Prosperity is not for the fainthearted
I wish to purposely ignore the house building project for a while and dig deeper into my experiences and challenges hoping that this will help you understand my point and approach better. In this article I will be sharing about how we broke through the barriers of poverty that we were facing. Or shall I say the barriers of lack and want. When we look at Psalm 23 we hear David speak about want. What is want? The English dictionary defines wanting as a state of desiring but not having or having a deficiency; or experiencing insufficiency, and also as lack. What we need to realize from this scripture is that David had this inner assurance that his shepherd was not going to give him over to lack or any kind of insufficiency.
But then I looked at another portion of scripture in the book of Philippians in chapter 4 verse 19, here Paul was addressing the issue of needs. He said ‘my God shall supply all your needs’ I Read these two passages many times over trying to get the difference between the two of them, this was going to help me to understand my situation better. Up to that point in my life I was not sure if what we were experiencing was want or we were just waiting for God to supply our needs. The importance of understanding this is that it gives you a shortcut towards God’s best by helping you to eliminate all things that retard your progress.
There is a very fine line between the two. It’s easy to realize that David was concerned more about not wanting and not about having needs. Then I read both scriptures again and again and ended up with a simple understanding. An understanding that would see me successfully separate my needs from my wants and approach God head on armed with the full knowledge of what He promises and what He committed Himself to. This is what I came up with; to succeed in this life we must understand that David did not say; ‘The lord is my shepherd I shall not need’ the reason he used the word want instead of need is because he understood that we were fashioned by God himself to be totally reliant on him for our daily needs, and this is where the ‘needs’ part come in. we will never come to a point in our lives where God has franchised this department. The supplying of our needs shall always be his business, and for this to run effectively we must trust and surrender to God’s perfect ability to take care of our needs.
Then whenever I read Psalm 23 I do so reading it in conjunction with Philippians 4:19 in which Paul assures us of God’s perfect ability to take care of our needs and NOT our wants. I drew the line between my needs and the things I want, this made me realize that what James says by citing that the reason we pray but fail to receive is simply because we pray being driven by what we want more than what we need. See; James 4:3. In this book James mentions the reason why we don’t receive; ‘when you ask you don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures’ the word pleasure is also the word greed. In the King James Version it is translated as the word Lust. It is obvious therefore why many fail to have a breakthrough with God in the needs department. And please note that the reason I’m going in an obvious circle in trying to explain this is because I wish to emphasize the need to know the difference between needs and wants; lusts; greed or pleasures. Because I have learnt that it is very hard for positive results to follow negative practices or negative beliefs.
Over the years Joyce and I have practiced strict discipline in these two realms and even though today we posses great wealth God knows we never lusted after these things, they were a direct result of ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you’ we have seen God add property; cars, clothes food and many other things into our lives. And please notice how God identifies them; He calls them ‘these things’ this sounds almost insignificant. And come to imagine how ‘these things’ make some people go literally crazy but to us who have reached that level of revelation we see them from God’s point of view. I currently live in extreme comfort and drive expensive cars drive an expensive bike wear expensive clothes and give R120,000.00 per annum, and to us it has become just these things as our father calls them.
The first thing we need to do in order for us to experience God’s move in our lives until we move in His divine provision is to set our minds on being instruments of prosperity and not recipients of it. Beneficiaries never get to enjoy the prosperity until the host has died. Decide today to become the host and not wait for handouts from others. When Joyce and I started our journey of prosperity with God all that we had between ourselves and starvation was a mere R40. We gave it all and it changed our lives for ever. The beginning of prosperity is not receiving but what I call ‘the God feeling’ I will tell you about it in the next article. To be continued
MVK
This entry was posted
on Thursday, March 31, 2011
.
You can leave a response
and follow any responses to this entry through the
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
.
8 comments