TODAY’S DEVOTION (Wednesday 5TH August 2020)
“Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.” 2 Corinthians 5:20 NKJV
WELCOME TO THE 216TH DAY OF OUR YEAR OF REJOICING
Our 50 days Wings of the Spirit, a special 50-day teaching sessions that can be best described as school of fat things, is on its fifth day today. So far, in just four days, we have learned things that may take some 50 years to learn. This is not an exaggeration. I know what I am talking about.
Learning is different from hearing. You may hear something for two hours but require 20 years to learn the very thing you heard for two hours.
That is why in the kingdom it is not the hearers of the word that are blessed but the doers. The doers are those who learned from what they heard. I believe at the end of these 50 sessions, great ambassadors of Christ will emerge.
No nation sends defected ignorant people to be its ambassador. The Kingdom of Heaven do not send defected morally bankrupt people to represent the King. The kingdom sends people who are holy, and without blemish to represent the KING of Kings – Jesus Christ.
Child of GOD, the last set of God’s ambassadors that will pioneer His last move will be pure, holy, and blameless. Make up your mind to be part of this rising army. Yes, join us in the realm of GOD’s Throne Room mysteries.
Talking of this class of kingdom mysteries, whenever I look at some throne room mysteries in the scriptures, I see a lot that make me wonder. I see things that make me wonder what people really expect from God. I see things that make me wonder why they treat Him (and His servants consequently), as a tool for the realization of selfish desires.
SO MANY HAVE REDUCED GOD AND HIS SERVANTS TO MERE CONSULTANT CLINICS AND HOSPITALS.
They have reduced GOD our dwelling place into a visiting place, and His provision for helping us spiritually find Him into tools for meeting selfish needs. Many do not know that the primary assignment of the ascension gifts, is to help us find God and make Him our dwelling place, not to make Him our clinic and His servants a sort of health personals.
Clinics and hospitals are only important when people are sick. But once they are healthy, they are no longer important. The Christian faith was not designed to treat God that way. It was designed to make God our dwelling place. That is why God should not be our visiting place. God should be our dwelling place.
To so many people, God and His servants are only important when they have problems. Once they are free from them, they disconnect.
To others, just as people move from one hospital to the other when they are sick until they find cure, so they treat Church, God and His servants; they move from one Church to another, pastor to pastor, and God to god just to find a cure to their problems instead of GOD to live in.
However, despite their hot pursuit and sacrifices, many are who are with this kind of Christian life are finding no cure to their problems. The reason for not finding cure is simple; nothing Divine is designed to be treated like a dispensary. It will not bless you significantly if you treat it that way.
I used to define the Church to be a spiritual hospital, God the doctor, and us the patients because of what Jesus said about the sick needing a doctor. But God brought me out of that when He gave me a deeper revelation of what Church is. I saw things in the book of Mathew, Ephesians, and few other letters that Paul wrote that shock my theology and aligned me with God’s definition of what Church is.
That was when I discovered that if we reduce a Church to a hospital, its members the patients, and their God the doctor, we will miss it big time. We will never step into the purpose of the Church.
WE WILL SIMPLY NOT BE ABLE TO FUNCTION AS A HEALTHY BODY OF CHRIST ON EARTH.
No! We will not be able to function as soldiers of the cross or operate as a spiritual house of God on earth, offering spiritual sacrifices that are holy and acceptable to Him. That is why you find so many who do not have a true relationship with God in local Churches where God is treated like a dispensary!
Ambassadors of Christ do not treat Church or God as a dispensary.
They do not call themselves sick folks needing a doctor because they know no patient really has a relationship with a doctor, a hospital, clinic, or dispensary. They have contacts but not deep relationship. That is why no one has ever moved out of his or her home to go live in a hospital, clinic, or dispensary with a doctor or nurse forever.
God wants people who will live with Him not just have contact with Him. That is why He is neither your doctor, His Church your hospital or servants your nurses. God is not a consultant of eternity affairs, neither are His servants. He is our source and His servants His arm for helping us find and live within our source.
So, if you are treating God either as a clinic, a hospital, or a consultant, you will never make it in your walk with Him. There are realms of glory you will never come into or embrace in your Christian life.
Our devotional text today says, “we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.” In other word, come back and live in God.
Moses says, “He has been our dwelling place for all generations.” That was the revelation he caught when he saw how Adam lived under the glory. You remember how the LORD God enabled him to see into the eternal past, from mount Horeb. He wrote everything down in the first two chapters of the book of genesis.
Christianity is a call to come live in God. That is why the Bible says, “if anyone be in Christ…” I believe this is the time to stop any foolishness we call Christianity, and be truly reconciled to God. Yes, this is the time that we must ascend to the height of faith where we can make Him our dwelling place not our visiting place.
God was a dwelling place and not a visiting place for the first Adam. He was also a dwelling place and not a visiting place for the second Adam (Christ). We will be out of order not to make Him our dwelling place.
True worshipers do not treat anything that carries the seal of God lightly.
THEY SIT UNDER IT, AND SUBMISSIVE TO IT UNTIL IT MAKES GOD THEIR DWELLING PLACE.
The version of Christian I see in the lives of so many today is in total conflict with the Christianity of the Bible. The Christianity of the Bible made God their dwelling place not a visiting place. That was why Peter said when He became the head of the early Church that they will give themselves entirely to prayer and to the ministry of the word. You cannot make God your dwelling place without doing that.
One of the spiritual agencies God helps us in achieving that goal is the gift of a pastor who understand that to be the goal of GOD. Many Church leaders and local church pastors are misfits because they do not know the vision of God for those who form the membership of their churches. They think they are there to have their earthly needs met.
Friend you do not need to be a member of a church to have your earthly needs met. Membership of a secret society may even help you faster. You need a Church to find God and make Him your dwelling place, and a pastor who knows this and is equipped to help you achieve that is who you need.
That is why I tell people you cannot have a perpetual online Church. Yes, we thank God for online Church but its more or less a spiritual first aid.
You see, this lock down will come to an end and we will go back to offline Church and still flow online to reach those afar off. But it is not the will of GOD that online Churches replace God’s original system of assembling, where His LORDSHIP is experienced, and His glory touched in a corporate sense.
Either you like it or not, I have said repeatedly that you cannot serve God without having a pastor who should know you face to face, over your life. One that you can to sit with from time to time to reason with and receive counsel. That also goes to say, you cannot serve God without being fully committed to a healthy local Church.
Except for very obvious reason, you cannot commit to a healthy local church on face book, pay your tithes and offering through credit card, and follow the pastor up on television or radio and fully make it.
EXCEPT YOU ARE SUPER AND CONSISTENTLY HUNGRY FOR GOD, IT WILL ONLY HELP YOU FOR A WHILE!
God wants us to be reconciled to Him. I said it before that if we are truly reconciled to God, we will not engage ourselves in spiritual masturbation; where we sit all by ourselves, having a feel of God all by ourselves, with the help of no one to push us into certain things.
However, irrespective of all this, I want to submit that it is better to join an online Church that is healthy spiritually and edifying in all aspects of the faith, than to join a local Church near you with a spiritually misfit as a pastor.
Yes, I will prefer and online Church to a synagogue of Satan close by, even if it offers to be paying me an allowance for attending the Church.
I will never call bull my uncle because I want to eat beef. The Bible says its is better to be a gatekeeper in the house of God than to dwell in tents of robbers. Gate keeping in this respect looks like watching TV or following a service online. One moment in a tent of robbers you call Church could be all the devil needs to make you his messenger on earth, or ruin God’s plan for your life eternally.
Friend as we bring this to a close, I want you to understand that you do not attend Church because it is closer to you. You will one day attend a Church that is closer to you and awfully close to hell as well. You attend a church because that is where the LORD will meet and make you what He wants you to be. And if that Church do not exist around you and you find it online, make it your Church until God sort you out.
Get in touch with the pastor for virtual counseling sessions and participate in all kingdom advance purposes using your time, treasures, and talents, and you will be blessed. If an online Church can prepare you for Heaven, it is better to stay connected to it alone than to be in a Church that has lost touch with God and is just floating with religious activities.
God warned us in His word to be careful about where we go to find Him. He will never show up where He has not appointed for us to meet Him. That is the message!
LET THIS SCRIPTURE BE AN ADDITIONAL MEDITATION FOR YOU TODAY
Take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in every place that thou seest: But in the place which the LORD shall choose in one of thy tribes, there thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, and there thou shalt do all that I command thee. Deuteronomy 12:13-14 KJV
Be extra careful: Don’t offer your Absolution-Offerings just any place that strikes your fancy. Offer your Absolution-Offerings only in the place that GOD chooses in one of your tribal regions. There and only there are you to bring all that I command you. (Deuteronomy 12:13-14 The Message Bible)