MESSAGE HIGHLIGHT:

Abundant Harvest: A Faithful Messenger – Ps John Bendixen (WTB)

Energy management vs time management. 

Essentially you don’t manage time you manage your energy; where you put your energy is effectively how time is going to go by. Time is only a tool to manage your energy. 

You have a certain amount of energy in a lifetime:

– so everything about life is about energy management.  

It’s important for us to do the right things – not just manage what we’re doing right.

A day of energy broken up in 3 segments:

  1. Energy replacement – sleep, rest (rebooting your brain and your body). 

     Your body needs to reboot in order to give yourself a chance to do the next management of energy.

  1. Energy provision and protection – work. 

Provision for yourself and family. Provision to some extent also gives you protection. If you have no provision, you cannot be protected against your own energy expenditure. You have to have provision to replace your energy. As you’ve got more provision to replace your energy it is a protection for your energy. The more your provision; the more your protection.

  1. Energy for opportunity or self-activity – personal time.  

Depending on how much provision you have and how much protection you have, will depend on how much personal stuff you can do.  

As a messenger sent by God,  where do you think I should spend most of my time preaching? 

Your energy, your provision and your protection.

Because once you’ve got that nailed, other things can come into order. If that is in the Hands of God and you know how to deal with that portion of your energy management, then the rest of the time that becomes your personal time also becomes time that you give to God (not to yourself). God wants you to have things and do things in life that give you joy.  He doesn’t want it so dominating your spare time that you have got no time for Him.

It is my job to teach you how to be dependent on God, not on yourself (even with your self-time). 

Proverbs 25:13 (TPT) A trustworthy, reliable messenger refreshes the heart of his master.

Harvest time is a time of work; when you are bringing in a harvest, you are expending energy. Ask any farmer, there is a period of time, that if you don’t bring that harvest in; you are going to lose it. It is not a time to do anything else or have any other kind of distraction.

Spiritually speaking it is time for us to work.

If we have a word for this year that says; it is time for abundant harvest, then it means it is time for work. It doesn’t mean to say it is time to just wait. When you sow the seed and when you reap the seed – you are going to work hard. 

Work is something that is going to happen if you want abundant harvest.  

God is requiring of me to be a faithful messenger, a trustworthy messenger, because He wants to bring cool refreshing to you while you’re working to bring in the harvest.  

Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 (NLT) There is a time for every kind of energy expenditure. God was forced to place a burden on men, because they chose themselves to have glory in their own will, rather than in the will of God. Men have to live with the consequences of their own will – they will harvest from the ground, but they are going to work.  

Everybody that’s living their life with purpose, whether that purpose is provision and protection, God has placed eternity in their hearts.  A person that does not have the desire to fulfil a purpose can be overwhelmed with sorrow, will lose hope and might not see a way out. 

Ecclesiastes 3:12-15 (NLT) Everything and whatever season you are in, whatever you are doing – it is a gift from God. It doesn’t matter where your activity of your energy lies; it is a gift from God. If you do not recognize that everything you have is a gift from God, then you are liable to make a decision and say, “I will use my gift the way I choose, this is not a God-given gift, this is my own given gift to myself. I’m the one who decides how to use my gifts.” The minute you do that, you take your enjoying the fruits of your labour from yourself, because yourself wants it (then yourself can never be satisfied by it). 

When you say, “It’s a gift from God”, then your satisfaction is knowing that God gave it to you, and you use it with His joy, with His blessing, with everything that He has given you.

John 10:9-11 (NLT, MSG, TPT) – this message is for everybody!

It might be an even greater message for uneducated, less opportunity, less provided for people because if they will truly believe this, it will change their future. It’s more challenging for people who have provided for themselves and have a protection against their future with their own provision, to believe this completely. The internal struggle is, “Is God really great enough to give me more than I could do for myself?” What you’re actually saying is what you did for yourself isn’t a gift from God anyway.  You don’t even recognize that it’s His gift. The thief has already come to steal your potential for your future because you think you got what you got by yourself. You didn’t get if for yourself, because it was His gift in you that gave it to you anyway.

Why don’t you use all the stuff that He gave you, to see what you can give back to Him, that you can use with Him, that you can work with Him – so that you can prove Him to see how great He is through the gift He already gave you to get what you’ve got? 

The devil tries to persuade you that it’s you yourself who could do what you need to do. 

Listen to these messages and the Word of God is going to change you; it is going to bring faith to you. But in order to live by faith, you first have to be honest about where you are at.  Ask the question, “Is it possible that I could be that person? Lord, show me if I am really like that?“  The devil wants us to close our hearts on things and keep our hearts hard. 

Open your heart to God before it is too late.

Confession: My life is in You, Lord.  God’s authority and wisdom flows from me into my life. This Word will become powerful in me and creates the momentum in my life that I need.