had four brothers seemingly all by Mary and sisters more than one, applying at least six siblings. So the whole cult of the Virgin Mary revolves around the female idols that is spoken about against throughout the Old Testament. Spiritual marriage became something that that was in vogue over many centuries, the form of marriage in which a man and woman were married in a contractual form but never had sexual intercourse. Nuns and monks found favour and association with religious vows of chastity associated with stringent lifestyles.
And sex came to be regarded as dirty, unclean, and second rate and something for the peasants and those ungodly people who could not contain their lust. And so the whole aspect of marriage, the sexuality of marriage, the spirituality of sexual act that we have talked about were utterly and completely lost and destroyed during this period. About 600 after Christ, the Roman emperor and at that time, head of the church, Justinian married Theodora, a reformed prostitute. Justinian is reported in historical accounts and alleged to have been a weak man whereas Theodora was alleged to have been quite strong and consistent and what we see there is that Jezebel was gaining legislative control over the church. I should mention that that information came to me after the Lord had spoken to me when in London, told me to visit a particular bookshop to go to a particular section and led me to take a particular book off the shelf and when I opened it I came across this information that I have just shared with you. So I have absolute certainty that this is what the Lord is saying, took place at that stage. There had been Jezebelic influences all over the situation that Jezebel at that point married. We read of that whole Jezebel. So Jezebel is associated with harlotry and Jezebel in a very real sense married the head of the church at that point, the Emperor Justinian and Justinian legislated monogamy for the first time in the Christian faith in the Roman church and around the Roman world, which was a large portion of Europe and so forth.
This is a fact that is overlooked by those in the church who argue that monogamy is scriptural. If monogamy is scriptural, why was it necessary for Justinian to legislate monogamy? We then discover that subsequently, in about 900 AD, a rabbi by the name of Gershom who lived between 965 and 1029 AD instituted or legislated within the Jewish faith a 1000-year ban on a man taking more than one wife. And it was reported that this ban which expired in 1950 and which is known as the [inaudible 01:22:33] Rabbeinu Gershom was renewed subsequently and remains in force over the Jewish faith today. It is interesting that if one finds footnotes for example in the Living Torah Jewish translation which makes this point, one finds it in Jewish books on marriage and you will find that most Jews if you engage with them in conversation roundabout the subject of marriage are quite well-informed that polygyny is scriptural, that there is no prohibition in Torah on it and the will also tell you that this is one of the reasons why they cannot accept that Christianity could possibly be from God and that Jesus Christ can be the Isaiah because we totally destroy the basic principles of Torah with regard to marriage, with regard to the Sunday Sabbath instead of the Saturday and so many other things, not to mention the persecution of the Jews.
Roundabout the time of Christ and that the exact timing is unclear to me, rings became common as a pagan symbol of marriage, I am not saying in the Jewish faith, but that just generally the pagans were using rings as symbols of marriage because virginity was of so little value that they had to have some other contractual device to indicate whether a woman was married or not because she was highly unlikely to be a virgin. By about the 1500s, ecclesiastical marriage was introduced in the Christian church that is contractual marriage in the presence of an ordained church official or priest as we know it today. By the late 1900s, the church was increasingly condemning divorce and ceasing to stress the importance of virginity and even suggesting things like so-called one night stands, casual sex, and premarital sex were unfortunate consequences of man's fallen state and therefore had to be tolerated. By the year 2000, there was more divorce, which is actually putting away in the church than in the world and statistics indicate that over two-thirds of marriages in the church are ending in divorce. These statistics are widely reported and they are never disputed and they are supported by casual observation. The vast majority of people in the world today have experienced divorce. I can remember even when I was a child and that is going back 40 odd years, divorce was a very exceptional thing.
Today, the vast majority of people that we know are divorced and remarried. The church has completely ceased to take a stand on divorce in the last few decades. We find it is even mentioned in the previous teaching that even internationally prominent Christian leaders are getting divorced and seem to have no shame at having their picture published on the front page of major newspapers. Yet we know that God hates putting away, and that most of those who remarry are committing adultery and therefore cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.
We also saw that nearly all Christians who are sexually joined to a person who is not resident with him and who in turn is similarly joined to another, not resident with them are in all probability, spiritually joined to every prostitute, witch and Satanist on the planet. The Body of Christ is defiled and the spiritual carnage is of catastrophic proportions where return to godly marriage in a miraculous turnaround in marriage are desperately required. We have to understand that viewed from God's perspective, the church is in the most terrible mess that it is the most appalling level of spiritual union between the Body of Christ and harlots, Satanists, witches, etc., etc. as a result of the total or near total disregard for the holiness of sexuality and the holiness and sanctity of marriage. I urge you to examine yourself in the Word of God, to examine what you have been teaching, examine what you have been doing in the living of your life and to where necessary repent, turn around, and seek the guidance of God to restore your life and the lives of those around you. Millions if not billions of people's lives are in utter spiritual turmoil and distraction as a consequence of the failure of the church to do what it is required to do.
The fundamental driving force behind that is our mistaken belief that today we represent the pinnacle of civilisation, the pinnacle of spirituality, where in fact, we do not realise how far we have fallen. We do not realise that man created in the likeness of an image of God 6000 years ago was enormously superior to us in terms of physical stature, physical capability, longevity, intellectual ability, knowledge and spirituality and knowledge of God. We do not know how far we have fallen and Satan has blinded our eyes with pride and through the false doctrine and teachings of evolution led us to believe that we are superior beings to any that have gone before us. We have to see the reality with regard to where we are today and seek to turn it around. And I have great in a certainty that at the absolute heart of this issue lies the truth regarding marriage that are being taught in this series of teachings. There can be no doubt that if Christian men and women can put into practice the corrections and adjustments that have been identified in this series of teachings, if they can come to the place where they have been healed and set free of their wrong beliefs and where their marriages are the way God intended them to be, we will come to the place where we will experience Heaven on Earth in our marriages and as we experience Heaven on Earth in our marriages, we will start to see Heaven on Earth in the church and the Body of Christ. We will see the Body of Christ coming into unity. We will see the lessons learnt in bringing marriage into harmony applied to bringing the church into harmony. We will see the denomination walls falling down. We will see the church coming to a place where truly it is a church with no walls. A universal church where people are free to come and go wherever the places of assembly may be, where there are no dictatorial rules of membership and partnership and where the church is approaching all truth. But there is a long period of restoration and healing required before God can return the church to anything that approximates the potential that she had at the time of the creation of Adam and Eve.
Please pray deeply about these points and consider your ways and the direction the Lord wants you to take going on from today, having listened to this teaching. Father in the name of Jesus I ask you to blow away anything that has been uttered in this teaching that is not according to your word, according to your will, or according to the true historical facts and in the name of Jesus, I ask you to take every truth that has been spoken, everything that is factually correct, everything that is according to your word, according to your will, and cause it to be implanted in the hearts of the hearers to water it by your spirit and to bring forth an abundant harvest to a glory of your name. And father, we just come to you now in the name of Jesus and we ask you to move mightily on this Earth today to restore the truths of your Scriptures, of your Torah, of your word to your church and to the world. Lead us Father by your spirit into holiness and sanctification, into all truth to deal with the deception and the error that exists in our lives today in Jesus name.
Father in the name of Jesus, share us the level of our present deception, convict us of our sin and turn us around from all that is wrong and not pleasing to you in our lives that we may become faithful servants. Pour out your spirit upon this Earth, Lord and upon your people. Judge us in this life that we may not be judged in the life to come. Father I ask you right now in the name of Jesus to judge all who call themselves by the name of Christ severely and correct them harshly that they may serve you more perfectly in this life that they may store up treasure in Heaven and not on Earth and that they may be found faithful servants on the Day of Judgement and not find themselves cast into outer darkness with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and classed as workers of inequity or people that never knew Jesus and Jesus never knew them or foolish virgins or goats. Father restore the truth to your church. Humble us we pray. And bring us to a place where we are in right standing with you in revelation of our desperate need with your guiding hand in our lives, in Jesus name. Amen.
04 21 Responsibility of Married Christian Women towards Single Christian Women
Number 20, in the second volume of the series 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' Volume 2 being 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage,' and this teaching is entitled 'The Responsibility of Married Christian Women Towards Single Christian Women.' This is another message, which seriously challenges our 21st century paradigm. If you have not travelled the whole road with us to this point, listen to all the preceding tapes I would really urge you to go back and listen to all the tapes that you have missed. If you do not, you will likely to have significant difficulty with this teaching. If you go the whole road, I really believe you will see that this is a logical extension of all that we have discussed so far.
I would ask you to pray with me now. "Father in the name of Jesus I bring before you all those listening to this message, I ask you open their ears to hear what you would have them hear and to close their ears to that which you do not want them to hear. I speak to any Demon or Fallen Angel that is within hearing of this message and in the name of Jesus I bind you now, and I command you to go down till this message is complete. I ask you Father to send your mighty warring Angels to bind, silence, and block the ears of any Demon that is within hearing distance of this message. And bind everything that would inhibit, any listener from discerning the truth according to your word, in Jesus name."
In the lead up to this particular teaching, there are a number of Scriptures which are particularly relevant and which I would just like to draw your attention to. Matthew 7:12: "Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." Leviticus 19:18: "Love your neighbour as yourself." Matthew 22:39: "You shall love your neighbour as yourself." The second commandment mentioned a total of 11 times in the Bible and throughout the New Testament. Jesus repeatedly mentioned, love your neighbour as yourself. Acts 20:35: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." It is really important that you see this message in the context of giving, loving, and doing onto others. 1 Corinthians 7:2 states: "Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband." However, the word in the Greek and the Hebrew translated wife has no singular or plural as we have seen previously.
1 Timothy 5:9 says: "Do not let a widow under sixty years old be taken into the number," and continues in verse 14, "Therefore I desire that the younger widows marry, bear children, manage the house, give no opportunity to the adversary to speak reproachfully. For some have already turned aside after Satan." So clearly, Scripture requires younger women to be married except in exceptional circumstances where they truly have been called by God to live a life of celibacy and that is not many as I read Scripture. And if they are not married, they will give the adversary Satan an opportunity to speak reproachfully and some of them will turn aside and follow Satan. In other words, this is a matter of spiritual life and death. We are talking about a situation here with a believing woman is unable to find a husband, she will find herself potentially falling away and not spending eternity with Christ in the extreme event. Accordingly, if we love our neighbour as ourselves, we have to establish how the situation is to be dealt with. We cannot continue to tolerate a situation which we have in the church today of an enormous proportion of women being unable to find husbands or ending up ultimately marrying unbelievers because there are not sufficient Christian husbands to go around. And depending on where you look, you will find in congregations anything from two times as many women to of the order of ten times as many women in just about any Christian congregation around the world.
Professor Christine, [inaudible 00:05:12] of the University of South Africa, a theology professor who has been speaking in favour of polygyny for some years now reports that the indications are that there are 200 women to every 70 men in South Africa. That sounds like a startling statistic, imagine in the light of AIDS and the violence over the last few decades, it could perhaps be correct but certainly that is challenging. But the bottom line is God intended every woman to be married and as we have seen in previous teachings, there is no prohibition on the number of wives that a man may take. Matthew 11:6 says: "And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me." That is because of Jesus because of the Word of God and he who receives you, i.e. Jesus' disciples receives me and he who receives me receives Him who sent me. So we are told not to be offended by anything that we find in the Word of God and we are told not to reject those who are sent in the name of God.
Matthew 10:27: "Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops." In other words, the truths we have encountered in this series of teachings, we are required to preach wherever we get the opportunity. Matthew 10:28: "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him (God) who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." Many people will find the subject of this teaching very, very difficult to accept and a major factor in that will be a question of what other people think, what will other people say. We are told that that is not a consideration. Ezekiel 33:4-6: "Then whoever hears the sound of the trumpet and does not take warning, if the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be on his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet, but did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But he who takes warning will save his life. But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand."
The critical implication of that passage is that every person who has heard some or all of these teachings and who may find themselves on the Day of Judgement convicted of sin in areas covered by these teachings, your blood, so to speak, will be on their own hands because they heard the truth and they failed to act on it. By the same token, [inaudible 00:08:18] have failed to produce this series of teaching tapes and to distribute them to the extent that I am negligent there or failed, the blood will be on my hands and since you have now heard this message, if you fail to take the message further to others, it is important to understand that the blood of those that you neglect to share the message with will be upon your hands. One of the things that has prompted me to really apply myself diligently to this sort of tapes over the last month or so was a blinding revelation about a month ago but because I had been less diligent in putting together these teachings and doing various other things around this subject that the Lord had called me to do, many people will potentially in hell or on their way to hell as a consequence of my negligence and their blood is all on my hands and I will be subject to a severe judgement on the Day of Judgement if I did not repent, turn around, and bring forth fruits worthy of repentance. And I would certainly say to everybody who is listening to this tape or this series of tapes, please understand that.
This is not a subject that can be listened to and put on one side. It is a subject of vital importance in the Kingdom of God. Each one of us will be judged according to what we do with this truth. And then the key verse that has attracted a lot of attention leading up to this teaching and is a critical element of this teaching is Isaiah 4:1: "And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, 'We will eat our own food and wear our own apparel; Only let us be called by your name, To take away our reproach." And we have seen specifically in the teaching on the anointing. That seven is the number of completeness. It is the number of perfection. It is the number of covenant. So the perfect number of women necessary to complete that man and to bring about a complete covenant will actively seek marriage with that man. That bears repeating in that day the perfect number of women to complete that man resulting in a complete covenant will approach him for his covering. This is not about men collecting wives as trophies. The counterpoint to that is that clearly the existing wife or wives of any Christian man finds herself in this situation and clearly has responsibility to walk with her husband according to this principle.
So there is a great onus on women who are already married to reach out and to help those women who are seeking a husband. This particular realisation came to me a couple of years ago. It is a realisation that initially I was rather reluctant or a revelation though as I was rather reluctant to accept in the same way that I argued with the Lord for many months over whether the Bible permitted a man to have more than one wife. I read in fact from Genesis to Revelation praying before as I read each book of the Bible, Lord in this book, please show me where you prohibit the man having more than one wife. And all I found was that every book in the Bible clearly by example or by explicit statement permits a man to have more than one wife. More recently I have come to the realisation that it is not so much...the teaching that follows makes it quite clear it is not about the issue of a man taking more than one wife. It is a case of the women needing that man. So it is a case of offering. It is a case of giving, not taking. A man should be looking at taking more than one wife, not because he is looking to take because he is giving. In other words, he should be looking to give his covering not take a wife. The semantic there is all important. By the same token, married women should be looking to give or share their husband to own married women. In 1998, I was impressed to write a document, which is entitled "A preliminary discourse on the scriptural responsibility of Christian men towards unmarried Christian women in the church of Jesus Christ." And I am just going to go through and give you some headlines out of that to elaborate on the point.
At that time I had been agonising over certain situations and I have been accused of various things because I had endeavoured to share the truth about marriage with a number of Christian leaders and others. So I was very reluctant to stick my neck out on the subject and as I was debating with the Holy Spirit as to whether I should write the document that I am referring to and in fact more publicly state of things that had been taught in this series, I became increasingly aware of the vast number of people who would not inherit the Kingdom of God or who would be judged severely and have a part in the Lake of Fire and Brimstone. I then in a last desperate attempt to back my responsibility, I asked the Lord for confirmation. He gave me Mark 7:7-9 in the Amplified: "In vain (fruitlessly and without profit) do they worship Me, ordering and teaching [to be obeyed] as doctrines the commandments and precepts of men. You disregard and give up and ask to depart from you the commandment of God and cling to the tradition of men [keeping it carefully and faithfully]. And He said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting [thus thwarting and nullifying and doing away with] the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition (your own human regulations)!"
That passage of Scripture carries an enormous punch for me and I hope, for you, so much of what has been dealt with in this series relates to just that. The Commandments of men being set up in opposition to the Word of God! Since writing this document I have been in contact around the world on a regular basis with a number of apostles some of whom who have put purer marriage into practice, others of whom are being prepared by the Lord. And in the discussions that revolve around a whole diversity of issues, one of the things that has cropped up repeatedly is that the world at large and many Christian wives seemed to see polygyny as some second-rate thing which involves depriving the first wife of something significant, and is often associated with very unacceptable, unchristian behaviour of the part of such wives. So we see that Jezebel principality manifesting in the Body of Christ as we have discussed previously. But out of ways discussions one thing has become absolutely apparent. Because a woman is one with her husband and is part of his house, she is accountable before God as he is with regard to responsibility to extend their covering to additional women who need it.
I just want to go in more detail to establish the fact that Christian men have a God-given nonnegotiable responsibility to provide covering to Christian women who do not have husbands and women who are already married to such men have a God-given and nonnegotiable responsibility to assist their husbands to extend that covering. That means that they should actively identify women who they believe are potential wives that God has brought across their paths. They should pray, they should intercede, and they should walk with their husbands down what is potentially a very difficult road in this day and age. The target situation here is any mature sincere committed Christian man who truly fears God and desires to do His will towards similarly mature devout and committed Christian women who do not have a husband and have been crying out for a husband and whose lives have been destroyed as a consequence of their difficulty of coping with their situation and the resultant attacks that Satan is making on them. That same comment applies to the Christian wives of such men.
The key Scriptures as far as this is concerned and these have all been touched on to a greater or lesser extent in previous teachings Ruth 3:9 in the Amplified: "And she answered, I am Ruth your maidservant. Spread your wing [of protection] over your maidservant, for you are a next of kin," i.e. please marry me. So we see from that firstly that Ruth was entitled to ask for covering. She took the initiative in asking for covering. Boaz did not decline to provide her with a covering and at no point there was a discussion as to whether is existing wives would permit it and the fact that Boaz was a respected senior member of the community as evidenced from other parts of the Book of Ruth, indicates that it is absolutely beyond the bounds of probability that he was a single man and a bachelor at that age.
Secondly Isaiah 4:1: "And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread and provide our own apparel; only let us be called by your name to take away our reproach [of being unmarried]." That is, there will be seven women saying please marry us for every man in the church with true believers as we have just said. And thirdly, Exodus 21:10: "If he takes another wife, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marriage rights." This refers to the rights of an existing man when a man takes an additional wife, even if the existing wife is a slave, a maidservant, or a concubine. So the net effect of all of this is that it is scriptural for any woman who is a Christian and asks for his covering and that man has no or little scriptural basis to refuse her. The only basis for refusal will be to pray and if the man was absolutely certain that it was God's speaking to him and telling him not to marry her then he should not marry her. But the underlying assumption in this is that if the woman is truly free to marry, and that is likely be the biggest single reason why the answer to prayer would be no because there are enormous number of women who are likely to ask for a covering or need a covering who are not contractually married in the sight of the word but who are not virgins.
So we have seen in a previous teaching the whole subject of covering and why the covering is so important and we have seen the reference in Genesis to the Fallen Angels, Genesis 6:2-5, which was cited in the previous teaching, again the sons of God, the Fallen Angels who had sex with and married the daughters of men gave rise to children, the apparent situation developing before the flood where virtually all men and women on the planet were part of a defiled bloodline with angelic genes, and this has come about because Satan was potentially seeking to pollute the bloodlines so that a woman could not give birth to an undefiled child which was necessary for the fulfilment of the prophesy in the garden of Eden that the seed of a woman would trample Satan's head. We also saw from that that the probability was that a large number of Satan's fallen angels are now confined in jail that is indicated in Titus and elsewhere and Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 and as a consequence Satan cannot afford to do that particular thing again but that towards the end of the age or in the very last days as he sees the time of his 1000-year imprisonment in the pit living rapidly he might in desperation resort to that and therefore it is absolutely vital that women are provided with a covering.
We ministered some months ago to a woman who is a mature Christian believer been serving the Lord for years without a husband, desperate for a husband, had an affair with an unbelieving man some years ago, dabbled in witchcraft, etc., before she came to salvation and apparently fairly regularly visited by incubi or succubi demonic spirit that made love to her, and she actually thought that this was coming from God. That is a measure of the deception, that is a measure of what Satan can do to a woman without a husband. There are enormous challenges around this. In the story of Ruth, we find that in the case of a widow, a man is honour bound in terms of Deuteronomy 23:3-4 to extend his covering to the widow of his brother. It seems a reasonable inference that one of the things that has changed in the New Covenant era is that we have moved from a physical bloodline through [inaudible 00:25:43] and Jacob Israel to a spiritual bloodline by faith through Abraham and therefore, we know that all of us who are born-again believers are Abraham's seed and therefore every woman in Christ is a sister in Christ and every man is a brother and therefore the dimension of this seems to change in the sense that it is arguable that every Christian man has a responsibility to any Christian woman who needs a covering.
We see in 1 Corinthians 7:39 that women are free to marry who she will, only provided that he too is in the Lord. In other words, she can marry any man that appears to her that is willing to marry her, irrespective of how many wives he already has provided he is a Christian. So very distinct requirements there in terms of marrying in the faith. No requirements in terms of the existing marital state. Coming back to Isaiah 4:1, we just keep coming back to this fact that there were far more women in the church than men and they are entitled to a covering. An interesting thing about Isaiah 4:1 is that it represents an amendment to the terms of Exodus 21:10. Isaiah 4:1 says: "And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, 'We will eat our own food and wear our own apparel; Only let us be called by your name, To take away our reproach of being unmarried." I refer you specifically to one, "Eat our own bread," two, "Wear our own apparel, only let us be called by your name." And the "calling by your name" comes about as a result of the consummation of marriage. The counterpoint to that is Exodus 21:10, if he takes himself another woman or another wife, he may not reduce the first wife's food one, clothing, two, or conjugal right. So we see that Isaiah 4:1 says that in these last days, a woman will waive any claim to the terms of Exodus 21:10 those first two items. She will provide her own food and provide her own clothing. Or if she will ask for is conjugal rights, the husband's name to take away her reproach.
So what she is looking for is the right herself wife and to take his name and it is interesting that in South Africa at least the new constitution does permit so-called customary marriage where [inaudible 00:28:53] appear to still be some legal technicalities to those married with civil marriages. It provides her with fellowship, companionship, and related privileges and allows her to fulfil her role of a homemaker, wife, and mother, sharing with the other wives. It permits wives to go out two by two as Jesus sent out his disciples and if we take the parallel between Jesus and his church and husband and his wives, it seems that there are many instances where it would be prudent for a wife to go out or wives to go out two by two for protection for companionship and so on and so forth. It is notable that a lot of women build up very close friendships with another woman and they tend to do everything with them at school and sometimes in later life and the realisation of the truth of a man having more than one wife permits best friends to marry the same man instead of ending up in a situation of vicious competition to see who gets him. Conversely it permits a situation to arise where a fellow wife becomes best friends.
Given the previous teaching on the strong One Flesh Bond, it is possible to imagine that one man and several women or seven women who are one flesh and in perfect unity and harmony would be a formidable spiritual unit on Earth, something against which the enemy would truly not be able to stand and undoubtedly a major factor why Satan has so ruthlessly lied about and opposed plural marriage since the days of Justinian in about 600 AD, if not before. It is also important to recognise that in Revelation 1 to 3, references are made to seven churches, apparently Jesus is married to a bride with seven major components, each of which has distinct strengths and weaknesses, each of them he reproves and corrects and to each of them he offers eternal life and victory with particular rewards if they overcome and endure to the end. It seems quite possible with Isaiah 4:1 for shadows is parallel on Earth and in error when men will truly learn to live together in unity and the church will come into unity. Many of the lessons which are necessary for a man to live in unity and harmony with seven wives in this generation are probably similar to the lessons of the church must learn to live together in unity. Rick Joyner makes it clear that it is only once the church comes into unity that victory over the enemy is gained.
Clearly, God did not provide the intimate parallel and in fact Ephesians 5:31-33 which has been the cornerstone of this series and I think marriage is an [inaudible 00:31:43] of our relationship with Christ. If we cannot live in marriages, he will have us live, we cannot begin to understand how to achieve the fullness of what is possible in our relationship with him. The harmonious seven wife marriage may turn out to be single most significant prerequisite to the church operating in godly works than Jesus did. It is also interesting to note that people all exhibit very different gifting, emotional, physical and other responses. It is therefore possible to envisage a situation where a group of women who have been brought to one husband by the Holy Spirit will find that they complement one another in such a wonderful way that the whole is truly great than some of them apart. This comes back to the teachings on covenant, covering one another's weaknesses, and we see from that with the diversity of skills and ministry gifting and intellectual and psychological and sociological skills and gifts that exists in humankind, one man and one woman cannot possibly cover all the weaknesses that exists in one another and larger team of people is called for.
Few other remarks, some people would say this is a carnal thing. I sincerely pray that by now, listeners have realised that this is not a carnal thing, it is a scriptural thing. It is about bringing wives under a spiritual covenant, providing them with spiritual safety. It is about building a spiritual house to serve God in spirit and in truth. People are concerned about AIDS when it comes to taking more than one wife. I have great difficulty understanding why when it comes to a man taking second wife, people would become more concerned about AIDS when it comes to taking a first wife. If the Lord brings him the wife, AIDS is not an issue. If you go out and start recruiting wives in the flesh, then AIDS becomes a problem, but it is just a symptom of a preceded problem of carnality. One flesh bloodline and other factors, we have talked at some length about the issues associated with marrying a divorced woman and given that many of the women who would potentially fall into category of prospective second wife or second, third, and subsequent wives, will not be virgins. There are enormous challenges around this, and again, the only safe route is to be absolutely certain that God has brought that woman in.
There are bunch of other issues which will need to be dealt with and God willing, there will be a wrap up tape in Volume 3 of this series which will deal specifically with ministry to people who have come out of adultery and come out of divorce. One thing that is very clear is that before a man takes a second wife or more than second wife, she and the first wife must be absolutely clear on the issues of submission, unity, and the fact that a divided house will fall. In this regard, I see increasingly that any man who is seeking to serve God will not even think of taking a second wife until he has got to a place where he is walking in real unity and harmony with his first wife and she is able to go with him into plural marriage. So there is an enormous, coming back to the subject of this teaching, there is an enormous responsibility on Christian women today to make an all-out effort to get there marriages on a sound fitting to come to a place of deep and sincere revelation of the truth of what has been taught in these messages and active intent to put it into practice and a devout realisation of their responsibility to encourage their husbands to extend their covering to women who need it. That is the bottom line. If the existing wife or wives will not support her husband to take another wife, the house will be seriously jeopardised. So we must conclude that these women are required by God to reach out to their unmarried sisters and if she does not do that, the blood of those who are unable to marry a godly man because of her refusal to share her husband will be on the hands of the woman who refuses to share her husband. Equally, a husband who refuses to take more than one wife, because he cannot handle a wife he has got and he is not prepared to do the work that is necessary to bring his marriage to this state that God requires it to be in order to take another wife will find the blood of those wives who are unable to obtain a covering because of his disobedience and carnality on his hands.
It is really important to recognise that wives do not own their husbands. One gets to a place where one has to conclude that the Western world teaches women that they own their husbands. We hear far more about husbands cheating on their wives and it is acceptable for woman to have a fling on the side and even to have a long-term lover. The reaction to a man having a second woman is generally far more violent. At the same time, it must be stressed that for a man who has a revelation of this to go and take a second wife without consulting his first wife, and without bringing unity and harmony and agreement with his first wife is asking for trouble. The prospect of his first wife coming into unity with him on this subject is extremely remote and a divided house will fall. So the minute he has joined himself to a second wife and the two are fighting amongst each other or fighting with him and will not come into harmony. Instead of getting Heaven on Earth, that man has lined himself up for hell on Earth. So there is absolutely no way that a man should sink of taking a second wife until his first wife is in agreement with him and he certainly should not do it clandestinely or illicitly. If he has done it, he needs to deal with the consequences. He cannot put her away, he needs to work through it, and the wife who finds herself in that situation and is walking in true submission, should be willing and able to make adjustment that is necessary, even though she will undoubtedly experience distress of the fact that her husband has not dealt openly and honestly with her. But as we have seen, divorce is not an option unless one partner is irrevocably headed for hell, however there is some other extreme sort of criteria which leads to the Lord permitting a divorce and remarriage.
We have referred on a number of occasions to Hebrews 13:4: "Marriage is honourable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge." The word bed refers to sexual lovemaking in a sense and we see clearly, anything that is done within marriage and within the marriage bed is undefiled. Fornication and adultery is what God regards as being defiled. There are endless debates about what a husband and wife can do. Is oral stimulation permitted? Is an oral intercourse permitted? Is anal stimulation permitted? Is this permitted, is that permitted, is the rest permitted? The answer to that is that marriage is honourable among all and the bed is undefiled. That is a simple Scripture which answers a lot of the debate.
Consider that once a man and wife are joined to each other, they are no longer two but one flesh and therefore what they do within the confines of that marriage is nobody else's business, unless starts getting into some of the perversities of the world in terms of sadomasochism, bondage and so forth, in which case it is a perversion, it is not what God intended and something needs to be done by that man to change or by his wife to pray and ask God to change him.
This discussion now raises another challenge. If the husband is united to two or more women in the same way, then they are all one. Where do you draw the line in terms of joined sexual intimacy? The simple answer to that is the one I have just given you. Hebrews 13:4 says: "Marriage is honourable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge." Therefore if a man is one flesh with two or three women, two or three wives, then that is marriage. That is his marriage with all of those women. It is honourable and the bed in terms of what goes on between him and those women is undefiled. Consequently, the basic conclusion that has to be reached is that there is no scriptural inhibitor to a man making love to more than one wife in the same room at the same time to those wives assisting in lovemaking either to the husband or to the other wives, or to those wives making love or being sexually intimate with one another.
Understand that that is probably a rather startling conclusion in the context of what you have probably believed up till now. But that is the conclusion that one has to come to from consideration of that Scripture. This is an issue that I am agonised over a bit like the other one of a man having more than one wife, which at the time was startling and very challenging, even though years earlier I reached the same conclusion that when I was backslidden and when I came back to the Lord, I had it rammed into me that God appointed monogamy. So when I realised that the spread of God was in fact saying something else to me I had a great struggle with it. The same applies to sexual intimacy between wives. It was something that at a fairly early age I saw as being beautiful and attractive and when I came back to the Lord, I concluded that this was something that was defiled and dirty and certainly not something that a Christian man should want to practice with his wife or wives. Over the years, I prayed about it. The Lord gave me various confirmations and brought me to a place where I increasingly saw that is the way things were and eventually I read a document, which is entitled "Some thoughts on is sexual intimacy between wife is scriptural," which was produced in February 2000 in response to a heated debate that I encountered on a website bulletin board debated to the subject of Christian polygyny.
The bottom line was that one group said that it was completely scriptural for the wives of one man to be sexually intimate with one another whether their husband was present or not. And the others argued that it was completely unscriptural and in fact an abomination. The time I had exposure to it, people were trading insults and the thing had become quite unpleasant and very heated and I then sat down to seek to satisfy myself one way or another to what the Word of God said on the subject from a solid scriptural basis. The document itself is about 45 pages long and I do not propose to take you through. The entire document is available if that is something that seems important to you but I just like to go through the headlines. The first point, why should we consider the interpretation of 1 John 5:3, "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome." Proverbs 30:5-6 states "Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Do not add to His words, Lest He rebuke you, and you be found a liar." Revelation 21:8 states: "But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death." So by adding to the Word of God, you may be found to be a liar on the Day of Judgement
So if the Word of God shows us clearly that it is acceptable for the wives of one man to be sexually intimate in his presence or absence, then it is not for us to state otherwise that we may choose as with many of the other points of these teachings to elect not to put it into practice in our own lives, but it is not for us to judge those who do and to speak against it. As I start to analyse it on the tracks of the debate and the bulletin board revolved around the Scripture, Romans 1:26 and the verses immediately decided that where God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lust of their own hearts to dishonour their own bodies between themselves who changed the truth of God into a lie and worship and said the creature more than the Creator who has blessed forever our men. For this cause, God gave them up to vile affections for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. Likewise [inaudible 00:46:56 - 00:47:07] and receiving in themselves that recompense of the error which was meat.
Now, it is quite clear that this is dealing with ungodly sexual conduct, men with men, for example. That is outside the One Flesh Bond. We are dealing with extramarital situations here. More in-depth consideration of the context suggests quite clearly that the sins that have been talked about and the sexual sins which are dealt with in great detail in both Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 which lists a whole catalogue of sexual sins, all of which relate to intercourse between certain categories of relative and other parties, for example, adultery, bestiality, sexual intercourse between male-male penetration and so forth. It is not dealing in any shape or form with sex within the marital bed. It is not dealing with lovemaking between a man and the women that are part of his house. They are all One Flesh and they are under a completely different covenant and the set of rules within that marriage bed relative to outside the marriage bed. All of the rules in Leviticus 18 and 20 deal with spiritual conditions that are unacceptable. It is unacceptable for a man to marry a woman and her daughter because if he does so then he is One Flesh with the mother, One Flesh with the daughter who is already in the bloodline of the mother and there is a spiritual short-circuit because now you have a path from the mother to the daughter down the bloodline, which is a spiritual path I might add, and you have a second spiritual path from the mother to the husband to the daughter, so you have a spiritual short-circuit which would cause all sorts of problems as we have seen in the discussion on love.
In the same way, if a man has sex with his father's wife, you get the same sort of scriptural short-circuit. If a man has sex with near relatives, it creates the same short-circuit because the bloodline is still strong in addition to the One Flesh Bond. If two men have sexual intercourse with one another and form a One Flesh Bond, then the two houses are joined together and this produces an absolutely catastrophic spiritual short-circuit between two bloodlines and something which is intended by God to be a hierarchical diverging tree of family growth through the male bloodline, suddenly turns itself into something which is absolutely appalling with two men joined to each other and joining their bloodline together and bringing about all sorts of spiritual carnage, added to which there is a spirit to spirit communication to a greater or lesser extent, although generally speaking it would not be well developed between those two men and I think you get the picture. It is an absolutely appalling situation.
And certainly in that context, the wrath of God against all ungodliness and unrighteousness is clearly apparent. But to argue then, when there is no Scripture which in any sense even tentatively suggests that the wives of one man should not be sexually intimate is an equally serious pharisaic abomination. So conclusion is that Romans 1:24-27 actually has nothing to say about women within marriage being sexually intimate with one another.
In the document that I referred to there is a much more in-depth analysis of individual words, natural and so forth. I do not believe it is appropriate and relevant to this particular teaching. So the conclusion is there is no prohibition associated with that. The conclusion that I reached is thus we might construct an interpretation to the effect that a form of relationship in which two women live together as they were husband and wife and one place the role of husband is not acceptable, this might be the correct application of the word lesbianism, we cannot determine categorically that this conduct is unacceptable in the sight of Yahweh and if we cannot determine that it is unacceptable, surely it is adding to the Word of God to suggest that it is unacceptable. So the suggestion was made there that even two women living in a sexual relationship together is not strictly prohibited by Scripture. However, it is apparent from all the teaching thus far in this series that is not what God intended and certainly it is not something that should be seriously considered, but at the end of the day it is between those individuals and God which was over many years of reading and praying into the subject, I have yet to find a single Scripture which expressly and explicitly gives guidance on that. I could be mistaken, it is not something that has been of a high priority in my life, but given that I have been researching the subject of marriage and divorce and what the Bible has to say about sexual lovemaking within marriage for the last seven years and certainly the last five and a half years, I say with some confidence there is no Scripture there. Leviticus 18 and 20 clearly do not prohibit any sexual intimacy between women or wives as I have just discussed. They deal purely with extramarital sexual intercourse and sexual intercourse with specific family members and adultery and idolatry and male homosexuality.
So the conclusion that was reached in discussion of that was that if the Lord considers sexual intimacy between women and wives in particularly to be unacceptable, then it is almost certainly would have stated it in the Leviticus 18 and 20 which are basically shadows of one another and both very, very definite about what it is prohibiting. So again, there is no prohibition there. How do we respond if Scripture is silent? When Scripture is silent, we will not be found to be unrighteous on the Day of Judgement if we have done something which is not expressly prohibited by Scripture. It may not have been the best thing to do. It may have been a foolish thing to do, but it will not be something that will lead to judgement. Whereas sexual intercourse with a woman who is another man's wife will prevent that person inheriting the Kingdom of God. That is serious stuff and yet somehow, one can have a more heated debate with many people in the Body of Christ today about a man having more than one wife, and even sexual intimacy between wives. And [inaudible 00:55:12] with regard to adultery and one night stand, etc. [inaudible 00:55:16] complacently accepting. So again, no basis for prohibition. If marriage bed is undefiled, we have looked at that in depth. Once the two are One Flesh, they are one. There is no basis for separation and there is no basis for dealing or even having a discussion around the subject as we come to understand the One Flesh Bond.
Argument on the bulletin board that sex is for procreation, we have certainly seen in the teaching up till now that while children are a by-product of sexual lovemaking, the main reason for sexual lovemaking is to build a One Flesh Bond. And I have some tentative information which suggests to me that when lovemaking is deeply spiritual, the energy of that lovemaking will go into building the One Flesh Bond and when it is carnal and without passion and without the building of the One Flesh Bond, it will go into making children. That may sound like a rather harsh thing to say, but there are very distinct physiological differences between the act of sexual lovemaking between a man and a woman who are giving themselves to one another totally, whose spirits are totally open to one another who are going out of their way to please one another who are both highly aroused and both experiencing dramatic orgasms, the whole physiology of the act is completely different in that case versus a case where there is no desire, there is no arousal and it is a straightforward mechanical act on the part of the husband or the wife to release sexual tension, which incidentally is unlikely to be released very effectively in that situation. So it becomes a vicious circle. The husband cannot get released because his wife is not open to him. He starts turning to fantasy because she is not doing anything to help him. The fantasy starts turning to pornography, the pornography turns to adultery, and the marriage completely disintegrates.
In the process because they are not aroused and because they are not building One Flesh Bonds and because only the physical ejaculation is of material substance, it seems to me that the prospect of children is far higher than in passionate building. And perhaps that would explain to some point why Sarah did not have children. We see with Isaac and Rachel that Rachel had fewer children than Leah and she was the more loved wife. We see with Elkanah And Hannah that the loved wife was less likely to bear children than the unloved wife. Partly a compensation it seems that the Lord puts in place to balance this. This goes, if you like, in favour of the wife who is perhaps given less love. But there does seem to be a strong spiritual dimension to it because if we are walking in the spirit, we are not necessarily desirous of having a large family, but that is very tentative and rather tenuous suggestion.
Another aspect which has been touched on repeatedly, we read in the previous teaching a whole series of passages which say that we should come and worship God. Considering that lovemaking is beautiful and that Yahweh created it as a type and shadow of praise and worship as a combination of the beauty of marriage. To suggest otherwise is surely an abomination in the Sight of God. If Yahweh intended wives to enjoy sexual intimacy with one another as well as with the husband, who are we to deny this if we cannot find legitimate Scripture to support our prejudice? Equally since we are all one body in Christ and Ephesians 5 clearly demonstrates this, we must carefully consider what this implies. We are regarded as a fundamental requirement that members of the Body of Christ should join in praise and worship together. We are told that we should not forsake the assembling together with the brethren. Therefore surely, the wives of one man should engage in lovemaking to him together. We regard it as normal practice for members of a congregation to minister to each other in prayer, counselling, fellowship, and laying of hand. Surely by extension the wives and one man should minister to each other in prayer, counselling, fellowship, and sexual intimacy. To suggest otherwise, when there is ample evidence to indicate that many women and men practices form of sexual intimacy simply another form of the monogamous live, exclusivity and separateness. As a South African I have to ask those who are opposing this doctrine whether they are certain that they are not exposing a form of sexual apartheid within marriage.
It really is a case that if one researches these things and I have shared briefly, elements of my testament previously and in that period of being backslidden and addicted to pornography and obsessed with many things, this whole subject of sexual intimacy of man with more than one wife is very prevalent in the section of the world that embraces wholeheartedly the act of sexual intercourse generally in an extramarital, adulteress, fornicating fence, but in terms of the actual practice of the art and the skill of sexual lovemaking. Those parties have considerable knowledge and experience and have explored the fullness of what is available and it is commonplace to find reports of a man with two or three women experiencing ecstasy and release enjoying climax beyond anything that one man and one woman report. Any man who reports on an event like that almost invariably comments that his sexual capacity was unexpectedly and dramatically increased when he find himself in a situation with two women. And the women also report challenges. There are equally many reports of sexual intimacy between women in the absence of a man which show that where there is real desire and where the women really concentrate on giving to one another, simultaneous orgasm is possible which results in a state which is referred to in reports on this condition that they feel as though they are one. So we see the limited projection of the spiritual thread of orgasm in a case like that bringing about some degree of unity. I do not know whether a One Flesh Bond is possible between two women who are not joined to the same man, but certainly I have encountered a number of instances where it has been reported that women in that situation find themselves or describe themselves as becoming one.
We have seen already that Exodus 21:10 presents a challenge in terms of the aspects of food and clothing, but it also presents a challenge in terms of the conjugal rights. If a man has been living with a wife and sharing a double bed and they have spent every night since they were married in the same bed together, cuddling, making love, and sleeping together holding hands whatever, as things have unfolded from day-to-day, if he takes a second wife, and he is not permitted to make love to her in the presence of the first wife and if the wives are not permitted to be sexually intimate, them that man cannot hope to take a second wife without breaching the requirement of Exodus 21:10 which requires him not to diminish the conjugal rights of his first wife. However, if what I have shared with you a minute ago in terms of secular experience in this area is the way God intended it to be, then it is quite possible for that man to take a second wife, to take her into the same bed with the first wife and to be sexually intimate with both wives consecutively together with the wives being intimate with one another and he will then be able to honour the requirement of Exodus 21:10 and it will not diminish the conjugal privileges of the first wife.
If he practices some form of rotational monogamy, which is currently, to the best of my knowledge, the generally practised form of plural marriage amongst most of those Christians around the world who have already moved into the area of polygyny. There is a significant number of families have corresponded with a number of families and individuals in a situation in the United States in particular, I have met with a few of them in various cities of the United States while travelling on business and also when in Singapore, and having contact with others, another in London who is expecting to go into that situation. But most of them are advocating what I term rotational monogamy. In other words, the husband sleeps with one wife one night, another wife the next, according to some roster and when he is not with his first wife or with any of the wives and he is with one of the others, then they sleep alone. They do not have the warmth and the comfort and the Word of God says, they shall lie together for warmth. So there are many practical scriptural principles which tell us that it has to be logical and reasonable for the wives of one man to be together in bed with him, to be sexually intimate with him concurrently and to be sexually intimate with one another whether in his presence or not.
It is also important to understand Yahweh is the God of unity and not division. And Jesus said just before he was crucified, when he lifted up his eyes to Heaven and said, "Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You," in John 17:1-26. In verse 11, "Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are." Verse 21: "That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me." So we see again, the world will believe that God sent Jesus when they see complete harmony and unity in the Body of Christ. By the same token, they will believe that plural marriage with a man with more than one wife is from God when they see perfect unity and harmony. And how can one reconcile complete oneness and unity and harmony with the theology or doctrine which says each woman sleeps in her own room and the husband spends time with each of them individually but there is no sexual intercourse with one wife in the presence of the others, and there is no sexual intimacy between the wives. That is a divisive situation. It is not complete unity and harmony.
Given what we have learnt so far in this series regarding marriage, it cannot be the Will of God that there should be the least bit of separation or division in the marriage bed. Also understand that Satan does not create. He counterfeits. It has been said that there are no counterfeit $3 bank note because there is no real $3 bank note. Isaiah 40:28 makes it quite clear that God has created everything; Satan creates nothing. He only copies counterfeits and distorts and perverts. So given that there is substantial secular evidence to the effect that women can be sexually intimate with one another and find the experience highly fulfilling and highly pleasurable and even experience sensational of becoming one, given that there is also considerable secular information which indicates that a man making love to more than one woman will have greater sexual capacity than if he is making love to only one woman and that both the man and the woman will all experience greater orgasmic release and climax and satisfaction and fulfilment, then we have to conclude that that has come from God. Satan is not able to counterfeit something which cannot be done. It is one thing for him to counterfeit and pervert sexual intercourse between men and women by bringing about sexual intercourse by anal penetration, male to male, but that is not the same as women being stimulated by one another and it is not the same as a man having greater sexual capacity when he is in the presence of more than one wife.
So again, the fact that there is considerable demand for pornography depicting men having sex with more than one woman and women together and that is viewed in large measure by men and women equally. It is a myth to suggest that pornography is essentially a male sin. The indications are that there are as many and some statistics even seem to suggest that there are more women that read so-called men's magazines depicting naked women or to an extent one man with several women. The men read them and this is because women are highly aroused seeing one another naked and making love to one another and watching a man making love to another woman. There is not nearly the same demand for pictures of Satan's perversions of men with men and multiple men with one woman and so forth. And that statistics can be gleaned very readily if one is concerned about becoming detail oriented with regard to these things. But these are realities that are easily verified and I do not recommend that you should try and verify them in a carnal fashion and they are easily verified and the things that are depicted there, the level of sexual fulfilment and arousal, etc. are not things which are vile counterfeits of something that God created. They are part of what created.
On the other side, there is a subculture of lesbianism in which women live together as a husband and wife pseudo-situation where one woman cut her hair, dresses her in so-called butch fashion and fulfils the role of husband. While it is not explicitly prohibited by Scripture, except possibly that passage in Romans 1:26, it seems quite clear to me that there cannot be a scriptural basis for that. God created man to be the head of the wife and there are plenty of scriptures which indicate that and that women should be married and married involves the taking of virginity with the male sex organ. I do not think we need to go into a great amount of detail there.
Coming to another practical factor, in terms of Scripture and we have seen this in an earlier teaching, the Bible clearly says that we should work six days and rest the seventh. And there are examples and a parable given by Jesus which indicates that it was typical for people to work from sun up to sun down, in other words 12 hours. So we have scripturally a 72-hour working week, which does not leave a man an enormous amount of time to spend in prayer, reading the word with his family, children, etc., etc. And on that basis for him to try and distribute himself, if he has three or four wives on a sequential basis between those wives, it is not going to work. Whereas if they are together, it becomes more practical. Equally, there is a constraint that it is not necessarily always economically affordable in a plural marriage setting for ever woman to have all her own facilities. And if there is some degree of sharing of facilities, it makes the situation more practical. It is also important to note as we have seen before, there is no word for wife and wives, woman and woman, it is all word in the Greek and one word in the Hebrew. Again, the net effect of that is that in order for the Word of God to prohibit sexual intimacy between wives, very explicit and specific wording would be necessary to make that visible. It is not something that can be lost in translation. It would have to be dealt with very, very specifically.
We have seen previously that the wife in every sense is one with her husband. So again, we have no basis for division. Looking at it from a slightly different angle, there is a logical construct in mathematics called reductio ad absurdum and that basically says assume a hypothesis, work through it, and if it can be proved, if it works through to conclusion and it is valid, if it does not, it is invalid. As a first step to that, one can work towards the proposition is it acceptable for the wives of one man to be sexually intimate and one another through the following steps. The first question is "Is it acceptable for a man to be present in the same room with two women who are not married to him?" Answer clearly is yes. Scripture, Luke 10:38-42 shows us that is acceptable. "Is it acceptable for two wives to be present in the same room with a husband at the same time without touching?" If they are not married to him and they are sitting on a seat one next to the other, there would not be a problem. They could not help touching each other. So practically it cannot be a problem for him to have contact with two wives in one another's presence. This is kind of an absurd argument but the point is to demonstrate some principles here. "Is it acceptable for him to hold the hands of both wives at the same time?" There is no Scripture to prohibit it and it would be socially acceptable in any community which accepted the probability to have two wives. He can certainly walk in the streets and hold the hands of his wife and one of his children. "Is it acceptable for him to kiss on the cheek of one wife while holding the hand of the other?" Again, presumably yes, of both his wives. There is no scriptural prohibition. We see in Genesis 26:8 in the Revised Standard Version, we read of Isaac fondling Rebecca, his wife in a place where Abimelech can see her. So to kiss one chastely certainly cannot be a problem.
"Is it acceptable for him for him to kiss one wife passionately while holding the hand of the other?" Again, we do not find a Scripture and what we are looking for here is a transition point from the clearly socially acceptable point of a man being in the same room with two women, bringing them closer and closer and more intimately and looking for the Scripture which says so far and so far we have not find anything which says you can go no further. "Is it acceptable for him to fondle both wives intimately at the same time and for him to both caress and fondle him intimately at the same time?" We do not find a break point from the other point. So it must be as a logical natural progression. "Is it acceptable for all three to be naked together?" Again, we find nothing to indicate that two women cannot be naked in one another's presence. In fact Genesis 35:16-18 refers to a midwife and clearly a midwife sees the woman giving birth most private part. Little bit of an obscure argument but there are no direct Scripture and we are coming from a point of view Scripture is silent, how do we derive a conclusion?
"Is it acceptable for the man to make love to one wife in the presence of the other without the second wife in any way being involved?" By extension of the previous points, there cannot be anything. There is no Scripture which prohibits it, so we must conclude that it is permissible. If we read Genesis 38:11-19 the story of Judah and Tamar, it would seem that when he went to her as a prostitute, she did not go back to her house, otherwise he would have known it was his daughter-in-law and it would seem that they had intercourse in the countryside possibly within sight of the companion who was travelling with Judah. The next step, "Is it acceptable for the two wives to share a bed with their husband without being intimate with one another?" By extension of the previous points, there is no Scripture which introduces a break in that flow of logic. Ecclesiastes 4:11: "Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm; But how can one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken." The inference there is that if a man has two wives, it would be reasonable for the three of them to sleep together and be entwined and share warmth, otherwise one of the three is not going to have warmth.
So Scripture supports the contention that it would be perfectly acceptable from them to share one bed, and quite possibly perfectly logical viewed from a different sociological perspective today. The perspective we have today which we have seen to be seriously corrupted by the enemy. "Is it acceptable for the second wife to caress her husband while he makes love to the first wife?" By extension there is no breakpoint. "Is it acceptable for the second wife to caress the first wife while the husband makes love to the first wife?" Again, no Scripture which tells us otherwise. So if we are just following a logical progression of increasing intimacy from a man being in the same room with his two wives, and starting to touch, kiss, fondle, caress, undressing, and moving to lovemaking, we do not have something which says at this point, God has said one wife must leave the room or she must stand back. We have no guidance and God is not unjust. He is not going to judge us. He is not going to penalise us for action for which we have no Scripture to tell us that it is not acceptable.
The next step, "Is it acceptable for the two wives to touch one another intimately while the husband makes love to the one wife?" Again, there is no breakpoint. There is no Scripture to prevent it. "Is it acceptable for the two wives to be sexually intimate with one another while the husband watches it?" Again, a natural next step in the process and one which is not in any way contraindicated by Scripture, so we must accept and assume that it is valid. "Is it acceptable for the two wives to be sexually intimate with each other when the husband is not there or the husband gets up and leaves the room?" Is there any Scripture which says at that point they may stop and the answer to that is no. So the conclusion we have to draw coming from this perspective and I am going into this detail simply because this is a matter which is widely regarded as controversial and because it is a significant bearing on very vital part of the relationship between a man and his wives, it is incumbent on us to exercise due diligence to satisfy ourselves as to what the Word of God says, so that we are not acting and adding to the Word of God or subtracting from the Word of God and thereby sinning in a pharisaic attempt to avoid a sin which is in the sin.
So the conclusion again, there is no prohibition. If we take it from a different angle, if we accept that Isaiah 4:1 is speaking about the present age and is speaking about marriage and that seven is the number of perfection, the number of completeness, the number of covenant and therefore the ideal state at the end of the age is a man with seven wives, not because men are being carnal, because that is the way God has ordained it for the end of the age. Then we have to look at a situation where a man has seven wives and if he is only able to make love to any one of them in the absence of the other wives and not to have them share a bed, then he only gets to spend a night with each wife every seven nights. And the other six wives spends the night alone, so the wives spend six nights out of seven alone. They do not keep warm and they are not able to build the marriage and they are not able to build the One Flesh Bond and here we see perhaps a nub of the issue. We saw in one of the preceding teachings how vital and we have seen it repeatedly in fact, how vital the One Flesh Bond is. We have seen that with really deep sensitive passionate giving, loving, uninhibited lovemaking on a regular basis between husband and wife, a formidable One Flesh Bond can be built which brings about a spirit-to-spirit communication over distance, a unity and harmony and a capacity to work together, which in our current society is almost unimaginable. That is not going to happen.
If a man has several wives and he cannot be intimate with them together, they will never spend enough time making love for the One Flesh Bond to reach its full potential. Whereas if they are all in the same room together, the wives who are not directly intimately engaged with her husband at any moment in time are becoming aroused by watching and participating on the side and by caressing one another. The One Flesh Bond will be built between all of them and if it is in fact the case, that a degree of One Flesh Bond unity comes about if two women simultaneously climax in an intimate fashion. Then we see an absolutely formidable spiritual picture of unity and harmony over a period of time and we can understand why Satan really will not want that to come to pass and why he will so strenuously and so vehemently resist this particular truth.
So the bottom line there is that a marital arrangement which favours the husband and his wife sharing a bed except when an individual wife is during her period of menstruation and must be separated according to Scripture is clearly the ideal. I referred a moments ago to the concept of reducing to the observed and I just want to take that as one further argument in this case. If we assume that Scripture prevents two wives of one husband from being sexually intimate with one another in the presence of the husband or absent from it, we then need to walk back to the conclusion the consequences of that. If that is the case, by definition, none of the seven wives may be sexually intimate with one another in the absence of the husband since our assumption prevents wives being sexually intimate in the absence of the husband and there is no definitive Scripture or breakpoint of course which suggests that it is acceptable for them to be sexually intimate when the husband is present, then the wives may not be sexually intimate in the presence of the husband. The next step in our logical construct since our assumption prevents wives being sexually intimate in the presence of the husband and there is no definitive Scripture which suggests that it is acceptable for them to touch one another when the husband is present and they are naked and the wives may not touch one another in the presence of the husband when they are naked. Since the assumption prevents wives touching one another while naked and in the presence of the husband and there is no definitive Scripture which suggests that it is acceptable for them to be naked together in the presence of their husband, then the wives may not be naked together in the presence of their husband, since the assumption prevents wives being naked together in the presence of their husband and there is no definitive Scripture which suggests that it is acceptable for them to touch or kiss him or one another while fully clothed then the husband may not touch or kiss one wife in the presence of the others.
By extension of the same arguments used to determine that two wives may not be sexually intimate together, we must assume for the purpose of this analysis that Genesis 26:8 with regard to Isaac sporting with Rebecca does not provide definitive proof that it is acceptable for a man to fondle or caress his wife in the presence of others even in the presence of other wives, since our assumption prevents the husband in any way touching more than one wife at the same time and there is no definitive Scripture which suggests that it is acceptable for them to be present in the same room without touching even while fully clothed and it must be concluded that only one wife is permitted to be present in the same room as her husband at any time. By extension, a man may not be present in a room with more than one woman at any time nor may any woman be present in any room with any other woman at any time and this conclusion is clearly observed. It does not agree with the passage in Luke 10:38-42 quoted previously and so far this clearly indicates that since Jesus was present in the same room as two women who were not his wives. We know that Jesus was spotless who knew no sin. 2 Corinthians 5:21 states: "For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." So there really cannot be any basis for any rational person who is unable to provide a rigorous and definitive Scripture along any of these constructs to argue that two women married to the same man cannot be sexually intimate with one another whether in the presence or absence of their husband.
One last input on this, when I first became aware of this, I have been praying about it. I had asked the Lord about certain Scriptures and eventually I said, "Lord, please show me clearly what the situation is." I happened to be travelling overseas at the time, walking under a strong anointing and as I was praying I had a vision. In that vision, I walked out of my hotel, I followed a particular route down streets that I had never travelled before in an area of a city that was completely unfamiliar to me and in this vision I turned left out of the hotel, I went down a number of blocks, I turned left into a manger where I had walked about 100 metres, I turned right, walked into a shop. On the right as I went into the shop was a magazine stand. In the middle and the top row of the magazine stand was a magazine with a picture of two women and the Lord said the answer in that. I went and bought it. I was very reluctant to buy it. I bought it, took it back to the hotel and the Lord showed me two instances there, one involving two women with a man in a long-term sexual relationship and the other was a long-term sexual relationship between two women. In both cases, the descriptions were one of beautiful intimacy and the conclusion that I had to draw was that God was showing me and saying to me quite categorically that this form of conduct was acceptable and pleasing in His sight. Then he told me to dispose of the magazine.
So I say to you today with absolute certainty, the Word of God does not in any way prohibit a man being sexually intimate with however many wives he has at the same time in the same bed and it does not prohibit those wives from being sexually intimate with one another in the absence of their husband. God's objective is to build a completely united harmonious One Flesh house. A massive and forceful spiritual structure which is capable of withstanding anything and everything that comes against it. His concern is extramarital sex adultery, fornication and all the other abominations that is spoken against in Scripture. He has never appointed for there to be any inhibition or holding back between a man and his wives. And it is an abomination in His sight to suggest otherwise. And in so far as the world at large, the Christian world at large would want to suggest that there is a prohibition. We have seen definitively in this study that there is a robust case to be made for it to be scriptural for a man to make love in the presence of as many of his wives as he choose to be there at any particular point in time and for there to be mutual stimulation and intimacy. It is extremely challenging, profoundly important. If we are seeking to experience Heaven on Earth in marriage, it [inaudible 01:32:57] us not to put any pharisaic restrictions on what is acceptable in the Sight of God.
"Father in the name of Jesus I ask that anything that has been uttered on this tape that is contrary to your will or your word will be blown away and find no root in the hearts of the hearers. And I ask you Father in the name of Jesus that everything that has been spoken that is according to your word and according to your will and your purpose will be engrafted and implanted in the hearts of the hearers, watered by your spirit and grow and produce abundant fruit to the glory of your kingdom, in Jesus name. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, saviour of the world. Amen."
04 22 Living in Excellence - Reaching for the Heights of Marriage
This is teaching #21 in the series ‑ 'Understanding God's Way in Marriage,' Volume 2 'Towards Heaven on Earth in Marriage' and teaching #21 'Living in Excellence.' As the picture was unfolding that has been painted for us by the Holy Spirit in the last few days, I was impressed to include this teaching by Casey Treat entitled 'Living in Excellence.' It is a tape that while I was organising facilities, etc. for preparing this series, I came across and just kept coming across until I reached the point where I felt that the Lord was saying to me that this now needed to be included in this series at this particular location. The message was recorded at [inaudible 00:01:08] Celebration in South Africa on March 12, 1995. It is entitled ‑ 'Living in Excellence' by Casey Treat. I have not heard the message since I listened to the tape probably a month or two or within a month or two of that. So it is five years ago. I have absolutely no idea what is on this tape in the same way that I had no recollection of the content of the tape by Kenneth Hegan on 'faith' and also the tape on Brian Houston on 'negativity.' So the Lord is just weaving together the picture and I am very excited and interested to see exactly what is contained in this message.
[00:02:01] Preaching by Casey Treat: In Ephesians 2:10, the apostle said we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to barely get thy. Created in Christ Jesus to suffer and struggle and try to make it through life. Created in Christ Jesus to hang on till Jesus returns. He said created in Christ Jesus for God works. Everybody say amen. I know this is the first service but just as act like real life. Created in Christ Jesus for good words which God prepared beforehand. God prepared ahead of time that we should walk in them. Is not that great. Listen to the Amplified Bible, you might get a little bit more out of it if make it louder. "For we are God’s [own] handiwork (His workmanship), recreated in Christ Jesus, [born anew] that we may do those good works which God predestined (planned beforehand) for us [taking paths which He prepared ahead of time], that we should walk in them [living the good life which He prearranged and made ready for us to live]." Wow. Go ahead and say it backwards. Wow. God prepared not a mediocre life, not a 'barely get by' life, not a 'hang in there hope you can make it' life, not a 'run around and find some kind of life,' but a good life. Ahead of time! Before the time!. [inaudible 00:04:12] chapter 1 said, before He created a planning for you to live on. He created a destiny for you to enjoy. Come on. Now we are taking paths, which He prearranged and made ready for us to take. A life which God has predestined, prepared ahead of time for us. You know where the best place to be in the world is? You know where is the safest place today right now, 1995? Do you know where the safest place in the world is? Think now. According to recent studies and all the data that we can gather, 1995, do you know where the most prosperous place is? Take the research all over the world, any nation you want. Do you know where the safest, best, highest standard of living, most prosperity, greatest opportunity on the whole planet? Do you know where it is? Wherever God wants you! Come on. Wherever God prepared a life for you. Wherever God predestined you to be.
You can be in a lovely suburb of the United States of America and if you are out of God's will, die that quick in a car accident, cancer, heart attack, food poisoning, drive by shooting, no matter what, you can die anywhere when you are not in the will of God. And yet if you are taking path which He prepared ahead of time, a thousand might be falling at your side and pass out that at your right hand, but it is not coming at you. Only with your eyes you behold and see every words of the wicked. If you are taking the passage that God prepared for you, you are safe and secure, because He has prearranged a good life for you. Do not try to run some place for you will feel secure. Find God's purpose for your life. And that is security. Come on! Say amen. Sometime ago a very rich commissioned a painting to be done. He said I want this painting to illustrate peace. I wanted to depict ultimate peace. Peace of God and peace of mind. And so artists began to draw. Some artists drew lovely water scenes, lakes, oceans. Some artists drew lovely field with the wind blowing across the wheat. Some artists drew various depictions gentle, peaceful settings. But one artist painted a picture of a terrible raging storm, dark clouds, raging winds, trees being uprooted, mountains being blasted with the force of the storm and one section of the painting, the little cleft, a little hole in a rock on the mountain side and in that cleft of the rock was a little sparrow snug, safe, watching the storm go by. That is peace. In the midst of the storm. We had the presence and the will, the plan, the purpose of God.
Now that God has prepared such a life for us, and promised it is a good life, and I listened to Pastor Ray's television programme this morning, he preached be happy and running my hotel room, yelling at the TV, I hope I did not wake anybody next door. You probably I was talking to Demon and casting out the devil and not putting up with it. Go watch the TV show. How come if these things were true, that so many Christians struggle? How come so many Christians are running around trying to find some kind of happiness, success, fulfilment and they go from place to place, church to church, city to city, nation to nation, job to job, life to life, husband to husband. Trying to find something. If God prepared ahead of time this good life, and we have paths which God prearranged and made ready for us to take, how come so many Christians are struggling spiritually, emotionally, mentally, physically, financially? Why? We know that when you come to Christ or spirit to save, you are recreated and become a new creature in Christ. We also know that when you come to Christ your mind is saved. Your soul is not changed by the new birth. Neither is your body. That is quite obvious. When you come to the Lord, your spirit is changed. Spirit born again, recreated, made brand new, old things passed well, they become new. They just told he had a funky attitude before you got changed, you still got a funky attitude.
Do you get mad and kicked the cat before you got [inaudible 00:10:23] you are still kicking that cat. Cat turned and step back to you, you say get out of here cat. Because your soul did not get saved. That is why the Bible says that we are being saved. 1 Corinthians 1:18, we are being saved. Spirits live in us soulishly and not physically. Physically you will be when Jesus returns, you will be changed in the twinkling of an eye, this bottle will put on immortality, this corruptible will put on incorruption and we will receive glorify bodies. So we were saved spiritually, we are being saved soulishly and somebody we will be saved physically. Salvation is that only instantaneous but it is a process and it is a future event. You already knew that, right? Okay, just reminding you about all that you already know. You know what, one of the reasons and probably the main reason why so many Christians struggle, not because they are not saved, but because they do not know how to grow in the process of being saved. The spirit is saved, but their soul has not been changed. Their mind is not being renewed. And therefore they are not taking the paths which God prepared for them. They are doing their own things their way, not God's way. They are being seeing with [inaudible 00:11:59]. And your way is not near as good as God's way.
But when your mind isn’t renewed, you try to do it your way. And you do silly things and you do funny things and people go how come that guy is so stupid. Well, because he is living with an unrenewed soul. He is doing things his way rather than walking the paths that God prearranged and made ready for him to live. Are you out there? Now, there is one area of our mind that I believe is the major issue when it comes to walking out this Christian life, living this life, fulfilling our destiny, being all God called us to be, fulfilling the potential that God put in us, I believe there is one area of thought that is the critical issue that must be renewed if we are going to move in to those paths and those good works which God predestined for us. And that is this, how you think about yourself.
Your self esteem, your self image, how you think about you. Now, I know some of you would say, oh no, it's not that, it's how we think about God. And that certainly is the major issue, but most people think right about God. You have been in a church like this, you figure out what God says and who God is and you believe it. You know He is the Father of son. You know that He came to save the world. You know that He poured out his spirit, you know that he loves you that he wants to heal you, that he wants to bless you and you believe everything about God. But then when it comes to receiving for yourself, you say I can't. I am not worthy. I know it will work for them, I don’t it will work for me. There is something hindering. There is something not working for me. I don’t know what it is, I was just born to be this way, or my parents told me I was always going to be average or the school teacher said I would never amount to a hill of beans. And so those thoughts about ourselves hinder us from receiving what we believe about God. We read in Genesis 1:26, Ray preached on the TV show this morning where the Lord said He created us at His likeness and at His image and we are to dominate, we are to take dominion and yet so many Christians, most Christians in the world today do not do that. They do not dominate their circumstances. They do not take dominion in their world. They run from their world. They are afraid of their problems. They are trembling under their circumstances rather than trampling on their circumstances. Come on, say amen.
God said I gave you dominion over the [inaudible 00:15:12]. I think it is at every creeping thing. How can you have not taken dominion, not because you do not believe in God but because you do not think you can do it. Look over Psalm 8. Just turn in your Bible to Psalm 8. Psalm 8:1: "O Lord, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth, Who have set Your glory above the heavens!" Look down to verse 4: "What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honour. You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet." Under the circumstances I do not think I am going to be able to make it to church. What are you doing under the circumstances? What are you doing under that? The Bible says all things are under your feet. Ray said this morning on the television that you got everything to stay together, look down he is under you. Somebody said if you want to write the devil a message, put it on the bottom of your soul as the only part of your feet that he can see. God has put all things under our feet and yet we are tossed about by circumstances, we are worrying about the economy, we are troubled about the company, we are nervous with the problems of the children, we are upset about things going on in the world around us because we do not believe what God said about us. We believe in God. We know God is able. We know God give me life. We know He is great. We know He is good. Oh Lord, our Lord. What about you? Well, I am just hoping and praying. I hope everything works out as though it does not look good. What about you. Why do not you believe what God said about you? You are crowned with glory and honour.
Was it wrong to believe the Bible? Well, no. Is it wrong to believe whatever God said? Well, no. Well, God said that He crowned man, woman, people with glory and honour. See what happened. The devil has beaten our self worth and pushed down our self esteem and filled our lives with such beliefs that we cannot accept what God says about us. We ignore it, we deny it, we avoid it. We say yeah I know that works for somebody else, but it does not work for me. You know, it is a number one fear of mankind that is on the Earth today but it is a natural study, psychologists, researchers, talking to people all over the world today, I am not sure how many thousands of people that went into the study, but one of the questions was, what is the number one fear? Years ago, the number one fear was death. And life after death that what was going to happen after death was the number fear. That is why you can give an [inaudible 00:19:29] and say you are going to die, you better get saved now and everybody start running about. But that is not the number one fear anymore. That is why if you give an [inaudible 00:19:38], you are going to die, everybody says I hope I do, man, this world is miserable. The preacher [inaudible 00:19:46] you are going to die, you better come to the Lord, and the guy set up and said, I am not worried about dying, I am worried about living. What is going to happen if I do die? That's why we teach people how to live for God, not just get ready to die.
So the number one fear is no longer death and life after death, but number one fear in the world today is having to speak before a group of people. Is not that weird? I cannot relate to that. You know what else? I could not understand why anybody would be afraid of other people, except for this thought, we are so worried about what you think about me. And our biggest fear is standing in front of other people and somehow being exposed, being known, being embarrassed. Our self esteem and our self image is more important than anything else in the world today. Guarding and protecting our image and our self worth is more important than anything else in the world today. It is motivating so much of our actions how we think and how we feel about ourselves. Wives get frustrated because your husband does not say I love you, does not communicate compassionately, is not time, warm and doing the things you want a husband to do. And you get mad and you get frustrated. You know why he does not do it? Because he is nervous. He is embarrassed. He is uptight. He is afraid. He was never taught how to be a man. How to give, how to love, how to communicate, how to share. He was taught how to drink beer, watch cricket, play rugby, be a real man. Man [inaudible 00:22:09] how to communicate. How is your day honey? Huh. What you want to do now? Huh. Are you hungry? Unhuh. He is insecure. How come the average person out there in the world today is going to have a cigarette and a beer or a cocktail or a tranquiliser or some Coke or some pot, how come?
I am telling you now the same reason that the little baby has to have the little gummy, we call it a pacifier. The little dummy. Why do you smoke? It is your dummy. What happens when you get nervous? I do not want to talk to you. So it is a pacifier. It is a tranquiliser. Why in the world where billions of people are hungry and thousands are dying of starvation, do we still have massive obesity and in America where we spend billions on exercise machines and diet, we are increasing in the number of people who are overweight. Why? Because food is their tranquiliser. They get nervous, they eat, and they eat the wrong things and they get fat. Why? They feel that pain. They feel bad, they feel insecure. So we smoke, we drink, we use drugs. As Christians we eat. Cannot smoke, cannot drink, cannot chew tobacco, so let's go out to eat. The problems in our society mostly manifest our insecurities with ourselves. The communication breaks down in the marriage, manifests our insecurities with ourselves. We do not talk honestly and openly. We guard, we protect, we defend. We know God is able, we do not feel we are. We know God is good, but we feel bad about ourselves. And yet God said he crowns you with glory and honour and He put out things under your feet and you can dominate and have dominion in your world. Listen to me, as long as you doubt yourself and you doubt what God said about you, you will never fulfil the will of God in your life. Because when God says you can do all things but you say, not me, you have limited God because you have limited yourself. You doubt God when you doubt what God said about you. Get in as hiding in the winepress, he is trying to make us little loaf of bread, feed his family and in other words, all he is trying to do is survive.
He is just trying to make a living. He is not thinking about destiny. He is not thinking about prosperity, he is not thinking about abundance, he is just trying to make a living by some of you. Where in the Bible you are told to make a living? God gave you the life and say go live a destiny. But we have lowered ourselves to the survivalist, animalistic mentality, which is just make a living. So he is just trying to make a living, just get enough bread, feed his family. He is hiding in the winepress so the enemy would not get him. Hiding now from the devil and his circumstances and his problems and there he has the Lord shows up, remember Judges 6 and he said, hail the mighty man of [inaudible 00:27:06] and his head pops up out of the winepress, uh? Where, who? What are you talking about? And the ends of the Lord says, the Lord is with you. [inaudible 00:27:20] said you have been listening to [inaudible 00:27:25] man. Kideon says, no way, you got to be kidding me. And [inaudible 00:27:35] begins to argue with the angel and the Lord. [inaudible 00:27:40] angel pops up [inaudible 00:27:44]. He said no not me, I am not Almighty. [inaudible 00:27:50] my father's house and my father's house is the lowest of the whole tribe and we came from the worst tribe. What kind of a tribe is [inaudible 00:27:59]? They did not even cross the river. That is a flaky tribe. But I am the least that my father's house and my father's house is the weakest in the whole country and we came from [inaudible 00:28:14]. God says you mighty man of valour and Gideon says well done all God's miracles. I have not seen a miracle. I heard about it but I have never seen one. I have never seen nobody get healed. God you have done nothing for me. [inaudible 00:28:33] how to make a living. Is that how you and I are responding to the word of God? Same way Gideon did. And so they went to the process of proving in all these times the wonders of [inaudible 00:28:46] which is Old Testament, now we get the Holy Ghost, [inaudible 00:28:53].
But finally Gideon accepted what God said about him and Gideon began to rally the troops and he held up the sword, he said, the sword of the Lord at Gideon. See he believed in himself. He began to take control. Still hiding in your lifestyle just trying to make a living, because though you know about God and you believe in God, you do not believe in yourself. You do not believe what God said about you and you do not climb out of your winepress and say, you know what, come let's start take dominion. I am going to start making a difference. I am going to get involved with the youth ministry, with the home ministry, with the outreach ministry, with the ushers, with whatever I can get involved with and I am going to start making a difference in this nation. I am going to rise up in my business. I am going to get involved with the educational process. I am going to be in the government whatever you feel God has called you to and begin to say I am a mighty man, a mighty woman of valour and I will start dominating, taking dominion in my nation. And see even thinking that way some of you say uhhu. You cannot be talking to me and you know very well whom I am talking to. You are the Gideon, have to climb out of your hiding places. You are the Gideons that have to get out of your fears and worries and trembling and start being what God said you are.
Come on, turn to your neighbours that he saw can be you now, just turn and tell him. I am talking to you. Look at Jeremiah 29:11 "I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." God says I am not thinking about you as some weak defeated, negative, miserable, barely get by, make a living bunch. I am thinking about good things. Peace always carries with it prosperity. You need your Hebrew dictionary or your Greek dictionary every time the word peace in the Bible is mentioned, it carries the connotation of prosperity. God said I have thoughts of peace and prosperity about you. Signs of hope and to give you a future, a destiny, a great life, and abundant life, not barely get by, hanging in there, trying to make a living. Come on, charge, let's begin to believe what God says about us so we can fulfil the plans of God for our life. Joseph was raised in a dysfunctional home. He had a dad who favoured him over his other sons and that always sets up the child from misery and pain. He had a mother who schemed and lied and connived. He had brothers who fought and hated one another. The brothers sold them in the slavery and that was only because it had a sudden [inaudible 00:32:54] mercy they had planned on killing him. You go up in a home with a mom that is lying and scheming and conniving, a dad that favours and does not deal honestly and fairly and a bunch of brothers who want to kill you and instead just sell you, I suppose you would not feel real good about yourself. You will probably think, you know, my life is dooming for misery, failure. I am definitely born on the wrong side of the tracks. What a bummer. This is a totally dysfunctional home.
But Joseph had one thing ‑ a dream. He believes God has a good plan for his life. He believed that he has paths that he can take that were prearranged, predestined, a good life with good works given to him by God. He hangs on to his dream even while he is in the cage on the way to slavery. And he begins to rise up in father for his house and realises his dream and he begins to rule and reign over his circumstances. And then a woman lies about it because he would not submit to her seduction and refused to bow and compromise his moral standards. She has him thrown in jail. He is lied about it. He is misused, he is abused again. Right now he could have done what many of us would do because enough is enough. Is it stop my mother or my father or my brothers. Now is the boss' wife. It is obvious, my life is doomed for despair. It is obvious I was born at the wrong place at the wrong time. It is obvious I will never get ahead and be successful. But no, in prison. Joseph believes in himself. Clings on to his dream. Rises up and begins to dominate his circumstances and soon he is running to prison. Hey wherever you are, run it. Wherever you are, dominate it. Wherever you are, be what God created you to be. Some of you are waiting to get somewhere else and then you go and really do something. You better do right where you are or you will never do it anywhere else. Come on. And so he is running to prison.
Well, then the baker and butler have dreams. A break, I will get now. It is going to help me. You know what, forget about it. The [inaudible 00:36:01] saved the [inaudible 00:36:04] neck of that butler and got him out of there was it the baker, forget about it. We will do here. A long time to forget about God had helped you. Again, Joseph could have said, well, look at this, three strikes, you are out. First my family, then the boss' wife, now my own friends who I helped, who I gave to, who I served, interpreted their dreams and helped them to get out of prison. Forget about me. I am telling you, it is not bad. I cannot believe it whatever I do nothing ever works. Come on.
He keeps his confidence. He knows God has a plan for his life and he is rising up. Two years pharaoh has a dream. Butler says I remember a guy who interprets him, he helped me, I forgot about it. He is in prison. Joseph comes walking in. He is ready. You see what happens with many people when their big opportunity comes? Their attitude is so bad, they are so hurt, they are so frustrated, they are so upset with all that they have been through and they feel so bad about themselves that they sabotage their opportunities. Pharaoh called Joseph, he comes walking in, he could have said, first of all let me tell you few things. I had a crazy mom, a stupid dad, and a bunch of hateful brothers, they still [inaudible 00:38:02]. You got a guy working for you who has got a messed up wife. She lied about me. I have been rotting in your prison ever since and that [inaudible 00:38:15] over there, I helped him out and he forgot about me. So why in the world shall I help you? Pharaoh sick and tired of helping people. Trying to do the right thing. Trying to be positive. Does anybody care know? I cleaned this up, I have served his family, I go to work and [inaudible 00:38:56] every day. I am trying to do good, but what difference does it make? Oh you sorry thing. Come and let me just smack you upside ahead. You see the attitude, the hurts, the frustrations and the bitterness only set you up to sabotage your opportunities. Pharaoh says I had a dream, I will tell you what it was. And he interprets the dream. And he says now here is how you have to prepare for the future. The pharaoh says who are you going to get to handle that kind of preparation? Joe says no man. He is ready, he is positive, he is up, he is prepared after sitting in prison for years. Because he believed in himself. He believed in his future. He believed in his dream. He believed in his destiny. And one day he goes from the pit, the prison, to the palace. He is the head of the whole nation. From a dysfunctional family to running the greatest country of the world at that time.
You are raised with all kinds of problems, dysfunctions, divorces, diseases, disasters, political, emotional, religious troubles, so many things I do not even know about, but none of them are big enough or bad enough to stop you from taking paths which God prepared ahead of time. None of them can stop you from rising up, taking dominion, being the man, being the woman that God created you to be. There is only thing, big enough, bad enough, or strong enough to keep you from being what God created you to be, and that is what you think about you. Because the main ticket, as the woman think it, so is she. What do you think about you, that is the controlling factor. It is not the devil. We tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy. He cannot stop you. Only you can stop you. Let me close with these thoughts. When I believe in myself and see myself as God sees me, I know I am a new person and my paths cannot affect me. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says I am a new preacher in Christ. All things have passed away and all things have become new. When I see myself as God sees me, I know I have a destiny and an exciting future. Ephesians 2:10 I have already read it, what I believe in myself I feel confident and bold and free. 2 Timothy 1:7 "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound disciplined mind." When I believe in myself, number 4, I feel strong and I feel disciplined. Philippians 2:13 God energises me creating in me the power and the desire to do His will. When I believe in myself, number 5, I am able to love every person. Matthew 22:40, I love my neighbour as my family. When I believe in myself, number 6, I am not afraid or consoled by what others think. Proverbs 29:25, the fear of man brings a snare. Lastly, when I believe in myself and I see myself as God sees me, I press for the prize of the high calling of God and Christ Jesus and I know I will finish my course of destiny. Philippians 3:14, 2 Timothy 4:7, charge, let's believe we are conscious we are. It does not matter what mama told you about you. It does not matter what daddy said about you. It does not matter what the school teacher said or the religious preacher said or what the political party said or what the world said, what matters is what God said. He said I prepared a good life, a good path, a good future, a destiny for you. We are not here to make a living, we are here to live our destiny.
Let's believe we are who God says we are. Say amen. HalleluYah. Take the hand of your neighbour, take your neighbour's hands and say this out loud today, Lord, I hear your word, I receive it into my soul, I am renewing my mind in Jesus name. I am what you say I am and will fulfil your plans for my life in Jesus name.
[00:44:44] Casey Treat is the pastor of Christian Faith Centre in Seattle, Washington. I do not have contact details for that Ministry. He can be contacted through [inaudible 00:44:58] ministry, South Africa, private bank, X3062, Randburg 2125, South Africa or 011-792-3815 for contact details.
The message that God had given me to follow on from this is entitled 'Reaching for the Heights, the Pinnacles of Marriage.' And the Lord has just given us a really solid base to build that teaching on. As I said to you at the outset of the second volume, I have had a picture of where this is going but it has been incomplete and the Lord has been filling in all sorts of pieces as we have gone along in this collection of tapes which I found on a bookshelf which had been lying there for years and which has suddenly come together to fill in some of the gaps. It has been a real blessing to me.
God is taking us to a place of excellence. He is taking us to a place where we can experience the pinnacles of what He intended marriage to be. He is taking us to a place where we can experience Heaven on Earth in marriage and in doing so, we can learn to walk in harmony and unity and we can take those lessons and apply them to the church and come to a place where the church works in harmony and unity and in doing that, we can come to a place by the Spirit of God where truly there is a spotless bride for our saviour. We have a long way to go but we have started on the journey and the Lord is with us and if God is for us, who can be against us?
Just some headlines out of this. Best place to be is wherever God wants you. We need to be in the perfect Will of God and if the perfect Will of God is within the context of what has been taught in these messages, which I have absolute conviction it is every person who has hung in there and listened to this entire series of tapes, [inaudible 00:47:39] no matter what the cost and no matter how much our paradigms and our prejudices are challenged. The point was made how do you think about yourself. Do we see ourselves as created in the likeness and image of God? Do we see ourselves as commanded to take dominion? Do we see ourselves crowned with glory and honour? Do we see ourselves that God has put all things under our feet that He has crowned us with glory and honour? Or are we in bondage to the lies of Satan to such an extent that we cannot believe what Jesus says about us? Are we so in bondage to our fear of men and what they think of us that we have lost the fear of God? We have to learn how to live for God and in learning how to live for God, we will put Him first, we will put His commandments first, we will love him with all our hearts, soul, mind and strength in the fullness of the love that we have learnt about during this series.
If we doubt ourselves, we limit God. We need to take dominion in whatever God has called us to do. It is very apparent in listening to this teaching and seeing where the Lord has brought this in right at the culmination of this series of over 40 teachings around the area of marriage. He has brought us into the context of the fullness of the blessings and the promises of God as overcomers. And it is very apparent to me that in order to get to that place we have to deal with the other issues that have been raised earlier in this series. We have to bring our mouths into subjection. We need to tear down the vain imaginations. We need to control the words. We need to be delivered from anything that is oppressing us. We need to discipline our flesh. We need to walk in love. We need to become holy and sanctified. We need to observe the true Sabbath. We need to walk in the ordinances and the commandments of God. We need to come to the place where we are serving God with all our hearts, souls, mind, and strength. We need to deal with our hindrances. We need to cut off the ungodly One Flesh Bonds. We need to renounce the ungodly vows and promises.
We need to make restitution. We need to make right with God. We need to deal with everything that is keeping us away from Him. We need to make sure that we are clear that our occupations are tent making and that our real purpose on Earth is to serve Him and do whatever He has called us to do. We need to rethink our position with God and we need to rethink where we are going and we need to say "Lord, wherever you send me, I will go for wherever you will send will be a place of blessing that I store a treasure in Heaven, if not necessarily treasure on Earth." And we need to recognise that there are times of abundance on Earth and times of disciplining and chastening that He can send us in many different ways, to do many different things and we will meet oppression and persecution before walking in the fullness of the anointing if we are close to Him, if we sanctify ourselves and then we will walk in the midst of the fiery furnace. We will be thrown into the den of lions and their mouths will be stopped but only if we lay down our lives to serve God. If we do not count the cost, if we do not hold back, if we seek to save our lives we are loser, so we must seek to lose our lives for His sake, not actively seeking to be put to death but seeking not to count the cost and not to be concerned if we are put to death. And if we do that, He will carry us through. He will provide for us in great abundance.
We have to be what God has created us to be by doing it right where we are. He will move us when He wants to move us when it is the right thing. He will bring in the people that we need to help us do it when it is right, but we must move now. We must believe we are what God said we are and we are who God says we are. The men in the Body of Christ need to learn how to be a man, they need to learn how to give, they need to learn how to share, they need to learn how to communicate. It is interesting that those four points raised by Casey Treat were at the very heart of what I stated with regard to building the house, the One Flesh Bond, and the consummation of marriage. The man will give and share to this wife totally in lovemaking. The union will be wonderful, it will be harmonious and at the end, he will be able to say "I am a man." We need to be the men that God has called us to be, which means we need to provide the covering and the shelter to the women God has called us to cover. And if we are seeking to be in the perfect Will of God and we have seen in this series that it is the Heart of God for man to have more than one wife, we saw that repeatedly with regard to David being a man after God's own heart. We have seen that Isaiah 4:1 speaks of seven wives in this age. That seven is the number of perfection, completion, and covenant and that God is seeing something that we have not necessarily understood.
We have seen the God intended marriage to be wonderful and good. We have seen that He created the One Flesh Bond to be a powerhouse of spiritual unity and harmony, that He created sexual lovemaking to grant to a man and his wives the ecstatic experience which will draw them close and build the One Flesh Bond. We saw that He created us to walk in agape, hesed, covenant love and to come to a place where husband and wives are in near telepathic communication with one another. And as a listener, whether you are a man or a woman, if God has called you into that form of marriage that is the best place to be. I am not saying that He has called every single man and woman in the Body of Christ to go into that form of marriage but there is certainly an enormous number of single women out there who desperately need a covering and we all certainly have many, many weaknesses that will only be compensated by a team of carefully matched people, each with their own strengths covering others' weaknesses.
It is remarkable that there are eight major personality stars identified in psychometric instruments and that each of those personality stars is identified with very distinct strengths and weaknesses with regard to the conduct of business and interpersonal relationships and the ability to get particular tasks done. There is a personality profile that is suited to a bookkeeper which is completely inappropriate to the sales executive and that in turn is different to the profile of an analyst and that it is different to a process control specialist and that in turn is different to a support specialist. If we consider the various gifts and callings within the Body of Christ, we find that the teacher, the pastor, the evangelist, and the prophet have very distinctly different attributes. The pastor is an outward focused shepherding sort of person. The evangelist is an extrovert, a communicator. The teacher is somebody who can take concepts and turn them into a fashion and present them in a manner that is easy for others to understand. The prophet is somebody who is quite and not oriented to relationships with other people. He is oriented to seeking God and hearing from God. The apostle is developed out of one of those four schools with a focus in one of those areas but with knowledge and experience across all of them to reach out and bring direction and correction to the church as the senior officers of the Body of Christ.
If we look at the secular area again, we see that there is a wide diversity of knowledge and experience sets. It takes years to train an engineer or a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer and each one of those disciplines has a role to play. If we come back to the marital team, one potentially has a situation where there are a diversity of spiritual gifting, some prophetic, some pastoral, some teaching in different areas. In the home environment, one can reasonably expect those that are more oriented to career and business, others who are more oriented to homemaking, running the home, raising children, teaching children, caring for elderly parents. There is a diversity of skills required which cannot possibly all be accommodated in one individual wife and if they are demanded put that wife under such enormous pressure that she is assured of feeling inadequate, God has a much better picture. God has a vision, a destiny for every man and every woman in the Body of Christ that they should be in the appropriate marriage with the appropriate partners that they should experience Heaven on Earth that their strengths should be fully utilised to the benefit of their family, but their weaknesses should be contained and covered by the others in the family unit.
God has a vision of men and women in complete unity and harmony of making an impact on our hurting world of drawing together to a place where they experience Heaven on Earth in marriage, where they come to a place with the One Flesh Bond between all of them. They are so strong and so harmonious that they are able to do great exploits for their God in prayer and intercession and in ministry, where they are able to move mountains with eight hearts, praying in perfect synchrony and harmony, tearing down the gates of hell and raising at the church. A family unit that can go anywhere and do anything that God calls us to do where the anointing and the power of God through love and that family's life is so powerful that it is unstoppable. That the dead is raised, the blind see, the lame walk, and Demons are cast out and the walls between the denominations and the divisions in the Body of Christ are torn down with a learning experience and the anointing gained in that family, those families around the world can be brought to bear in bringing the church into unity and harmony, that the day surely will come when the church will walk in unity which is unknown in the realms of the world and then and only then will mankind say "Now we believe that God, the Father, sent Jesus." And when that happens, when people see Jesus on us and in us and we do the works that Jesus did and greater works, then the God of Christ will be ready for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.
There is an enormous amount to do. There is an enormous challenge. If you have learnt nothing else through this series of teachings, I pray that you have realised that there is an enormous amount you do not know about the things of God, and there is an enormous amount of error in what the church teaches around marriage and many other things today. I do not say that to put you down. One of the things that I increasingly realised is that the more one learns about the things of God, the more one knows how little one knows and the more one learns the more one realises how little one knows. It is good for us to realise we know very little but then it is better for us to focus on Jesus and know that he knows all things and that he can do all things and that by his anointing and his spirit on us, he will work through us and he can and we can do all things through Christ. The anointed one and his anointing that strengthens us but his strength is made perfect in our weakness. So we must die to serve. We must seek the death of the cross daily. We must seek to be crucified with Christ and we must seek to come to the place where there is no flesh to sin and that which obstructs the will of God.
If we can come to that place where our flesh is crucified with and to Christ and where there is perfect harmony and unity in our bodies and in the bodies which are marital homes and if the One Flesh Bond has reached its full potential between husband and wives, then we will communicate with the Lord God spirit to spirit without the interference of our flesh. And that will be an awesome sight on this Earth. Will you step out in faith and accept the challenge that God is giving us today? To seize these truths and this vision and run with them and put them into practice in your own marriage and to take them and share them with everyone you know. To set the captives free, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord to open blind eyes, and to serve the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the saviour of the world with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul and all you strengths that you may overcome to the end in Jesus name. Amen.
Father I thank you that all that is contained in this teaching that is of you, according to your word, according to your will, and by your spirit, will be engrafted in the hearts of the hearers that it will grow and produce abundant fruit, watered and nurtured by your spirit and I thank you Father that anything in this teaching, which is not of you, which is not according to your will or your word will be blown away that it will take no root in the hearts of the hearers and it will be completely forgotten, in Jesus name.
May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, amen.
This message has been recorded by a church without walls, a ministry of End Time Issue Ministries, PO Box 898, Randpark Ridge, Randburg, 2156, Republic of South Africa. We can be contacted by email at James@end-time-issues.org.za. Our phone numbers, international dialling code normally 0027 but this may vary from country to country, the 27 is standard. Our landline 0027-11791-2327 or when in South Africa, 011-791-2327. My mobile number 0027-83251-6644 and in South Africa 083-251-6644. Our fax number internationally 0027-11791-5004 and locally, 011-791-5004. All materials produced by this ministry are available at no cost to those who require them, irrespective of financial means. At the same time, donations and offerings are clearly welcome to support the work. Please feel free to copy any of our materials in part or in full as the Lord leads you, understanding that the manner in which you utilise those materials and the manner in which you cite them and quote them is for your account on the Day of Judgement. So we would ask you to use the materials widely, but please feel free to copy them however you see fit and to share these truths with anybody as the Lord leads.
I would urge those of you who received copies of these tapes at no charge that once you have listened to them that you consider passing them on and blessing others with them. Our hearts' desire is that they should not become artefacts sitting on a bookshelf and gathering dust but the Word of God contained in these teaching should be spread as far and as widely as possible.
Should you be led by the Lord to sow into this ministry, our bank account is End Time Issue Ministries, the account number is 0427527805. The branch is the Standard Bank of South Africa, Randburg Branch, and the branch code is 018005. If in listening to these messages you have realised that you do not have a personal serving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that if you were to die right now, you would not spend eternity in Heaven with him, I would urge you to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and to pray the prayer of salvation. The steps to salvation are as follows. Firstly, admit and recognise that you are a sinner. Romans 3:23 says: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Secondly, accept and believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that he came to Earth as a man, that he was crucified and died on the cross, that on the third day he rose again, he is now seated at the right-hand of the Father. By his death and resurrection, he took your sins for eternity. Romans 5:8 says: "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Thirdly, confess your sins, repent of your sins, and turn around. Repentance means turning around. It means ceasing to do what you now realise is wrong. 1 John 1:9 says: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Four, confess your faith that Jesus Christ is Lord that you believe this and receive his salvation and invite him to dwell in your heart. Romans 10:9-10 says: "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation."
Give thanks to God for your salvation. Pray and cry out to God and give thanks to Him for saving you. Sixthly, work out your salvation by the Spirit of God. Philippians 2:12 says: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Salvation is a process. You are saved the moment you pray the sinner's prayer, the prayer of salvation and invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into your heart and be Lord of your life. That salvation is also a process whereby your mind is renewed and you come to have a personal and deep relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is your choice how far you go in that relationship. He desires a wonderful and a deep and an intimate relationship with you, but it is your choice whether you will do what is necessary to come to that place through reading your Bible, praying, seeking counsel, seeking guidance.
You should be water baptised at the first possible opportunity. Matthew 3:6 says: "And were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins." I encourage you to ask the Lord to lead you to somebody who has some knowledge of the basic ordinance of water baptism who can water baptise you or to lead you to a church where they can water baptise you. There is no reason why you cannot be water baptised today as a symbolic cleansing and washing of your sins. In fact, the minute you pray the sinner's prayer, it would be preferable for you to be water baptised. Choose to be obedient to the Word of God, accept the Bible in its original Hebrew as given by the spirit of God and choose to live your life according to that. 1 John 5:3 says: "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome."
I encourage you to read the Word of God daily and to put into practice everything that you encounter as a principle which I believe will bear fruit in your life. I would encourage you to make an effort right now after you prayed this prayer, start reading your Bible from the Book of John through to the Book of Revelation and then make a discipline of reading the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation at least two, three, four times a year and read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi at least once a year and I would encourage you to do that using different translations. Ask God to lead you to the church where he wants you to be at this time, where they will teach you, they will guide you, they will pray for you and they will help you to walk in the fullness of what God has called you to be. Be aware that He may move you. God may move you from church to church over time to teach you new things and you should not be reluctant to do this.
The service of God is a personal choice. It is a wonderful choice and if you will step out by faith today and pray the sinner's prayer and follow Him, you will reap a rich harvest if that is your desire to be found faithful on the Day of Judgement. Should you have listened to this and have decided that you are now ready to make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, I would ask you to pray the following prayer with me, in Jesus name.
Father, I come to you in the name of Jesus and I confess that I am a sinner. I confess that I don’t have a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and I recognise that without Jesus if I were to die right now, I would spend eternity in hell and not with you. I confess that I have sinned and I repent of those sins and I turn around, I choose to turn my back on sin and to serve God. I confess that Jesus Christ came to Earth as a man that he was crucified that he died and was buried and that he was resurrected on the third day, and that he sits on the right hand of the Father. I confess by faith that he died to take all of my sins, and I thank you Jesus for taking my sin and I give you my sin right now in Jesus name.
I confess by faith that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and I choose now Lord Jesus to make you the Lord of my life. I invite you to come and dwell in my heart. I invite you to take charge of my life. I invite you to start leading and guiding me and directing me and I give you my life and everything that I have and I commit myself to serving you now, Lord Jesus. I thank you that you have heard me and I thank you that you have now come to live in me, and I thank you for saving me. I thank you that I am now child of the most High God. I thank you that I am now servant of the most High God and that you will lead me and guide me into the paths that you want me to walk. I ask you Lord to lead me to the church where you want me to be. I ask you in the name of Jesus to bring the people that you want in my life into my life by your spirit and to remove the people that you don’t want in my life by your spirit, in Jesus name.
I ask you to close all doors in my life that you do not want opened that no man may open and I ask you to open every door in my life that you want opened that no man may close it, in Jesus name. Father, I ask you to teach me to be lead by your spirit. I ask you to open my eyes to have a revelation of the Word of God. I ask you to give me a hunger for the Word of God and for your spirit and I ask you to teach me to pray, in Jesus name. I thank you Father and I thank you Jesus for saving me and I declare that I am now a child of God and I praise you and I worship you and I glorify your holy name and I thank you for changing me and saving me and delivering me, in Jesus name. Amen.
Now that you have prayed that prayer and you are born again into the body of Christ, realise that the Christian walk is a journey, which Apostle Paul likens it to a marathon race. You need guidance, you need assistance. If you have no one to help you, pray and ask the Holy Spirit of God to come into your life and to help you. If you need to contact somebody, contact any of the major ministries. If you are not sure who to contact, contact this ministry through the address and telephone and email, details that was supplied earlier. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.