Scripture Reference: Ezekiel 28:11-19 (NKJV); Isaiah 14:12-17 (NKJV, MSG); Isaiah 8:11-12( NKJV)
Praise You, Jesus, thank You Lord that Your anointing rests upon the words and the worship and that your anointing rests upon the word that is still to come for the rest of the service. I thank You, Lord that every heart is ready to receive and every ear will hear, not just with natural ears, but spiritual ears. Thank You, Lord that the rest of this service gives glory and honour to You, in Jesus’ Name, amen. You may be seated. Praise the Lord.
Well, first of all, let me say to everybody that gave me wonderful words for my birthday and gifts. I say thank you, bless you. There were three wise men that came from the East and they brought me gifts from the musical kind, and I say thank you to them. Now I have to learn to play guitar again, my fingers get so sore, but anyway. For all of you that gave me words, I have a box at home with beautiful and wonderful words and they are very precious to me and it’s an indication of the wonder and glory of God that is at work in the lives of His people and so I say thank you. It is a great joy to me. Amen.
Pastor Sharon has done a great job of ministering to you and one of the scriptures that she used a couple of weeks ago, is what I had the Lord witness it to my heart that I should be ministering on that scripture, and so, I just want to read it to you this morning, it is from the Book of Ezekiel chapter 28, because we are born to an eternal confrontation. It’s the confrontation of the will of God and the confrontation of the will of anti-god. Meaning those people that have or beings that have a will against the will of God, so let me just read it to you, and then I will go on in the message.
Ezekiel 28:11, 11 Moreover the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 12 “Son of man, take up a lamentation for the king of Tyre, and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “You were the seal of perfection, Full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. 13 You were in Eden, the garden of God; Every precious stone was your covering: The sardius, topaz, and diamond, Beryl, onyx, and jasper, Sapphire, turquoise, and emerald with gold. The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes, God made him with timbrels and pipes, and music was created in this being, this angelic being called Lucifer. Was prepared for you on the day you were created. 14 “You were the anointed cherub who covers; I established you; who did he cover? He was the head angel of all beings. You were on the holy mountain of God; You walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones. 15 You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created, God never creates anything that is not perfect, that is always perfect.
You were on the holy mountain of God; You walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones. 15 You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created, till iniquity was found in you. 16 “By the abundance of your trading You became filled with violence within, and you sinned; therefore I cast you as a profane thing Out of the mountain of God; and I destroyed you, O covering cherub, from the midst of the fiery stones. 17 “Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor; I cast you to the ground, I laid you before kings, that they might gaze at you. 18 “You defiled your sanctuaries by the multitude of your iniquities, by the iniquity of your trading; I’m going to talk about trading in a minute, therefore I brought fire from your midst; it devoured you, and I turned you to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all who saw you. 19All who knew you among the peoples are astonished at you; you have become a horror, and shall be no more forever.” (Ezekiel 28:11-19 NKJV)
Well, this being was a created being; a magnificent being that God created and he was created with all these beautiful stones and all these magnificent things that were in him and his trade was the trade of worship and words. What he did was, he walked in the presence of God, he walked in the realm of God, he walked on the mountain of God. He was designed to receive all of the beauty and the glory, the light and the splendour of God that was in the mountain of God. All of those things came into his being and then all of the pipes and the timbrels and the things that were created in him were designed for him to mix music, create music. So that out of his being would come the fire and the splendour and the glory of God, associated with all this magnificent and amazing music. He traded in walking, in the presence of God, receiving all of the glory and majesty of God and all of the songs that were created in God that would flow through him. He would come into different places, where there were beings in the universe, and he would radiate that glory and that beauty among them. He would sing of the praises and glories of God and in return the people that would see this beauty, this glory and this amazing being with all of his music that was coming from him. They would praise the most high God and give glory to the most high God. They would worship the most high God and he would receive their praises and their worship and he would come back into the presence of God and then he would let the praises of those beings come out of him in the presence of God, that’s what he traded.
When the Bible says in the iniquity of your trading, is what he did was he received that glory, that worship, and that praise and then he decided to keep it for himself and he decided to create a will for himself that said, “I will be like the most high God.” He didn’t fully, at that moment what he didn’t understand is that the minute you raise your will against the will of God, the fire of the glory of God, itself is triggered to remove the glory from you, it’s just the way it is. Nothing can stand in that very presence and will of God.
So, in Isaiah chapter 14 we find out what happened to him. 12 “How you are fallen from heaven, o Lucifer, son of the morning! How you are cut down to the ground, You who weakened the nations! 13 For you have said in your heart: ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will also sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north; 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High.’ 15 Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the Pit. 16 “Those who see you will gaze at you, and consider you, saying: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, 17 Who made the world as a wilderness and destroyed its cities, Who did not open the house of his prisoners?’ (Isaiah 14:12-17 NKJV).
Next week it is possible that I will be back here, and hopefully this afternoon I will join those on an informal motorcycle ride out to go and have pancakes. Keto pancakes, you know they make keto pancakes. You know how they make a keto pancake? You want to know? You really want to know? When you receive the pancake you say, “I command all carbs to leave,” and now it’s a keto pancake [Pastor John laughs]. You have to have real faith for that, you know.
When I, if God wills and I will be back here next week, mostly because of things that Pastor Sharon has to speak on behalf of God to the people in Johannesburg, I will read to you out of Isaiah chapter 14 verse 12 and it says this, and I am not going to preach on this today, but it says, 12 What a comedown this, O Babylon! Daystar! Son of Dawn! Flat on your face in the underworld mud, you, famous for flattening nations! (Isaiah 14:12 MSG).
No, I’m going to say, I will just say I will go to this passage of Scripture in Isaiah, it’s chapter 8 verse 11, 11 For the Lord spoke thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people, saying: 12 “Do not say, ‘A conspiracy,’ (Isaiah 8:11 NLT). This scripture talks directly about plagues and different things that will happen to nations. Next week, if the Lord is willing, I will talk to you about the place that the Church must actually take up in this time, hallelujah.
Whenever you have a significant birthday, time goes by, doesn’t just happen on birthdays, but when times go by, you often have, you reflect on the time that you have on the earth. You wonder just when you die, you just wonder whether your time on the earth has done, what you were supposed to do. It is more clear to me and real to me now, more than ever, because I am very much aware that in the heavenlies, there are all manner of beings that are watching what is happening on the earth and in the Church, and there are that great cloud of witnesses of people that lived on the earth that have gone before us, that have lived by faith and they haven’t seen the end of their faith. The Bible says many of them died not seeing the fulfilment of their faith, still living in hope. We put our faith out for a rent money for the end of the month and we don’t see God come through for us and then we think God has deserted us. Go read Hebrews 11 and you will find out, the Bible talks that these people that lived on the earth, were so worthy that we, ourselves don’t have, even the right to almost speak about their faith, how amazing their faith was. The Bible talks about that there’s not enough words to be spoken that can talk about these people that lived and died with faith in their hearts and not seeing the outcome of their faith. That means if you have real faith in God then your faith is not about a result, your faith is about a relationship and the result becomes immaterial because your faith is about the relationship. So, if you’re having a living relationship with God in faith, then your result is not as important as living in faith.
We’re living in a moment where the world’s economies are in chaos, sickness, and disease has overtaken the planet. There are many things that are going on in the world right now, that are wanting to undermine and hurt humanity. These things that are happening, are happening in my lifetime. I must be on the earth for a reason, and God wouldn’t want me on the earth in this lifetime, unless I could do something that was valuable for Him, in this lifetime. On my watch, while I’m alive, there is a pandemic that has happening in the earth. On my watch, meaning me, being alive in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, I have to understand that I have a part to play and you have a part to play.
As I’ve been musing and meditating, I’ve had many thoughts about just the last hundred years, never mind if you go back to the years of the crusades and the wars between the Christians and the Muslims for the city of Jerusalem. I mean there’s just many wars that’ve been fought on over the years, the many centuries, years and years. The earth has been full of violence, the earth has been full of plagues. In the most common years the Spanish flu, the black plague, the bubonic plague. There are many plagues that have come into the earth – none of these things are from God. They are all created because sin, is in the earth. I can’t speak for people that have gone in the times before, but indeed there were many people in times before, that gave their life for me, they did. They were honourable people, they were people that had good values, they had strong character and many of them died. If I just go back within the hundred years, to the First World War, the Second World War, talk about many things that have happened – many wars on the earth. The wars that are even continuing now. The war between Russian and Ukraine, the war in Syria, the war in Lebanon. There are just many wars that are being fought on the earth right now.
We can consider those people that were in those times and many men, I mean if you take the Second World War and you talk about “D day.” The day the Allied Forces came off the seas onto the beaches of Normandy. You have soldiers coming out of boat carries and while they’re on there, they know they’re going to come out of those boats into the waters and there’s going to be lead coming at them from the bunkers, from the German soldiers on the beaches. Yet they strengthened themselves and they got out of that boat and they ran into fire, knowing they were going to die. Talk about men of courage, men worthy of honour and remembrance.
More recently if you like, there was a time, where a terrorist attack was taken out against America. I talk about it because it is one of the most famous terrorist attacks ever. Where terrorists got into airplanes, took over airplanes, and flew the airplanes into the World Trade Centres. I draw your attention for a moment to honourable men, that were trained to be first responders, and so all of those fire engines were going towards those big towers and those big buildings and they’re getting out of there and they’re carrying these hosepipes, and they have to try and run up 30 floors. You and I in our best, probably on our best day, couldn’t run up ten floors in a tracksuit, never mind in full armour of whatever you need to help people and a hosepipe over your shoulder. Then the building implodes and kills all of the men who were trying to help people and save people’s lives. Truly men of courage and character and worthy of honour, wouldn’t you agree.
I want to take that story and tell you a story and use two men running next to each other, or one in front and one behind and they’re helping each other, and they’re into the building and they’re going to help people. They’ve been trained, this is what they do, this is what they must do. They’ve been trained to do this.
One of them has Jesus in his heart, he’s made Jesus Lord and Saviour of his life. The other one has not done so, but lives his life with good values, good morals, lives his life without the order of God in his life, without knowing Jesus, but he’s a good man. As they both – the one’s got Jesus, the other one hasn’t, but they’re both serving, as they’re running up the building collapses. One of them instantly, as they leave their bodies, one of them goes to be in the presence of God, the other one separates from the presence of God forever.
You might say to me, “But Pastor John, how can you say that, because such honourable men, surly such men of character and courage and such men of goodness, surely their goodness stands them, in good stead for eternity.” I say to you, that’s not what the Bible says. The Bible says that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. It’s not your good deeds, that make you worthy of eternity. There’s nothing good enough you can do to give your life eternally. Jesus came to die for you because you couldn’t match up against all the goodness you need to do, to be able to live in eternity. You have to receive Jesus and believe in Jesus. You’ve got to make Him the Lord and Saviour of your life, and you need to live for Jesus.
The one that didn’t make Jesus his life, but certainly noble, courageous, honourable man, as he separated from the presence of God forever. One might say, well how can he be saved? Well, he can’t because while he was on the earth as a human being, he didn’t make the choice to believe in Jesus. Even though he was given the opportunity. People may say, “But if you haven’t heard the physical Gospel preached to you, you don’t have opportunity.” The Bible says in Romans, that every man has been given the consciousness to lead him to Jesus and if you through your conscious call on God, He will answer you and He will cause you to be saved, one way or another, but people refuse and reject God.
Why is this story important? Because of the life that we live, is a contest. We live in an eternal ancient conflict of wills; it is ancient, and it is eternal.
The other day I was riding on my bicycle and you know, if your body is warm and the outside air is cold and you get vapor and then the vapor comes on your glasses, so then you have to take your glasses off and let them in the cold air so that the vapor goes. You with me? Well, the Bible talks about our lives as a vapor, and so we might think – I do too, I’ve lived for 60 years, you know. I don’t look 60 right? I’m sure I look like I’m 30 or 40. I refuse to acknowledge the six before the zero. I still think I’m four something zero. Praise the Lord. I believe anyway that the Lord strengthens me and gives me good health and satisfies my life and I’m doing my job by eating well and exercising. Praise the Lord for that.
But as I was exercising you know, vapor – your life is like vapor because, if you watch these movies and they wanting to give you a kind of a feeling of how many years go by, they will do a time-lapse movie segment, you know where you will see spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer, autumn, winter, and they will like speed it up and you will just see the winter and the… and it will all happen like in 10 or 15 seconds. They’ll show you multiple years of seasons, in order to give you this concept of time going by. Yes. Well, actually in eternal time that’s exactly what your life looks like. Spring, summer, winter, autumn, winter, and in spiritual eternal time, wrrrt and you are alive and wrrrt and you’re dead. You are alive and then wrrrt and you’re dead. I don’t know where the wrrrt comes from but anyway wrrrt, you know, it’s meant to give you a feeling of speed, because actually in eternity a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is a day, it’s what the Bible says. So, even though you are living a day, it’s like a thousand years in eternity. It’s like that [snaps fingers] and you’re alive and you do your stuff and you’re gone.
And yet somehow even in the wrrrt you know, there is a lot that matters because you’re will matters. What you do on the earth with your will, to praise Him and honour Him, and give Him glory matters. It matters because Jesus came to die for it, came to die for your will, to actually belong to the will of God. Hallelujah.
I said this in one of my recent media ministry moments that I did, I said that the smartest man that ever lived, is Jesus and so people might want to argue with me and say, “Well, how do you know He was smart, I mean, everybody talks about Him in the context of Saviour and Lord, and God, but how do you know that He was smart?” Well, He was smart – they couldn’t measure IQ or EQ or anything in His days. He was smart because He only said what the Father said, He only did what the Father did, and He was completely submissive and obedient to the will of God. That made Him the smartest man on the earth. It wasn’t the divine being in Him that made Him smart, it was the man submitted to the will of God, that made Him smart.
That happens to me and you, if you walk into a room where there is a lot of knowledgeable people, that have got a lot of understanding about a lot of things in the earth, lawyers, accountants, doctors, whatever and you need to be in that room for something that’s important to you, you automatically become the smartest person in the room, if you submit to the will of God and to the life-force of the Holy Spirit; you become the smartest man or woman in the room. Because Jesus speaking through you, is smarter than anybody in the room. Doesn’t matter if you’re uneducated and they are. If you obey the Holy Spirit, you get what you need to do by the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God. This is a wonderful thing.
I want to finish off my ministry to you today by saying, that in this ancient confrontation, this ancient conflict that we are born into, it is about will. It’s about a being’s will that turns against the will of God. He is still after the souls of men. He’s still after humanity. He has no other pattern of behaviour in him, other than to kill, steal and to destroy. It is the only way that he knows.
I want to share something with you the Lord showed me, and that is this; your will is your platform for anything that you do in life. Your will is your platform, and your worship is your power. Your will gives you the platform for everything that you want to do. If you have no wills you have no platform. Everybody has a will. Whatever you’re doing in your life, is an expression of your will.
Even if you’re doing what other people suggest you must do. Say, you’re in a company of people and few of them say, “Hey, why don’t we go and have a burger or let’s go and have a coffee some place.” You say, “Ok, let’s go do that.” You may say that wasn’t your will that decided that; but it was. You agreed with their will, so it was still your will that you’re exercising. You exercise your will when you get up in the morning, I mean, you wake up and you get out of bed, it takes will to get out of bed. It takes will to brush your teeth, it takes will to do things that you need to do, that everybody takes, it is your will, it is your choice, it is your will that you’re doing. You exercise your will every day.
Your will is your platform for everything that you do, and your worship is your power. If you put something on a pedestal for example, if money is important to you and you will to make money, then if you’re focused on making money, then the worship of money, gives you the power to get money. That’s why the Bible says, and Jesus said directly, “You cannot worship God and mammon or money at the same time. You will either love the one or hate the other.” You cannot do both, because your will is your platform and your worship gives you power to live life.
If you are worshipping money, then money will give you the power in the way you live. If your will is the platform for you to do the will of God, then your worship will be of God and then the power comes from God, who you worship to get things done in your life. That’s why the Bible says in Matthew chapter 6, if you seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and then all these things will be added unto you. Why? Because what you’ve done is you’ve decided with your will, that’s created a platform for you to worship Him and seek Him first. When you worship Him and seek Him first, it releases the power for you to have everything you ever need. It’s not your power, it’s His power, that provides everything for you because if you use your platform of your will to worship Him, and power is released to take care of you. It’s the power of God.
This is the way it works. When your will is His will, then your ways become His ways. When your ways become His ways, then your life becomes worship of Him. When you worship Him, then your life becomes wonderful, and then everything that you’re work in life is full of wonderfulness. It’s full of worship. It’s full of His ways and His glory and His pleasure.
If you use your will as a platform, to do your will, and get to worship things that your will wants you to do, then you will make sure that you have the power, use your energy, use your intelligence, your skills, your talents to get what you want. Then you are not living a wonderful life, but you will be living a wandering life.
You will wander around in life and you will find that there are many questions that you ask. You will ask the question, “Who and why and when and what for?” Who is influencing my life and who am I doing it for and who is involved in this thing in my life? And you ask the question, “Why am I doing things and why is anything happening the way it’s happening?” And then you ask, “When is anything going to happen and what for?” And there are all these questions.
That’s what happened in the Garden of Eden when the enemy came, and he deceived humanity. He said, “If you want to have the most wonderful worshipful life, then you will exercise your will.” He was incorrect in the wonderfulness, because he doomed them into a life of wandering, because from that moment onwards they were always going to question, who said it, why did they say it and when is it going to happen and what for?
So, if you ever found your life in that space where you’re asking questions and you don’t have answers to questions, it’s because your will has created a platform for you to worship what you want to worship and power has been released in line with your will. Then you will find yourself full of questions, but when your life is submitted and your will is created a platform for you to worship God, then the power to worship Him every day is released in your life, then you don’t have to ask the question, “Who why what and when.” You will just say, “I’m walking in a wonderful life.” I’m working in a worshipful life and I’m working and living in a life where everything is His ways, His will, and we worship together. Hallelujah.
So, to be straight with you, you are always going to find yourself in this eternal confrontation with will. It’s not something that you wake up today and say, “I conquer my will today, so it’s conquered for tomorrow.” Every day you wake up, you will use your will to get out of bed. That same will that you will use to get out of bed is the will that needs to be submitted to God, every day. So, it’s never anything you conquer once and for all and you forever got it done. No, what you do is every day you wake up and if you wake up with worship in your mouth, then you find that your will comes in line with your worship. Your platform that you create with your worship and your will releases the power for God to come into your world and just sort things out.
I invite you to come work with me, in this momentums time of human history. Whatever the Holy Spirit wants us to do at a church, it’s our time to stand between God and the forces of evil on the earth that are creating chaos and creating disorder on the earth. I don’t want to be standing before the great cloud of witnesses one day and before all the beings worthy of much honour because of their faith that walked the earth and say, “But John you had such an easy time of life of earth while you lived there, and yet you couldn’t take care of a pandemic. You couldn’t do the will of God, that needed to get done so that the church which is the most powerful institute in the universe, can do what it’s needed to relieve humanity, because the only relief humanity is going to get is not from the United States Government or the European Union or any other union in the earth. It’s because of the union between God’s people and Him.”
It’s the church of the Lord Jesus. Our union makes the difference in the earth. Our union can make the difference where people living and dying. Our union can make the difference between the pandemic continuing and the pandemic ending. It can make the differences where economies can be revived. Politicians can be removed and replaced with ones that God wants in place. We need to be in a place where we don’t use our will just for our own platform, so that we can use that platform for our worship and then we can live in the power of our worship and our will, but rather for Him to get things done on the earth. Hallelujah praise the Lord.
I think I’ve preached pretty good today. Don’t you? Hallelujah with all your masks on and all the stuff that is happening you know. It’s like I can’t see your faces. I only see this. [Shows mask with cupped hands over his face]
Won’t you stand with me please? Praise the Lord. Please put your hand on your heart like this and pray with me and say, Jesus, I thank You that You are my Lord. Thank You for saving me and I ask You to help me Lord, to serve you all the days of my life. Where my will is weak, I thank You that You help me, to make sure that my will is ready to worship You. And through that worship, power is released in my life and power is released through my life. In Jesus Name. Amen
I just pray that your life is blessed, your days are blessed. You are living in health and you’re living in increase and prosperity and abundance. It doesn’t matter what’s happening around us, the will of God is to bless you and to bring good things into your life. So, you must wake up every day and worship Him because in your worship you release power for Him to intervene in your circumstances. I pray that wherever you go wherever your feet go whatever your hands touch you will prosper and be blessed. Hallelujah.
No weapon formed against you will prosper; you are covered by the Word and the Blood of Jesus. In Jesus Name. Thank you for coming to church. Have a glorious wonderful day and week ahead. Amen
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