Month: February 2019

• We must go beyond our current levels of celebration and religious ritual.
• We must go beyond our way of “poverty” thinking and enter into a “harvest-multiplication” thought mode! Poverty has a voice that says that God is not able. 
• We must go beyond our debt mentality and know that the Lord can free us to accomplish His purposes.

1. Firstfruits.  Look at your lump and give the Lord the best portion you can give Him.  Enter into the celebration of Rosh Chodesh.
2. Tithes.  Tithing was an instituted covenant practice in the Old Covenant.  In the New Covenant, Yeshua Himself used the concept of tithing to show people where the treasure of their heart was. He addressed the Pharisees and said that tithing was the least they could do, and that they did it to the letter of the law. However, they were missing the greater portion of justice and goodness.
3. Alms. We should all help those less fortunate than ourselves.  This is the year of being a Good Samaritan.  By giving alms, it insures you of receiving help if you are ever in need.
4. Special and Memorial Offerings. I take every opportunity I can to give, remembering how the Lord has so brought me out of captivity and blessed me. There are often times when I hear someone speak, and I must give a special offering or memorial offering into the principles they are sharing, to thank God for doing that very thing in me.
5. The final type of giving is what I want to encourage you to break into in your own life. Paul talks about Extravagant Giving.  I remember when the Lord liberated my wife, Pam, and me to enter into this incredible way of life.

Many times, when people talk or think about prosperity, all they think about is money or wealth.  Luke 18:24-30 says, “’How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ And those who heard it said, ‘Who then can be saved?’ But He said, ‘The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.’ Then Peter said, ‘See, we have left all and followed You.’ So He said to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or parents or brothers or wife or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who shall not receive many times more in this present time, and in the age to come eternal life.’”  

I think, so many times, we get so immersed in questions like, “How are we going to pay our bills?”, “How can I make more money this year?”, and “Why isn’t God blessing me like He says He promises to?” that we tend to completely miss what God even means when He is talking about prosperity.  During one of the weekly prayer times we have been having, Justin Rana gave some great perspective into how the Lord views prosperity.  He said, “There’s a point that God wants us to get to.  We take all these steps in our lives and there’s a point of fullness that He wants us to get to.  Close your eyes for a second and just visualize the word fullness and what that means to you.  It may be a different picture for everybody.  If you can consider the most beautiful picture of creation — whether it’s a mountain scape or something like that — if you can look at that, and everything that God created, there’s a sense of fullness that comes over you because you can hardly contain what you are seeing. God desires for us to get that way. He wants us to be full of Him and His Spirit, and full in every way.  That’s really what a picture of prosperity looks like.”

I love what he said during that prayer meeting and I love how it can be applied to this passage in Luke.  We are a part of ALL the prosperity that God created and we are part of the covenant of prosperity that He established with Abraham.  That’s thousands of years of prosperity that God is trying to bring us into!  The prosperity He wants us to come into is one of the FULLNESS of His promise.  He doesn’t want to only give us a portion.  He doesn’t want us to only think prosperity is linked with wealth or money.  The fullness of His prosperity is the fullness of His creation and the desire He had when He created man.  Ask the Lord to clear your mind of all the distractions of this world and bring you into the fullness of prosperity that He desires for all of us to walk in!

We all know that God desires to prosper us.  He delights in seeing His children prosper and He delights in us giving Him praise for all that He has done in our lives.  So many times, we forget to thank Him for all that He does.  I know that I have forgotten to do that numerous times in my life, and when I do, I immediately understand why something hasn’t gone according to my plans, the next time I do it.  That is just a snare that the enemy has set for us.  He tries to tell us that when we have succeeded at something once, we don’t need to continue thanking God for it and we will continue succeeding at it.  That’s not the way it works.  In order to live in the full prosperity that God is calling us into, we have to shift our hearts to be perfectly in line with His.

In Matthew 6:19-21 Jesus says, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  What is Jesus trying to tell us?  Is He telling us that we aren’t meant to be prosperous or have an overabundance of what we need?  No, of course He isn’t!  He is telling us that there are many snares that the enemy has in place to distract us from what God has planned for our lives.  He is imploring us to put our faith, hope, and trust in God (whether we are wealthy or not) and we will be rewarded with everlasting life in Him.  He is saying that, although we are meant to prosper, we are not meant to put the earthly possessions or wealth or prosperity we have accrued ahead of the plan that God has for our life, which is eternity spent with Him.

Read Matthew 6.  Tell the Lord that you desire Him above anything else and walk diligently with Him to make your way prosperous.  God wants to see us prosper just as any father would want to see his children prosper.  It makes Him proud when we respect what He calls us to do and it makes Him even more proud when we honor Him by praising Him for what He has given us.  Align your heart with His and He will make your way prosperous!

• Do we want wealth?
• Do we want a long life?
• Do we want a stronger spiritual connection with the Lord?
• Do we want a healthy and prosperous family?
• Do we need healing?

God doesn’t always want to go to incredibly drastic lengths in order to get us to come into the place He desires for us.  Yes, lots of the stories in the Bible are very tragic, but that doesn’t mean that it always has to be that way.  Unfortunately, most of us (me for certain) are just too darn stubborn to get to our calling the easy way.  That is one thing that I love so much about the story of David.  Yes, David was full of faults and he did a lot of things wrong.  However, he never really complained about what he was going through.  He loved the Lord more than anything else in the world and all he wanted was for God to be happy with him.  David was a man that put the Lord above everything else.  If he messed up, he was quick to repent.  He worshipped the Lord every day and gave thanks to Him for all that He had done.  God loved David and delighted in blessing Him because of the obedience, love, and faithfulness that he showed the Lord.

Psalm 35:27-28 says, “Let them shout for joy and be glad, who favor my righteous cause; And let them say continually, ‘Let the Lord be magnified, who has pleasure in the prosperity of His servant.’  And my tongue shall speak of Your righteousness and of Your praise all the day long.”  That is just an amazing picture of how God desires to bless us.  God delights in seeing us prosper!  He doesn’t want us to have to endure the trials and the tests that we go through all the time.  He desires for us to trust in Him and have faith in Him so that He can pour out His blessings on us unconditionally.

Spend time reading the Psalms and praising God for all that He does and continues to do for you.  Fill your atmosphere with a spirit of admiration for the Lord.  Let Him delight in the praise you are giving Him and begin to watch His blessings pour out on you!