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!”
There’s a spiritual flood coming. God has promised it. He’s promised us an outpouring of Holy Spirit power that will bring in the greatest harvest of souls any of us have ever seen.
As believers, we’ve been reading about it in the Word and hearing about it from the pulpit for years. We’ve been staring toward heaven so long, waiting for it to come, that we’ve gotten cricks in our spiritual necks. We’ve had this mental image of God pouring down His Spirit from some sort of big heavenly pitcher above us.
But you know what? We’ve been looking in the wrong direction!
Truly, it’s time for us to stop looking for the living among the dead. It’s time for us to stop wandering around in the cemetery of sin, sickness and failure and to step into resurrection life!
As a resurrected creature, you’re no accident going somewhere to happen. Your life isn’t just a loose web of events and circumstances. God has specific plans for you.
God honors those who honor Him. He’ll never forget the seeds of loyalty you sow. He’ll multiply them and give them back to you in a harvest of blessing. And Malachi 3:17 says when He makes up His jewels, you’ll be forever among them.
Forever. Think about that for a moment. By honoring God with your life and your lips, you’re stepping into a realm of blessing that will literally take an eternity to explore.
All my life people told me the reason God saved us was so that when we got to glory, we could spend the rest of eternity loving Him and worshiping Him. But, you know, that’s just not so.
It sounds pretty good, but it’s just something someone made up. God isn’t selfish. He’s just the opposite. He’s the ultimate giver. The ultimate lover. He doesn’t do anything just so He can get something in return.
Why then did He save us? The Word of God tells us He did it so that in the ages to come, He could show us the exceeding riches of His grace.
You and I are living in the most exciting days this earth has ever seen. All around us God is pouring out His Spirit in preparation for the endtime revival that will bring this whole age to a glorious close.
Some of God's children are just standing by as spectators, watching Him work. Others, however, have become a vital part of it all. They've volunteered for service in this great end-time army. They've become what the Bible calls the servants and handmaidens of God.
Resurrection. What do you think of when you hear that word? Most people think of the past. Of a stone rolled away. An empty tomb. And a risen Lord.
Praise God, Jesus is alive today, isn't He?
What we don't fully understand is this: He's not the only One who has been resurrected. We've been resurrected too!
We were spiritually resurrected the day we made the Lord Jesus Christ the Lord of our lives. That day we passed from death to life. The greater part of your resurrection has already happened!
Most believers don't know anything about true humility. If you tell them they're the righteousness of God, they'll fight to keep from believing it. You can give them scripture references to prove it, and they'll still argue.
"Oh no," they'll say, "I'm not righteous. I'm just an old sinner saved by grace." They're making a sincere attempt to be humble. But they're sincerely wrong. They're so afraid of being exalted by pride that they've let Satan trick them into falling right into it.
There's a dimension of living you can only experience when you make a decision to please the Father in every activity of your life. In that dimension, Jesus becomes real to you and manifests Himself to you.
Just after the turn of the 20th century, God poured out His Spirit and started a revival on Azusa Street. It was an awesome time, a time when people's entire lives were turned inside out. Everything else in their world seemed to lose importance. Supernatural things were happening. God was manifesting Himself in their presence.
Do you know what Jesus was really talking about when He said those words? He was talking about the mourning of the intercessor. He was teaching about the comfort that comes to the intercessor when he is assured by the Holy Spirit that he has prayed through.
To pray through means "to break through the barriers that have stopped the work of God in the lives of others." It means using your spiritual armor to push back the forces of darkness that surround them.
The truth of this verse hasn't really dawned on most people. They mistakenly think that Jesus was able to work wonders, to perform miracles and to live above sin because He had divine powers that we don't have. Thus, they have never really aspired to live like He lived.
"Oh my," they say with great humility, "I could never live like Jesus did. After all, He had an advantage. He was God!"
Are you destined for greatness in the kingdom of God?
Ask most believers that question and they'll humbly assure you they're not. "You know we can't all be golden vessels" they'll say. "Like the Bible says, some of us are just called to be little clay pots."
Praise God, the Bible doesn't say any such thing!