SANCTIFY YOURSELF 3A

Why do we praise God? We praise him for who he is. We praise him for what he has done. We praise him for what he is doing. We praise him for what he can do. We praise him for what he will do. Once you begin to praise, praise draws you closer to God more than anything else. You just fall in love with him. The atmosphere of praise is the atmosphere of joy because it is the atmosphere of his presence. The Bible says, in his presence is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). When people look for joy outside of the presence of God, they get fake and get fed up. Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

If you have ever tasted heavenly worship, everything down here will seem like toy, nothing else can satisfy you. One of the ways to identify people who have not tasted heaven is in the way they pursue the things of this world. If you see anyone who is ready to die for money, that person has never had a taste of heaven. Anyone who is ready to kill in order to make it has not scented heaven. That person is far away even if he is a knight in his Church. You can be a knight and yet not be in the light. It is better to be in the light than to be a knight.

Things don’t get better where an agent of darkness is in charge. It is only Christians that expect things to get better in an organization where an agent of darkness is the Chairman. Someone who has sold himself to darkness cannot give light. This is what differentiates a child of God who is led by the Holy Spirit from any other person out there.

Why do people get ensnared? They get ensnared because they departed from light and decided to embrace darkness. Darkness is always displayed on a very large bill board. It is so easy to drift into darkness. It is appealing to man because when man fell, he acquired a diseased perception of reality. His will became united with the will of the father of lies who is also the custodian of darkness. You don’t need to go far in order to capture this. The Church needs to know this and I have taken it upon myself to teach it so that we don’t miss it. It is better to be spiritually correct and be politically misunderstood than to be politically correct and spiritually wrong.

Unfortunately, you cannot run away from politics. You are born into a community and before long, there will be issues that border on resources. Someone needs to determine how things go round. It surfaced in the early days of the Church when disciples practiced the first apostolic communism. People sold their properties and brought the proceeds to the Church. They had everything common according to the Bible (Acts 4:32). But what happened? Politics crept in. The fallen nature of man, which is difficult to run away from as long as you are on this earth, reared its ugly head. Those whose responsibility it was to share food started being discriminatory.

It is exactly the same thing today, the same distribution of who gets what and when and how. That is the problem. How was it handled in the early Church? Thank God for the apostolic anointing; it does not cover darkness. It brings everything to the fore. You don’t solve a problem by avoiding it, if you do, it means you are deluded. The worst delusion is self delusion – when someone lies to him or herself. You must acknowledge it.

Pray –

• Father I thank you for showing me the way through the death, burial, and resurrection of your son Jesus Christ. I ask you to grant me the grace to always align my will to your will as revealed in your word in every facet of my life in Jesus’ name.

TO BE CONTINUED…….