Author: gzidevelopment

• 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!

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!