Consider ONLY the Promise:

I actually wanted to post this message of Dr Cref.lo Dol.lar (Because of your Unbelief Pt 2) the other day, but I couldn’t find it in between all the other recordings I have, and like I said then I felt compelled to share that other message. Well, yesterday I wanted to look for this message again, but once more I had no idea where to look for it. I just thought to myself; let’s start at the message we recorded on the first of March. Guess what? That was the message I was looking for! The very first message I opened, was the one I couldn’t find earlier this week. It can only be the Holy Spirit’s guidance that led me first to the message of Walking in the Supernatural and now this one:

“Go to Romans chapter 4. I want to show you something that … I don’t know, I never thought about this before, not in this perspective since I’ve read this scripture. Verse 19: “And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about a hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb:” Now we know the story, God told him that he was going to have a son, he is a hundred years old, his wife is old, everybody is old, everything is dead, and here is one word that I never… watch this, watch me use this word – I never considered – and it’s the word consider.

Let me give you the definition of this word and then you will understand what he did to not have unbelief. This word consider means; “to think carefully about, especially in order to make a decision.” To consider something means I’m thinking carefully about this, especially in order to make a decision. Here is another definition I like; it means; “to bear it in your mind…” To bear it in your mind. You’ve heard people say, “now, bear in mind, now…” Consider means to bear in mind, it means to contemplate. When you are contemplating something it means you are reflecting on it, it’s what I was doing with that polyp. Now, now watch this, this is so awesome…

So why is it that a hundred year old guy and a ninety year old woman, how is it that they can get together and give birth to an impossibility? I’ll tell you how, because Abraham would not contemplate, or would not bear in his mind, or would not think about the deadness of his body! He would not bear in mind; he would not contemplate, reflect on or think about the deadness of Sarah’s womb! He only thought and contemplated and reflected on what God promised. When he refused to consider the deadness of his body and when he refused to consider the deadness of his wife’s womb it kept unbelief out of the equation. And when unbelief is successfully kept out of the equation, mustard seed faith can go to work, and give birth to impossibilities.

I believe this year God wants to give birth to some impossibilities in your life. But He is not going to able to do it until we refuse to bear in mind the contradiction. We can’t think about the contradiction. We can’t think about the thing that goes against the promise. Here is what God is saying; “I need my people to only think about my promise. I need my people to only reflect on my promise. I need my people to only bear in their mind what I promise.”

So what the devil’s saying? The devil is trying to play the same trick on us that he did on Adam and Eve. They were only God conscious, they only contemplated God, they only reflected on God, and he shows up in the garden one day with the contradiction to what God said; “hath God said…?” And that was enough to get their thinking on what he said and get their thinking off what God said and what happened? The presence of unbelief began to short circuit their faith that had given them just the total, complete immersion in the presence of God.

See, it’s not that we are trying to be deep when we say; “you might not need to be around this, you might not need to listen to this, you might not want to look at that…” Why? Because the introduction of the contradiction is going to and could bring in the presence of unbelief.

If you find yourself – and this is what’s so wrong with the church – you see people wanting to put the scriptures in a certain place – “we are in church now and I don’t want to hear that.” Do you see the problem here? “We are in church and I don’t want to hear no scripture now.” You know what they are doing? Instead of hearing the scripture they are probably entertaining, contemplating, and bearing in mind the contrary to the scripture. You need to hear some scripture when you are acting crazy. Because what we are trying to do is stop the presence of unbelief.

Abraham focussed, listen… If you read Abraham’s life, if you read Romans chapter 4, Abraham looked like a perfect person, but if you go back to Genesis then you will see… You’ll try to figure how did they write that about Abraham? Because God is not recording a bunch of mistakes in heaven. You understand what I’m saying? So He is not trying to talk about all Abraham’s mistakes. Everything that it said in Romans chapter 4 about Abraham, it seems to contradict itself in Genesis. This man of faith – was not a man of faith at all in Genesis! They were laughing at God when He made promises, all of that stuff – you wonder where do they get that from. But this guy finally got it. I am only going to consider what God promised.

And you know what? In this economic time, don’t consider the decisions they made in Washington DC. You only consider what God says in His word; “You give and it will be given unto you, I’ll supply all your needs according to His riches in glory,” that’s what you consider. You don’t consider how much you make, you don’t consider how much your pay check is going to be, you’re not going to consider how much lesser your pay check is going to be.

You only consider what God said, you know what, when you consider what God says, and that is what you are contemplating, and that is what you are meditating on then that is what you are going to get! You will give birth to an impossibility! But that can’t happen, that can’t happen if you’re believing that God will supply all my needs and at the same time; “O, God is going to take care of me financially” but at the same time; “O dear God, did you hear how much my taxes are going to be…”Real Christians who want results are going to have to be willing to become more diligent about thinking and contemplating and reflecting on the promises of God ONLY.

That is why Jesus said, when Jairus’ daughter was on her death bed and a servant from Jairus’ house came in Mark chapter 5 and said; “your daughter is dead, why trouble the Master any longer,” and the Bible says that when Jesus heard that, immediately He said; “be not afraid, only believe.” Or another way is He said; “believe only.” In other words, don’t let an outside report distract you from where you are going. “You believe Me enough to come and find Me, to bring Me back to your daughter, and you are so focussed on I know…” This is what he told him, he says, “I know if You come and lay hands on my daughter she will be healed and she will live.” That is what he believed and then in the midst of him being focussed on that and contemplating and thinking that, there is somebody that came from his house and said; “She is dead. Don’t worry about it anymore…” And Jesus said, “wait a minute, if you just only believe, and not let this fear come in, you can have what we started working on before we met that woman with the issue of blood, she had it…”

There are too many miracles that we are reading about in the Bible for us to not know what we need to do to experience those things right now! How come we can’t experience it right now? I’ll tell you how come, because we keep letting the contrary come and counteract what we ought to be focussed on. I would rather have this many people as a member of Wor.ld Chan.gers Minis.try believe in God, than have 40 000 of them who don’t. I want to raise up some people who want to believe God, some people who will say; “You know, I know what you just told me, but I’m just trusting God!”

The Bible says about Abraham; “he considered not his body being dead nor the deadness of Sarah’s womb,” so what happened? As a result of Him not considering the contrary, notice what happened: “He did not stagger after the promise,” next verse, “he did not stagger after the promise in unbelief.” He did not stagger in unbelief; he did not stagger in unbelief! Why? Because he put a guard over his thinking – be careful how you think. Be careful what you hear. He put a guard over his thinking, and he refused to think anything except what the Word had promised him…

This is how we are going to get ahead ladies and gentlemen. It’s not much information, but its knowing how to practically function and operate in this information.”

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Miracle anniversary:

Exactly 2 years ago we received our miracle. I cannot tell you how it felt when I saw that very feint second line on the pregnancy test. I tested 4 days early and there it was – the positive we’ve been dreaming of for 11.5 years! I remember the very first thing that went through my mind was, Thank you Lord! Then I burst out in tears of gratitude. Then I felt shivers go up and down my spine because I realized this is it! This is the moment where we receive what we have been hoping, praying and believing for. One of the best days of my life, let me tell you – the first day I knew we received our miracle…

Even now I am still in awe of God’s grace and how good He is to us. How much He has blessed us and especially how much He has blessed baby G.

God is so good! Hallelujah! Thank you Lord! All the praise and all the glory must all go to our almighty Lord!

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Happy New Year!

First off I want to wish all the readers of this blog a very blessed 2013 – may you receive all the abundant blessings that Jesus paid the full price for!  That is what I’m determined to receive this year, and I wish it for all of you too.

Then the next thing I want to do is share a message with you that I heard on the 30^th of December because it made a huge impact on me.  It is once again a message that I stumbled across – I was watching TV while DH was taking a very long nap and there was just nothing on the regular channels, and when I saw that Cref.lo Dol.lar’s program was on TBN, I decided to watch it as I wanted to see one of his programs for a while now, but somehow just never got around to recording one.  I believe the Holy Spirit was guiding me to watch this specific program…  Since I did not plan to watch it I did not record it, so I’ll have to tell this from memory, and I hope the message comes across as strong as I heard it…

Luke 1:26-38 (NKJV):  “²⁶ Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, ²⁷ to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸ And having come in, the angel said to her, “Rejoice, highly favored one, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women!”

²⁹ But when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and considered what manner of greeting this was. ³⁰ Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. ³¹ And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus. ³² He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. ³³ And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.”

³⁴ Then Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?”

³⁵ And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. ³⁶ Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age; and this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren. ³⁷ For with God nothing will be impossible.”

³⁸ Then Mary said, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.”

Just put yourself in Mary’s shoes here for a moment.  Just think how difficult it must have been to believe that what the angel said was true.  Never in all of history was a baby conceived without the act of intercourse with a man.  Even in today’s day and age it is generally thought to be impossible.  Any doctor will tell you so.  It’s just us Christians who actually believe that is what happened.  But Mary never heard of such a thing, yet she believed the angel Gabriel.

The angel Gabriel told her; “³⁷ For with God nothing will be impossible,” and she believed him.  More than that, she replied; “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.”  In Mary’s case God’s Word acted as a sperm and fertilized one of her eggs, because the Bible says in John 1:1-5: “¹In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. ⁴ In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehendit.”  The Bible is speaking of Jesus here, calling Him the Word.

Now just think of all the impossible things in your life and this New Year start to believe for that.  Believe that all your debts would be paid off supernaturally, or that you will be miraculously healed of something that the doctors say cannot be cured.

“For with God nothing will be impossible.”

Do you think it’s impossible to fall pregnant?

“For with God nothing will be impossible.” 

Do you have a problem that makes it impossible to get pregnant naturally?

“For with God nothing will be impossible.”

Whatever your problems are insert them in here:   ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“For with God nothing will be impossible.”

³⁸ Then Mary said, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.”

Why don’t you insert your name here in verse 38; “³⁸ Then ……………… said, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word,” and speak this verse out over your life.

Not only that, but go to God’s Word (the Bible) and see what it says about your specific problem and speak that over your life too.  Let God’s Word act like a “sperm” in your life too, like it did in Mary’s life, so that you too can become “pregnant” and receive the impossible in your life.

I’m sure your problem is not as impossible as what Mary had to believe for, but even if it seems impossible to you, stop limiting God, and just trust that He will take care of the impossible for you…

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Receiving Blessings:

I want to share a part of a teaching from An.drew Wom.mack again, How to receive God’s best, about receiving blessings from God and how we are still blessed even though we don’t deserve it and what stops the blessings in your life:

“Here’s the thing you’ve got to get:  the blessing of God is not dependent on your holiness.  Whether or not you are worthy of it.  Abraham was blessed by God and Abraham wasn’t the greatest man around.  Abraham lied about his wife – twice, and was willing to let other men take… as a matter of fact she went into the harem of other kings.  Because Abraham was chicken and wouldn’t stand up for his wife and afraid somebody would kill him to get to his wife, she was so beautiful.  The first time that happened she was in her 70’s, the second time he was afraid somebody was going to take her because she was so beautiful, she was in her 90’s…  Boy, that woman was blessed!

But Abraham, you know what, even though he didn’t do things right and he wasn’t the holiest man, he believed God and he believed the promise that he was blessed and because of that God didn’t rebuke him for what he did, He rebuked the kings!  And He told that king; “you are but a dead man for that man’s wife.”  And the king said; “I didn’t know she was that man’s wife, he said; ‘she was my sister!’”  God said; “I know you, I know you weren’t guilty that’s the reason I’ve warned you, but if you don’t turn her back over to her husband I’m going to kill you and everybody in your house.”

You know why?  Because God had said in Genesis 12; “I will bless him that blesses you and curse him that curses you.”  God put a blessing on Abraham and even though he wasn’t holy and he didn’t always deserve it, once the blessing is given it cannot be reversed!  God doesn’t give the blessing based on your goodness or worthiness.

Religion has basically taken the power out of the blessing because we say we’ve got to be worthy of it.  No you aren’t worthy of it, it’s not because you are worthy, it’s because God is Holy and God said this and once God has spoken a blessing over you, you are blessed regardless of how good or how bad you are, it’s just a matter of will you believe it.  The only thing that can stop a blessing of God is your unbelief.  Not your sin, not your unworthiness…  Man that is one powerful truth!”

I want to end this message with the following scripture; Galatians 3:10-14 (NIV):  “¹⁰ For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.’ ¹¹ Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God, because ‘the righteous will live by faith.’ ¹² The law is not based on faith; on the contrary, it says, ‘The person who does these things will live by them.’ ¹³ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.’ ¹⁴ He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.”

What does that mean to us?  We can never live a sin free life, and if we try to we will be cursed, because we will break the law, but fortunately Jesus took the curse upon Him, He took all our sins upon Him, and those have been forgiven, once and for all.  Jesus redeemed us, so that we might receive the blessing of Abraham!  We get what Jesus deserves, fortunately not what we deserve!

Hallelujah!  Thank you Jesus!

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The spiritual world and the physical world:

Here is some more from the teaching of An.drew Wom.mack that I started yesterday:

“See God has already given, but we look at our experience – well, so and so died, it couldn’t be God’s will to heal everybody.  See here is the problem – most people interpret God’s word by their experience.  They say, “Here is what God’s word says, but here is what happened!”  What is the answer?  Well, they come up with all kinds of things.  “Maybe it wasn’t God’s will.  Maybe God says no.”

God will never say no to something He’s already said yes to.  2 Corinthians 1, I believe its verse 26 says, “All the promises of God in Him are yea and in Him amen unto the Glory of God.” That means they are all positive, they are already yes, anything God promised you when He says that it’s His will that you be in health and prosper even as your soul prospers then God has already said yes to that.  You don’t have to wonder whether God is going to say no.  It’s not God saying no, God said yes!

But here we’ve got a conflict – every one of us can probably see examples in our life where God’s word promised us something to the best of our knowledge, we did what God said, and we didn’t see it come to pass.  How do you harmonize the 2?    Well you start with the scripture that I used this morning, Romans 3:4 says, “Yea, let God be true and every man a liar.”  You can also put in there, let God be true and your circumstances be a liar.  Don’t interpret God’s word by your circumstances; interpret your circumstances by God’s word.

If you’ve got a circumstance that says, “well, I asked God, I believed with all of my heart, and yet it didn’t work…”  The natural conclusion is therefore, “it doesn’t work for everyone.  Not everybody gets healed.  It isn’t God will for everyone to be set free.”  That’s the natural conclusions.  You need to change that, you need to go to God’s word and say, “Can I find a scripture that says that God doesn’t heal every time?  That it’s not God’s will to heal?”  If you can’t find it, then you tell your circumstances that they are wrong…  Amen!

Here is an explanation of this:  There are 2 worlds, there is a spiritual world and there is a physical world, and most people aren’t really aware of the spiritual world and what’s going on in the spiritual world, but it does exist.  As a matter of fact the spiritual world created this physical world that we see.  It says in Hebrews 11, “We understand that the worlds were created by things that are not seen.”  It didn’t say things that don’t exist, they do exist but they aren’t physical.  Everything physical was created by something spiritual.  There is a spiritual reality for everything physical we see.

There is a whole spiritual world out there – did you know that the Bible says that there are angels assigned to each one of us?  Everyone of you have angels that are with you constantly, for your own protection, and I personally believe that in the Old Testament there was a 186 000 angels assigned to one person and if that is so, then what we’ve got makes that look like nothing in comparison!  According to 2 Corinthians 3, every one of us must have hundreds of thousands of angels to our disposal.

Now if you take hundreds of thousands and multiply it times the number of people in this room, then this room is crowded, Amen?  We’ve got all kinds of spiritual things in here but you don’t see it, and most of you, if you don’t see it you don’t think it, and you don’t believe it and you don’t know it exists and therefore you don’t draw on it.

Look at this in 2 Kings 6, this is an example of what we are talking about, this is Elisha, he was the successor to Elijah.  Elisha was a mighty prophet of God and the king of Syria was fighting against the Israelites and every time he would go down and set a trap for the king of Israel, Elisha would be told by God, and he would tell the king of Israel, the King of Israel would send spies out there and they would find that it was true and he would escape.  After a few times of this happening the king of Syria says, “one of us is a spy for the king of Israel.”   One of his servant girls, it was a captive that they’ve taken out of the land of Israel said, “it’s none of us, but there is a prophet in Israel that tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bed chamber.”  When this king heard that, he decided that he is going send his armies down and that he would capture Elisha.  So here is the story of it in verse 13, it says, “Go and spy where he is so that I may send and fetch him, and he was told, in saying, behold he is in Dothan, therefore send he forth horses and chariots and great hosts, and they came by night and encompassed the city about and when the servant of the man of God was risen early and gone forth, behold an host encompassed the city with horses and chariots and his servant said unto him, ‘alas my master, how shall we do?’”

That’s old English for saying, “Man, what are we going to do?”  And then he panicked – he saw these armies and he knew why they were there.  And look at Elisha’s answer.  He said, “fear not for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.”

You know if you don’t understand that there is a spiritual world, and that it is real and it exists, just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it don’t exist.  Now if you don’t understand that, people would think that Elisha lied.  See a lot of people when it comes to confessing the world of God and saying, “By His stripes I am healed,” and any idiot can look at you and tell that you aren’t healed, Amen?  I mean you look sick, you feel sick; you act sick, anybody can tell that you are sick!  You’re just lying!  It’s just positive lies!

I don’t know if any of you have ever been taken to task for confessing the word of God when it didn’t look so, well, see people who would believe that way would say, “Well, Elisha lied!” He said that there were more with him then there were with the enemy.  And yet you could look out there and count the enemy by the thousands, 1000, 2000, 3000 and here Elisha was saying, one, two…  Amen?  And there was more with him than there was with the enemy?  How do you explain that?  The answer was, that there wasn’t more physically but see in the spiritual realm there were more.

It says in verse 17, “Elisha prayed and said, ‘Lord, I pray that you open his eyes that he may see.’  And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man and he saw and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire around about Elisha.”  Praise God!  He was speaking the truth.  A person that says that it is a lie to say that you are healed, when you don’t feel healed, what that means is, you’re only looking at the natural realm.  The only thing that you consider to be true is what you see, taste, hear, smell or feel – you’re 5 senses.  And if that is what you consider to be facts, then yes it’s a lie, because according to your physical senses there are times that you speak that you are healed and you don’t feel healed.

But see, one of the keys to walking with the Lord is recognising that you’ve got to walk in the spirit.  There is a spiritual world out there; there are spiritual realities you can’t prove in a test tube.  How do you know what spiritual realities are?

I mean if you want to see the physical truth, if you want to see if your hair is combed, you go look in a mirror.  I have no idea right now if my hair is combed.  I hope it’s combed, but you know I can’t tell by my 5 senses.  I have to look in a mirror and I’ve got to trust what I see in that mirror.  How do you know that mirror is telling you the truth?  You’ve never seen the top of your head, all you’ve ever seen is a representation of it, a reflection of it, you don’t know….  “Well, I’ve seen a reflection, well, I’ve seen a picture…”  You have to take by faith that what you are seeing is true.  Well, see the Bible says that John 6:63, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.”  God’s word says that this is spirit, this is true.

What you read in the Bible is what spiritual truth is, so if you want to see if your hair is combed you go look in a mirror, and if you want to see what your spirit is like or if you want to see what is happening in the spirit then you hold the Bible up and look at it and whatever it says you just believe it.

The Bible says that Elisha had angels and chariots round about him and the Bible says in 2 Corinthians 3 that, “What they had, had no glory compared to what we got.”  It says in Peter that, “They were longing for the day that we live in because what we got is so much better than what they’ve got.”  If Elisha had angels and chariots round about him, praise God, I’ve got at least as many as he had and more round about me!  If he was able to take an entire nation captive with the power of God, then praise God I can do the same thing.  There is a whole spiritual world that exists out there.

You know our sister that got born again this morning, praise God for seeing her today, I was talking to her before the service, and I said, you’ve now got Jesus living in the inside of you and the same works that Jesus did you can do also (John 14:12).  You can do all of these things.  She was just looking at me kind of stunned!  That’s the truth – she’s now got God Almighty on the inside of her and as much as she can renew her little peanut brain – I’m not speaking specifically about you – all of us have a little peanut brain – and as much as we can renew our little peanut brain, we can receive this life of God in the inside of us.

But see one of the things that limit it, is we only think in the physical realm.  We say the Bible says, “Ask and you shall receive,” “I asked and I didn’t receive…,” well how do you know?  “Well I didn’t see it!”  Just because you didn’t see it, does that mean God’s word isn’t true and that God didn’t do it?

I want to propose to you – and a lot of you never thought of this, that God can answer your prayer and you don’t even know it.  Because see, God is a spirit, John 4:24 says, “God is a spirit and those who worship him must worship Him and in spirit and truth.”  Did you know that when God answers your prayer He doesn’t give it to you in a physical form?  He gives it to you in spiritual form…  If you ask for finances, finances are material; do you know what God will do?  He will release the spiritual power that it takes to produce those finances into your life, and He will always do it.  If you ask, you do receive.  God gave it.  If you seek, God will give it to you.  God is faithful; God always, always, always answers everything.  If you prayed for healing – God gave you healing, but He gives it to you in spiritual form.  And God’s operation independent of you ends in the spiritual realm.

God is not the one that is going to manifest it into the physical.  Do you know what does that?  Faith!  Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance,” substance is talking about physical tangible reality. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  Faith brings into physical tangible reality things that already exist in the spirit.  Faith doesn’t make things happen in the spirit.  They already happened by God’s grace, but your faith brings what God has accomplished into physical reality.  Is everybody following that?  God answers your prayers, but God gives it to you in your spirit and then your faith brings it from the spirit into the physical realm.  So if you’re praying for healing, God releases healing into you, but that don’t mean that you are going to see healing, unless you believe, unless you know how to co-operate.  Faith brings spiritual things into physical form.

An example of this is like radio.  Do you know right now we are using radio for you to hear me?  This microphone is a wireless radio, that’s what it is.  It’s broadcasting the signal over there and it picks it up and is broadcast over the speakers, but did you know that there is more than just this radio signal in this room?  There are literally dozens of radio signals and television signals in this room.  If you say, well, I don’t believe it, why?  Because I can’t hear it?  That doesn’t mean that they aren’t here!  That just means that you aren’t very smart!

There are things that exist beyond your capability to comprehend them with your physical natural ability.  You can’t hear radio and television signals even though they are in here and they are loud.  Do you know why you can’t hear them?  Because they are broadcast at a very high frequency, a frequency that is outside the human hearing range.  But they are in here and those signals are just as loud as this signal that we are tuned into.  There are many signals in here but the difference is that you can’t hear them; they are out of your range.  But they are here and they do exist and it is a physical, tangible reality.  But what happens is you get a receiver that can hear those things and it picks out an individual signal.  It can choose which signal it wants, it picks that out and then it re-broadcasts it, it demodulates it down a number of octaves and re-broadcasts it in a range that your ear can hear and that is the reason you hear me instead of all of the radio and television signals, but did you know they are also in here?

It’s just like God. God answers prayer, God will give it to you, but many people they don’t even know that God’s answered their prayer.  They aren’t able to perceive it, they aren’t able to get it and they aren’t able to put it down into the realm where they can perceive it and operate in it in their physical realm.  So they say, well, God didn’t do it.  Well, see the radio station is faithful.  The radio station – the signal is here – but whether you tune into it, turn it on, get it to the right frequency, whether you know how to make that thing work or not, has nothing to do with whether the power has been generated and whether the signal is released.

Did you know God has answered our prayers?  Anytime any of you have ever prayed for anything based on God’s word and you prayed in faith, God gave you your answer, but He gives it to you in a spiritual form, and whether you get it into the physical and whether you see it, is not dependent on whether God answers your prayer, it’s dependent on whether you can receive from God.  Amen?  That is important.

When I saw this, what it did – you see I had experiences in my life, like this girl I was telling you about that Jamie and I saw die, that really affected me.   And I guarantee you I had problems with it.  And I had a decision.  Was I going to get bitter and say, “God why didn’t you do it?”  Or was I going to hold on to, “God, you are faithful, You didn’t miss it, we missed it.”  I had a choice to make.  I just chose to believe that, “God I believe you answered our prayers, I don’t know why it didn’t work and it took me about 3 years before I began to find out some of the reasons why.

Every one of you have had instances where you have prayed or are in the process of praying for something and you haven’t seen it manifest yet.  You’ve got a decision to make.  Are you going to say, “Well, God why haven’t you done anything yet?”  The Bible says, “You’ve got to believe before you receive when you pray,” not when you see it, but when you pray.”

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Some explanations of common misunderstandings:

Recently I listened to An.drew Wom.mack’s teaching on How to receive a Miracle again and I realized there are some awesome explanations in there of things that are often misunderstood by Christians, and that it will help a lot of you who are still waiting for your miracles.  It was also a useful reminder to me, I must admit…

“Mark 11, this is where Jesus cursed the fig tree and the fig tree dried up from the roots, the next day the disciples saw it, they were amazed, and they asked Jesus about it and this was His reaction, Mark 11:22, “He answered and said unto them, have faith in God, for verily I say unto you that who so ever shall say unto this mountain…,” who so ever, that means that this applies to every person in this room, “Who so ever shall say unto this mountain, be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his heart but shall believe that those things which he sayeth shall come to pass, he shall have what so ever he sayeth. Therefore I say unto to you what things so ever you desire when you pray, believe that you receive them and ye shall have them.”

This passage of scripture’s got so much in it that we can teach on this for weeks, so I’m just having to hit a couple of things but one of the points I wanted to show you here is verse 24, He says, “what the things you so ever desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them and you shall have them.”  You’ve got to believe you receive now and then you shall – future tense – have it. That future tense may only be a second, a minute, a week, a month, but you got to believe right now. You don’t believe when you see it, you’ve got to believe when you pray. Now that is so simple, and yet this is where a lot of Christians stumble.

I’m teaching on how to receive a miracle from God and I’m just teaching a lot of it out of experience as I’ve dealt with people. What is it that hangs people up? And do you know most people, when I pray for them and lay hands on them, by the time they hit the ground, if they feel healed, then they are able to believe. Most people can maintain faith for 5 seconds, but the problem is when you pray and you walk out and you haven’t seen it manifest. 99% of even spirit filled, tongue talking word type people, have their faith just to start decreasing fast as soon as they don’t see a manifestation. Most people struggle with it.

And see the Bible says that you’ve got to believe that you will receive when you pray and then you shall have it, so what I want to share with you tonight, are some simple things, explanations, again I want to make this point, that the word of God and the kingdom of God is based on laws. There are rules, there are ways that things work and you don’t have to be ignorant of the things of God.

Paul said, “I’d not have you to be ignorant concerning the things of God,” in Ephesians 5, yet most of us are ignorant. Ignorance is a breeding ground for unbelief and for problems, there are answers to things, and there is a reason why you pray sometimes here and it’s only here before you see a manifestation.

What I’d like to explain tonight is why sometimes there is a period of time in between when you say “amen and there it is.” That’s the terminology Jerry Seville uses. There are things going on – if you understand this it will take away anxiety, it will take away worry and care and frustration, it will help you to stand and be able to believe and it could make a big, big difference in your life.

Look at Matthew 7, this is a familiar passage of scripture that everybody knows and doesn’t believe. It says, “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.” This is an awesome promise in God’s word. Did you know honestly, if tonight we were just acting like we were brand new, like we have never heard this scripture before, or if this concept had never come to you, and if I was here speaking, “Thus sayeth the Lord, ask and it shall be given to you,” did you know most of you would say, “that’s too good to believe.” That would be hard to believe. This is an awesome promise, and yet most Christians know this, you can quote it, we sing songs about it yet we don’t believe it…

Do you know why? It’s because I asked and I didn’t receive, I sought and I didn’t find, I knocked and it wasn’t opened to me, and so we arrive at this problem – here is what God’s word says, here’s what my experience says… How do you harmonise the 2?

Most of us say, “I don’t understand and we just lose our excitement, our authority in the word of God and you wouldn’t sit there and openly say, “well I just don’t believe that scripture,” but in practise you don’t expect it to work like that, and we will develop an elaborate systems of doctrine to explain why it doesn’t work and religious systems come out and say, “well, not everyone that asks receives.” See the next verse, verse 8 that says “everyone that asks receives…” That’s not true! The Bible says that “everyone that asks receives,” but this person asked and they didn’t receive…

I remember a good example of a very good friend of Jamie and I, had leukaemia and I was with her when she died, and she believed God to heal her. She stood up and testified at one of James Robinson’s meetings, with over 4000 people that God was going to heal her and I mean it shook us when she wasn’t healed. We prayed for her to be raised from the dead for a long period of time and it’s a long story but I mean, we believed the best we knew how, and if you would have been there you would have thought that this girl believed with all of her heart, when she was dying she said, “It’s got to be soon… It’s got to be soon…”

She was expecting God to heal her at any moment, yet she strangled on her own blood as she haemorrhaged, and you look at that and you see that and I can tell you what her father’s reaction was. He came to me and he said, “Well, I think we were wrong. It couldn’t be God’s will to heal every time or she would have been healed.”

What he was saying was, she believed with everything she had. Well it looked that way, it really did and I guarantee you that at the time she died I didn’t have an answer. But I told people, I said, “look, God’s word promised that it was His will to heal her” and I said, “I don’t know what happened but God doesn’t lie. It was God’s will to heal her,” and I said, “maybe she missed it, maybe I missed it, maybe her family missed it, maybe all of us missed it, something’s wrong but it wasn’t God that was at fault. It was God’s will to heal her and I had people get mad at me, I had people reject me and it was 3 years before I found out what was wrong, but man, it was a miracle we got as far as we did!

God’s healing was in her body! It was supernatural and we short circuited it, we didn’t understand anything about how to walk in faith and we just allowed the devil to beat us on that one. Some of you are saying, “Well, that is terrible that you could do something that would actually cause a person to die.” Brothers and sisters it’s just the truth. You can go out here and fall asleep at the wheel and you can kill somebody. You do have responsibility in the kingdom of God. There is responsibility for us to believe God and God just can’t violate all of his laws.

Sometimes we think, “Then why didn’t God come down and intervene?” Because there are laws put down and God observes His own laws. He’s bound Himself by His own word, that’s gone out of His mouth when He says, “You have power to heal, if you don’t use that power to heal it’s not going to get done!” Again, people don’t like that. I had a Baptist pastor come to me one time and we were talking about this one girl that needed to be healed. He said, “Look if God wants her healed, she is going to be healed whether you or I pray for her or not.”

It’s not so. God’s will does not automatically come to pass. The Bible says in 2 Peter 3:9, it says, “God isn’t willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” That is God’s will, but is every person going to come to repentance? No, because they have a choice in the thing, and also we have the responsibility to preach the Gospel, it says in Romans 10, “How can they believe if they don’t hear? And how can they hear except somebody preach the gospel.” Man, there is a responsibility on us. There are people dying and going to hell that were ordained, God loves them, He’s provided for them and yet, they aren’t going to receive because they didn’t hear.

People don’t like that so we make theology see, we just change our theology to fit the situation so that we will feel good but the truth is, God’s will doesn’t come to pass perfectly. Amen? I hope I’m getting you to think. Some of you are looking at me strange. “You mean God’s will doesn’t automatically come to pass in my life?” People preach the sovereignty of God, which I may be stepping on your religious toes right here… Sovereignty literally means independent, such as the United States is independent, we have declared our independence from Great Britain, and so we are now a sovereign nation. That means nobody dictates to us, but does that mean that we are without control, that we are without laws? No, we’ve got laws, there are restraints, we’ve got a constitution that dictates what this nation is like, but nobody else wrote it for us, it is not imposed upon us by somebody else, we wrote our own constitution. We’ve got limits but they are self imposed limits.

When we say God is sovereign people will say that, “well, you never know what God is going to do. God can do anything He wants to, God may do it this way one time, God might do it that way, God can do anything. If God wanted to he can come down and just heal you, whether you believe in faith or not!” That is not so! God has bound Himself by His word; I used that scripture this morning, Psalms 89:34, He said, “my covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that has gone forth out of my lips.” When He says, “You resist the devil and he will flee from you,” that means that if you don’t resist the devil, he won’t flee. God cannot rebuke the devil for you. And it’s wrong is you are saying, “O, God get the devil off my back,” God can’t do it. God gave you authority over the devil; you’ve got to learn what God’s given you. You’ve got to start exercising what God has given you. It’s not God that’s letting the devil run roughshod over you, it’s you that’s letting the devil run roughshod over you…

We are the ones that need to be turned on! God is not the one that needs to get stirred up. It gets me about intercessors today man, they’re just in there shaking God’s cage until He does something, “God, move, move!” God is not the one that we need to get motivated. You don’t need to beg with God to move in the Denver area, God wants to do something – He is trying to rattle your cage! To get you going! So much of our intercession, 90% of it is trying to motivate God to do something, God is more motivated than you are! You don’t have to pray for God to send a revival, God sent it 2000 years ago, what you need to do is get in there in the line of fire, amen, let some of it rub off on you, and God flow through you…”

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Receiving Blessings from God:

Yesterday morning while I was just about to get up out of bed I felt this burning desire to share a specific piece of scripture with you. I can’t actually remember if I’ve already blogged about it or not – I knew I’ve wanted to in the past, and I actually might have, but I guess it does not really matter much as I feel the Holy Spirit is telling me to do it now.

Let me start this post by sharing with you something that my friend “G” said to me a while ago. For those who don’t know who he is – he is a 62 year old man who also volunteers with me at a feeding scheme for the poor and unemployed in our city centre. Now “G” has had cancer for the past 25 years or so. He is a Christian and loves God dearly but he does not believe in the laying on of hands for healing. The reason being that he has known a lot of people with cancer and quite a few had believed in healing this way and have not been healed and have in fact died. He does believe God can heal, and God has done some awesome healing in him, since initially the dr’s gave him a short while to live, yet he is still alive today, but he is not completely healed. He has had numerous operations and many radiation sessions and even one course of chemo, but the cancer keeps on coming back.

We were talking about stuff and I was trying to convince him that God does want to heal him and want to bless him and he said something like, “I know this guy who is so arrogant that he demands blessings from God, and he says I must demand healing from God. I don’t think that is right, we cannot demand anything from God, He must want to give it to us…”

When the Holy Spirit laid the following scriptures on my heart, I immediately thought back to this instance and I wished I had thought of these scriptures at that stage, but right there and then I didn’t know what to say.

Genesis 32:22-30 (NIV): “Jacob Wrestles with God ²² That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. ²³ After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. ²⁴ So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. ²⁵ When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. ²⁶ Then the man said, Let me go, for it is daybreak. But Jacob replied, I will not let you go unless you bless me. ²⁷ The man asked him, What is your name? Jacob, he answered. ²⁸ Then the man said, Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome. ²⁹ Jacob said, Please tell me your name. But he replied, Why do you ask my name? Then he blessed him there. ³⁰ So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

I think we can say that Jacob was arrogant here to demand blessings from God, but he got it! Isn’t that amazing? It totally blows my mind – I would have never thought that God would do something like that. Especially when we look at who Jacob was – he deceived his father, and cheated his brother out of his birthright; Jacob was not a nice guy! Yet God blessed him, why? Because God had made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and God cannot break His word or His Covenant.

The good news is that we also have a covenant with God. We have a new Covenant, where Jesus was the sacrifice, the lamb, who had to give up his life so that we can partake in the covenant. What is covered by Jesus’ sacrifice? Firstly he died so that we can be saved – he took our sins upon Him so that we don’t have to be punished for our sins, Galatians 3:13 (NIV): “¹³ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.”

But what a lot of people don’t know is that there are other things also covered by this sacrifice, like healing: 1 Peter 2:24 (NIV): “²⁴ He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” The other things that were covered by the atonement (what Jesus paid for with His sacrifice) is deliverance from evil, eg, demonic oppression, depression etc, Galatians 1:4 (NIV): “⁴ who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father,” and financial blessing and prosperity, 2 Corinthians 8:9 (KJV) says that, “⁹ For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.”

Now I’m not saying we should be arrogant and demand the above things from God, mostly because it is not necessary. God is not the one withholding the blessings from us. God wants to give it all freely, and has, as a matter of fact, but we are deceived and we don’t know what we are entitled to, and a lot of the time we are actually limiting God by believing that we don’t deserve anything from God, so we cannot receive anything from Him.

That is true, we don’t deserve anything, but we don’t have to because Jesus has already paid the full price and that was enough! We cannot add anything to that! Our acts will never be good enough in the eyes of God, because we are sinners. That is what makes Jesus’ sacrifice so special – he gave up His Godliness, became a human for our sakes, a human who never sinned and he sacrificed Himself, shed his precious blood, just like they did in the Old Testament when they made covenants, so that we have a chance to not only be saved, but to share in God’s glory. Know that the full price was already paid – all the blessings are available to us, we must just receive it!

Once I knew this truth, it was so much easier to receive our blessings. I knew it was already done – God has made provision for it and He wants me to receive it, no matter who I am. He is gracious, even though I am a sinner and I do not deserve anything from Him, He still wants to bless us. No strings attached. Why don’t you also receive freely what God wants to give to you?

Now, you might wonder what are the blessings that God wants to give to us, over and above what is covered by the atonement? Any scripture in the Bible where God promises something, like for instance: Exodus 23:25-26 (NIV): “²⁵ Worship the LORD your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you, ²⁶ and none will miscarry or be barren in your land. I will give you a full life span.” Or Philippians 4:19 (NIV): “¹⁹ And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

See this previous post of mine about a lot of the promises God makes to us.  Why don’t you find out what blessings God has in store for you?   Learn the truth, believe that God wants to give it to you and that He in fact already has given it to you, and receive those blessings!

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Receiving Through Grace and Faith:

I heard this message from And.rew Wom.mack and I want to share it because I think a lot of people really don’t know how grace and faith impact their life.  I get the idea that a lot of people think that to have faith means that you just say you believe and then you sit back patiently and wait that God will move in your life.  Or others believe they must do things for God, to prove that they are good people so that God would reward them.  I certainly thought that was how it worked for many years, and was guilty of both, first with passivity and later works of the flesh.

When I still did not get pregnant, I made excuses, like “maybe it’s not God’s will for us to have children,” or “maybe God has a different plan for us,” or “God is probably teaching me something…”  I did not have any idea how wrong I actually was, and I am so grateful the Holy Spirit gave me revelation on this not long ago.

And.rew Wommack says: “Faith does not move God.  All Faith does is appropriate what God has already provided by grace.  If grace hasn’t provided it Faith can’t get it.   Faith doesn’t move God – God moves totally by His grace, and that means unmerited, unearned, undeserved favour.  God provided things for us completely independent of our performance, but does that mean our performance has nothing to do with our receiving?  No, you performance does because your performance is how you release faith. But faith just reaches out and appropriates what God has already provided by grace.

Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV):  “⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith— and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—⁹ not by works, so that no-one can boast.”

This verse says that you are saved by grace through faith – you aren’t saved by grace alone, and you aren’t saved by faith alone.  You are saved by a combination of the two – grace through faith.

1 Corinthians 15:10 (NIV):  “¹⁰But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them— yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

Paul, here, was talking about how he was not even worthy to be called an apostle, because at one time he had actually persecuted Christians and put them to death and he says, “I don’t deserve anything, but by the grace of God I am what I am, and his Grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.”  He is implying that just because God extends grace towards you does not mean that you are necessarily going to prosper, because you have to mix faith with that grace, and so therefore he said, “I laboured more abundantly than they all.”  In other words it was just totally the grace of God that called Paul to be a Christian and then enter into the ministry instead of killing Christians.

Justice would have demanded that God kill him, but God by grace extended mercy to him, but God’s grace had a greater impact in Paul’s life and through Paul, than many people, because he laboured, he also added to the grace of God his faith, and this is what it’s talking about in Ephesians 2: 8.  It is God’s grace that saves us, but your faith is how that grace impacts your life.

Here is another way of saying it:  Over in Titus 2: 11 (NIV):  “¹¹ For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.”  It says that, “the grace of God has appeared to all men,” now if God’s grace alone saved you than every single person would be saved because God’s grace that brings salvation has appeared to all men.  Now this right here ought to prove to you that it’s not just up to the grace of God, whether you receive or not.  God by grace provides things, but then faith reaches out and takes hold of what God has provided by grace and faith brings what is real by grace into physical manifestation.

God by grace has already accomplished everything He is going to ever do, but it doesn’t automatically come to pass in your life, you have to access God’s grace by faith.   Romans 5:2 (NIV):  “² through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.”  So you aren’t saved by grace alone, you aren’t saved by faith alone, you are saved by a combination of the two.  God, before you ever had a need has already provided everything by grace, but that grace won’t release its power in your life until you appropriate this grace by faith.  See, if it’s a true step of faith in God’s grace that it’s already done, then you will see a supernatural supply.

So this scripture I was using of Ephesians 2:8 that says, “you’re saved by grace through faith,” not one or the other but a combination of the two, now if you go back and apply this to Titus 2:11, it says, “the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men,” if grace alone saved, if it wasn’t necessary for us to have a positive response of faith on our part, if it was just the grace of God that whoever got saved, then you know what, every single person on the face of the earth would have been saved, because the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared onto all men. But we know through Jesus’ own teaching that He said that there would be more entering in by the broad gate of destruction than onto the narrow gate of everlasting life…  Jesus said that the majority of people are not going to receive salvation.  Why, because God hadn’t provided it?  No, the grace that brings salvation has already appeared onto all men.

The atonement has been made for every single person.  In 1 John 2:2(NIV) it says, “² He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”  Jesus has paid for the sins of the whole world, the grace of God has already paid the debt, the grace of God has purchased salvation for every single person, not only those that God foreknew would accept Him, but every person has had their sins paid for.  The grace of God has bought that salvation and appeared onto every person, but not every person receives, as a matter of fact the majority of the people don’t receive, not because God’s grace isn’t there, but because they didn’t put faith in God’s grace.  Man that is one powerful truth!  This teaching has changed my life.

I don’t know if you are getting this because the things that I’m saying it’s so easy to say but it seems that it’s harder to comprehend because we don’t have a real example of grace and faith in our world.  Really the only person who treats us with grace on a consistent basis is God. There is nobody else that does this and so because there is not a role model, a physical person that we can see, most people just can’t grab this.

You have to meditate in these truths, take the word of God and allow the Holy Spirit to just show you these things by faith and you have to grab hold of this but most people struggle with this because it’s just so contrary to their normal existence, but God has already done everything by grace, before you were ever born, Jesus died for your sins, before you ever got sick, Jesus bore the chastisement for your healing in His physical body.  You were healed 2000 years ago, before you ever existed, before there was ever a sickness to be healed of.  Before you ever have a financial need, God has already made Jesus poor so that we through His poverty might be made rich (2 Corinthians 8:9 (NIV):  “⁹For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”)

God has moved through Jesus, through Jesus by His own free choice and volition, He chose to provide healing, prosperity, salvation, deliverance, all of these things.  He’s already done it; He’s already released His power, that’s grace – independent of you.  It didn’t have anything to do with your goodness or worth because you didn’t even exist when Jesus came and provided all of these things.  So does that mean that by grace God has already provided it, that everybody is going to be prosperous or everybody is going to be healthy or everybody is going to be saved, everybody is going to be delivered?   No, because you have to appropriate God’s grace by faith.

Now if you can understand this, this is tremendous, because I used to think that, “well I’ve got to speak the word of God, I’ve got to pray, I’ve got to study the word, I’ve got to do these things and when I do enough good things then God sees that and my faith moves God and God will respond and grant me my finances, my prosperity, my healing, deliverance, whatever…”  But no, that’s not true – God has already done it and what I have to do is study the word not in order to affect God’s grace or His heart, I study the word to affect me, to make me more sensitive to God.

If you don’t understand what I’m saying right here, if this doesn’t make sense to you, this is one of the reasons that you aren’t seeing the power of God manifest much more.  If this is like speaking a different language, it’s not communicating to you, then that means that you haven’t really got a working revelation of the grace of God and you’re still under this mentality that you do one, two and three and then God responds and does this.  I’m telling you God does not respond to your faith – here’s another way of saying it – that true faith is not something you do to gain a response from God, but true faith is your positive response to what you believe God has already done by grace.

Now, if you ever get that confused and if you ever start feeling like, man, I’ve got to start confessing the word and I’ve got to pray, I’ve got to go to church, I’ve got to pay my tithes and if I’ll do these things then maybe God will do this… See that’s not true faith, what you call that scripturally is legalism, works mentality and that will not release the power of God, as a matter of fact that’s really about the only sin that will stop the power of God.

Your sin of not paying your tithes and not reading the Bible and lying and stealing and any of these kind of things – that doesn’t affect God’s grace – grace means it’s independent of your performance – but the one sin that will stop the power of God is the sin of self righteousness, the sin of trusting in your works and instead of trusting in the Saviour and looking at what He’s done for you.  You are going to try to make it happen, because “I paid my tithes!  Now God’s got to give it to me!”  That’s not faith – that’s works!  That’s legalism and I guarantee you that will stop the flow of God quicker than adultery will.

Now those are some strong statements – I know that I just bumped into some religious traditions, that there are probably people very upset, but that is the absolute Gospel truth… That is the truth!   That God loves you and He’s already provided all of these things by grace, but they don’t just automatically come to pass, you need to study the Word, you need to pray, you need to live holy and do all of those things so that you can be in faith, instead of fear and unbelief and then that faith will appropriate what God has already provided by grace.

But don’t ever make the mistake, don’t get this confused and think that, “my actions caused God to do this,” because that is no longer faith, if you think that.  God does what He does by grace, your actions have zero to do with what God has provided.  By grace God has already provided your need before you ever had one, but faith is just a positive response, it’s things you do in order to receive what God has already done, not in order to get God to do something.

If you ever get confused on that issue, and if you start thinking, “well if I pay my tithes, now God’s got to bless me, because I paid my tithes.”  You know what, in a sense you are trying to manipulate, to control God, you’re using faith like a pry bar, a lever on God that will force God to do something and that will stop the power of God in your life in a heartbeat.

You know I get people coming up to me in the thousands saying things like, “well, how come God hasn’t healed me, I prayed, I studied the Word, I pay my tithes I’ve done this and this…  How come God hasn’t healed me? ”  Well, you told me why God hadn’t healed you, because you didn’t point to what Jesus did for you by grace, but you’ve pointed to what you’ve done and you have the mentality that this is going to make God heal you…  “If I do enough right things…”

See you think faith is something you do to move God, I’m telling you that is absolutely wrong.  God has already moved by grace, He’s already provided everything and your faith just reaches out and appropriates what God has already provided by grace.  This concept is something that I find missing in most people’s life, they just haven’t figured this out, and I’m not trying to criticize anybody else, it took me a long, long time – decades before I got this figured out.”

I can testify that shortly after I got the revelation that Jesus already paid the price, that He already finished it and that I am healed, even though it didn’t feel like that or look like that, and once I started praising Him for healing me and making me pregnant, I actually got pregnant.  When I prayed, I didn’t beg or ask for anything anymore, I just thanked Him and praised Him for already making me pregnant, even though I wasn’t yet.  Every time I said things aloud I spoke about how it’s all been done, how Jesus work is finished!  I totally assumed that I would get pregnant, and that it would happen soon.

The month we found out I was pregnant – that whole cycle – I just knew in my heart that it would work, because it was so much more than a belief by then…  It was reality – I knew Jesus paid the full price for me, by grace.   I wasn’t bothered much by what I had to do, and I was totally waiting in anticipation for the proof of what I believed, that I would get a positive pregnancy test.  I was almost like a child before his birthday, counting the days before I could test and to get proof of God’s mighty works.

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Actively Receiving:

I cannot believe how faithful God is.  I’m not sure why I’m surprised, but I must say God has done some awesome things for us recently!  We are seeing things materialize that we have asked for and that is just awesome!  I read this scripture yesterday and I realized that I have asked and God has provided answers to my questions!  He is so awesome!

Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV):  “⁷ Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  ⁸ For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” 

I remember as a child my grandmother (my mom’s mom) always used to say, “Zoek en gij zult vinden,” which is Dutch for “seek and you will find.”  I didn’t realize then that she was actually quoting scripture to us, she used to say it to us a lot if we were looking for something, and I must say I have been irritating DH with that saying ever since we’ve know each other.  Every time DH is looking for something I say, “Zoek en gij zult vinden,” mostly because I hear my grandmother saying it in my head, but I never realized how God will use that regarding His Word!  I have asked, and received; I have looked and found what I was looking for…

Do you realize what the first part of verse 8 says?  Everyone who asks receives!  Wow, that is wonderful!  Everyone! Now I am fully aware that a lot of people will say, “But I haven’t received what I asked for!”  That is not God’s fault.  I’ve mentioned in my previous post that the devil can’t stop God, and that is because he was defeated by Jesus.  The devil has less power than God, and the only power he has is what we give to him.  I’m sure some people will not like what I’m saying, but to be honest, I don’t care, because sometimes we need to hear the truth.  It is time we take responsibility for our problems and stop blaming other people, our circumstances, the devil, or whatever excuses we like to think of…

I have touched on the fact of there being a spiritual world and a physical/natural world in this post, where the angel of the Lord told Daniel that his prayers were answered immediately in the spiritual world, but that it took time to manifest in the physical world.  With the help of mostly An.drew Wom.mack’s teachings I have realized that I need to receive the answers to my prayers in the physical world too. 

Now if you don’t believe there is a spiritual world I’ll prove it with Scripture.  2 Kings 6:15-17 (NIV):  “¹⁵ When the servant of the man of God got up and went out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city. Oh, my lord, what shall we do? the servant asked.  ¹⁶ Don’t be afraid, the prophet answered. Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.  ¹⁷ And Elisha prayed, O LORD, open his eyes so that he may see. Then the LORD opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all round Elisha.”

The King of Aram wanted to capture Elisha, and they surrounded the city where Elisha was.  When they woke up the next morning the servant of Elisha was afraid, because all he could see was the physical world and to him it seemed to be a terrible situation that they were in.  Then Elisha prayed that the servant’s eyes were opened to the spiritual world and he could see multitudes of horses and chariots of fire surrounding Elisha.  Their situation was not lost, even though it seemed to be so initially and we also need to learn that things might not be the way we perceive them. 

If we pray and ask for something, and it is according to God’s will and we pray in faith, God will give it to us.  How do you know what is God’s will?  Well, what does God say about it in the Bible?  The best is to pray God’s Word, and then you will sow God’s word as a seed.  If we sow the seed of God’s Word, and we believe those words, we will harvest those promises.  It will first appear in the spiritual world, but we need to receive it in the physical world. 

God’s Word must become real to us; we must know that it is true.  I almost want to say we mustn’t believe anymore, but it must be so much part of our reality that we know that what God says is true and that it will happen.  We mustn’t let our circumstances dictate what we believe anymore.  Even if things might not look good, we mustn’t let it affect us, because we must know that in the spiritual world God has made it happen already and that it is up to us to let it happen in the physical world.  Sometimes, like in Daniel’s case there might be demonic opposition, and then we must pray that God will deal with that on our behalf. 

God’s words are extremely powerful.  We must use them – God’s Word is one of the weapons of the spirit:  Ephesians 6:13-17 (NIV):  “¹³ Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. ¹⁴ Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, ¹⁵ and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. ¹⁶ In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. ¹⁷ Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

Mark 11:23 (NIV):  “²³ I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.”

Look at the above scripture.  I always heard:  If you do not doubt but believe, whatever you ask for will happen.  What I only realized recently was that Jesus says here, “if anyone says to this mountain…” and “…what he says will happen…”  It’s not just about believing and not doubting, it’s about saying God’s Word too!  That is how powerful God’s word is – saying it aloud can make things happen! 

This receiving that I’m talking about is not a passive act – something that just happens to you.  That is what I always thought it was, but it has not happened that way in my life.  Joy.ce Me.yer had a message about receiving blessings a while ago and there she used Jacob as an example and here you can see receiving is something you must actively do:

Genesis 32:22-30 (NIV):  “Jacob Wrestles with God  ²² That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok.  ²³ After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions.  ²⁴ So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.  ²⁵ When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man.  ²⁶ Then the man said, Let me go, for it is daybreak. But Jacob replied, I will not let you go unless you bless me.  ²⁷ The man asked him, What is your name? Jacob, he answered.  ²⁸ Then the man said, Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.  ²⁹ Jacob said, Please tell me your name. But he replied, Why do you ask my name? Then he blessed him there.  ³⁰ So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

Jacob was a trickster, a liar, a thief.  He was not a very good person.  He tricked his brother out of his birthright, and had to flee for his life.  But at one stage he decided enough is enough and he would return to his land and his brother.  He could not take it anymore – he had enough of the fear and being in exile. So he decided to return and bring gifts to his brother in the hope that it would appease him.  On the way there Jacob took everything he owned and all that was dear to him and sent it across a stream called the Jabbok. 

Jacob stayed on the other side and during the night he wrestled with God.  Isn’t it weird to see that Jacob insisted that God bless him?  I don’t think I could have been so bold.  He was a bad person – how could he insist on it?  I would feel that way, that I don’t deserve blessings.  Yet that was what Jacob did and he actually received those blessings!  He didn’t walk away unscathed, but he did receive his blessings. 

Jacob’s story just shows how wonderful God actually is, he did not deserve the blessings, and because he was bold, he still received them.  God loves us so much that He does not give us what we deserve (punishment), Jesus took that upon Himself, but He gives us through His grace and mercy, what Jesus actually deserves (blessings).

So from now on I am going to be actively receiving God’s blessings, all He wants to give us and everything I have asked for…

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