TODAY’S DEVOTIONAL (Saturday 25th December 2021)
Praise the LORD! Blessed is the man who fears the LORD, who delights greatly in His commandments.
His descendants will be mighty on earth; The generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches will be in his house, and his righteousness endures forever.
Unto the upright there arises light in the darkness; He is gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous. Psalm 112:1-4 NKJV
WELCOME TO THE 359TH DAY OF OUR YEAR OF HIGHER HEIGHTS.
I want to begin by wishing every one of us a very merry Christmas. I thank the LORD how has not dealt with us according to our sins but according to His mercies. He has kept us from one Christmas to another. To Him belong all the praise.
Yes, the celebration of Christmas was not part of the Christian faith in the days of our fathers. It became part of it when some church leaders decided to replace the worship of the god of misrule with the worship of the Almighty God, using the arm of flesh.
I shared about this some years back when we were not in the media and will be repeating it this morning in our Christmas service if God wills. What the men did backfire greatly because you cannot make a lost soul a worshiper of God by the arm of flesh. It takes the arm of the LORD to make an idol worshiper a worshiper of the One and only True God.
So, their righteous attempt to help those idol worshipers find God never worked, giving birth to the celebration of what we all grew up to know as Christmas, with the same god of misrule being worshiped by many. In fact believers who do not believe in Christmas; who do not celebrate it at all, are not sinning against GOD. They are indeed doing the right thing.
The worship of the god of misrule in the name of Christmas continued until it became a great concern to men, women and people of God. They decided to extract the worship of the god of misrule from the celebration, making it a period of talking about the birth of our LORD Jesus Christ and His move against sin. I belong to this group of believers.
WE DO NOT BELIEVE IN CHRISTMAS BECAUSE WE KNOW CHRIST NEVER SAID WE SHOULD CELEBRATE HIS BIRTHDAY.
In fact, what He said we should celebrate is His death day, burial and resurrection. And that is what we do when we take the Holy Communion either as bread and wine in outer court, word and Spirit in the holy place, or the hidden manna in the most holy place.
We celebrate His resurrection when we assembly in corporate assembly to fellowship on the first day of the week, Sunday.
So, we do not believe in Christmas but used it as a tool for kingdom advance. We do not mark the Christmas that those Church leaders started. We mark one that glorifies God by stopping the worship of the god of misrule, and reaching out to it’s worshipers with message of the kingdom for the purpose of their salvation.
This is the kind of Christmas every child of God should celebrate because it will lead to the salvation of souls. That is why we hold a Christmas service and fellowship that day. The vision of the service is to prevent men and women who trust in Jesus from going out there to worship the god of misrule in the name of Christmas. This way of celebrating Christmas has indeed led to the salvation of souls.
I cannot talk about the men and women of God who gave their lives to Christ on Christmas days, who are presently doing great exploits for the LORD. There are so many worshipers of the god of misrule who have been saved by our way of celebrating Christmas.
So, instead of sitting down there and saying “there is nothing like Christmas in the bible so I will not even say merry Christmas” do what we in the second group are doing; join us to save souls by saying to someone “Merry Christmas! Jesus is the reason for the season” with the intention of stopping the worship of the god of misrule.
Do not seat on a judgments seat saying all manner of things that may be helpful to you but not to a lost soul out there, who have been caught by the god of misrule using the Christmas thing.
SO, I SAY UNTO YOU, MERRY CHRISTMAS! JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON, MAKE HIM YOUR LORD THIS DAY IF YOU HAVE NOT!
This is the Day the LORD has made we shall rejoice and be glad in it. Hallelujah!
One of the major aspects of life that you find God ministering to, over and over again, especially in the Biblical account of the Birth of our LORD and savior Jesus Christ, apart from the spiritual aspect of our lives, is the financial aspect of life. It is the second most critical and sensitive aspect of a man’s life.
That is why if the financial life of a man or woman is not in order, and there is no supply of grace to keep that man, he or she may become worshipers of mammon to fix their financial lives. It is like this, to fix your spiritual life, you must worship a God or god somewhere. To fix your financial life, you must also worship a God or god somewhere. Worship is the one way to one can fix a broken-down aspect of life. There is no other way!
That is why you find people engaging even the worship of demons to fix the broken-down aspects of their lives. But for us in God’s kingdom, we chose to worship the One and only true God who alone can fix any aspects of our broken lives; He can fix our financial lives because He delights i