Month: January 2019

Now that we have a better understanding of what prosperity is and that God desires for us all to prosper, let’s look at some more ways we are called to prosper.  God calls us to prosper in every way imaginable.  He wants us to succeed in everything that we do.  That means spiritually, financially, in our workplace, with our family, and any other aspect of life we are in.  He also calls us to be fully committed and fully submitted to His will for our lives in order to bring us into the FULL prosperity that He desires for us.  So, that makes me think, if we are prospering well already, are we sure that we are fully committed to Him and stepping into the fullness of prosperity that He desires for us?  A really good example of this is the story of Job.

Job was a very prosperous man back in his time.  He was wealthy beyond measure.  He had thousands of animals, 10 children, a very large household, and so on.  It says that he was the “Greatest of all the people in the east” (Job 1:3).  What happened then?  Was he living in the fullness of his prosperity that God desired for him?  The story of Job goes on to tell about all the tests and trials that he goes through from losing all his wealth and property and possessions, to even losing all of his children.  Through all of his tests (that the devil was allowed to put him through) he never once cursed God for the things that happened to him.  Yes, he definitely got down on himself and asked God why this would happen, but he never blamed God for anything.  Job 36:10-12 says, “He also opens their ear to instruction, and commands that they turn from iniquity.  If they obey and serve Him, they shall spend their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasures.  But if they do not obey, they shall perish by the sword, and they shall die without knowledge.” That is a pretty divine thing to say to someone that had been living in prosperity his entire life and had always been a Godly man and loved the Lord.  So, what does that tell us?  God had a bigger plan of prosperity for Job than he had already been walking in!

Job 42:10 says, “And the Lord restored Job’s losses when he prayed for his friends.  Indeed, the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.” GOD MULTIPLIED!  Once he endured the test and remained faithful to the Lord, everything he had doubled!  Through all the tests and trials that the Lord let Job go through, he was able to get to a place where he trusted in Him, had more faith in Him, and was able to obey Him more. That brought him into the complete fullness of prosperity that God always desired for him.

Tell the Lord that you are ready for Him to show you the fullness of prosperity that He desires for you.  Tell him that you are willing and ready to make the sacrifice to obey Him FULLY in order to step into your prosperity!

As I am sure that you have all noticed, God places cycles, not only in our lives personally, but also all through history.  That way we will have opportunities to draw on past experiences, so we don’t continue going through the same cycles that have caused us problems.  He desires to set cycles in our lives that cause us to come into a place of victory and prosperity and to move into His blessing.  In A Time to Prosper Robert Heidler writes:

God uses cycles to bring us into new levels of His blessing and provision.  An example of this is found in Joshua 6, where God instructed the Israelites to take the city of Jericho.  At Jericho, God put Israel into a cycle of victory.  As the Israelites walked in obedience around and around that city, God caused them to triumph over their enemy! 

God’s cycles usually begin with a word of revelation.  God says, “Do this!”  When you obey what God has said, you may not notice a great difference immediately.  But if you continue to walk in obedience, you will be led into a cycle.  Each time around that cycle, you’ll be just a little higher than you were before.  By the time you’ve gone through the cycle several times, you begin to see major changes! 

God wants to lock you into cycles of blessing – cycles of growth and increase.  God has a cycle of victory for you today.  God wants you to break out of Satan’s cycle of destruction and into God’s cycle of blessing

God puts cycles in our lives in order to keep us in the boundaries that He has established for us and to help move us into the blessings that He has planned for us.  When I think of a cycle one of the first things I think of is baseball.  In baseball, a cycle is where a batter hits for a single, double, triple, and home run all in the same game.  It is a rare thing for a batter to do, but when it is accomplished it is pretty amazing.  God desires for us to come into the cycle that He has planned for us and go from a single all the way to a home run!  Ask God to show you the cycle of success and prosperity that He has planned for your life and make the choice to follow that cycle until you break into the level of prosperity that God has destined for you! Read and Meditate on Psalm 103.

Many times we wonder if God really wants us to be prosperous.  For so long it has been taught that if you are not well off then you can have a closer and more intimate relationship with the Lord.  While it is true that God can and will put us through difficult situations, He does that to see how we will respond to those situations.  That doesn’t mean that He plans for us to live that way forever!  He desires for us to prosper!  In A Time to Prosper, Robert Heidler writes:

God desires to prosper His people.  That is His heart and nature.  God is a good Father.  He doesn’t want His Church – His Bride – to be hindered by a continual lack of resources.  He doesn’t want His children so focused on “making ends meet” that they can’t walk in overflowing thankfulness and generosity.

Many Christians have been hampered in their faith by the pagan philosophy of asceticism that crept into the Church during the Dark Ages.  Asceticism subscribes to the belief that by being poor, a person could better concentrate on being spiritual.  In the medieval church, monks had to take vows of poverty.  Even today, many Christians have a mindset of poverty.  But that philosophy is not found in the Bible!

The Bible promises success and prosperity to those who walk in God’s ways.  Those with a poverty mindset try to argue against that, but they have a lot of scripture to explain away!

The fact is, the Bible not only promises prosperity to those who walk in God’s ways, but it is also filled with examples of people who experienced it.  Most of the godly men and women you read about in the Bible were prosperous.  Abraham and his offspring had great wealth.  Job was one of the richest men in the land.  Joseph rose to the top in every situation.  David became king.  Both Daniel and Nehemiah held high positions.  The apostle Paul was incredibly successful and planted thriving churches all over the Roman Empire!  Don’t let a poverty mindset hold you captive!

God has absolutely no desire for us to live with a mindset of poverty.  His desire for us is to prosper!  The people throughout the Bible are perfect examples of this.  Did they go through some tough times?  Sure, they did!  It’s what they did during those tests and during the times they were at their low points that gained them favor with God and brought them into the prosperity that He desired for them.  Ask God begin to remove the mindset of poverty that has impacted the church and ask Him to renew your mind, in order to come into the blessings and prosperity that He desires for all of His children!  Meditate on Romans 8 and Philippians 4.

How do we begin to experience the blessings that God has planned for us?  God desires for us to prosper, but at the same time, He requires that we follow Him with our whole heart.  He wants to pour out blessing after blessing on us.  He wants to see us succeed in ways we never thought or imagined that we could.  In the third chapter of their book Dad writes:

The Old Testament gave clear instructions of what we need to do to experience this blessing: Obey the Law!  In Deuteronomy 7:12, God says you will receive the blessing “if you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them” (NIV).  He also pronounced a curse on those who do not fully obey: “But it shall come to pass, if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments and His statutes which I command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you” (Deut. 28:15). 

To understand blessing, we need to see that God’s Law reveals His boundaries for our lives.  The area within those boundaries is called righteousness.  As long as you live within those boundaries, you live in the realm of blessing!  Within those boundaries, you find prosperity, security, joy, abundance, protection, health, fruitfulness and satisfaction.  Those things are all God’s will for you, and they are all found in the realm of righteousness.

When you violate God’s boundaries for your life by choosing to sin, you leave the realm of righteousness.  You are in sin!  Because of that, you no longer live in the sphere of God’s blessing, and you instead find yourself under the curse.  The curse includes things such as poverty, sickness, fear, sorrow, hatred and betrayal.

Read Deut. 7, and Deut. 28.  God gave us a clear path to His blessings.  He gave us His Law to follow and He told us that if we follow His Law and His commandments that we will we blessed.  Living in His blessing causes us to be healthy, protected, satisfied, and prosperous.  Ask God to renew your love for His Law and let Him give you a new understanding of it in order for Him to move you into the health, protection, satisfaction, and prosperity that comes with His blessings!

As I have mentioned in the first few days, we are called to desire to prosper.  We are supposed to expect to prosper.  It is our promise, through the covenant that God established with Abraham for us to prosper, we need to desire and expect that God will make us prosper as long as we believe and trust in Him and have faith for Him to make us prosperous.  In the second chapter of A Time to Prosper Dad writes:

Desire was the part of the soul that was affected most when Eve ate the forbidden fruit.  Genesis 3:16 says, “To the woman [God] said: ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’”  Woman’s soul was shifted at that moment.  In Hebrew, the word translated as “desire” means that there is a stretching out after something that you wish for, a longing for something that is deep and driving your emotions.

Desire means much more than merely longing for, asking for or demanding.  Our prayer life is developed through desire, and the whole of our personalities is wrapped up and dependent upon our desires being in submission.  Misplaced desires can easily become covetousness.  Also, a skewed desire can lead to envy and jealousy.  When the whole soul submits to a desire that is sinful, our lives shift and we miss the mark of God’s targeted plans for us.  Then the soul falls to lust (see Num. 11;4,6).  This creates an iniquitous pattern that affects all of society.  Desire can be stimulated by the will to get rich (see 1 Tim. 6:9).  The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. 

If desire is not submitted to the power of the Spirit of God, we go “haywire,” as they used to say in East Texas when I was growing up.  Haywire was used to keep the entire bale of grass together after haying.  However, if that wire came loose, then the whole bundle would go every way imaginable.  Desire is the function of the emotion that causes us to look forward.  Desire is also linked with the deep longing of an individual that can cause us to expect God to move on our behalf.  Unless desire is in check and submitted to God, our whole destiny can go in many directions and will never fully manifest during our lives.

Read and meditate on Psalm 37. We have to get to where our desires are in line with the desires that God has for our lives.  Don’t let the temptations and distractions that come up every day distract you from the prosperity that God has desired for you.  We need to submit the desires that we have to God in order to get them in line and submitted with His will for our lives.  We must also have faith that He will show us the steps we need to take in order to reach the desired prosperity that He has destined for us!

Over the course of the next few days, I want to focus on some portions of the book A Time to Prosper that my Dad (Chuck Pierce) and Robert Heidler wrote.  This book gives you a great understanding into not only what prosperity is, but also how to move into the prosperity that God has destined for each and every one of us.  If you don’t have this book, I would like to urge you to get your hands on it so that you can gain a better understanding of how God desires us to prosper and how we can move into the prosperity we are promised.  In the first chapter of this book Dad writes:

Prosperity occurs when we enter into the fullness of God’s plan for our lives.  Just as He promised Abraham, God begins to bring us to our land.  When we submit to His plan of prosperity for our lives, He cleanses us from all idolatry and unfaithful ways.  This submission causes hearts of stone to be replaced with hearts of flesh (tender hearts to hear God).  He places His Spirit within us.

God then opens doors that are linked to abundance – not just worldly abundance, but abundance of revelation to understand who God our Creator is through His Son as well as who we are.  He blesses the works of our hands.  He fills us with revelation.  He gives us boundaries and says, “Take dominion!  Prosper on every front.  Be like Nehemiah.”  In his day, Nehemiah saw Jerusalem in ruins and began to rebuild walls, restore gates, hang doors and ready the place for a new move of worship.  We have to submit ourselves as Nehemiah did.

Read Nehemiah 1-3.  Prosperity doesn’t only mean that you will become rich or famous or anything like that.  Yes, that is definitely one aspect that comes along with prosperity, but that is not at all the main focus for being prosperous.  God wants to make us prosperous so that we gain more revelation into His Kingdom, that we take dominion over the things we have let the devil steal from us, and yes, that we have all the supply and wealth that we need.  To do any of this though, we must first submit to the full plan that God has for our lives.  Tell the Lord that you are ready to submit to the fullness of His promise and prosperity for your life and let Him show you how you are meant to prosper!

How do we get to the full prosperity that God is calling us into?  The prosperity that God calls us to achieve is never intended to be easy to come by.  While that might seem frustrating, God wants to see our desire to prosper in order to make us prosperous.  For instance, take a professional golfer.  He works, and he practices, and he plays in tournaments in order to make a living for himself and his family.  If he, or she, truly wants to be prosperous as a professional golfer than they need to put the work in.  That means hours upon hours of work practicing and preparing in order to just try to make the cut to the weekend of a tournament so they even get a check to support their family.  So how can we relate this to our everyday lives?  We need to be diligent in what we desire in order to see God make us prosperous.  Yes, God desires for us to be prosperous, but He doesn’t give it out freely without seeing us put forth the effort.

Consider the life of Solomon.  1 Kings 3:7-9 says, “Now, O Lord my God, You have made Your servant king instead of my father David, but I am a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.  And Your servant is in the midst of Your people whom You have chosen, a great people, too numerous to be numbered or counted.  Therefore, give to your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people, that I may discern between good and evil.  For who is able to judge this great people of Yours?”  Not only is Solomon asking for the wisdom to judge God’s people, but he is also asking for God to be patient with him while he learns the proper way to judge and rule them.  What does that take for him to learn that?  It takes practice.  He is asking God to give him wisdom to practice and not to be judged WHILE he is practicing.  Solomon desires to succeed above anything else, but he wants to please God while he is doing it.  That is why God blessed him so much with all of the riches he eventually had.

Read 1 Kings 1-4.  See how Solomon practiced the wisdom that he was given in order to become one of the greatest rulers that the world had ever seen.  Understand the practice that he put into perfecting the wisdom that was granted to him and let’s all put that practice into our own lives in order to prosper in the way that God has intended for us!

We are all destined to prosper!  That is part of the covenant that God established with Abraham (and that we are all still connected to)!  Many times, when we believe our destiny has been delayed, we tend to shrink back.  To me, it seems that Christians have more of an issue with “delayed destinies” than we do with dealing with demonic structures.  What are we scared of?  Is God just delaying us to see how we react?  If so, how are we going to deal with the test that He is putting us through to bring us into a place of prosperity?  Honestly, there is no better place to answer these questions than the story of David.

1 Samuel 16:12 says, “And the Lord said, ‘Arise, anoint him; for this is the one!’”  Now, keep in mind that David was just a young boy at this time.  He didn’t know what he was being destined for.  He didn’t know the legacy that God was planning to build through him.  He didn’t know any of that.  He did his job as a son for his father and he loved the Lord and that was enough for him, at that time.  But God had much more planned for him.  God had a reason for all of the trials and hardships that He sent David through.  He wanted His Son to come from someone from his family line.  If that isn’t prosperity then I don’t know what is!  Yes, he eventually became king and brought all the nation together, but in God’s eyes, that wasn’t His uptimate goal.  He planned to have His Son come from David’s lineage in order to restore what was lost from Adam and Eve after the fall.  We are all tied into the prosperity that God had planned for David because we are all tied into the restoration that Jesus brought when He sacrificed Himself on the cross to restore our lives.

Read 1 Samuel 16-18.  See how God orchestrated David’s life, in order to bring him into what He has planned for him.  David was not perfect by any means, but he had a heart for the Lord, unlike few others in the Word and was faithful and repentant and honored anything the Lord asked him to do.  Because of that, God established His lineage for Jesus to come from him.  That is an incredible story of prosperity!

What can we do to make prosperity come to us?  What happens when we feel that we have lost our inheritance, and how do we gain it back?  All I can say is that God never gives up on us!  That’s a pretty amazing thing to think about really.  He has every opportunity to give up on us, but yet He doesn’t.  God WANTS to see us prosper and He WANTS to see us come into the inheritance, destiny, and prosperity that He has destined for us.

Ruth 1:16-17 says, “But Ruth said: ‘Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following after you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.  Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.  The Lord do so to me, and more so also, if anything but death parts you and me.’”  What does this passage about Ruth tell us?  First off, she KNEW that the Lord had destined her for something great.  She was not going to be complacent and go back to just “living a life” and going through the motions in order to only exist and “get by”.  So many times, we feel that if we are “getting by” we are succeeding and doing what God has planned for us.  Absolutely not!  God has no desire for us to just make it through.  He desires for us to thrive in our lives!  Ruth desired to thrive.  Verse 18 of the first chapter says she was “determined” and she was determined because she knew that God had great plans for her life.

Read the book of Ruth.  Tell the Lord that you are “determined” to walk in the prosperity that He has planned for your life.  There will always be hard times that you must go through, but choose to be determined to walk them out, just like Ruth did.  Then, your destiny and prosperity will unfold in front of you! Ruth went from desolation, to gleaning, to reaping, to owning!