Hebrews 13:17 (AMPC) – is a two-sided statement. This is a trust relationship: there must be submission, because there is a watchfulness, a care. Every day as a spiritual leader, I have to give an account of your trust. In return you have to obey in such a way that it makes it easy for your spiritual leader.
I don’t believe authority is taken, I believe authority is given. If authority has to be taken, then it implies forcefulness, power, strength, dominance (and not much of a choice). When authority is given then it’s in proper order. For instance, with Power of Attorney, authority is given willingly, and account is given willingly.
I have been overwhelmed by the great love of God for the people that are in my care, spiritually speaking. I cannot even describe to you the great love that God has for you. It is beyond my imagination, beyond my scope, beyond my thought process, to understand that Jesus would stand on a hill overlooking Jerusalem and He would speak over the Jewish people and say, “Don’t you know that the God of all gods that is your living God, is wanting to take care of you, and you would not”. I just love the different cultures that God brings into my life and different personalities, but it is not about that. It’s the love of God that is in me that has matured to the point where I love you, because the love of God in me draws me to you.
When people get married they take everything that they are and they join themselves to this other person in relationship and marriage. When you bring these two people together in marriage, it is at the best of times challenging, because of different households, different experiences, different emotions. With good intentions this ‘dance’ together is sometimes not a matter of compromise, but a determination to win and it then becomes: my will versus someone else’s will. Marriage is meant to be two people coming together and together they are supposed to become something greater (that can overcome trouble), than the two individuals . Marriage is a completely different thing to form a coalition, to achieve things.
When two lives come together, many times I watched them struggle and sometimes God will have me intervene. Pastor John shared testimonies of instances where he and Pastor Sharon were watching over congregation member’s souls – in a circumstance that relates to marriage (Simon and Tarryn) and a circumstance that relates to finances (Gideon and Riona).
It took a spiritual leader that watches over their soul, to intervene and speak a word, speak a direction, which they then took and began to use in their lives and their walk with God has jumped and escalated and they’ve really grown in God and they are completely different people.
If they had continued in the direction of life without spiritual input, their lives would be in a very different place. Without spiritual leadership involved, there’s not as much strength. Generally speaking wherever you make big decisions in your life, you tend to be very subjective and to want to do what you want to do, rather than what God wants you to do.
As life hands you circumstances, you’ve got to react to it. As a born-again believer, you are in a place where you have to make a decision, am I going to respond to the circumstances that life hands me the way life wants me to handle those circumstances, or am I going to respond to the circumstances of life how God wants me to handle it?
Who is God that we should serve Him? Who is God that He has a right to our choices?
He is God in the fact that you wouldn’t exist if He wasn’t God; you don’t breathe without Him; you have got no gifts and callings, talents, skills and abilities if He didn’t give it to you; you don’t even have a brain without Him! Say on a daily basis, “Thank God, that You are my God, I’m alive because of You and my whole life is because of You, thank You for my life.“
God says, “I want you to be like Me and you cannot be like Me, unless you have a choice. I’m not making you do anything, unless you choose it”. The more you are aligned with what God can use you for, the more you are in line with what God can bless you with (while you are doing your own thing, His blessing cannot come upon you). It’s a very different thing for God demanding who He is in your life, versus you making God the God of your life. There’s going to come a time when God’s going to hold you accountable and say, “Are you doing what I told you to do?” It means nothing to God if you say to the whole world, “I give glory to God for what I’ve achieved” and you are completely out of the will of God, because you used your genetic makeup to achieve something.
The sweet spot of your life is when you let God be your God and not when you decide how much of God you’re going to let in. That is a very big difference.
1 Timothy 1:18 (MSG)
The fight is keeping a grip on yourself and on your faith, so that you can keep making Jesus the Lord of your life, every moment of every day, because you want Him to be, not because you permit Him to be. If you permit Him to be, then it’s only when you give Him permission that He can do anything. Christians want God to intervene in their lives when they permit Him, normally because they have some kind of issue in their life that they want resolved. When God places a pull in your heart to want to be with Him, you have to follow that, because if you say, “No” to that, the next time He puts that in you, it’s going to get harder to follow. The reasons why you said no to Him in the first place, are the same reasons that are going to prevent you from pursuing Him after that.
God is opening a New Door and Supernatural Increase is coming to your life in 2020. To the extent that you follow God completely with everything that you’ve got, will be the measure that you can have supernatural increase. How much you decide, is how much you’re going to get.
Before Brother Jerry comes, I am wanting you to move past this point where you think, “I am here because it’s my will to be here and I am here because I will give a little bit to God (of my time, talent, energy, what I think is good enough)”. Because this is a moment for all of us, spiritually, we’ve got to keep a hold of ourselves and of our faith, because God has created a spiritual opportunity for us. We can have all of those new things right now, but our choices cannot be our old choices, we cannot say, “I’ll give God what I think I should give Him”.
I know this great love for you, that has come upon me, is because I know what it takes. I’m wanting you to get all of it. There should be no other arrangement that should keep you away from church when Brother Jerry is here. I can guarantee you the devil will throw challenges in your life and he will, on purpose, make you make hard decisions so that you cannot come.
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