obedience

I know from personal experience that when people start to criticize you and persecute you because you live by faith, your natural human response is to want to strike back. You want to start dishing out a little criticism of your own. Maybe if they get a taste of their own medicine, they’ll shut their mouths, you think.

But you know what? They won’t. Your words will just add fuel to their fire and they’ll criticize you harder and louder than they did before.

If you’re born again and have the Word of God in your heart, you can live in victory. You may not have all the answers. There may be a great many spiritual things you don’t understand. But it’s not those things that are most likely to destroy you. It’s the things you know to do—but don’t—that usually make you fall.

Have you ever been in the position in the past where every time you opened the Bible you received a river of revelation? Does it seem lately that the river’s run dry? If so, I strongly suggest that you backtrack to the last revelation God gave you. Back up and see if you acted on it, if you did what God showed you to do. If you didn’t, start again, digging in to that revelation and then putting it into action in your life. You’ll soon find new revelations are beginning to flow.

If you want your deeds to be blessed, if you want to see supernatural results in your life, you’ll have to do more than simply read the Word of God. You’ll have to put it into action.

That’s what I did. Years ago when I realized that God was the One who had the answers to all my problems, that He was the One who could supply all my needs, I committed myself to do everything His Word told me to do. I made a quality decision to step out in faith on every command I saw there.

When you’re facing a problem, the very first thing you should ask God for is wisdom. Not money. Not power. Not even healing. But wisdom.

God’s wisdom is the key that will unlock every door in your life. It will turn your every failure into success. So, stop wasting your prayer power begging God for things you think you need and spend some time instead listening to what He has to say about your situation.

If you’ve never tried that before, practically speaking, here’s what you need to do:

We often praise God for His faithfulness. We’re thankful that we can always count on Him to be there for us. But we rarely consider the fact that He needs us to be faithful too.

It’s true. God needs people He can count on. He needs faithful and wise stewards He can trust over His household. In this final hour, He needs faithful believers to team up with, so He can manifest Himself in the earth more than ever before.

“Oh Gloria, God doesn’t need me!”

Do you ever have seasons in your life when it seems like every time you go to church and every time you spend time in prayer and every time you open the Bible, you receive a revelation from God? I do. Spiritually, everything will be going great. I’ll be higher than a Georgia pine. Then, suddenly, something starts to happen. I start drying up in spiritual things.

It seems like it doesn’t make any difference what I pray or how much I read the Word, I can’t get anywhere spiritually. I’m so dry my spirit’s creaking!

If you hang around God very much, it won’t be long before you’ll start wanting to do things the world considers supernatural. You’ll start wanting to lay hands on the sick and have them recover. You’ll start wanting to cast out demons. You’ll start wanting to cast mountainous problems into the sea.

What’s more, you can do it if you want to!

How? Not by jumping out and “trying” to do supernatural things, but by obeying God one step at a time. By doing the things He’s already given you power to do.

You are an ambassador for Christ! If you have made Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, you have been sent to act as a representative for Him in this world. Just as nations send ambassadors to represent their interests in other countries, you've been sent here to look after the interests of the kingdom of God.

Some people have the mistaken idea that when the direction of the Holy Spirit comes to them, they can just ignore it for a while if they want to and then obey Him later in their own good time. They think to themselves, I know what I'm doing is wrong. I know my lifestyle isn't right, but I'm just going to do it a while longer. Then I'll get things straightened out with the Lord.

If you know how to listen to the voice of God, you can hear Him calling throughout the Body of Christ today. He is calling for unity. He is calling us to lay down our disagreements and come together in preparation for Jesus' return.

Just the thought of that scares some believers. "How can I unify with someone from another denomination?" they say. "I'm not going to give up my doctrines and agree with theirs just for unity's sake!"

What they don't realize is this: scriptural unity isn't based on doctrine.

Self-consciousness is a major problem in the Body of Christ today. It keeps us from doing the things God tells us to do. Instead of simply obeying Him, it makes us start to wonder, Now what will people think of me if I do that? What if I command that person to get out of the wheelchair and he doesn't get up? What if I start believing for prosperity and go broke? What about that, God? I won't look too good, will I?

So many believers are unsure of their ability to hear God or know His voice. They're always afraid that they won't be able to tell when the Spirit of God is talking to them.

What they don't realize is this: Hearing the voice of the Spirit is a privilege that the Bible says belongs to every believer (Romans 8:14). All we have to do to exercise that privilege is to receive it by faith and put ourselves in a position to hear.

Next time the devil tries to tell you that you can't hear God's voice, remember that.

We have what we say. As believers, we know that's a vital biblical truth. We can see it in Mark 11:23, Matthew 21:21, James 3:2 and many other verses. Yet we often let it slip.

We allow ourselves to begin talking like the world instead of talking the Word. And eventually we get what we've been asking for—a big mess.

So often we miss out on what God wants to do for us because He doesn't do it the way we think He should. We work up an idea in our minds about how He's going to heal us, for instance. We think He's going to send some famous preacher to lay hands on us or that He's going to knock us off our feet with a blast of His power. When He doesn't, we let our faith drop and foul up what He had actually planned to do.

That's what Naaman did. He went to Elisha expecting to be healed in a particular way. When it didn't happen that way, the Bible says, he went away in a rage.

God is vehemently against worry. Jesus preached against it. Paul preached against it. The whole Bible preaches against worry because it was designed by Satan to produce stress, strain and death.

Yet many of us still act as if it's an option, as if we're free to worry if we want to. But we're not! Worrying is a sin. It's one of those things the Word of God directly commands us not to do.

Even though Satan lost all his authority on this earth the day Jesus rose from the dead, for the past 2,000 years he's been running around as a spiritual outlaw—continuing to kill, steal from and destroy all who will let him. But, you know, he's not going to be able to do that much longer. There's coming a day when he's going to be put out of business completely. There's coming a day when the evil he's done here on earth will be put totally underfoot by the power of God.

Don't ever be so afraid of making a mistake you miss out on the joy of acting on the voice of the Lord. Instead, trust the leadership of the Holy Spirit and let Him show you how. He'll begin by speaking to you about the little things in your life, and as you grow accustomed to hearing and obeying, He'll speak to you about weightier things.