VIRTUES OF THE CROSS 3D – (UNDERSTANDING WORSHIP II)

If you teach people spiritual warfare before making them worshippers, you will produce enemy-centric people. Worship makes you a theocentric (having God as a central focus -Godcentric) person. God will be the One who fights for you, you don’t take on all the battles. If you are not a worshipper and you learn spiritual warfare, you will become vengeful. You will begin to take up battles that do not belong to you. A lot of people are vengeful in the place of prayer, this is one of the reasons why they pray without any result. Your spiritual warfare will be reduced to nothing if you come from the perspective of a vengeful heart because vengeance is the Lord’s. Bitterness will demean your spiritual atmosphere.

You cannot be a worshipper if you have bitterness in your heart. Your prayer will not fly. The Bible says, if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me (Psa. 66:18). Your one hundred days of fasting does not move God. What moves him is the state of your heart. If there is bitterness in your heart, work on it. Get into worship.

If you try to teach people faith without first making worshippers out of them, you are going to produce fake Christians because any faith that is not theocentric is not faith at all. You will produce those who use God to get things. That is the worst form of idolatry. All their definition and understanding of faith is just about getting things. All the heroes of faith in Heb. 11 were people who placed their trust comprehensively on God – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Daniel and so on. They were all worshippers. The fact that you are getting financial blessings because you sowed the seed of money does not make you a worshipper. The richest people in the world today are not Christians; some of them don’t even believe in God but they are worshippers of other things. Worship is devotion, such people have devoted their lives to something else. A lot of people are succeeding to fail; any success that is not God-ward is a failure ultimately. This is why we must be very careful. This is the weakness of the prosperity message. It hardly raises worshippers, instead, it raises those who give in order to get. Real giving proceeds from the heart of worship, from desperate love for God. 

Gal. 2:20, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me”. Jesus loved and he gave. Your giving must be a product of your devotion (the love that you have for God and his kingdom). That is the one that is acceptable to God.

True worship begins with surrender. In the place of worship God takes over your battles; as you magnify him, he steps in, he is the man of war, he cannot lose in any battle. 2 Cor. 10:4-6, “(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled”. If you get into carnality, you will miss the real thing. You cannot kill a spirit. It is more effective to use correct legislations in the place of prayer.

Pray –

• Our Heavenly Father, Mighty God, I worship and adore you. Thank you for your love, faithfulness, and loving kindness towards me. I ask you to X-ray my heart and remove anything in it that defiles and damns the soul.
• Grant me grace to live above bitterness all the days of my life. Let my heart be filled with the joy of your presence and continuously flow in ceaseless praise and honor of your almightiness in Jesus’ name. Amen.

TO BE CONTINUED……