WELCOME TO MARCH OUR MONTH OF PERFECTION

Eph.4:11-15: “And He gave some apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ: that we henceforth be not more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and the cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; but speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:”

Psalm 138:8: “The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me…”

Recently, one of our Church members was telling me a ridiculous story of a “Church” she used to attend where they were told that the way to subdue the devil was to take up physical canes and weep him. Also, when you look around today, you find so many believers praying that the demons afflicting them should fall down and die! These are just a few of the unscriptural practices you find in the body of Christ that gives me a lot of concern. In the first place, you cannot subdue the devil with physical canes because the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Secondly, spirits do not die! They are eternal beings. All these truths are in the bible which these baby believers carry around without reading or if they read, do not understand. Unfortunately, many who pedal and believe these lies are not even believers but humans seeking solution to their personal problems from places where they cannot find it.

The reason for this state of affairs if that many are not recognizing and taking advantage of God’s gift of the fivefold ministry offices of the apostle, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. God set these ministry gifts in the Church to help us grow up to be able to do the work of the ministry. Contrary to what many in the body of Christ believe, ministry is not restricted to these fivefold ministry gifts or full time Levitical work; it is an all-encompassing lifestyle of the believer intended to prepare the world for the soon return of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I have always believed that it is not good enough to complain about a situation without doing anything about it. The word of the Lord to us this month has therefore provided us with the opportunity to make our contribution to solve this problem. To this end, this month, we shall be looking at the fivefold ministry in the body of Christ and the role each of them is expected to play to help perfect or cause us to mature in Christ to enable us arise and fulfill the ministry or our destinies as assigned to us by God. The office of the Apostle for instance is not in the title but in the work of planting Churches or setting up similar institutions as appointed by God. Their ministry is usually accompanied with genuine signs and wonders and mighty works and the vessels remain humble before God.  

Also, from our second text scripture for the month, it is clear that the perfecting or maturing of the saint could only be made possible with cooperating with God and this is why Apostle Paul said in Philippians 2:13 that it is God who works in us to will and to do of his own good pleasure. This is why we cannot attain to spiritual maturity without God’s Spirit guiding us. However, to get His guidance, we need to renew our minds with His word because without that we would never agree with God as the Bible says in 1Cor.2:14 that the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God because they are foolishness unto him. Thus this month, we shall also learn how to renew our minds to follow the dictates of our spirits which are controlled by the Holy Spirit to the end that each of us would be able to discern the voice of God and hear directly from Him.

It is my heart felt prayer that this month, you will grow up spiritually to the point of being led by the spirit of God so you do not fall prey to spiritual charlatans in Jesus’ name!

For God to lead you however you must belong to His family and if you are interested in hearing from God directly so He can lead you, the first step is that you must be born again into the family of God. If you want to do so, you can do it right away by saying the prayer below out loud:

Heavenly Father,

Have mercy on me a sinner. Today, I believe that Jesus died for me and you raised Him from the dead for my Justification. I therefore declare that Jesus Christ is my Saviour and Lord and from today, I renounce the fatherhood of Satan and embrace Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord. Thank you for this father in Jesus’ name!

Amen.

Congratulations! For more information and resources that would help you grow in this new life, please visit our blogs at www.flourishinggirl.blogspot.com and www.kingdomheirsministries.blogspot.com and follow us on twitter at alero_nanna and on face book on www.facebook.com/flourishinggirl . Remain on top of your challenges in Jesus’ name!

Four Simple Steps to Consciously Hear the Voice of God always

In the time which we live in, the need to hear the voice of God in order to be guided by Him in our daily lives cannot be over emphasized. This is why it is so important for us to hear his voice. Sadly, many hear without realizing it because Jesus said in John 10:27 that His sheep hear His voice. Also, we see from Ps.32:8 where God said He will instruct and teach us in the way we must go that it is God’s will to cause us to hear His voice.

In light of the foregoing, we shall examine four simple steps we must take to consciously receive the voice of God. These four steps are set out in Hab.2:1-3. That text reads thus in the King James Version of the bible:

“I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what He will say unto me and what I shall answer when I am reproved.

And the Lord answered me, and said, write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it;

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie; though it tarry, wait for it because it will surely come, it will not tarry”

1.     Stillness: This is keeping still before God with absolute concentration and a determination to receive a revelation of your God given purpose from God or any other thing you may desire to know of the mind of God. A good example of this is found in the story of Elijah in 1Kings 19:9-21 in the Old Testament and Paul in the New Testament. Acts 9:1-20.

2.     Vision:  When God speaks, it paints a picture in the canvass of your mind. Where you have difficulty with comprehending this, God could even use something you can see physically to give you a vision because God works with what we can envision. This is the good use of the power of imagination God talks about in Gen.11:6. For example, God had to make Abram look at the sky to see and attempt to count the number of the stars in the sky until he lost count just to help him get a vision of how numerous his offspring will be even though he was said to be childless at that time and his wife Sarai was pronounced barren. See Gen.15:1-6.

3.     Spontaneity: The still voice of God that is not physically audible comes to you through a chain of spontaneous thoughts. You have no control over the thoughts. They just flow and when God is through with Speaking, they stop. There is no thought original with man. Thoughts are taken. This explains why Jesus said in Mat.6:25, 34 that we should not take thoughts that result in anxiety. These thoughts are words that are conveyed to the spirit of man which must first be picked by the soul. The spirit realm controls the physical one. This is why Paul says in Rm.8:14, 16 that as many as are led by the spirit of God are the sons of God. That the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the sons of God. See 1Thessalonians 5:23 which makes us understand that man is spirit, soul and body. Your spirit is the real you made in the image and likeness of God and which departure from your body causes physical death as revealed to us in James 2:26. Your soul is the intermediary between your spirit and body and contains your mind (seat of memory and creativity), your will (seat of decision making), and your emotion (responsible for the direction of your will and general drive in life). Your body is the physical you made up of the five senses of the central nervous system – sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Whereas your body controlled by your physical senses had dictated the way you have lived as a natural man because of the separation of your spirit from God’s through the fall of Adam, now that you are born again, you have to retrain your body to follow the dictates of your spirit which is now led by the Holy Spirit as we saw earlier. This is the real battle of the new creation man. The only way we can win this war is to allow the word of God renew our minds to have the mindset God wants us to have. When this takes place, our wills and emotions would easily follow divine directives and cause our bodies to act accordingly. See Romans 12:1-2.

4.     Journaling: Then you move on to the next step which is journaling. If you try to understand everything God is telling you at the moment, you will lose concentration and may not be able to receive everything God is telling you so you journal for the duration of the flow of thought and later, you can read through what you journaled and you will get the true picture of what God is telling you. This is how the ancient prophets kept records of what they were told (see 2Tim.3:16-17; 2Pet.1:19-21). God exemplified this when He gave Moses the law he wrote on tables of stone and to tell you how important this was to God, when Moses in his anger at the behavior of the Israelites destroyed the tablets, God called him up to the mountain again and made him get two other tablets of stone and He wrote the same commandments on these new tablets of stone. You will find this account in Ex.24:12; 31:18; 34:4. Moses recalled these incidents in his final speech to the children of Israel packaged in Deut.5:22. I believe that the importance of journaling what God tells you cannot be overemphasized. This is why God commands us to write the vision and make it plain on tables so someone can read it and run with it. If what God told the ancient prophets in the past was not journaled, Peter would not have had a more sure word of Prophecy to refer to in 2Pet.1:19. For example, Jeremiah the prophet wrote down what God told him and more than seventy years later, Daniel read it and ran with it. It enabled him to pray for the freedom of the children of Israel from captivity. You will find these accounts in Jer.36 and Daniel 9:1-4. Even when in Jeremiah’s life time, the king tried to destroy the writings of Jerimiah, God caused him to preserve it by telling him to write another which Jeremiah did. See Jer.361-4 and 27-32.

A word from the Lord on the 1^st day of April 2011 when I taught this message in a seminar in Hohoe, Volta region, Ghana.

“A new day has dawned for you because you have obeyed me in spite of all odds I will cause my voice to be heard in all the nations of the world through what we have done here tonight. Remember that through the voice of the Lord shall the Assyrian be beaten down who smote with a rod. I am your God and there is no one who put their confidence in me who shall be disappointed. I do not relate by the ways of men for my ways are higher and my thoughts are higher. I will be exalted in the earth I will be exalted among the heathen because of the trumpet I shall sound by you in a short while. This is my mind for all my own.”

The Sinner's prayer
You may have stumbled on this and you are not born again yet. This steps pertain to only those who are born again but the good news is that you can be born again now by saying the following prayer out loud meaning it with all your heart and God would immediately kick you off on this journey of being led by His Spirit.

Heavenly Father,

Have mercy on me a sinner. Today, I believe that Jesus died for me and you raised Him from the dead for my Justification. I therefore declare that Jesus Christ is my Saviour and Lord and from today, I renounce the fatherhood of Satan and embrace Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord. Thank you for this father in Jesus’ name!

Amen.

Congratulations! For more information and resources that would help you grow in this new life, please visit our blogs at www.flourishinggirl.blogspot.com and www.kingdomheirsministries.blogspot.com  and follow us on twitter at alero_nanna and on face book on www.facebook.com/flourishinggirl . Remain on top of your challenges in Jesus’ name!

Welcome to February 2014: Our Month of Good Success

“This book of the Law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.”

An examination of our text scripture for the month would immediately reveal to us that qualifying success with the adjective: “good” implies that Success cannot be viewed as positive all the time because good success implies that there is a bad one. Our text also shows us that good success is founded on the truth we know, meditate on and live by. The Lord Jesus Christ in John 17:17 defined truth as the word of God. When our text scripture was written, the word of God was known as “the book of the Law”! This explains why God told Joshua here that as long as he built his life on “this book of the Law”, he would have good success.

On the other hand, bad success is based on falsehood and it cannot stand the test of time not to talk of measuring up in eternity. Such acts of success can best be described as a smoke that would soon disappear or a flower that would soon fade away. A good example of this is the successful coveting of Bathsheba; Uriah’s wife by King David and the clever elimination of Uriah to cover up their infidelity. This proved to become the “but” in David’s life because what he did could not be hidden from the eyes of the all-seeing God. The result is that God judged him and told him the sword shall never depart from his house. Shortly after this, his reproach began to speak as his first son raped his daughter and another son of his killed his first son in vengeance and after this attempted a coup d’état to dethrone him and take his place until he was killed! Really, bad success is the decorated word for abysmal failure! Believe me, this is not the kind of success you want. See 2 Samuel Chapters 11-18. That you successfully dupe a person or an institution of their hard earned money through fraud or obtaining under false pretense does not make you successful even if it enables you to live in luxury for a season. The truth is that you would soon be found out no matter how tight your security is and how committed you are to the cult that empowers you. Any day a saint rises up in prayer against you, you will quickly come to the rude shock that your cult is not as powerful as it pretends to be. You will be cut off in the midst of your days and would prove to be a fool in the end. See Jeremiah 17:11; Proverbs 13:11!

This is why God is telling us that we can have good success and it would begin to show this month as we lay the foundation for it. In 2Timothy 2:19, the Apostle Paul pointed out that the foundation of God’s word rests on godliness: a departure from iniquity. When we make the truth our life style, good success is sure for us. Thus this month, our mission is to unfold the mystery of skillfully using the word of God so that we can maximize the benefit of good success available to us in the truth which is the word of God. Let me close by saying that good success can be defined as releasing and maximizing your potential for your benefit and that of others including your posterity. In some cases; it comes with a lot of money depending on the purpose for which you were created. However, it will never come with lack and want so your needs would always be met. See Psalm 1:1-6; Deu.28:1-15; Exod.23:25-26; Philippians 4:19; Lk.22:35; Acts 4:34.

This month, you shall flow in such light from the word of God that your good success cannot be denied you in the mighty name of the Lord Jesus Christ!

If you want to walk in Good success and you are not sure of where you stand with God, you can make sure right away by saying the prayer below out loud and believing:

THE SINNER’S PRAYER

“Heavenly father, I come to you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Have mercy on me a sinner. Today, I believe in my hearth the Jesus Christ came in the flesh, died for me on Calvary’s cross and on the third day, you raised Him from the dead for my justification. Therefore I ask; Jesus, please come into my life and be my Saviour and Lord. I reject and renounce the fatherhood of Satan from now on and forever, Amen!”

If you just said this prayer, congratulations! Welcome to the family of God. Please send me an email at flourishinggirl@gmail.com.  This will enable me send you an e-copy of our “Believers’ Guide to Growth” to help you start out well on your spiritual journey.  

For more information and our resource materials, you can visit my blog at:

www.flourishinggirl.blogspot.com & www.jointheirsfamily.blogspot.com.  You can also become a fan of our page on face book by logging on to www.facebook.com/flourishinggirl and liking: healing & Restoration time with Pastor Alero Nanna.