2023/2024 OPERATION 18-18 – (THE BEST WAY TO CELEBRATE CHRIST II)

Seven ways we can properly celebrate Jesus

1. Fall in love with him.
In the military, people obey their superiors not out of love but out of duty, they know that failure to obey can lead to court martial. Instructions are meant to be obeyed. In the military, you dare not argue with your superior. It is not tolerated neither is it tolerated in God’s kingdom but God just allows people to manifest and take decisions based on the will he has given us. But he has his revealed will as enunciated in his word written in black and white. Wherever you go, you find people violate God’s will and impose their will on the will of God while still confessing that Jesus is Lord. May the Lord help us to be so fanatically in love with him that the idea of substituting that love for anything else does not even remotely exist.

The fastest growing religion in the world today is idolatry. The unfortunate thing is that the Church is multiplying idolaters in big Cathedrals without knowing it. Whenever I meditate on This, I feel bad. And people who are in it do not even know it. There is so much error and perversion of worship. This is the devil’s specialty. This imposition of the other wills is the starting point. A lot of people think that salvation started in Eden. No, it started long before the creation of Eden. If you want to understand how great and deep the gospel is, you have to go beyond what transpired in Eden. You have to go up to where Lucifer was the anointed Cherub. Everything about him was perfect until his heart deceived him. Lucifer wanted to be like God and proclaimed the five ‘I wills’ in Isaiah 14:13-14. He wanted to be worshipped. Nothing is hidden before God. That is why we must be careful of what we entertain in the garden of our hearts. God judged this rebellion and cast Lucifer down with a third of the angels that aligned with him. We need to be careful of what we align with. There is a law called the law of vicarious liability. Don’t be part of any nonsense. No one can violate your right to choose, not even God, but for every decision, there is a price to pay. That is the greatest problem of man.

The snake in the garden deceived man because man did not take God seriously enough to obey him. He elevated the word of the snake above the word of God which is the will of God. If we understand our salvation from this perspective, it will help us. Man acquired a diseased perception of reality incapable of making right choices. His will became unified with the will of the snake – the unified intelligence. It is so easy to start doing your will and call it the will of God. That is why we must be very careful. When Jesus was confronted with the reality of the agony on the cross, he prayed to God that if it was possible, God should allow the cup pass but “nevertheless not my will, but thine be done” (Luke 22:42^b). He taught us how to re-align our will with the will of the Father. He said my meat is to do the will of the Father (John 4:34). Heaven reacted immediately and empowered him to go through the ordeal. Grace is divine empowerment to do what ordinarily we are unable to do. But people have twisted grace to mean license to live anyhow.

You cannot feign love. You cannot serve God and mammon, you cannot love the two. If you chase money, you miss God. It is as simple as that. Modern day idolatry is using God to get things. Three times, Jesus asked Peter, do you really love me? then went ahead to say “If you do, feed my sheep” (John 21:15-17). Show me the direction you are facing and I will tell you what you are chasing. The love of mammon is the root of every evil (1 Tim. 6:10). It is a spirit regardless of what you call it. A nation can never rise beyond the standard of morality of the Church in the land. What we have in the Church today is “give me your gold and I will make you a god.” When the Jews wanted to make Jesus Christ an earthly king, he walked away. True success is aligning with God’s purposive will for your destiny and fulfilling it and the moment you start doing that, God will tell you what to drop. One thing I know that God will never ask you to drop is His call; if you drop the call of God, you have lost focus.

PRAY –

• Everlasting and most merciful Father, grant me the grace to always align with your perfect will in every facet of my life in Jesus’ name.

TO BE CONTINUED.