MESSAGE HIGHLIGHT:

Power of Resurrection Part 5 – Ps John Bendixen (WTB)

The greatest benefit that we have, the greatest value we receive in knowing Jesus Christ, is to have heaven in your heart. Jesus has to be real in your heart, and you have to have heaven in your heart before you can go to heaven. If you don’t have heaven in your heart, then you have something else in your heart and almost always, that something else is you. It’s to live for yourself.

The greatest value that we have, once you’ve received Jesus in your heart, is that He begins to transfer; He begins to transfer heaven into your heart. You, on the other hand, should not focus on natural realities, but focus on heaven realities, so that what God is placing in your heart becomes what you live.

A human heart that lives for itself, when they find themselves in a time after death, there’s a whole lot of things that they wish that they could have, that they would rather have done differently. They realise that there are people that they have left behind, that they don’t want to have the same outcome as them, but it’s too late. The only time you can make a decision for eternity is now while you’re in the body.

Just being born into a covenant doesn’t give you automatic access to anything. Jesus must live in your heart. Heaven must occupy your heart, not the natural world.

While Jesus was on the earth, everything that He said was what the Father told Him to say. Everything that He did was what the Father told Him to do. Him and the Father lived in such unity, with the Holy Spirit, that it was all one—one as though one living on the earth.

When Jesus went into the Garden of Gethsemane, He was tempted to quit. He was about to suffer such severity in His body, and His soul was about to have so much pressure to quit, because in these moments He was human. He had to determine for Himself that this human body and the pressure of the soul that will come at Me to quit will be the most intense since Adam.

How do you prepare yourself to prevent temptation? You’ve got to be with the Father, and you’ve got to be in prayer, and you’ve got to be with people who you can trust to pray with you. Sometimes the temptation to quit on God and follow a different plan for your life is so great that even Jesus Himself said, “If it is possible, may this cup pass from me.”(Matthew 26:39 AMP)

He dealt with the temptation before He got to the cross because He knew that if He didn’t deal with it before He got there, He may not get there. It doesn’t matter how strategic the moment is in your life; even in the most strategic moments of your life, you will have two voices, and the voice is either “Follow God.” or “Do things your way.”

2…following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. (Ephesians 2:2 ESV)

We as Christians cannot look at the world’s lifestyle and say we must follow their course of action because they are sons of disobedience. They do not obey God. You are delivered from that. You are set free. You are set free from having to run your life and see your whole life through the eyes of the sons of disobedience who live their lives according to the natural course of this world.

We were once like that, and now, we must live according to heavenly realities, not natural realities. This is one of the most liberating messages that you can have because the very power that raised Christ from the dead, is the same power that lives in you to enable you to not have to follow the sons of disobedience. You are delivered from that. The more Heaven you have in your heart while you’re on the earth, the more Heaven you’re going to live on the earth, the more you’re going to be acquainted with Heaven when you get to Heaven. The whole idea is that the process begins now. The process doesn’t begin when you get to Heaven. The process is; now, Heaven is in your heart.

We are at this moment in time; our business is to live life with Heaven in our heart, with the power of resurrection life in our mouth. As we live, we become like Christ, not just singularly as an individual, but corporately as a body, that we will make the enemies of God, His footstool. 

There are many things on the earth that come as a result of this pattern; sickness and disease, poverty, oppression, violence, wars. Many other things that are on the earth, that the church, as a corporate collective, have power, by the resurrection of Christ to live in such a way that we can be let out of a jail cell just because we pray.

It’s time for us to be obedient. It’s time for us to follow God’s course, not the natural course of this world. It’s time for us to walk in power.

Jesus was faced with temptation, and He bowed to the Father of heaven, and He called on the Father of heaven, and He spoke to the Father in heaven, and even though His soul was in anguish, and the Father sent an angel to strengthen Him. In that moment, the natural course of events that were going to happen were about to bow eternally, not just naturally, eternally to what Jesus was going to go through. The death of His body was a small price to pay for the eternal transition.

We’ve got to stop the blame game. We got to stop the accusation game for ourselves and others. We gotta stop this guilt stuff. We got to stop all the stuff where there’s strife and enmity and all manner of bad words and arguments and stuff that happen all the time. Let’s live with heavenly realities.

Don’t follow the normal, natural course. That course can’t take you anywhere. That course has got no life for you. That pattern can’t bring you any good things. Change your conversation!

The more you live in heavenly realities, the more you live with the Resurrection Power of Christ, that power that’s inside of you. When it’s faced with temptation, it’s got the ability to say no; it empowers you to say no.

Say: The resurrection life of Christ, the power that raised Him from the dead, lives in me, and it raises me up from the dead; that lifts me up from myself nature, it lifts me up out of my mentality of this natural world that wants to pull me down. The resurrection life of Christ pulls me up! I’ve got the life of God in me!