Scripture Reference: Hebrews 11:1; Mark 4:13-14; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4; verse 19-23; verse 36 (AMP); 1 Corinthians 15:37, 45-49 (AMPC); Genesis 8:21-22; Genesis 9:1; 1 Corinthians 15:49
I thank you Lord that the name of Jesus is greater than any other name. There is no name that is on heaven or on earth or below the earth that is more powerful and greater than the name of Jesus and we thank you Lord that the greater One lives in us and that as we speak the name of Jesus and we believe in our heart, all things must change, hallelujah. I thank you Lord that even in this service today things are changing, I thank you Lord that we are making progress, there is a rising of the Word of God in our hearts, there is a stronger flow of the Spirit of God in our lives and I thank you Lord that even today, that we worship the Father, we glorify the name of Jesus and we give free reign to the Holy Spirit. Father I submit this physical vessel to Your will to say and be and do whatever you want to do today Lord. I thank you for it Father, in Jesus name, and everybody said, Amen.
Glory, hallelujah, praise the Lord, praise the Lord. I’m having a lot of fun and I don’t think you can have more fun than you have in Jesus, well I mean – that’s my personal opinion – but it happens to be a fact, you know, you can’t have more fun than the fun you have in God, well you know, because God is the originator of all fun-a simple statement of truth – nothing exists without God making it in the first place. So if people are to have fun, then He made fun – people have just distorted the way they want to have fun to suit other desires but I’m having fun right now, amen. Hallelujah, glory to God, praise the Lord.
I’ve been teaching over the last couple of weeks and what God has been bringing out of me is really, it certainly is transforming me as He’s teaching me and as I’m teaching you. And in fact, Matthew and Kate brought us through today because Matt is helping out with the sound system and helping us out with a few things but, we were just reminiscing in the car coming here about, you know the Jo’burg to Cape Town cycle thing that I did. I was just reminiscing how crazy it was, how stupid I was and they asked me the question: ‘would I do it again,’ and I said, “I don’t know who that crazy person was that did it in the first place but no I’m not doing it again, once is enough you know. We were just reminiscing about some things but one of the things I said was that God really spoke to me on that trip and he began to give me revelation about seed that must die and resurrection life, while I was spending those hours on the bike. Well, I guess anything that you can do to get rid of the sore bum and the sore hands and sore shoulders and everything else – give God some space and it helps get you through some of that time. I’m very grateful to the Lord that that revelation is flowing through me, it’s flowing into my life and it continues to change me.
So I just want to start off today and say that the one thing that is coming against the ‘modern day’ person is that much of what is happening in our world today is a really narrowing down, a very sort of constricting margin of hope. So for the most part, people are becoming more and more hopeless in the world because their circumstances are becoming more and more hopeless. So the thing that people are craving more and more, is hope because you need to have something to hope for to change where you’re at and so people are doing different things to have hope and they have hope in different things, and unfortunately a lot of people put their hope in government, a lot of people put their hope in money or wealth or they put their hope in something that will change where they’re at so they can have something better. And so there is, for the majority of people in the planet, that margin of hope is getting less and less so to many, many people, their hope is just…. I hope to get up and have a day where I can eat tomorrow. You understand? For a large population of people, they are so hopeless that if I just wake up tomorrow and I’m safe that I wake up the next day, that’s already something they hope for. Then if they can just get through the day and eat, that is something they hope for, so it’s just the way it is. There are just less and less things to hope for in this world, so people are making up things that they can hope for, so hopelessness creates an ideal condition for very negative things, it’s an incubation for many negative things – hopelessness.
So that’s where faith comes in, faith comes in to give us hope – it does. Well, the reality is, it takes faith to believe that God is real, it takes faith to have the real God live in your life and it takes faith to live the way the real God wants you to live. It takes faith, it doesn’t take intellect because if you try and intellectualize that process, you can never get to a result, you can always get to some higher force conclusion but you can never intellectualize that, it takes faith and so faith is something that people have to choose; it’s not something that just arrives. Faith is something you have to choose, you have to choose to want to have faith and if you choose to want to have faith, when you choose to want to have faith in Jesus, then He gives you the faith so that you can choose Him. So then, when you say, “I want faith to believe in Jesus,” then He gives you the faith to receive Jesus, then as you receive Jesus then that faith grows. So once you receive Jesus, you begin to see life completely differently.
I’ve said this for many years, I say it again as the Holy Spirit leads me, there is no other God on the planet that people use His name as a swear word, there is only one God on the planet and that should be enough of a reason to tell you that there is only one God in the universe because it’s the only God that other people want to demean as a curse. You know, they don’t ever want to use Mohammed as a curse word, neither do they ever want to use any of the Hindu gods as a curse word or any other god that has ever been, they only use Jesus Christ as a curse word so that in any body’s intellect should tell them anyway that there is only one God because it’s the only God that people want to curse in a swear word. Come on, now I’m being intellectual or having an intellectual argument about it but once you believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, then you can begin to see things completely differently and as Jesus becomes more real to you, through a growing faith, then with the growing faith takes you in,…. you see things that you couldn’t see before.
So as I was ministering before this morning in Witbank, I have a condition where I have to wear glasses. So my eyes have deteriorated through age, not everybody’s eyes deteriorate through age, some people have different things wrong with their eyes, but mine have got weaker through age. So the particular DNA structure that I have genetically is that when my eyes weaken, they weaken in a certain way that means when I have the need for glasses, my prescription glasses have to be a certain type of prescription glasses. So these glasses that I’m wearing today, these are multifocal lenses so they allow me to see far, they allow me to see in the middle distance to a computer and they allow me to see short distance so that I can read. So these glasses give me a clarity of vision that I could otherwise not have. If I take these glasses off, my eyes have deteriorated and I suppose one could say, the use of glasses and this is a fact, that once you start using glasses, there is an adjustment phase and then your eyes deteriorate further and you not using muscles in your eyes that you used to. But then it kind of settles down to a certain range of strength in your eyes, well my eyes are in a place right now where if I were to look at you, more to people towards the back, but if I look at you and I see you, you could smile at me like where Pastor Lynn is sitting sort of three quarters back in the auditorium, if he was to smile at me, I wouldn’t know he was smiling at me, I’d just see his body shape. So if he had smiled at me and was looking for a response and I didn’t smile back at him, he might think I’m being rude because I’m not responding to him. The fact is, I can’t see him-I can’t see that he’s smiling at me, I know he’s there but you know, I couldn’t actually see if he’s smiling at me or not because his facial features are a blur to me. Once I put my glasses on, he can smile at me and I can smile back, as he is doing because my glasses have brought clarity to me. It’s an amazing thing that when you live in faith, your faith brings clarity to your life that nothing else can bring.
And so what we need to do, is we need to have a set of glasses in our minds that are the glasses of faith, not the glasses of intelligence or the glasses of something else that we might give value to and I’ll talk about that a little bit later but we might give value to skills, we might give value to intelligence or education, we might give value to a set of value systems, you know there are many things in our lives that we can live life by but all of those have different kinds of glasses. So if I take these glasses off, I bought these some time ago – these are also prescription glasses – I carefully chose these glasses because I like to think that I am fashion conscious, thank you. I like to think that my taste in fashion is quite well, you know fashionable – So when I bought glasses of course I bought glasses that matched my desire to present an image, right? So I found these glasses that were at the time only available in America and so I bought them in America because they told me that they would do a free test on my eyes as long as I bought the glasses from them but they would have to send them away because they would have to get the glasses done for me because the producer of the frame does the lens. So I said, “Well I’m only in America in this area for seven days so I’ve got to have the glasses back by 7 days,” so they said, “Guaranteed!” So I said, “Well let’s do this so I bought these glasses.” So what do you think, huh?
They’re pretty cool don’t you think? I mean they look good on me, come on. Thank you son, yeah, you better say that. No I mean the reason I bought them is because I think I fit my face well, they look good on me, you know, and they kind of have this in between look that I wanted: classy/sporty. You know I didn’t want a sporty look, that’s what my Oakley’s are there for so I can ride on the bike and run and do stuff like that with sports glasses. I can see my Garmin, you know what I mean. It’s a major thing you see a Garmin, I need to see someone coming towards me, you know, get out of the way or do something you know. But these are kind of ….like if I’m hanging out with Brother Jerry or some other fancy people, you know like that, you know, he wears very expensive glasses so at least I want to feel comfy when I, say okay, you know I look all right you know.
Here’s the thing with these glasses: because they are designed for outdoors. If I’m outdoors and even now indoors you can’t see my eyes, but I can see you- sharp clear. I can see all your facial expression but you can’t see me. That means that I have a set of glasses on here that have a particular filter and my filter to allows me to see things now in a certain way. And even in bright sunlight these, these particular lenses are designed to polarize and to be in water, at water in a certain way, in the bush a certain way and so they, they are fancy lenses, okay. So I have a new set of filters on which means I see life differently but you can’t see what I see and you can’t see me completely. So in order for us to engage properly and meaningfully in this session today, I must take these filters off and I must put these filters back on, right. So you can see me and I can see you.
Well, I propose to you that what the Lord has been giving us as a group of people and what I’m ministering to you today is to help you change the filters in the way you see life. Because if you don’t change the filters of your life, then you don’t even know what kind of filters you have on until somebody begins to do an eye test on you. Can I say a life test on you? And so the only reasonable thing that anybody should be able to do a life test on you, is the life test of the Word of God, not someone else’s opinion. I don’t mind psychologists but all they can do is really dig into your past and your emotions. If I want any help in life, I want someone that’s qualified to help me. The best person I know that’s qualified to help me is the one who created my life, His name’s Jesus. He created my life so He’s best qualified to help me. Don’t you think?
All right, so now we start with Hebrews 11 verse 1, 1now our faith is the assurance of things we hope for being the proof of things that we do not see and the conviction of their reality (Hebrews 11:1). In other words faith is perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses. So obviously faith is something that doesn’t happen to your senses. Faith is not something that happens to your intellect. Faith is something that you choose to live by. So faith is something perceiving as real fact which you cannot see with your senses. So the Amplified Bible puts it this way,1now faith is the assurance of things we hope for, being the proof of things we do not see and the conviction of their reality – that’s faith (Hebrews 11:1).
So, I gave my own definition of faith over the months that I’ve been teaching and if you remember we had that weekend where the Lord really ministered to us powerfully and I said, “Faith is a power released by the Heavenly Father, faith is the power release by the Heavenly Father, to enforce the will of the Heavenly Father expressed through His words.” So, people and governments on the earth think they have power but the only power that is on the earth is the power that God permits. Hallelujah, so I said again, “Faith is the power released by the Father, to enforce the will of the Father, expressed through His words.” Hallelujah. I don’t want to just,…. I don’t want to get caught up too much in this because I’ve got more things to talk about.
I’ve spoken about, last week I talked about how, how Adam made a choice and when Adam made a choice in the garden, God said you cannot stay here and the ground is cursed. So that’s going to be the toil you’re going to bring forth from the ground through hard labour and toil, you’re going to bring forth life. You remember that? And I gave you a whole lot of definition of that and then I spoke to you about how Cain killed Abel because he brought an offering and the offering wasn’t about what offering he brought, it was about what was in his heart or what wasn’t in his heart. And so when he found that God rejected his offering and his sacrifice, God said sin is crouching at the door of your heart – master it – he didn’t master it so he killed his brother. So then I read you the scripture about now the earth is crying out with the blood of your brother and so it’s not going to yield to you its strength. Hallelujah, and so I began to teach a little bit about that and I can’t go through all of that.
I go to Mark chapter 4 verse 13 which I now read to you, just the first two verses and then I’ll explain the rest to you. Mark 4 verse 13 goes this way 13 and He said to them “Do you not discern and understand this parable? How then is it possible for you to discern and understand all the parables? 14The sower shows the word.” (Mark 4:13-14). So the sower sows the word. So now if we read in the beginning of Genesis, people were going to sow seed into the earth to receive back productivity and things to eat. The new,…. in this passage of Scripture, God’s talking about the human heart being the soil, and so what you sow, is words.
So you know there is a whole, there’s a whole bunch of teaching out there and people talk about positive, talking words of positivity and positive confession and talk positive, don’t talk negative, you know. And there’s a whole lot of courses that you can go on, a whole lot of places that you can go and teachings you can get about how to change and have a positive attitude and positive thinking and positive conversations. Well, the reason why they do that is because people understand that if you’re negative, you are going to attract negativity. If you’re positive, you’re going to attract positivity. I mean this is not even, this is not even – this is common stuff amongst you know, knowledgeable people, let’s put it that way. This is not a surprise to you what I’m saying, there’s been lots of tests that have been done that way. If you’re a positive person wherever you go and whatever you do positive things are going to happen around you because you bring the positivity to you. If you’re negative about stuff then negativity is going to keep coming at you all the time because you bring negativity.
So where does that come from? That comes from what you are permitting into your soul. So your soul is a breeding ground for things and whatever is in your soul, comes out. Whatever you permit and you let grow in your soul, if I can put it that way, is going to come out. So this shouldn’t be a surprise to you that when Jesus says the sower sows the word, then He’s also going to talk about the different conditions of your soul or your heart because that’s the incubation place of seed. Right?
So he talks about the different conditions of the heart. There’s a heart condition that’s so hard to the Word of God that when the Word (the seed) ….so for example, the message that I’m preaching today, when the message gets preach to you – seeds of words get preached – then your heart is so hard that the word comes and lands on your heart and it’s got no place to go from there. So it can do nothing to you and so because it can do nothing to you there are birds of the air, and you can read the rest of the passage of Scripture, birds of the air, circumstances, people, ideas, ideologies, philosophies – all come out and they take that word away and it can bring no fruit because this is just another word. Because your hard heart can’t receive this word. It’s resistant to it. I mean I know if you, if you go up and down these sand roads here and you drive on some of that hard ground, it’s like concrete the ground. It’s sand but it’s concrete. You put a seed on there, there’s no ways that seeds going anywhere, because it’s going to get flung up and caught out and thrown and spat out because it’s got nowhere to go. It’s just going to lay there. So that’s the one condition of the heart so obviously any words that get sown on that condition of heart, can do nothing to change anything.
Then the Bible talks about a different condition of heart, where the soil is in fairly good condition, it’s much softer and the Word goes into the soil and it’s immediately received with joy… Gee, that was a good word, you know. And if I had to take me as an example you might walk out of here today and say, “Gee that pastor – he was pretty good and he gave a good word and yeah I like what he said and it was nice and you know hey, man I think you know, there’s a few things that he said that can really work for me.” And you receive it with joy, then the Bible says but then circumstances happened where actually because there’s no real root, it’s not properly prepared soil, it starts to grow but then it has no chance to survive in the long term. It has no endurance in it and so then it just shrivels up and dies.
This is unfortunately a condition that exists way too often in the church and it is often why Christians have much to say against the church and much to say against the Bible because they have much to say against Christians that fail. Because what happened is the Christians receive it with joy and then they have no endurance in themselves, the way the Bible puts it – they have no root in themselves. They have no endurance to live this word, so it springs up and while it springs up it’s got a lot of greenery going on…and then it wilts and fades away. Doesn’t have endurance. And so a lot of people blame God. A lot of people blame a lot of churches and they blame a lot of things because of that. Huh.
Then there’s another condition that Jesus talks about here and this is the condition where the soil has been well prepared. If I can give you the picture of a tractor just going through the things and, and I actually you know gave you those slides where I showed you people cutting up the ground and you have well-prepared soil and the Word of God goes in the soil but the ground has not been removed of all of the weed seeds. So the soil – the good seeds are sown along with other kinds of seeds that grow up and they choke the Word. And those seeds the Bible calls: the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches and the lust of other things. So, some put it this way, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life and the lust of other things. The Amplified Bible says, “The deceitfulness of riches is part of the pride of life.”
Those things all grow up and they choke the Word of God that has been sown into your heart and so, it bears no fruit. So, it’s looking good, it’s looking good. It’s coming up, it’s coming up. But at the same time the weeds are coming up. Sorry, doesn’t stay the distance, so you can’t get a harvest. I know you know this. But I’m ‘re-preaching’ this to you today because of what the Lord showed me in Genesis that comes all the way. You’ll see where I’m going with this. Remember I’m actually preparing you for a whole teaching that I’m going to do on Jacob’s Constellation. So, then there’s some soil of the heart that Jesus talks about here, that’s well prepared. There’s no weeds in the heart, in the soil. And when the Word goes into that heart, the word returns 30, 60 and a 100-fold. And you can see a person like that. You can see the condition of their life begins to change. And it’s almost, ….you can see they begin to grow: their words begin to change, things begin to happen in their life.
So, when I was sitting on the front row here, before I came up to minister, I just felt that I wanted to remind you all. It was just in my heart to remind you of some things that God had put in my heart. And I want you to understand just as a way of reminder that I found, although I was raised as a Christian and I was raised in a Christian home, I was raised as a pastor’s kid. The theology that I grew up with, told me that God would allow me to get sick to teach me a lesson. You know, God would allow me to be poor to teach me lessons. You know, and, in myself I just couldn’t gel with that even though my dad preached that. There was something against me, there was something inside of me that said, “I don’t want that kind of hopelessness in my life that one day if I get sick, you know, that I can’t actually beat that sickness because God’s trying to teach me something that I don’t know what He’s trying to teach me about.” You understand what I’m saying? It just didn’t gel with me at that time. And so, then I got a hold of the message that I’m preaching to you today. I got a hold of that message and I said, “I understand this message of: if you take God’s words which is His will and you believe that, He releases the power to make His will and His words come to pass.” So, then I began to realise if I’ve got His words that are His will and I speak His words with His will, He releases the power to help me change things. Revelation, life-changing revelation.
So, where I grew up poor, I decided, “I’m not going to be poor anymore.” You know, those days in church life, they had this attitude… You know this, I said this to you. They had this attitude, “Lord, You keep the pastor humble and we’ll keep him poor.” You know. That was the attitude of the church those days. Well, I just…. I was not going to be poor. And I found out that God didn’t want me to be poor. He wanted me to be rich. So, I said, “Okay Lord, me and You, here we go. I’m going to take Your word which is Your will, and I’m going to put it in my heart, and I’m going to speak it out and put it in heart and speak it out and put it in my heart and speak it out. And I’m expecting You to release the power to make Your will which is Your words coming out of my mouth, to come to pass.” And so, as I spoke His will and spoke His words He began to give me more and more faith to release the power to change what needed to be changed. Hallelujah.
Here’s the good news. And it’s certainly coming out different this afternoon than it did this morning. Here’s the good news. The good news is, that as I began to speak this out, my life began to get full of joy, because when I realized that actually I’ve got His Word that is His will for me to be prosperous, there’s nothing for me to be sad about anymore. There’s nothing for me to be hopeless about anymore. There’s nothing for me to not look forward to anymore. Even though my circumstances may not reflect what I believe, my circumstances will eventually become what I believe. And so, I began to life what I believe and the more I said it and the more I lived it and the more I said it and the more I began to speak it and God’s power began to be released into my life to change it. So, the power to change was released through His Words that were in my mouth that I believed.
So, when I got married to this girl, I found that she was, you know, strong willed and vibrant. I was stubborn. And so, what I did was, I needed to release the will of God through the Word of God and He released the power to begin to reveal to her what she needed to do to change to be something to me that I needed. When I spoke His will and His words over my marriage, He started to change me to become something that I needed to be, to become what she needed. And as we both started to speak the Word, this dynamic change began to happen in our relationship that where we once headed for disaster, we were now headed for greatness. 37 years later we are still living in this vibrant amazing marriage energy that gets stronger and stronger, to the point where if she goes for the day for a day without saying to me, “I adore you,” from her heart, then she feels that she’s missing out. The power to change!
Well, that applies to my money. So, my money circumstances started to change, my whole visual experience of what I saw my life becoming began to change because I now no longer lived in a hopeless day-to-day survival mentality. I began to live in something that God gave me into my… as a future plan for my life that I began to see because as I spoke His will through His words He released power to change everything. This is important because remember when Adam fell, God cursed the ground and said, “All the days of your life you will only be able to get something through toil and through the sweat of your brow.” Jesus is talking before His death, He’s saying, “I’m telling you that you have the Word in your mouth, the heart is the condition, it is the place where you need to sow it. The results of your life are not based on what happens with the sweat of your brow. The results of your life is dependent on what you put in your heart.
So now I read to you that passage, and it’s the reason I started about the Cape Town trip, you know. In 1 Corinthians 15, I read to you from the Amplified Bible. And it says this, “ 1And now let me remind you [since it seems to escaped you], brethren, of the Gospel (the glad tidings of salvation) which I proclaimed to you, which you welcomed and accepted and upon which your faith rests,” Don’t believe in Jesus – can’t have faith. Believe in Jesus – can have faith. Simple as that. “ 2And by which you are saved, if you hold fast and keep firmly what I preached to you, unless you believed at first without effect and all for nothing.” In other words, if what you heard was just something you received intellectually and you thought you believed but then you didn’t then it was to nothing.“3 For I passed on to you first of all what I also had received, that Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One) died for our sins in accordance with [what] the Scripture [foretold], 4that He was buried, that He arose on the third day as the Scripture foretold,” (1 Corinthians 15:1-4 AMP) In other words, this is important that Jesus offered His life as a seed. When He took His life and He offers it as a seed, His seed went into the ground and it died and it was resurrected in a new condition. So, the very ground that was cursed, is very ground that Jesus died and went into, bearing in mind that the Bible also said, “Cursed is everyone that hangs on a tree.” Jesus died and hung on the cross for us so that we can be saved. So, He went from a cursed tree to the cursed earth but He was raised back to life in glory by the Father.
Hold on with me. If you’re a visitor here today, I’m sorry you coming in the middle of this whole series of teaching but hang ten. It should still be good for you anyway. Are you having fun? Are you enjoying this? So, 1 Corinthians 15:19, “19 If we who are [abiding] in Christ have hope only in this life and that is all, then we are of all people most miserable and to be pitied.” Why? Because our Christianity is only about what we can get out of it in this life. Well, that should tell you that Christianity is all about good things, because this scripture is saying: ‘If all that you are doing is being a Christian for what you can get out of it in this life, never mind that you’re actually saved for eternity, but in this life that means that whatever they were teaching then was about goodness coming to you in this life.’ Otherwise, why would you be wanting to someone who’s becoming a Christian for what you can get out of it in this life. Come on, that’s reasonable intellectual argument on its own.“ 20But the fact is that Christ (the Messiah) has been raised from the dead, and He became the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep [in death].21 For since [it was] through a man that death [came into the world, it is] also through a Man that the resurrection of the dead [has come].22For just as [because of their union of nature] in Adam all people die, so also [by virtue of the union of nature] shall all in Christ be made alive. 23But each in his own rank and turn: Christ (the Messiah)[is] the first fruits, then those who are Christ’s [own will be resurrected] at His coming.”
Now I go to verse 36. “ 36You foolish man! Every time you plant seed, you sow something that does not come to life [germinating, springing up, and growing] unless it dies first.” In other words, you’re a foolish man if you think that a seed that is sown doesn’t die before it can become something else. And when it dies it looks something completely different to what it’s going to become. So, the dying process and the becoming process are two different things. So, if you just take a little, you know, seed of wheat and you put it in the ground and it dies, as its dying and crackles and it lets out its little…. you know, and the whole thing of what it looks then is completely different to what it becomes. What it becomes is a whole stalk with many the sheaves of grain on it – one little seed. Right?
37Nor is the seed you sow then the body which it is going to have [later], but it is a naked kernel, perhaps of wheat or some of the rest of the grains (1 Corinthians 15:27, AMPC). So he’s just talking about there are different bodies of different seeds that come in to the earth and they’re all different. Okay? 45Thus it is written… verse 45. 45Thus it is written, The first man Adam became a living being(an individual personality); the last Adam(Christ) became a life-giving Spirit… So the one man brought life to the natural realm, the other man brought life to the Spirit realm. 46But it is not the spiritual life which came first, but the physical and then the spiritual.47The first man [was]out from the earth, made of dust (earthly-minded) the second Man [is]the Lord from out of heaven.48Now those who are made of the dust are like him who was first made of the dust(earthly minded); and as is [the Man] from heaven, so also [are those] who are of heaven (heavenly-minded). 49And just as we have borne the image [of the man] of dust, so shall we and so let us also bear the image [of the Man] of heaven (1 Corinthians 15:45-49, AMPC).
So here’s the end of the story: You cannot be on earth if you don’t have a body to live in. So this is a casing that use yourself live it. So you are a spirit and you have a soul that lives in this body. The body dies, you go. So what comes first is first the earthly man comes first. The spiritual man comes second. So in each of our lives, this is the status quo: you were born and you’re born into the natural world and later on you get a choice to make a spiritual decision. So God, He’s making this as a direct connection to Adam who was the man who brought human life onto the earth. God placed his life into the human body. And so, Jesus is the One that came along and said, “I’m not going to restrict your existence to living in a human body. I’m going to elevate your existence to have a heavenly capacity.” So God designed us to have a heavenly capacity, but because of our decisions, we only lived in an earthly capacity. When we receive Jesus into our heart, we make a choice – I want Jesus. When I say, “I want Jesus in my life,” He gives me the faith to receive Him. That same faith that I received, that He gave me to receive Him, is the faith that I now live my life by. It’s what it says in the book of Romans, that’s the faith that I now live my life by.
As I live by this faith that He gave me to receive Him into my heart, as I live my life by this faith, I have the capacity to become like the Heavenly Being. How do I do that? I speak His Words that is His will and He releases the power to make it come to pass to change my life. So what happens is that, as I change my life, in my marriage, in my finances, I am changing my environment. But I’m not only using this Heavenly Being status to change my environment. This Heavenly Being status changes me – in other words: my glasses change. I now begin to see life through the eyes that God would see life through, rather than my effect eyesight that I would see only through a natural being. Praise the Lord.
This is pretty cool, hey? So once again, as I preach to you, the Bible is the source of everything. The Word of God says that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and it is all of the Bible has given us for correction, for edification and sometimes for rebuke. The Bible is the true source of everything. So if I want anything to change my life, I want the Source of life to change my life. I don’t want to have somebody’s opinion or somebody’s thoughts about life to change my life. I want God’s Word to change my life. I’ve said to you many times – if I stand in this pulpit and I preach something that’s not in the Word, don’t believe me. You go and find it out for yourself. Go to the Bible and read the Bible and then if you say, “I have a different…” Then I’m happy to come and talk to you. Bring your scriptures and bring what you have to say. Don’t bring someone else’s teaching, you know.
I’ve had people come to me over years and they want to say to me, “We have a different philosophy to what you say about the Word. And I’ll say, “Well, where did you get it?”“Well, we read this book and we went to that Internet and we went to that Google and we searched this.” I say, “Well, where did they get their stuff?” “So now it becomes a matter of you’re just choosing their opinion over my opinion. So then it’s not a contest anymore, because you’re just saying that opinion has more preference to me than this opinion.” So, there’s, you know, then it’s just… you know, where’s the truth init? But if we go back to the Bible and say, “Hey, the Bible is the source.” And I say, “Okay, now I’m ready to really talk to you, because now we can talk about the Bible.” You know, where you have studied the Bible and you have made…you’ve read the Bible and you’ve gone to this, and you’ve looked in the Hebrew, and you’ve looked at the Greek, and you… and you’ve looked at the context of this, and then you do a whole study about what the Bible says. If you’ve done all that much homework and you still don’t believe what I’m saying, then I’m ready to talk to you. Because now you’re taking seriously this difference of opinion.
But most people hear someone else saying something different – and they hear this preacher saying that and then whatever suits their fancy best, “Well, I think I’ll believe that one, because that sounds more intelligent or it sounds more based on the choices I’ve made in my life, that’s the kind of message I would rather follow.” The Bible calls it itching ears, itching ears: teachings that are designed for itching ears that just want to hear one kind of teaching that suits their lifestyle. Yeah, I’m preaching so good this afternoon. Yeah, thank you, even on my birthday, it’s pretty good hey? Hallelujah.
So remember this slide… Can you put that slide up that I gave you last week? Put the slide up – and this was a slide that isabout the birth of man and Genesis and all
that, and I talked about Adam and Eve and how Cain killed Abel and so Adam and Eve had another child called Seth and Seth had Enoch and then it came down to Enoch. And Enoch walked with God and he was so close to God that God said this, “And you can’t live on this earth anymore, you must come and live with me.” And Enoch lived 365 years and he had a son by the name of Methuselah, who is the longest living person ever. He lived nearly a thousand years. And so, I told you last week, you know, why did he take so long to die? Well, because he had a father that walked with God, worshipped God, spoke God’s will, spoke His words. And so powerful was He into communion with God, that he just couldn’t stay on the earth anymore, because the earth was cursed and he was walking in such a heavenly realm as a being that he couldn’t stay on the earth, so God just took him and lived in heaven with him. I imagine he was like walking and talking with God and they were having this fellowship, this fellowship, this fellowship and before Enoch knew it, he was actually in heaven and God and him didn’t even know it – they’d kind of just gone into heaven together. I mean, I don’t know that from that, but I can just imagine – how else did he, I mean… there’s no… it didn’t say that he died. God took him, just said, “Come, come be with Me forever. Because you and I’ve got such fellowship, come.” Hey?
I’ve got to use marriage again. It’s like, you know, Sharon and I, and I talk about this always marriage. You can live in a marriage, where your marriage is about the habits and the patterns of the way that you live together. And if you’re living in a habit and a pattern and the ways of your marriage and particularly if you’ve lived as long as we have together, you have a pattern and a way together. So when you live in the pattern of what you have set up as your marriage, you are likely to be comfortable in this pattern, but if you don’t continuously find the joys of the reason why you’re together, then your life just becomes a pattern of habit, rather than moments of pure joy. But the reason you’re together is because you had pure joy – not the habits of patterns or pattern or habits, you know. And so, if you only have a marriage that’s about a pattern of responsibility and a framework of habits that you have created for yourself, pretty soon something that gives you real joy will enter your life and you’ll look at this real joy and say, “But this doesn’t reflect what joy I had before, so I want something that gives me joy.” Like I’ve said to you many times, and you know the answer, so I’ll tell you. How much time does it take to destroy a marriage? Just one day – and it’s one day at a time. So what does it take to make a great marriage? One day. One day at a time. So you’ve got to look for every day where you can have a moment of joy, so you can enjoy the thing that brought you together. If you don’t do that, you’re going to just get to a place where you no longer having joy moments.
It’s the same with your walk with God. If you walk with God as a habit and a pattern of values and a set of responsibilities as a Christian lifestyle, then your life just becomes the pattern of not doing wrong and doing the best I can. And so you have no joy in your relationship, because it’s just a habit and a pattern of living. God never designed us to have Christianity like that. He designed us to have Christianity and a walk with Him that is daily. It’s a daily joyful relationship with Him. It’s an experience of knowing God every day that when you wake up in the morning, you say, “Good morning Lord, it’s a great day for us to be together.” Just by the way, ‘tussen hakkies, né’(Afrikaans for between brackets) just on the side notes – this is a really good reason for people to pray, because if people pray, they allow God to use your words to affect someone else’s life that can’t see. So because they can’t see, everything in their life is blurred – and they don’t know where to go and they can’t respond to circumstances the way they should. When you pray for people, prayer becomes the tool that God can use to help put His glasses on someone else’s eyes. When they see through those glasses, they will make the right choices. It is still their choice, but when they see clearly they will make the right choice. Hey, that’s a good explanation of why to pray, why to pray for somebody, some people, even for governments it’s a good reason, because governments often make decisions, not just without glasses, they got blinders on – and when we pray for government, then God says, “Thank you. I will take your prayers and I’ll take the blinders off them and then they can see and then God shows them the solutions that He wants them to see. Even the ANC – the A and C, you see, just in case you didn’t see that, hallelujah. Praise the Lord.
Again, just aside note, if you’re into the Bible and you’re into the numerics of the Bible–it’s interesting that Lamech, who was the man who birthed Noah, and who prophesied and gave Noah his name, he said, because God will deliver us from this hardship of having to toil in the earth – that was what Noah… That’s what Noah’s name means. It is interesting that Lamech lived 777 years. It’s a three numbers of seven. It’s a tri-union of evens, which is the order of completion and perfection.
So then, let’s go to the next slide, if you’re into Bible numerics. So Noah lived 950 years, that’s pretty long anyway, you know. And he had Shem, Ham and Japheth and then all the way and I’m getting to talking about Jacob’s Constellation. And so, I showed you this – that Abraham eventually had two sons, Ishmael and eventually Isaac and Jacob – we’re going to get to that next time, hopefully. Next time. Hallelujah. So I’m kind of coming towards the end of what I have to say to you today, but I just want to remind you, you know, that when God; when Noah came back to the earth, God pronounced a blessing on Noah. So Noah makes a sacrifice to God and that sacrifice is a pleasing aroma to God. And He says: “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination (the strong desire) of man’s heart is evil and wicked from his youth…” In other words this is the first Adam that was born; he has evil in his heart from when he is born. “…neither will I ever again smite and destroy every living thing, as I have done. 22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” And then chapter 9 and verse 1 in Genesis, 1“And God pronounced a blessing upon Noah and his sons and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. (Genesis 9:1)
Okay, so He says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” So God has pronounced a blessing. He has pronounced a good life and He says the earth will never again be cursed because of man. So He also says, “I put a rainbow in the sky and everytime you see a rainbow, it’s an eternal mark of my covenant that the earth is not cursed because of man’s behaviour.” Hold on a minute, there is still a curse to the natural man. The human body man that will live and die, has to still live in the Adamic curse, why? Because the Adamic curse says, “that the natural environment, you have to extract from it with toil and sorrow.” Your natural living flesh has not yet been redeemed to the end of time, the way it will be redeemed, so that’s why we still die. Okay.
So we still have to work to earn a living. However, God says, “If you want to elevate your status, you don’t have to just live in the realm of the Adamic source of life, you can be elevated into the heavenly man and you can live in a realm of heavenly productivity that is way above the Adamic productivity.”
So I go back to the sower sows the Word. So now I use my son Garth this morning. I’m going to use my son Brynn this afternoon and again I’m going to do my best not to lose it emotionally. I did okay; this morning I introduced to the Witbank congregation my son, Garth as Pastor Garth because, I mean we’ve been speaking about him in that way now for some months, because it’s God’s time and God had decided it’s time Garth spiritually get elevated to this position. Not because Garth is my natural son. My natural sons will tell you that I have no favouritism with them when it comes to he spirit. If they have done wrong spiritually, they get the same treatment as everybody else. Sometimes I’m even tougher on them. So in other words, I have not permitted my sons to get away with behaviour patterns in their life and live in the church as though those behaviour patterns were not there. When their behaviour patterns were out of line with the Word of God I have taken them to task and when they’ve had positions in the church where they could not walk in those positions, I have taken them out of those positions. There was a time, in my son Garth’s life, when he was a praise and worship leader of the ministry, but he was doing things in his life that I became aware of. I said, “Garth, you can’t walk here. You can’t be here. This not only damages the church, but this damages you forever. So you got to come out of this position.” And I did it to save his life and ours. Hello. And it did. And this morning I introduced, through what I’m about to tell you, at the end of it, I introduced them to Pastor Garth because Garth has made spiritual decisions to live his life for God. So come stand by me please Brynn.
So one of the most significant moments of my life is when I had this realisation. When Brynn and Garth were around about seven, eight, nine years old – round about that time. I became aware that my son Brynn, was going to become like me. I am aware of all of my weaknesses. Those weaknesses I’m not aware of, my wife made me aware of. No (laughing). You know that was a joke (laughing). As a person who grew up in church, who grew up with the Word, who grew up in God, I was very much aware, although I didn’t have sins like getting drunk and taking drugs and having a promiscuous lifestyle before I got married. Although those things were not part of my life, and neither did I defraud anybody? I had good value systems. Are you with me? I had good value systems. I loved God, God was in my heart and I lived my life for God.
So, I was either on the sports field, or I was at church. There wasn’t anything in-between. I didn’t want to go to discos and nightclubs and do all that kind of stuff. You’re with me? I wanted to live for God. When my sons were seven, eight, nine years old, I became aware that the closest people that I have to me; the ones I cared most about, are the ones that live with me all the time. And I became aware that they were picking up on words; language that I spoke that was not in line with faith. I was aware that my weaknesses that were in my life were going to become them. Devastated. The person that I gave birth to, that I love most is about to have all of my weakness. There is something I don’t want my son to have is my weaknesses. Some of you might argue with me; but you had strengths and those strengths would become his too – not necessarily. He’s his own person with his own choices and if I have strengths; to someone else they might be weakness. But whether they are strengths or weaknesses, I was aware that I was human and my humanity was the image that he had as a person, that I wanted him to have my image to live by. And so the image that I was giving him to live by; I began to realize that it’s got weaknesses and it’s flawed and I’m purposefully giving him them.
So what could I do about this? The only thing that I could do about this to change this as this reality became mine, was I could take him by the hand, and I have done that, because he’s in church today, and I’ll tell you that my son and I speak this out because, I knew beforehand, that if he’s here this is what I want to say publicly. Those of you, who know him, will know that he is a man that can pray and has a spirit of prayer that rests upon him. Not only that, he has a prophetic gift that resides in him and he can be abrasive in his prophetic gift as much as his mom can be. Which is the power of the prophet is that it has fire. I have my son and I can speak about him; does he have weaknesses? Ya, he has weaknesses; his own choices.
Here’s what I did with him, I said, “Brynn come walk through life with me, and we are going to walk with Jesus” and the best thing I can say, Jesus wherever I’m teaching in my weakness, I’m asking You to teach him about You because there’s nothing I can do to change my weakness, other than give my weakness to You and some of those weaknesses I don’t even know about, and he’s becoming those weaknesses that I don’t even know about, and so I’m lost because I don’t want him to be that. How many of you want your offspring’s to become all of your weaknesses? Nobody wants that. The only thing I could do to overcome that is to say, “Son let’s walk in Jesus together. Let’s put the Word of God in our hearts together. Let’s allow the Word of God to come into our hearts and as it grows up, and grows up into a thirty, and a sixty, and a hundredfold return in my heart and in your heart. And wherever there is weakness in our life, that Word will change us. That Word will change us and it will deliver to both of us, the things that we need to be able to live life. And I cannot then be responsible anymore for the weaknesses that I’m giving you because I was born with these weaknesses and as much I don’t want these weaknesses to come to you, I know they will come to you but I’ve got to trust Jesus.”
And so I had long conversations with both of my sons about me walking with Jesus and them walking with me with Jesus. When I had; when I saw my lifestyle sometimes I would call them and I say, “Hey boys, I have; I have missed God and I have not walked with Jesus the way I should be walking and I ask your forgiveness.” Of course they gave me that forgiveness. They loved me. But we had an honest open enough relationship where I said, “My weaknesses are becoming yours.”
So I say and I let you all know this publicly, that we don’t just have a father-son relationship, we have a covenant relationship. Our relationship was not based on the fact that he’s my son and I’m his father, covenant is based on the relationship that we both follow Christ. He knows that I love him because of the love of Christ that is in me, not because of what my value system is, because value systems can be a human commodity, but the love of God is a heavenly man power force. It’s different. It has the power to change. It has the power to shift. It has the power to take my weaknesses and convert them into His strengths, because it’s the love of God. Hallelujah.
And so I read to you; I read to you from Corinthians again. “And just as we have borne the image [of the man] of dust, so shall we and so let us also bear the image [of the Man] of heaven.”
We have the power to bear the image of the man of heaven, come on. I can’t do this out of my own natural man because my own natural man is dust and it has sin embedded in it. Hey, let me just tell you something, I’ve learnt this a long time and I’m doing this just by the Spirit of God, I’ve been a thither all my life and I receive all of the power of tithing in my life. I’m aware that there are people that I teach tithing to that are not in the place where they have the capacity, spiritually, to receive the revelation of tithing. So I’m aware that when it comes to tithing that they see a blur. And we teach on tithing because we want the Word of God to have glasses on because tithing is not a law, tithing is the release of the power of God to release you from the man of dust into the heavenly man; to release you from the bondage of sorrow and toil and to release God’s power in finances and it releases you into the heavenly realm of the heavenly man. And I am aware that some people have the glasses of tithing that is interfered with through the pressures of life, through the circumstances of their affordability of the tithe, through their own religious ideas and things that people have taught about law and all kinds of things. All I can do is stand and say, “There are glasses which you can have and they will change you from being a man of dust into the heavenly man.” Praise the Lord.
I am blessed enough to say to you today, that I have a revelation that my walk with God is no longer about a set of do’s and don’ts. I have a revelation that my walk with God is about the power of the faith that He gave me to walk with Him. And I can live in that faith if I take His Words – this is an i-Pad but I have a Bible on here – I can take the Bible, His Words and I can put it in my heart and I can speak it out of my mouth and I can put it in my heart and I can speak it out of my mouth and as I do that, I release the power of God – not only to change me…. so you understand that there is a part of me that’s dying every day. There’s a part of me that is dying, that part of me is the dependence that I have on this natural man. But as I am dying, it looks distinctly disturbing because someone who is dying, is always crackly like a seed. It’s got to crackle open. It’s got to morph. And it looks distinctly unlovely.
So what you see here, looks lovely (Pastor John pointing to himself), don’t laugh like that! But I am dying daily. But I am not dying because of a set of do’s and don’ts, but I am dying because as the faith of God is getting stronger in me and as God’s life, the heavenly man, is growing bigger in me, the power to overcome this natural man gets bigger and bigger and the natural man keeps trying to fight for its place to have its own comfort zone back and to have its own choices back and to have its own desires back and the power of God is rising stronger inside of me and says, “Why would you settle for something that is so inferior to something that is so superior?” and the natural man is dying and in the death throws and people look at me and say, “What is going on with you?” And I say, “I am dying” and they say, “I don’t want any of that!” No, you want some of this! You want some of this glory that is in my life.
Hallelujah. There’s such joy and peace in this cause I tell you what, as you begin to explode into that heavenly man, you understand that your movements, your decisions and everything you do is just altered. It’s just altered. Why, because you know, I couldn’t smile at Pastor Lynn before, but now I can smile at Pastor Lynn because I can see him. It makes a huge difference in what you see and how you see it.
So the reason I used my son as an example of weakness is because when Noah, and I finish off with this,…. when Noah comes to earth and God begins to bless him and God begins to prosper him, he begins to plant things in the earth that now has a new blessing from God on the earth. And I finish with this, because this is going to take us into next week to talk to you about Isaac, because Abraham comes out of this and Isaac comes out of this and there is a story about Isaac’s sowing in famine and in the same year, receiving a hundred fold return because He accessed the heavenly man rather than the natural man, whereas his father Abraham went to Egypt, Isaac stayed and sowed in famine. But first I have to tell you that Noah is sowing and he receives the strength of the earth back to him and so Noah is sampling all this good stuff that is called wine that came from the earth. So he samples his Chardonnay, and his…. whatever you know, Pinotage and Cabernet and he’s sampling and doesn’t make a choice to get drunk – but I am just giving him the benefit of the doubt: all his sampling gets him drunk. Go read it for yourself. He got drunk.
So he is lying in his tent naked and his son Ham goes into the tent and sees his father lying naked and he goes out to his two brothers, Shem and Jafeth – he goes out to his two brothers and he says, “Hey, have you seen dad’s nakedness?” There’s a lot of debate about what actually happened here and a lot of theologians that have talked about a lot of things, including sexual activity that happened with his dad – between him and what he did to his dad while he was in a drunken state. I can’t prove any of that. For me this is about: he saw his dad and he despised what he saw. So he goes out and talks to his two brothers and he says, “Have you seen what condition our dad’s in?” So when they become aware of his condition, they take a piece of blanket, whatever covering, they put it on their shoulders and they walk backwards into the tent and they walk over his nakedness and drop the covering onto his nakedness and they walk out of the tent without seeing his nakedness and they have not another word to say about his nakedness or his drunkenness.
I can teach on this because there was a moment in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness and there’s a lot of shame and guilt that came with the nakedness of their choices. And so the Bible talks about his drunkenness and his nakedness and there’s a lot I can teach about this but I don’t want to focus on that. I want to focus on what the sons did to the father, because the father was operating in his natural man with weakness. But his sons came along and said, “We do not consider this to be relevant, we cover it.” Shem – so you will find out next week, that when Noah finds out what happened Noah doesn’t curse Ham, he curses his son, Canaan. Go read it for yourself. He doesn’t curse Ham, the man who despised him, he cursed his son, Canaan. He says to Shem, “Shem, I pronounce a blessing on you and all the future generations of all future humanity are going to be blessed through you.” And there is Abraham, here is Isaac and Jacob. He says to Japheth, “Japheth, you are going to have a relationship with your brother Shem, where you’re going to have all having to participating in the blessing of Shem, but you’re going to participate in them in more of a serving role. But you are going to participate in all of the blessing that I’m pronouncing over Shem.” Why did this happen? Because Shem was the first born. He was the eldest first born. Jesus is the first born among many. Herewith endeth the lesson. Praise the Lord.
It is interesting that Ham and Canaan, they became a very different group of people than the Hittites are from the descendants of Canaan. If you look at all the major problems that are in the earth today in terms of sin problems, they all came from Canaan. When God blessed Abraham and He said, “Go to a land that I will give you.” He said, “I am taking you to the land of Canaan.” Because the blessing is going to totally overcome the curse. And now I must really stop because if I keep going, I’d be here all day and all night. I’m telling you that we have hope because we don’t have to live as natural people, we can live in the heavenly realm and it’s not about how good we are and how many do’s and don’ts we’re capable of doing, it’s about this walk with God that we choose and as we choose this walk with God, things you know just seems to get clear and we get glasses.
And I don’t know about you, but I want Jesus glasses to see in life. I don’t want my own set of glasses, because I am just blurred. So don’t go around calling me blurry now. “Hello Pastor Blurry,” I’ll blur you back! Praise the Lord, Hallelujah, Glory to God. And so when we eventually gets to Jacob’s Constellation, it will mean a whole lot more to you because of this background of how we got to Jacob and how God blessed Jacob and then how everything happened from there. So in the end, Jacobs’s Constellation is about: the blessing of the father, and the blessing of the future and the blessing of identity change. And so you can already see when I say that how this was essential for me to teach it, for then you will understand more the blessing of the fathers and the blessing of the future, and the blessing of identity change. Will you all stand with me please? I’d like us all to pray this prayer together. Shall we? I did this prayer this morning in Witbank and I want us all to do it this afternoon. Let’s just all pray this prayer together:
Father, we come to you in the Name of Jesus and I declare that in myself, I don’t have the strength to live completely in Your will, but with the faith that Jesus has given me, I choose life and I choose to walk in the heavenly realm, as a heavenly man and where my natural man is weak, I ask You Lord, to be the Saviour of my life, be the Saviour of my lifestyle, and I thank You Lord that You are regenerating me from an old man to a heavenly man, in Jesus Name, and everybody said, Amen. Well, thank you for coming to church. May you have a blessed weak that is full of prosperity and the blessing of God, Amen. Ok Bye you all.
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