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Archive for the ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Category

…Until It Becomes Life to You

Posted in Spiritual Warfare, tagged , , , on December 12, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Scripture reading: Ephesians 4:11

Yesterday we talked about “having your loins girt about with truth” and about following the true apostolic leading. Let us look today at more “truth” and the other ministries described in Ephesians 4:11.

We have the prophetic ministry but we do not respect them. If somebody prophetically comes and tells me something, for example my wife, I say, “Now, where did you get it? Is it you or from the Lord?” She says, “Well, it just comes to me.” I say, “Well, that is good enough for me.” The prophetic ministry is not only speaking through the prophets, but it is speaking through the hearts of all the brethren, because the spirit of prophecy is the Spirit of Christ (Revelation 19:10)! When the prophetic ministry speaks, I have already had the word inside of me. The Christ in me says, “Aha!” I am afraid to do anything against what is said by a prophetic ministry! We have to begin to believe God.

“…and he gave some evangelists…” There is a brother I know who is going out as an evangelist. I noticed that when he goes, God makes it a point to give him some substance wherever he goes. I am not talking about people with whatever faults we have, but I am talking about “God in us.” I am talking about “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Christ moving in you and Christ moving through you! I have no business with your faults! God will take care of them! MOVE AS GOD WOULD HAVE YOU TO MOVE, AND STOP SUBMITTING TO THE SPIRITS OF UNBELIEF! Hallelujah! Instead of sitting back on your haunches and criticizing everything that everybody does, get up and do something! Amen!

“…and he gave some shepherds…” You know, we lack shepherds. Oh, we lack shepherds! There is nobody who loves the people, who will lay down their lives for them, who will go and seek them out in the darkness, who is looking after them. I think that the poverty of this specific group is the lack of shepherd ministry. Does anyone care? Do we really care? There is such and such a one and we have not seen him for a while; he has not come back to service. We do not know what is wrong with him; and then a little news might come around that he is out there eating dirt—and nobody goes after him! We cannot allow them to stay there! We will not allow them to stay there! Somebody should say, “Lord God, kill me unless such and such comes back!” But do you know what? If you just say it of yourself, you are a goner. You are going to die. That is, if you say it of yourself. You need to have the spiritual energy that comes from God, which gives you the real compassion for that person. Compassion that rises to a level that you put your own heart and life on the line! Not one should die in our midst. Many are walking in the ways of death and hell, but we need to reach out to them.

We pray for the people, because these things are being done by spirits. The spirits are even going as far as dressing up the people like spirits. Have you ever looked at the costumes the children wear at Halloween? These are the spirits that are reigning and ruling in the world around us, the powers of the world (the “cosmokratoras”) that are binding us, binding the church, and stopping the church from going. God Almighty is speaking a word to get the church loose. THE CHURCH MUST MOVE OUT NOW AND BREAK THE POWER OF THE DEVIL IN OUR LIVES! Amen!

If you find yourself cursing, you know that it is something that is wrong. A brother once said that he found himself cursing, having profanity in his mind. He said that he would not talk it out and nobody would hear, but it was in his mind. That shows that there is a demon ministering death to his mind. This brother was only the mouthpiece to talk it out, of that which goes through the minds of some of the brethren.

“Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth…” If you do not have the truth, if your belt is not properly girded, then you have left a space for Satan to administer DEATH to you. Do you understand? You have left a space! The truth MUST be there! Question everything that you hear, and question it and question it and question it until it becomes LIFE to you! The clean animal chews his cud. So CHEW YOUR CUD!

(Excerpt from The Omega Message, December 2003, pg. 55-57)

Thought for today: Trust the ministry that God has ordained in the church and chew the cud until it becomes life to you.

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Key to Winning Your Battles

Posted in Spiritual Warfare, tagged , , , , , on December 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Scripture reading: Ephesians 6:13-18

Did you know that if you want to win your spiritual battles, you must take unto yourself the WHOLE armor of God? What does that mean? It means that if you take only one piece of armor, you are still vulnerable in the other places. You put on the helmet and your head is protected, but the rest of your body is exposed. You can put on the breastplate of righteousness, but it is not enough. You also need to have your feet shod or else the enemy can destroy you by making you not to be able to walk. So you have to put on the whole armor.

Let us look at what Paul states in Ephesians 6 as to what the armor is. Verse 14, “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth.” I trust you understand that you CANNOT stand if you do not have the truth girding your loins. It is a simple thing! God has put a ministry in the earth (see Ephesians 4:11). None of us will stand unless we believe in the body of Christ. Do you hear me? If you don’t believe that other brethren have gifts, you will not get deliverance and you will not be able to stand! God said, “…not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.” (1 Corinthians 11:29-30). Amen!

Let us talk more about this “truth.” The world churches teach the rapture. The doctrine of the rapture started in 1830 with the man Irving in London, England. Actually he was in Scotland, but afterwards he moved his headquarters to London. His doctrine was then taken by a theologian named Darby. These were not men of great spiritual repute. (That is a nice way of saying that I do not believe in what they did.) Then there was a man named Scoffield who took the doctrine and his Bible (the Scoffield Bible) became so prevalent and so widespread that everybody wanted to have it. I remember that as a young Christian I had to have a Scoffield Bible. But when you look at the Scoffield Bible, it is misleading. It is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ at all! But then, all the churches took from that and began to preach the “rapture.” They put it in the Bible schools. You had to believe the rapture! When I went to join the Church of God, I had to believe the rapture before I could be ordained; you can see how important it is.

One day, I was speaking to a man on the phone. He said, “What do you believe, brother?” I said, “I believe the Word of God.” He said, “Do you believe in the rapture?” I said, “No.” He said, “Oh, I won’t even talk to you then.” “Bam!” He dropped the phone.

The church began to follow a wrong apostolic leading. Remember, God sends apostles to the church to be that bar in the tabernacle (Exodus 26:28), that thirty cubits long bar to hold the church together, to hold the church in line. God will reveal to certain people truths for their time. He called Martin Luther. He revealed certain truths to Martin Luther for his time. The Anabaptists came up with certain truths. Then the Methodists came up with the sanctification truth. That is all that they had, nothing more; and instead of going on, they rejected every further move of God! They rejected the other moves. So then the very thing that God had put in the church to lead you and to guide you, you end up rejecting it. And so the thing that comes forward today is that none of these brethren are hearing from God. They teach the “rapture,” the teaching that we are going to fly off the earth and God is going to burn it all up. No man who preaches the rapture is preaching the truth! He has not heard from God!

When I first heard this, I went to God and said, “Now, God, tell me. I will not preach it until You tell me!” For if God does not tell me, how will I know which is true? So then I went into the Word of God, and I found out that “rapture” is not in the Word of God at all. I found that all the passages they taught us to preach on the rapture were not talking about rapture at all. For example, Matthew 24:37-42 says that as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the time of the end. Listen now, what happened in the days of Noah? WHO was taken away? All the sinners were taken away out of the earth, and the righteous were left. The rapturists turn it upside down!

My Brother Frank went to school, learned all this and came in with his doctorate, including Greek and Hebrew. I was very happy because I could talk to him now. We spent a whole night. I said, “Now, Frank, “…two in the field, one is taken and the other left.” Who was taken and who was left?”

He said, “Oh, sure! The righteous were taken up on top of the flood, and the sinners were left.”

I said, “Okay. Let us read the Bible. The scripture said that ‘one shall be taken, and the other left.’ The Greek word for ‘taken’ here is ‘paralambano.’ The meaning of this word says that those who were ‘taken’ were not raptured but ‘grabbed and arrested.’” I showed him that, and, well, eventually he came to it.

What am I talking about? The apostolic leading was wrong. The apostolic teaching that is showing the way to the people of God was wrong, leading them astray! And now they reject anything that is from God!

Brethren, make sure that your foundation and the apostolic vision you are following come from God.

(Excerpt from The Omega Message, December 2003, pg. 52-55)

Thought for today: “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth.”

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Weapon against Weapon

Posted in Spiritual Warfare, tagged , , on December 10, 2024| 1 Comment »

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Scripture reading: John 8:36

Let us look at this one spiritual principle: Dirty devils come to you and they say, “You are no good. You cursed yesterday; you have sinned since this morning. You are no good!” When the devil told me that one time, I said to him, “Look at YOU. Look at YOU! Who are you to tell me that I am no good? You were in heaven, you saw all the glory of God, and you left heaven to go to HELL! WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME I AM NO GOOD?” Hallelujah!

Jesus said, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). He also said, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common (unclean)” (Acts 10:15). And then, “…And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). He said that those who walk in Jesus, those who walk under the canopy of Jesus Christ, those who are part of the body of Christ, because they obey Christ – they have no sin! Amen! Remember now, even if you have just killed seven men, you can say, “I HAVE NO SIN BECAUSE JESUS HAS FORGIVEN ME! I have asked Him to forgive me, and He said that if any man sins, he has an advocate with the Father, even Jesus Christ the righteous. I ask You, Father, forgive me of my sins now! Now, Mr. Devil, you have nothing against me, for my sins are forgiven and they are under the Blood of Jesus Christ.”

In the spiritual warfare, we need weapon against weapon! Firepower against firepower! It is amazing, you know. In Iraq, when Hussein heard that the American army was coming, he moved his mighty brigades to meet them. Most of them never saw what hit them. The American army destroyed them from twenty miles away before they even got to them. They were being destroyed from twenty miles away! Some of them never got a chance to fire a shot. Amen!

God is talking about “powers!” He has given us power over the power of the enemy, even against “…spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12) What does “…spiritual wickedness in high places” mean? That means that there is a wickedness that is higher than you. You have to rise up to combat that wickedness, because it is higher than you are. God is speaking to a people that He has ordained to be overcomers, but as I have said before, you cannot overcome unless you overcome in yourself. You have to overcome in your dining room. Some of us cannot overcome there. We keep stuffing our mouths and lose the battle from before we start fighting. You have the temple of the living God and you are going to have to learn to put the temple of the living God in order!

Stop eating so much! Oh, yes! Listen, when I am talking about eating, I am talking about “appetite.” If you cannot control your natural appetite to eat, you won’t control yourself sexually, or any other way. Men have to learn to control themselves. Amen! Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7:29, “But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none.” “BE AS IF YOU HAD NONE!”

I am walking along the street (I am speaking on a different level now) looking at the people, and I see written across their minds, “SEX.” They are walking and looking at you to make sure that you see them. The whole world is taken up by this! Why? It is because it is the best thing the devil has going for him. He has caught many men of God on that score.

Do you know that the Communists found out that if they tempted their captives, they would get more out of them? They were going through all kinds of things to put Christian man into torture to get them to deny God. But then, they found out that all they had to do was to get a naked woman and put her in the cell with them; the only ones who survived were the overcomers. If they had not already learned to overcome, it would be too late at that time. Amen!

We then must begin to address these areas. We must begin to come face to face with this battle that is before us. If we do not, we cannot win! We cannot win! There are many losers in our midst and the losers are going to lose until they receive the power of God in the various chambers of their souls to give them the victory. Amen!

(Excerpt from The Omega Message, December 2003, pg. 51-52)

Thought for today: Let us not be counted among the losers but among those who do and will overcome!

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Walking in Power

Posted in Spiritual Warfare, tagged , , on December 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Scripture reading: John 1:5

I was in India one time and, for some reason, I provoked the angel of death. I did not willfully do it; I just started to study about the Hindu god Kali and went into a store that had different images and other things. I said to the man, “I want to know something about this spirit called Kali.” He looked at me. I said, “Yes, do you have any literature here?” He replied, “Well, this is all I have,” and gave me a book. I paid him for it and man alive! The man was a worshipper of Kali! Without knowing it, I had gone directly to the priest of Kali and told him I was against Kali. When I went home, the spirit came in and attacked me. I grappled with him and started to speak, “In the Name of Jesus! I command you to lose your hold!” But it was ineffective. The spirit of God came to me and whispered in my right ear, “The Blood.” That is a different ball game! That is a higher level! You cannot talk to a spirit like this with just the words that might be powerful to some spirits. YOU HAVE TO GET UP THERE WITH HIM!

Brethren, I say it every time I preach to you. Get yourself trained in commanding the Blood of Jesus Christ. If you are not trained, then when you are in battle, you will not be able to remember it. Somehow or the other, the power of the spirit that is before you prevents you from reaching out to the Blood. That is, unless you are already in the Blood; unless you are already moving with the Blood!

You know, one time when I was a young man, God was teaching me the Gospel. I did not go to Bible school. I went to God’s school! As He was teaching me the Gospel, one of the things He taught me was the crucifixion. He said, “Come with Me, and let Me show you the crucifixion.” Have you ever taken your Bible, gone through the whole crucifixion and imagined what all happened there? He took me through the crucifixion and every step of the way I felt the pain, the suffering. I saw them dragging Jesus along. I saw Him with His hands tied and a man spit right in His face. He carried me to the cross, and I saw the Blood!

Do you know what happened, brethren? In India, when this prince of devils attacked me, I began to see the Blood again! My mind went back to the Blood of Jesus Christ. When you do that, you are LIFTED! Immediately, you are lifted into another realm! Yes! I said, “SMITE HIM, Lord!” The Blood smote him right in the middle of his head and he crumbled to the floor!

OH GOD, HELP US TO UNDERSTAND! HELP US, LORD, TO UNDERSTAND!

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the DARKNESS of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

The “DARKNESS…” Do you know what darkness is? It is opposite to light; but the darkness cannot overcome the light (John 1:5). Light overcomes darkness! I want you to understand that. Any time the darkness comes upon you, TURN ON THE LIGHT! Have you ever had a dream where you go to turn on the light, and the light won’t come on? You turn on the bulb, and nothing happens? God wants you to begin to practice to turn on the light! Hallelujah!

God is speaking to many of you. He is saying, “Turn on the light.” In other words, your mind is your eastern gate. And eastern gate is the gate through which God comes in. So many other things are crowding up in that gate, preventing God from coming through. Just begin to repeat the Word of God. Yes! “I am the Lord thy God, that brought thee out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage.” Say, “I will have no other God beside You. You are my God. You are my Savior.” “Deliver me now from this darkness that is coming down upon my soul!” Amen! Begin to talk aloud! Begin to read the Bible. Sometimes your mind is so befuddled that you cannot remember words to say. Get the Bible! Read it!

Psalm 91:5-8, “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.”

(Excerpt from The Omega Message, December 2003, pg. 49-50)

Thought for today: We need to walk in the power that we have been given!

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All Power Is Given unto Me

Posted in Spiritual Warfare, tagged , , , on December 6, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Scripture reading: Matthew 28:18

Have you ever wondered why it is that even though “all power is given unto me (you) in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18), we are suffering so much? Why do we have our houses being broken up? Why are we being smashed to pieces? It is because God is ALLOWING it! Now, why would my God allow that? You see, God has given you a weapon, but if you do not use it, you are going to die.

I remember David moaning for Abner (2 Samuel 3:33). He said, “Abner, oh Abner is a fool!” He said, “He died with his weapon in his sheath. He allowed the man to take him and kiss him, plunge his sword into him and kill him when he had his sword in his sheath.” David would have been pleased if he had died fighting instead. This is the situation with the church!

Brethren! Psalm 91:1 says, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” “…shall!” Amen! There is NO excuse for failure! NO excuse! The first thing that happens to you, when something begins to happen to your life, is that the devil starts telling you, “Oh, it is natural. It is natural.” IT IS NOT NATURAL! Sister, it is not natural for your husband to be taken away from you. Do not believe anything else but that God gave you that man! Do not believe that it is God’s will for him to be away from his children. You have to believe the truth! Hallelujah! Begin to command it! You have a blood covenant with him! Yes! You have a blood covenant with him, but many times we do not exercise our blood covenant because we are afraid that God might kill him. Isn’t that true? Many times we are afraid that he might die if God goes to arrest him, but that man is part of your blood and your body and you must command God to release him! But you see, because he might be held by a prince, it is necessary for you to rise up to the place where the power of the prince is, before you can overcome him. Amen.

The church could do it. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean that God has given us power. I remember my brother, Frank. He was a wild, wild, fun loving fellow! Oh, he would be just going! When I would see the man, it would just grieve my soul. Do you know what I said? I put my life on the line and I said to God, “If that boy does not come to Jesus Christ, kill me! My life is not worth living if Your Word is not true to me! Kill me!”

Now, you cannot fool with God. You cannot say that if you do not mean it, and you cannot mean it unless you have the spiritual energy. There is one level of energy down here, and there is another level up there. If a prince up there holds your family, you have to get up there also to knock him out. YOU CANNOT STAY DOWN HERE AND WIN UP THERE! Don’t you understand? The frequency on which he operates is up there; the powers that bind your person or your family are on a higher level. If you stay down here, the spirit does not even hear you. You rebuke him, but he does not hear you. Amen!

So you have the power! Remember, “All POWER is given unto me (you) in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18).

(Excerpt from The Omega Message, December 2003, pg. 48-49)

Thought for today: Let us stop fighting in the natural, but let us start using our spiritual weapons and set the captives free.

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