Scripture References: Romans 1:16-17 (NLT); Philippians 3:10 (NKJV)
Praise the Lord! Thank You, Lord, that Your Word is blessed today. You bless Your Word that is spoken and that is received in Jesus’ Name. Amen. Please be seated.
I would like to tell you a story, when I was in my military days I was fortunate enough to have been a member and part of a military unit that was airborne, parachute, battalion and about 18, 19 months into, maybe 20 months into the legal requirements of my having to going to the military service, I was transferred to a head office function and to do some things that the military wanted me to do. So of course I was in those days you had to wear step outs when you went in a head office function like that, had my step outs, had my maroon beret on and I came first time I came to those particular set of headquarters. I came walking down the path way and something was happening inside the building that I had not no idea was happening, but there were two men sitting in the office doing administrative duties. They were watching me walk up that pathway. Never met them, they knew nothing about me other than the fact that I was now walking that they could see me with their eyes. One of the guys turned to the other man and said, “This man is walking down the pathway. He is a born again Christian and I’m going to kill him.”
Now the man that was making this threat I later came to find out was a very brutal and very violent man. He was the kind of guy that if you were in the pub somewhere and he just looked at you, you looked at him and he thought that there was an attitude in your look he will just get up and go and smash your face or do something bad to you, he was just, he was like that you know. He had no reason to know I was a Christian but there was a life inside of me that was a light that shines that the darkness in him immediately recognized there’s a light that is coming. This light is a threat to me and I need to stop this light otherwise the light is going to be a threat to me. So, it was on occasion on where it was my chance to stand as officer on duty and there was an opportunity for me to make sure that everybody that’s standing guard that night was in the proper position and so I was doing the rounds and I walked up to him and he was standing and I called to him. I went and I stood right next to him and I called him by name. I said, “Wayne, you want to make Jesus the Lord of your life, don’t you?” He said, “Yes, I do.” I said, “Let’s pray right now.” So, we made a few adjustments to where we were actually present at the time and we prayed together, and he asked Jesus into his heart. He made Jesus the Lord and Savior of his life.
The next morning, I used to run a prayer meeting in a little room that could seat probably no more than ten people. It was just a little room that they allocated to me that anybody who wanted to join me for morning prayers could join me for a prayer meeting. Normally there were just two people, three people at the most. A lot of the time it’s just me and one other guy you know but there were a couple of people sometimes. That morning I walked into the room and the people were sitting on the floor. It was packed, packed you know. I mean even people were standing outside waiting to get in and so then I walked in and I said, “Now what are all you doing here?” They said, “When Wayne finished his beat last night he woke everybody up and told everybody what happened to him and demanded that all of them come to the prayer meeting the next day otherwise he was going to beat them.” So fair enough they all showed up at the prayer meeting but that’s defeating the point you don’t come here out of fear because someone is going to beat you. You come here because God wants you here. You know but there was an opportunity for me to tell them about Jesus and they all heard about Jesus and some of them gave their heart to the Lord that day. Hallelujah.
See the power that is Jesus Christ that is in you is much greater than any power that is in the world and it doesn’t matter that someone has earmarked you for death and destruction in any form or shape or area of your life. Jesus is much greater than that and Jesus is wanting all of us to have a wonderful experience in meeting Jesus as Lord and Savior of our lives.
I agree with the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 1 verse 16, it says “16 For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work”. As I share a testimony with you about Wayne, the power of God is at work in your heart that you may have the same encounter with God that he had. Because in one moment when I prayed for him, he was a man that was violent, he was oppressed, he was a man that had no future, no possibility of a future. He grew up in the south of Joburg, where mob rule and power and anger and violence was the only way, gangs was the only way to actually save yourself. And uh when he met Jesus he found a power much greater than himself. He found a power much greater than gang warfare, he found power that was much greater than anything else that he could ever experience. That is an enormous power that you and I have. I want to say this, you know, everybody talks about nuclear energy as being a way to give energy to everybody and but yet it’s got to be controlled because it’s so dangerous. It’s that kind of nuclear spiritual power energy we have inside of us. It’s called the resurrection power of Christ. The resurrection power that raised Christ from the dead, is that same power that lives in you and me.
“16 I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes—the Jew first and also the Gentile. 17 This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.” (Rom 1:16-17 NLT). You and I have life because we have faith in Jesus. We have life. Uh, all, all my years that I grew up in high school I was a Christian, I was a born-again Christian and I made Jesus the Lord and Saviour of my life. And then when I realised I had to go do military service I said to the Lord, “I want You to show Yourself great. I want Your power to be available, and strength to be available to me. And so I’m going to go and get the best training, in the best unit that I can possibly go. Not that I’m able to make it.” And therein is where my faith came. “That where I might be physically inferior, incapable of actually doing and completing my course, that You would actually make up the difference in me.” And I’ll tell you the power of God is so great that when I was weak in my mental ability, when I was weak in my physical ability, when I was weak in many different fears that come upon you when you are in that circumstance, the great power of God which was His Word that I would read every day and consume it into my life, made the difference for me. And when I found myself in life and death confrontations with the enemy it was His life that shielded me and protected me.
And I’ll tell you there is a life and death situation going on in the world right now. The enemy of God has brought sickness and disease to all of humanity. He’s brought economic failure and economic, and poverty to everybody’s doorstep. But this is not the end of this because the enemy of God would seek to bring all humanity under his subjugation, under his rule because if he can live, cause humanity to live by fear and to live in a secluded isolated view of life, then he can prevent you from worshipping God for all of the goodness that God is. I’ll tell you what I do, is that in these moments I keep on giving thanks to God. Recently the Lord led me to give a thanksgiving seed to some people.
And the reason why I wanted to give a thanksgiving seed to Him is because we are three months into lockdown and there’s nothing that this ministry has ever needed in three months. Nothing. There is nothing that I have needed in three months. God has met every one of our needs. God continues to meet all of my, our needs and my thanksgiving seed that, that the Lord wanted me to give is a thanksgiving seed to Him, that we are going to not just be where we are, but we are going to increase where we are. We are going to defeat the enemy in his own game. Where he thought he can isolate us, we’re going to get stronger with thanksgiving and with joy and with grace. Hallelujah. Because no weapon formed against you or me can prosper. If we give God our lives then His power releases us and delivers us from the stuff that he tries to bring us under his rule.
Philippians 3 verse 10 says, “10 that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, 11 if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Phil 3:10 NKJV). I’ll tell you this is a very real thing to me. And the very real thing is my revelation and my walk with God grows. I understand more and more what the Apostle Paul was writing here. And his writing was that when you have the power of the resurrection power of Christ inside of you, you know you have the strength, you have that eternal power that actually can cause you to live in such a place of freedom that you actually do not even experience what the world brings to you.
There’s a scripture in the Bible, I don’t have time to read it to you today, it’s in my message but I don’t have time to get to it today but he talks about I have learned in whatever situation to be content, whether I have abundance, or nothing. None of these things – not sickness, not any persecution and Paul, the Apostle Paul he was beaten so many times to death. Where he was actually whipped on his back so many times that they left him for dead. You know I have thought about this in detail recently, that when somebody puts you on a pole and they whip your back and they whip your back, and they whip your back with 39 stripes so that you are just mushed mincemeat on your back. They were not allowed to hit you with 40 stripes, because that was death. That’s how close they beat him every time to death. And he wasn’t beaten like that once, he was beaten like that many times and then the next time he got beat he got beaten over the scars that healed from the last time. How much time do you think it takes for a man’s back to heal from the scars of a beating like that? Long time. Then he would go into a town and he would say, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, because it is the power of God to salvation”.
You can’t say that – we’re going to beat you, and they’d beat him again. And when he is healed, he gets up and he walks to another town and “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, because it is the power of God unto salvation”. Oh no, this time, we are going to stone you and leave you for dead. You know how many wounds you’ve got to have in your body to be left for dead? That literally your own people around you think you are dead, because you are not breathing. And maybe he was, and maybe they had to lay hands on him to bring him back to life. But none of those things could cause him to quit. He could say, “There is nothing on this earth that can hold me. Because I realised that actually this body is just a temporary body and whether this body has got a lot of stuff to keep me happy or no stuff to keep me happy – the life of Christ inside me keeps me going. Everything that is the resurrection life and power of God – there is nothing the devil can do to me to stop me from worshipping Him and raising His Name high. Because He died for me, He was raised from the dead for me – what else do I have to complain about?”
The Gospel that he is not ashamed of, is the gospel of the cross of Jesus Christ where all of our weaknesses, all of our sicknesses, all of our things that we struggle with were all nailed to the cross with Him. But if there was only the cross, then sin would win, because then Jesus would still be dead today. But He put His trust in the Heavenly Father and the Heavenly Father had to raise Him from the dead. Had to raise Him from being separated from the Life of God. Sin would win, and we could not live by grace and in grace and we have this power to live free from those things that would keep us oppressed. Hallelujah. The power of grace and the real future is in the power God used for resurrection and then sending the Holy Spirit to partner with us in our new life with the same power so that we could live with that power every day.
I want to tell you another story about Wayne. When we left the army, eventually after a number of years we reconnected. I invited him to the church that I was attending at the time and he started to come to that church, he began to grow spiritually, and he got to know more things about God. Eventually he left that church and moved back into the South where he had a job opportunity and started a family there. He met a girl from that neighbourhood and then he started going to a church there. One day the Pastor of the church came to him and said, “Wayne, I’d like for you to go and sort out a problem for me please.” He said, “Yes Sir.” He said, “There is a man whose wife has complained to us and she’s actually gone to the police and laid a complaint against her husband, because he is violent and abusing her physically. So I would like for you to go and represent the church and help them.” So Wayne said, “Yes sir, I’ll do that.” So he went to the door, the door opened, and there was a burglar gate there between him and the man. He asked the man, are you so and so? He said, yes. When he said yes, he hit him. He hit him as hard as he can through the gate like that, he just hit him. That man took off from his feet and on his backside and nose bleeding. He said, you touch her again, I am back, and he walked away. Well, that was the wrong power.
That’s not the resurrection power but the good news is he never hit her again. But that was the wrong power you see, if we want to and try fix problems in our life because we’ve got natural power that we think we can use to fix problems, that’s not the way to go about it. We have the power of Christ that’s inside of us that can fix those kind of problems without having to hit somebody in the face. It’s the power to deliver that man from the weakness, the inferiority, the insecurities, the violence, the failures, the things that hold him in bondage. The power of God can touch that man so he doesn’t have to beat a wife to prove something to himself, or to be released from something that he thinks he needs to be released from. That’s the resurrection power that we’re talking about.
Praise the Lord. Today I want to just leave you with this acknowledgement. That the enemy of God is after your worship, the enemy of God is after your energy, the enemy of God is after your capacity, your talent, your vitality of life of every human being. He’s not just after the Christians he’s after everybody’s life because he himself cannot create life. All life is created in God. So any human being that is born is evidence that God is alive. And every human being that is born the first cry that a baby gives, that cry, that wah, is a worship sound to God because only God can bring life to that child. And from the moment a child, even before a child gives its first wah the enemy of God is trying to stop that child from being born in abortion clinics around the globe. Because he can only get the worship from men when men give into their fear, when men give into their lust, when men give in to things that make them weak. But Jesus died and the power that raised Jesus from the dead, that same power that raised him from the dead is now living inside of you and as you are faced with all of your human weakness and the energy that God has given you, He says, worship me. Give me thanks. Give me praise. Give me something that comes out of your mouth that’s My language, that’s My life, just give me that and you will see how My power goes to work to change you. To change your future. Overcome your weakness, overcome your limitation, overcome everything that you need to make you go after success in your life.
I know none of you ever do anything with failure in mind, do you? I mean if you do anything you want it to succeed. You want to have the fullness, the joy, the greatness of life. And so you should, God created you for that. I really want to minister much more on business and finance, and I want to tell you that in this earth the enemy wants you to believe that there is a limited amount of resource because if he can get you to think with limitation then he can captivate you or capture you in your future because if there is only limited resources then there is only so much that can go round, but I got news for you Jesus showed us that He can turn water into wine. Jesus showed us that He can multiply bread in His hands. Jesus showed us that He can do things like walk on water. That same power that raised Christ from the dead is the same power that can turn things around for you. And if He’s got to create more gold on the earth He’ll create more gold on the earth. How will He do it? I don’t know He’ll speak it and it will just be there. If He’s got to create more anything on the earth He’ll create it, if we need it. Hallelujah. That same resurrection power of God that is in us, that raised Christ from the dead is in us. And this is our moment, this is our time that we need to be overcoming in our thinking. We need to be experiencing the glory and the greatness and the wonder of how great He is because certainly as for me and Pastor Sharon, we will not be defeated. As for us we are not going down, we are going over. As for us, no weapon formed against me is going to prosper, no sickness, or disease or plague will prevent me. I’m going to finish off with a testimony of something that happened to me this last week.
So some of you may know that actually I’ve had an on and off lower back injury for about a month, three weeks to a month. And I had an injury, then I thought I had recovered from it and then I started running again and the injury came back worse to the point where my left leg was quite numb and I struggled to walk properly and I certainly couldn’t walk up stairs, I had to walk up one step at a time with my right leg so I was having days of quite a lot of pain. I was at the chiropractor and doing a lot of stuff with my legs, my lower back. Sunday afternoon the Lord spoke to me in my spirit as loud, it’s one the loudest He has spoken to me in a long time, just like a foghorn almost. He said, “so, you like this pain hey?” I said, “No Lord.” He said, “You want to put up with this sickness in your back, this disease in your back.” I said, “No Lord.” He said, “Do something about it.” I said, “Yes, sir.”
I laid my hands on my back like this and I said, “I command this pain and this disease to leave my body right now, in the name of Jesus’.” And from that moment on I just began to praise Him and thank Him. He said to me, He said this to me, He said “John, if you don’t actually take this authority over your pain it is going to continue to plague you.” So I said, “Yes, sir.” I can tell you for the last six days I have had no pain, no pain. The next morning, Monday morning I got out of bed and I said, Ha, Glory to Jesus, Glory to Jesus, because I would get out of that bed and I would literally stand there waiting for the wave of pain to hit me every time, and then the first ten minutes would be, like I would crawl into the bathroom and hold onto my leg and as my blood flowed and muscles warmed up and stuff like that I would begin to feel a bit better. I am pain free. I am healed. Hallelujah. Glory to Jesus.
So on Thursday I did a bike ride, yesterday I did a bike ride, today I am doing a bike ride. Hallelujah. Because the resurrection power of Christ, see the devil wants to make you think all the time, the doctors got the answer, and certainly doctors have answers for you and I am grateful for the help the doctors gave me, but only God knows exactly what is going on in my body hundred percent, and His healing resurrection power has touched my back. I still have a bit of stiffness but that is leaving my body too. It can’t stay, Hallelujah. Glory to Jesus. Yes, the power of God is here for us for everything we need, every day, every way. Hallelujah. Won’t you stand up please. Glory to God. This is the best news kind of message you can have. It is the best news because if you are a Christian then the life of God lives in you. If you are not a Christian then this is the best news that you have got because you are about to become one. Hallelujah. Praise Jesus. So let’s pray together, put your right hand on your heart like this, and just say, “Jesus, I thank You that You live in my heart, that You are my Lord, You are my Saviour. I thank You Lord that the resurrection life of Christ is in me, and that You save me now from all my weakness, all of my twisted ways, and I thank You Lord that I am free to live with the power of God in my life, in Jesus name. Amen.” Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. That is a good day, that is a good pray on this holy day. Hallelujah. Praise Jesus.
Let me tell you this is not a complicated life to live, if you believe in your heart that the Lord Jesus is your Saviour, then He is in you, He is inside of you, this is not so complicated, this is not about how many do’s and don’ts you do or don’t, this is not about complicated ways of trying to live, this is just about, live in Him. Glory to Jesus. Praise the Lord. I just want to pray for you and declare the peace of God over you, the peace of God that passes your mind and understanding, it just rises up and protects you and covers you so no matter what the circumstances, this week you will live in peace. I pray that you will be blessed going out whatever you put your hands to will prosper, where your feet go you take the power of God there with you to overcome and to be there for you, to create and to be powerful wherever you are. Hallelujah. I ask the Heavenly Father to send His ministering spirits, the angels out, into your life on your behalf so that they can go and find finances and things that you may need to make your life better, in Jesus name. Do you agree with this prayer today? Then say, “Amen.” Have a blessed week. Glory to God. Thank you for coming to church.
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