TODAY’S DEVOTION (WEDNESDAY 1ST NOVEMBER 2023)
“Blessed are those who dwell in Your house; They will still be praising You. Selah
Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, whose heart is set on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a spring; The rain also covers it with pools.
They go from strength to strength; Each one appears before God in Zion.” Psalm 84:4-7 NKJV
WELCOME TO THE 305TH DAY OF OUR YEAR OF SIGNS AND WONDERS.
Today is the first day of the 11th month of our year. We are grateful to God for keeping us alive and helping us through and through, and bringing us to this season of the year, despite our frailties, morals and spiritual failures.
Indeed, God does not deal with man according to his sins, but according to His own faithfulness, kindness and love. He is love, in Him is no darkness at all. That is why even when He is angry, He is still love. His anger is usually an expression of another side of His love for us. What a God we serve.
In prophetic numerology, the number 11 represents finish, last or stop. While the number 10 represent measure in test, trial or temptation, we can also say the number 11, represents extra measure of all that. All these has messages for people of God who can decode them.
Doubtlessly, God wants us to live blessed lives on earth. He never prepared an accursed life for anyone. Accursed lives are product of man going against His will, ways, and word. They are products of sin, iniquity, and trespasses. Being a month, whose numerology represents finish, last, or stop, I believe, something that does not fall into God’s will for our lives, must be stopped this month, and that which the LORD started this year must be brought to completion.
It is a necessary determination for you and I if we want to live blessed lives in an accursed world. I want to take us back to a word on visionary living that came to us at the beginning of the year. The reason is for you and I to cross check things in our lives; to carry out an assessment, so that we can determine if we allowed God’s word to be fulfilled in our lives this year or not.
It will also help us to know what to stop, or bring to a finish. May the voice of the LORD come to us expressly as we go through them. Amen!
THE BLESSING OF VISIONARY LIVING (01)
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. Matthew 6:21-24 NKJV
It pleases the Father (Source) of our LORD Jesus Christ, and the whole council of Heaven that you and I be alive to see the first day of the year 2023, according to the Gregorian calendar. Glory be to GOD that we finally made it. Not everyone who will see or hear that you made it to this year will be happy about it, but do not worry. Just rejoice in the LORD.
Yes, they will not be happy because they prophesied so many things to the contrary, gossiped and spread so many unpalatable things about you. Some would have ended your life, but God’s eternal decision was superior, that was why you made it to the new year. To make matters worse for them, the LORD has declared it your year of Signs and Wonders. What more can we say, other than Welcome to 2023! Celebrate Jesus because it will be one of your best years on earth!
The Bible says;
“If it had not been the LORD who was on our side,” Let Israel now say— “If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose up against us,
Then they would have swallowed us alive, when their wrath was kindled against us;
Then the waters would have overwhelmed us, the stream would have gone over our soul; Then the swollen waters Would have gone over our soul.”
Blessed be the LORD, who has not given us as prey to their teeth. Psalm 124:1-6 NKJV
We join the Psalmist to say, “Blessed be the LORD, who did not give us as prey to the wishes, prayers, prophecies, gossips, conspiracies, betrayals, evil reports, slander, lies, deception, evil dreams, visions, expectations and stealth assaults of those the enemy swayed against us in 2022.”
We know even in 2023 He will not give us over to them. We forgive all of them and hope that they see the True light of Jesus Christ, and live lives that are Heaven worthy. We look forward to running this race successfully and seeing all of them in Heaven. Let no one go to hell because of their hate for us or wickedness against us. Let us all live lives that are Heaven worthy. Amen.
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF NOT JUST THE YEAR 2023, BUT THE FIRST DAY OF THE FIRST MONTH OF THE YEAR 2023.
It is therefore a unique day; but there is more. I carried out a prophetic and historic research of years and found out that 2023 itself, like few years of its kind in the past, is a unique year. It is one of few years in the Gregorian Calendar that begun on Sunday. That means a lot because the year marks the beginning of a fresh circle – a circle of 12 years.
Do not forget the prophetic place of Sunday. It is the first day of the week, the day of the resurrection of Christ. It is a blessing for a year to begin on it, after years of waiting for time to make it happen. It calls for the application of our hearts unto wisdom and gives us a rare opportunity for restarts, re enforcements, re planning, re-energizing, and other related beautiful things.
You may be wondering why I took my time to research this. I did that so that we can have something to use in numbering our days and gaining a heart of wisdom.
The Bible says,
“So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12 NKJV)
In line with our apostolic tradition, we are beginning a fresh 31-day journey of faith today with the Cry of the Holy Spirit on one of the most beautiful subjects of God’s kingdom – visionary living. Believe it or not, the last 12 years of your life knowingly or unknowingly, shaped you for this next circle of 12 years to come! Whatever happened in your life during the period, prepared you for this year, and the circle of years to come. The only thing we do not know is the kind of preparation, because there is a preparation that brings success and there is a preparation that brings failure.
IF THE LAST 12 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE PREPARED YOU TO SUCCEED, BLESSED ARE YOU.
This 31-day journey will give you something to build your success on. But if it prepared you to fail, you can change that using the wisdom and power of GOD that will be coming to you through this journey of faith. Understand that during the last 12 years, people spoke into your ears things that shaped your thinking and decisions, consequently preparing you for either failure or success this year.
Whatever your eyes saw, ears heard, or life experienced, got registered in your mind in the last 12 years and prepared you for either failure or success this year and the next years in the circle.
You are today, the sum total of what you saw, heard, felt, experienced and went through in the last 12 years. That is one major wisdom to apply your heart unto in your quest to succeed this year and the other years to come, especially as a son of light. It will help you to be patient with GOD and determined to have a better circle of years.
The starting point can be the place of looking backwards.
It is important to look into the last 12 years of your life and see what went wrong, the quality of wisdom you had, and what you can do consistently right, in the next circle of years starting from today, to have a better future.
The Bible phrase that described this judicial way of looking backwards, is called “judging ourselves.” The white man will call it, “personal appraisals” or “assessment of one’s personal life.”
It is important that you judiciously stretch the curtain of time backwards sometimes, especially for the purpose of learning or picking some wisdom that will help you go forward. The truth is, if you carry out an honest assessment of your life of the last 12 years, you will discover among other things, that your areas of ruined were created by the darkness that rested or arrested your emotions. You will discover that, among other things, you never lived a visionary life. You led an emotional life.
GOD NEVER BUILT MAN TO MAKE SIGNIFICANT STRIDES BY HIS EMOTIONS, EITHER GOOD OR BAD.
That was why there were no emotional display in all that Adam did well in the Garden of Eden. There was just vision. The only time he went emotional was when he ate from the tree of sound judgment because of what he felt for his wife, Eve. The result is all we have today. If he had stuck to vision, he would not have sinned.
We sin or become rebellious when we depart from the realm of vision and step into the realm of emotions or feelings. That is why visionary living involves a life of holiness, submission to divine will and total commitment to GOD. A visionary life will not break God’s instruction or live a sinful life because it knows the consequence. The Bible says Adam was not deceived. Meaning he knew what he would lose eating from that tree. Yet he ate anyway. That is how stupid we become under emotions.
Carnal feelings do not really care about what GOD says because it is a creation of the flesh. It only cares about getting what it wants.
The feeling of sexual pleasure, for example, will never care about wedding vows. It just cares about the very person it has decided to sleep with. God originally built man to live based on Heavenly vision not feelings. It is when we live the way GOD built man to live that we succeed in life. Any other way will bring ruin, either in time or eternity.
The ruin of living by feelings can be diabolic and unredeemable. That is why most times we blame witches for what our emotions created. We forget that the creations of negative emotions like lust, pride, anger, carnal cravings, envy, jealousy, disappointment, tribal sentiments, greed, covetousness, lack of contentment, bitterness, malice, vengeance, and etc., can be more dangerous than devils sometimes.
I can’t stop thinking that if Samson was in the present-day deliverance churches, his fall on Delilah’s laps and subsequent loss of eyes and dignity, would have been blamed on witches and wizards, or altars raised by the Philistines or something else. No one would have seen the role his negative emotions played. In fact, if they see it at all, they will say it was demons that made him think that way. That is how ignorant our generation has become.
THERE ARE NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE THE RUIN THAT EMOTIONAL LIVING CAN BRING INTO OUR LIVES.
Yes, we need good emotions to enjoy life on earth, but no type of emotion was designed to be the determinant of life. Emotional living, especially carnal emotions, is a silent destroyer that many do not even know exist. While we are busy searching for our enemies here and there, it is right there within our very souls, causing us great harm.
Sadly, the present church has built a culture of blaming so much on a devil the Bible says Christ’s death on the cross and subsequent resurrection destroyed, and the rest on people who appear antagonistic towards others, thereby becoming blind to the real enemy within.
If you want to succeed this year, or in the next circle of years that will usher us into another new year on a Sunday, walk away from that culture. Recognize all the enemies within your soul and deal with them squarely.
God’s grace in the manifestation of the Holy Spirit and revelation of God’s holy truths, will always be there to help us defeat them.
Among the enemies to recognize and deal with is the enemy of emotional living. Embrace visionary living in place of emotional living. Stop living the way you feel about yourself, about those GOD may have placed in your life, or about anything in your life. Start Living the way you should.
LIVE THE WAY YOU SHOULD NOT THE WAY YOU FEEL. THAT IS THE ORDER!
If you live the way you should, you will be visionary and not emotional, no matter what may be wrong with you. That brings us to some Bible based definitions.
TO BE CONTINUED……