One day, he went out with some friends for a game of squash, and after the game, he laid down on the ground to rest. Today, this brother whom the Lord delivered from alcoholism is a key leader in my Church. You know, all our struggling, willpower, discipline and self-effort cannot do what the presence of the Lord can do in an instant.
And who is to say that as we are talking about Jesus now, His presence will not take away something that is destructive in your life? You are transformed by beholding Jesus and believing that He loves you and wants to save you. We must understand it the same way the Hebrew people would have understood it. There is something beautiful here—this is the secret of Immanuel! The Jewish mind understands that when the Lord is with you, you become successful in every endeavor in your life.
Look through the chronicles of Jewish history. The Bible records that whenever the Lord was with them in battle, the children of Israel were never defeated, and every military campaign ended in overwhelming success. In fact, in the battle for Jericho, the city was theirs with just a shout! The Lord was with them. Even in battles when they were outnumbered, they triumphed because the Lord was with them. It is no different in the modern context. When the Bible says that Jesus is with you, He is with you to help you, assist you, turn things around for you and make good things happen for you.
He is not with you, as some wrongly believe, to condemn, judge or find fault! When Almighty God is with you, good things will happen in you, around you and through you. I have seen that time and time again! I learned the truth of what it means to have the Lord with me early on in my teens.
I began to claim that verse every day and I would say out loud,. I was practicing the presence of Jesus. You can start His presence by speaking it out. Feelings can be deceptive. Go by His promise that He is Immanuel!
Have you heard the story of a groom who approached his pastor almost immediately after his wedding ceremony? You ARE married whether you feel it or not, understand? Just take it by faith that you are married! Anyway, soon after I graduated from high school, I took on a part-time job to teach in an elementary school where I was placed in charge of a class of year-olds.
Now, it is very common for kids to miss class now and then for various reasons, and I had never been led by the Lord to pray specifically for any of them. This girl was the first! The Lord told me very clearly to pray for His protection to be over this girl and to cover her with His precious blood. The next day, there was a big commotion in the school and I found out that the girl had been kidnapped by a notorious serial killer that very afternoon that the Lord had told me to pray for her.
The killer, Adrian Lim, had kidnapped several children to be offered up as sacrifices to the devil. He believed that Satan would give him power when he offered the blood of these children to him. Sadly, she was the only girl released. All the other kidnapped girls had been brutally murdered. When she returned to class, I asked her how she came to be freed. Listen to what I am saying here. In America today and around the world, the devil is trying to destroy a new generation because he is afraid that the young people of the new millennium are going to take over the world for Jesus.
I am sharing all this with you because I want you to see the importance and power of practicing His presence. As a teacher during that time, my class was my responsibility, just like my congregation is my responsibility today.
Think with me: How in the world, with my finite knowledge and intelligence, could I have known that one of my students was in grave danger? It is not possible! But because the Lord, who knows all things, was with me, He made me a successful teacher.
Similarly, whatever role or vocation you are in, whether you are a schoolteacher, business leader or homemaker, I want you to know that Jesus is with you and He wants to make you a success. Beloved, His unmerited favor is for you. The Lord Immanuel is with you. Whatever role you are in, Jesus is with you and He wants to make you a success. You see, it is not us; it is Him.
If Jesus is with us, He will give us success in all that we do and cause us to have good results in every area of our lives to the glory of God.
If God can do it for Joseph, a young man sold into slavery, He can do it for you! Let this be your reality:. The world looks at what you have, while God sees who you have. The gospel is simple, and it takes theologians to complicate it!
It essentially comes down to the question of dependence. Who are you depending on today—yourself or Jesus? Do you want to fight for yourself, or do you want Almighty God, the Creator of the heavens and earth, to fight for you? You see, when you depend on yourself, you carry all the stress, burdens and anxieties that your circumstances may present you. Its meaning includes peace, prosperity, health, completeness, soundness and safety.
What a powerful fortress we have in Jesus! In A Crisis? Jesus Can Rescue You My friend, the circumstances around you may appear bleak. Your bank account may have dried up. Perhaps your home may be up for foreclosure soon. You may be mired in credit card debt, and the friends that you once trusted may have disappointed you. Maybe you have just received a devastating medical report. The whole world seems to be crashing down around you, and you feel crushed, frustrated and disappointed.
Now, what can you do? Beloved, now is the time for you to turn away from yourself and look to Jesus. His story begins in Genesis His Father made no secret about the fact that he loved Joseph more than all his other children, and made an exquisite tunic of many colors that was given to Joseph only. The phrase means a coat of pieces of various colors. The coat is a long tunic with sleeves worn by young men and maidens of the better class, a dress of distinction. Why is this important?
This fine linen tunic set Joseph apart from his brothers in terms of their responsibilities in the family. It meant that unlike his brothers, Joseph did not need to work in the fields and tend the flock. All he had to do was to attend to his Father and bring his Father pleasure. What an awesome job description! Filled with jealousy and envy, they hated Joseph and could not speak peaceably with him. Furthermore, Joseph shared with his brothers the two dreams that he had received from the Lord and these dreams only exacerbated their hatred toward him.
Or shall you indeed have dominion over us? They knew that he was sent by their Father to check on them, and they burned with resentment as they recalled how this little squealer brought a bad report to Jacob the last time he had come to spy on them. Overcome with rage and compounded jealousy toward Joseph, his brothers conspired to kill him. Bright-eyed and unsuspecting, Joseph headed toward his brothers, ready to embrace them.
Without warning, his brothers seized him and violently stripped him of his beautiful tunic. Struggling frantically all the while, he was dragged toward a nearby pit and shoved into its cavernous depths. The next time we see Joseph, he is trussed up in ropes and sold like a piece of meat in an Egyptian market. His whole world appeared to have collapsed around him.
All that he owned had been stripped from him. He was reduced to nothing more than a slave in a foreign land. Was this the end of Joseph? In the natural scheme of things, it sure looked like it was. But even with the odds stacked up against Joseph, the Lord was far from finished. Remember, it is not what you have. It is who you have that makes all the difference. Can you imagine every project, assignment and even errand that you undertake becoming prosperous? Your hands become hands of blessing.
You touch your family members and they are blessed. Your company may be struggling to manage a difficult project, but once it is placed in your hands, the project becomes blessed. You become a blessing waiting to happen to someone, waiting to happen. The Lord Jesus will make it happen when you depend on Him in the same way that Joseph depended on Him. Joseph had nothing. He could not trust in his skills or experience he had never been a slave , nor could he trust in his natural connections his Father was out of the picture because he believed that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal.
He was an Egyptian who worshipped idols. So this tells me that Potiphar must have witnessed tangible results that were really out of this world. He must have seen results that were so spectacular that he knew they were beyond that of an ordinary human being!
Perhaps Potiphar ordered Joseph to dig new wells for his household and every well that Joseph dug yielded water even in the midst of a drought. Perhaps the field that Joseph tended yielded crops that were shockingly bigger than the crops in the surrounding fields.
They had to be due to the fact that the Lord was with Joseph, and God made all he did to prosper in his hand. In everything that I do, I want people to see Jesus and Jesus alone! When I pray for a sick child, I certainly do not want the results that my own hands can produce. If the results are what Joseph Prince alone can produce, I can guarantee you that the child will remain sick. No, I want the results that only Jesus can produce! When I preach about Jesus and His finished work, my prayer is that my Church congregation and those who are watching our broadcasts around the world would hear not what I have to say, but rather, what Jesus is speaking to their hearts through me.
I am but a vessel, and my words alone have no power. But at His Word, sinners get born again and are saved for all eternity. Sick bodies are healed. Demons flee, marriages are restored and families brought together. Debts are supernaturally cancelled, fears disappear in His perfect love, hearts are encouraged, hope is restored and joy is renewed.
Now, THAT is the Jesus-kind of results that I want, and by His amazing and unmerited favor, we have seen all these blessings happening in our Church week after week! For instance, some people think that Joseph Prince somehow grew New Creation Church from members to more than 20, members today because of some clever strategy or comprehensive year growth plan.
A senior Christian pioneer in my country once asked me what I was doing to grow the Church. The point of this book is to encourage you to not focus on what you are doing, but to focus on beholding Jesus. When you stop doing and start depending on His divine favor, trust me, you will begin to experience the Jesus-kind of results. In the same way, I am believing for the Jesus-kind of results in your life as I write this book. I do not want you to read what I have to say to you.
I want you to receive what I believe Jesus has put in my heart for you. I am but a pointer and I am writing this book to point you to the person of Jesus! It is His manifested presence, His glorious power working in your heart and through your hands that will cause everything you touch to prosper with the Jesus-kind of results, such that even your harshest critic will have to conclude that the Lord is with you and is prospering the work of your hands!
Beloved, stop looking at your outward circumstances or the position you are in. Whether your employer is a believer or not, Jesus can make ALL that you do prosper when you depend on His unmerited favor in your career! And believe me, when that begins to happen, your employer will sit up and notice that there is something special about you. You will stand out in a crowd!
Remember that the same Lord who was with Joseph is with you today. His name is Jesus and because Jesus is with you, you can expect good success in everything that you do! For example, when you are placed over a sales project, believe that your sales team will hit record levels of sales never achieved before in your organization. When you are overseeing the finances of a company, believe that you will find legal ways to help your company save on operating expenses and increase its cash flow like never before.
When you are placed in a business development role, believe that Jesus will cause doors that have always been closed to your company to be opened to you because of His unmerited favor upon your life.
In the natural, you may be unqualified and inexperienced, but remember that all your disqualifications exist in the realm of the natural. You, beloved, live and operate in the supernatural realm! The Lord Jesus is with you percent.
Without Him, We Cannot. I trust that by now, you have no doubt in your heart that Jesus is infinitely interested in your success. In more than two decades of ministry, I have learned this from the Lord: Without Him, we cannot.
Without us, He will not. What this simply means is that we need to recognize the fact that if we do not depend on Jesus, there can be no real, long-lasting and abiding success—without Him, we cannot. The Bible tells us that unless the Lord builds the house, we labor in vain. Believers who want to experience His success need to recognize this truth and begin to depend on Jesus and Jesus alone. There are some believers who may not articulate it, but in their hearts, they believe that without Jesus, they can still succeed.
These are strong words of warning. You are cut off from Christ and have fallen from the place of having His unmerited favor work in your life. Well, Jesus is a gentleman. He will not force His unmerited favor and success down your throat. He needs you to allow Him to work in your life.
He waits patiently for you to trust Him. As much as we are interested in the Jesus-kind of results in our lives, it is of equal importance that we desire the Jesus-kind of success. God does not want us to have success that will crush us. I am sure that you have heard many stories of people who receive a sudden windfall when they come into a large inheritance or strike the first prize in a lottery. However, for some of these people, the sudden wealth did not give them a better life.
Instead, in many instances, we know that it corrupted and destroyed their lives. Often, these people were not able to handle their so-called success, and ended up leaving their wives and allowing their families to break down before their eyes. Perhaps they bought all sorts of things and lived in huge houses. Yet, they still felt a chronic sense of loneliness, emptiness and dissatisfaction.
The sad reality is that many of those who chanced upon such sudden wealth squandered it all away, and some even became bankrupt.
Such results are clearly not the Jesus-kind of results, nor are they the Jesus-kind of success. Let me make it clear from the onset: God has no problem with you having money, but He does not want money to have you! Having money does not make you evil. It is the obsession with and intense love of money that lead to all kinds of evil. Just because a person has no money in his pocket does not mean that he is holy.
He may well be thinking, dreaming and lusting after money all day long. If a person is always purchasing lottery tickets, going to the casinos and gambling in the stock market, this person clearly has a love for money.
He is obsessed with getting more money. I will bless you Now, how can we be a blessing if we are not blessed in the first place? How can we be a blessing to others when we are always flat on our backs with sickness, living from hand to mouth, never having enough for.
No way, my friend. God wants you healthy and strong, and He wants you to have more than enough financial resources so that you can be generous with your relatives, friends, community or anyone who needs help. How can you be in a position to help others if you need all the help you can get yourself? He wants to bless you so that you can be a blessing! Sicknesses and diseases are not from God. On the cross, Jesus bore the curse of poverty!
The entire chapter is about money and being a blessing financially to those who are in need. Let me ask you again: How can you be a blessing to anyone when you are always sick and always borrowing from one person to repay another? My friend, it is the devil who wants you sick and poor, but the God I know has paid a heavy price to redeem you from the curse of sickness and poverty!
As a parent, how would you teach your child character and patience? With sicknesses and diseases? Of course not! There are institutions where we put such parents! Again, as a parent, how would you teach your child humility? By cursing your child with poverty for the rest of his life?
No way! He is our Father who operates on the frequency of relationship, and through His unmerited favor in our lives, we learn character, patience and humility as we rest from our self-efforts and depend on Him. The more we know our Father, the more we become like Him. This is how God causes us to grow from glory to glory in every area of our lives.
It is simply by beholding Him! You know that as parents, we always seek the best things for our children. How much more would our Father in Heaven want the best things for us, His precious children? In the same way that you want your children to be healthy, God wants you to enjoy His divine health. And in the same way that you want your children to always have more than enough, God wants you to enjoy His supernatural provision.
When He provides, get ready for a net-breaking, boat-sinking load. Get ready for 12 baskets full of leftovers! In the same way that you want your children to always have more than enough, God wants you to enjoy His supernatural provision. Now, take a walk with me to the intensive care unit of any hospital. Look at the people there gasping to draw their next breath and groaning in anguish despite the painkillers being pumped into their ravaged bodies.
Look at the inconsolable woman, who has just lost her husband, crying hysterically in the corridor. Then, look me in the eye and tell me that you really think that this is the work of our loving Father. Then, walk with me through the malaria-infested streets of any slum, and look at the children scavenging through mounds of rubbish and gratefully eating any scrap of discarded food that they can find.
Look at the young girls forced into prostitution and the scarred bodies of desperate parents who had no choice but to sell their organs to make ends meet. Then, look me in the eye again, and tell me that you believe poverty is from our Father. Come on!
Even the world has more common sense than some Christians! They are using their fame, resources and time to fight against sickness and poverty. And here, we have believers who are completely blinded by legalistic beliefs, telling us that sickness and poverty are from God. I hope that you are beginning to see how warped and embarrassing this is. He is against money and things having you. My friend, get this right: God abhors sickness and He loathes poverty.
He gave everything He had to annihilate sickness and poverty when He gave us His only Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross for us. God wants you to be blessed spirit, soul and body. He is not against you having money and material things. But let me make it clear: He is against money and things having you. I often tell my Church this: Use money and love people. God wants you and your family completely blessed and having more than enough to be a blessing.
But at the same time, He wants to be sure that success will not destroy you and cause your family to disintegrate. To be safe for success, keep your heart ablaze with passion for Jesus and His presence, rather than on empty materialistic things. Jesus tells us that you do not have to be consumed by these concerns. If your Father feeds even the birds of the air, even though they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, how much more will He take care of you, who are of much more value to Him than the birds!
Beloved, just keep your eyes on Jesus and His finished work on the cross. Not only will He add the things that you need in this life to you, He will also cause you to become safe for success. Now, turn with me to the Book of Jeremiah to see what the Lord says about having riches, wisdom and might. Let us be a people who will not depend on our own wisdom, might and riches in summary, our own merits , but rather, let our boasting dependence be in understanding and knowing Jesus.
Know that He is gracious and full of unmerited favor toward us. Know that He executes justice against all injustices. Know that He Himself is righteousness and He clothes us with His robes of righteousness. The more you focus on beholding Jesus in all His loveliness and the less you struggle to earn things by your own merits, the more you become safe for greater success in your life. There are still many precious gems hidden in his life that we have not touched on, and I want you to see what it means when a man is safe for success.
The results that Joseph produced were so spectacular that even Potiphar, an unbeliever with no spiritual discernment, could visibly see that the Lord was with Joseph. Potiphar was no fool. My friend, the unmerited favor that you have with the Lord will overflow and lead to favor with the people around you. In your career, when Jesus causes everything that your hand touches to prosper, you will receive favor from your boss, and that will lead to accelerated increase and promotion.
Believe that because you, child of God, are in the organization, your organization will thrive and be blessed. The Lord will bless the organization that you are in for your sake. We did nothing to deserve His favor.
It is completely unmerited. Favoritism, however, stinks of self-effort. Individuals who rely on favoritism for promotion have to resort to apple polishing, office politics, manipulative tactics, backstabbing and all kinds of compromises just to get what they want. They use all their efforts to open doors for themselves, and in the process, they lose themselves.
God has a higher and better way for you. It hurts Him to see His own precious children groveling like sycophants just to get ahead in life.
If a door closes, so be it! Believe with full confidence that God has a better way for you. That was how Joseph operated. He depended on the Lord for his success, and not on favoritism, which would have required him to compromise his beliefs.
By the way, I believe that Joseph faced a real temptation. He was the captain of the guard, and a man of position, influence and wealth. As a man of the world, he would not have married an ugly woman for her inner beauty and would certainly not have married an year-old grandmother! He would definitely have chosen a young, beautiful woman to be his wife, and she was possibly one of the most beautiful women in the land.
So there is no doubt that she was a real temptation to Joseph, and that is why Joseph had to run! How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God? From his words, it is clear that Joseph knew the source of his success, favor and blessings. It was the Lord! Look at the life of Joseph. Yet, he could look at. Who taught him that adultery was a great wickedness against God?
Think about it. He could have been bitter with God and with his brothers, who had betrayed him. He could have chosen to take full advantage of the situation that was presenting itself to him, since it appeared as if he had been abandoned by the only people that he cared about.
Nobody was around and nobody would know. But guess what? Joseph had a relationship with God. He had a relationship with the King of kings. He knew that the Lord was with him every step of the way and that the Lord had not forsaken him.
You see, we cannot have a relationship with the law, with two cold tablets of stone, but we can have a living relationship with Jesus, and He will put His laws upon our minds and write them on our hearts, causing us to walk in His ways that lead to life.
Joseph had no Ten Commandments governing him. All he had was a living relationship with the Lord. He knew that Jesus was His success, and that made him safe for success!
The presence of Jesus is all that you need. It is exciting to enjoy His presence daily in everything that you do. The Bible records the story of a group of friends who broke through the rooftop of a house, so that they could bypass the crowds that were blocking their way to Jesus, and bring their paralytic friend before Jesus to be healed.
But you know what? Right where you are, Jesus, your Immanuel, is with you! There is a powerful rhetorical question in the Bible and I encourage you to memorize it:. When God Himself fights for you, defends you and vindicates you, what adversity or adversary can stand against you? There are none! I still lose my temper on the road now and then, and from time to time, I still get angry with my wife and kids. Why should God be on my side when I fail? Great question.
Let me tell you why. The answer is found at the cross. Do you remember what happened on the night of the Passover? The children of Israel put the blood of the lamb on their doorposts. What did the blood do? The blood put God on their side! None of the families who had applied blood on their doorposts had to fear the death of their firstborn children.
Now, think about this for a moment. Were the firstborn children of Israel spared that night because of their perfect behavior and conduct, or were they spared because of the blood of the lamb? Of course, it was because of the blood of the lamb!
In the same way, God does not bless you, as a new covenant believer, based on your perfect behavior and conduct. He is for you today because of the blood of the perfect Lamb—Jesus Christ. Now, who can come against you? No sickness, no disease, no creditor, no evil accusation, no gossip—no weapon formed against you, can come successfully against you! Some people believe that doing a lot for charity or performing acts of kindness will put God on their side.
Somehow, they have this idea that if they have donated significant amounts of money to the poor or volunteered their time to serve in Church, all these doings will put them in favor with God and cause Him to be on their side. My friend, let us speak openly about this.
That kind of thinking still places the focus on you. He is about relationship, not rules. On the other hand, legalism is all about rules you need to keep and how often you should do something. Christianity becomes a life of legalism for Christians who believe that if they spend a lot of time reading the Bible, praying, fasting or volunteering their time in Church, they will gain increased favor with God. They think that all their works will cause God to be on their side and answer their prayers.
Is He on. No, a thousand times no! All that I am saying is that when you do these things, do them from a heart that wants to, and not from a heart that has to because of legalistic obligations. Think with me for a moment. Would you like your spouse to spend time with you because he or she wants to, or because he or she has to? Do you think that our loving God is any different? Jesus is not interested in works driven by a sense of legalism. He is interested in you wanting to spend quality time with Him in His Word, so that He can talk to you, encourage you and impart the necessary wisdom to you for the day.
Absolutely not. And out of that overflowing abundance of appreciation for His love that you are undeserving of, you desire to hear His voice and seek His face. You begin to trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. You begin to acknowledge Him in all your ways and allow Him to direct your paths.
The presence of Jesus in your life is a free gift from God. There is no number of good works that you can perform to merit His favor. My friend, God is with you today because of His precious Son, Jesus. God gave us Jesus. There is no amount of good that you can do to earn the presence of Jesus. His presence in your life is a free gift. Now, because you did nothing to deserve His presence in your life, there is nothing you can do that will cause His presence to leave you.
Once you have received Jesus into your heart, He will never leave you nor forsake you! No, Jesus is right by your side to encourage you and restore you to wholeness.
Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down; for the Lord upholds him with His hand. You can count on Him. He is a faithful, dependable and trustworthy friend. Even when you have failed Him, He is right there with you, ready to pick you up and restore you to wholeness. The Divine Exchange There was a time under the law in the Old Testament where God would be with you only when you were in complete obedience. But when you failed, He would leave you.
Today, however, you and I are under a completely different covenant and God will never leave us. Because of what Jesus did on the cross. At the cross, He became our burnt offering. He bore our sins and carried our punishment. That is where the divine exchange took place. What a divine exchange! When you are doing right, He is with you. Even when you have failed, He is still with you! What can man do to me? It means that when you are up, He is with you. When you are down, He is with you.
When you are glad, He is with you. When you are sad, He is with you. That is what it means when Jesus said that He would never leave you nor forsake you! In case you are still not convinced, let me show you what it says in the original Greek text. Ou me is used for both.
Wow, that is what Jesus has done for us! He has given us the constant presence of God! My friend, you need to settle it in your heart once and for all—God will never leave you! God will never forsake you! And if you hear anyone telling you that you can forfeit the presence of God, stop listening. When Potiphar heard his wife telling her version of the story, his anger was aroused and he seized Joseph, stripped him from the place of authority he had given him and threw him into prison.
What is happening here? With the painful memory of his brothers casting him into the pit still fresh in his mind, here he is once again, cast into a dungeon even though he had not done anything wrong. Any average person would be bitter and angry with God! Why had God brought him this far, only to abandon and forsake him? How could this happen? Where is the justice against this false accusation?
He knew that the Lord would never leave him nor forsake him. Joseph considered not his circumstances, but kept his focus on the presence of the Lord. Instead of getting bitter, he kept his hope in the Lord.
Instead of throwing in the towel and giving up on God and on life, he kept his confidence, knowing that all his success was wrapped up in the presence of the Lord. And boy, did the Lord deliver him! I want you to read this for yourself to see what the Lord did for Joseph:.
The same applies to you. When the unmerited favor of God is upon you, you are like a rubber ball in a pool of water. Natural circumstances can try to push you down and keep you suppressed under water, but the unmerited favor of God will always cause you to POP right up to the top! It was so for Joseph! If Joseph had not been betrayed by his brothers, he would not have been sold as a slave. If he was not in. You shall be over my house, and all my people shall be ruled according to your word; only in regard to the throne will I be greater than you See, I have set you over all the land of Egypt.
Stop looking at your circumstances and stop allowing them to discourage you. The same Lord who was with Joseph is with you right now. You cannot fail! You can expect to see success beyond your present circumstances!
It is one thing to know theoretically that God is with you, but to experience His presence, you have to increase your consciousness of His presence by practicing His presence! This is not something difficult. In fact, it should be rather effortless. Do you know that even as you have been or are reading about Jesus right now, you have been and you are practicing the presence of Jesus?
As you are reading about Jesus and discovering what He says in His Word about you, you have just become effortlessly more conscious of His presence with you right now. And as you think of Jesus more and more, you will begin to experience a peace you never had, a strength like never before and a joy that you cannot describe with words.
Wisdom starts to flow and your decision-making ability is sharpened. Just by being exposed to the presence of the Son of the living God, the breakthrough that you have been struggling for supernaturally occurs. Instead, with adequate exposure to sunlight and water, fruits are produced effortlessly.
Your victory is a fruit. Your success is a fruit. Your health is a fruit. Family harmony is a fruit. Career success is a fruit. All these good fruits are birthed just by you being in the presence of the Lord!
Stress, depression, and anger fade away and no longer dominate your thoughts. Worry has no foothold in your mind. You feel and start behaving like the new creation in Christ that you are, regardless of your current circumstances.
Trust the Lord to open your eyes to see Him in your situation, and the more you see Him, the more He manifests Himself. If you are in the midst of committing to an important business agreement, I assure you that if you can see the Lord there with you, His wisdom will flow through you, and He will give you supernatural insight to locate any loopholes,.
Once you involve Jesus and acknowledge His presence, you will sense Him intervening in any decision you are about to make, through the absence or presence of His peace. Everything can appear to be in order on the surface, but somehow, if you sense a discomfort rising up in you every time you think about your decision, my advice to you would be to not rush into it.
Once you have involved the Lord, the lack of peace that you feel is often His leading to protect you. Somehow, there will be a supernatural restraint that you know is not from yourself. That is also the Lord! Before we continue, I just have to say this: It is important for you to eradicate the notion that the Lord is present to find fault with you. God knows every idiosyncrasy about you, yet He loves you perfectly because He sees you through the lens of the cross, where His Son has removed every failing from your life!
So even your current argument with your spouse is washed by the blood of Jesus. No, my friend, His presence is with you to direct you, guide you, lead you into becoming more like Christ, and make you a success in every endeavor you undertake.
No matter where you are, the Lord is with you. Even in the midst of your fears, while you are alone in your room, He is there with you. You cannot psych yourself out of fear nor can you psych yourself out of worry. There is nothing to worry about. The debt will still be staring you in your face and your problems will still be as insurmountable as ever no matter how hard you try to psych yourself up.
That is what the world is trying to do, but it does not work. It takes the presence of the Lord to keep you free from worry. I am your defender. I am your fortress. I am your refuge. I am your supply. I am your healing. I am your provider.
I am your peace. I am your joy. I am your wisdom. I am your strength. I am the glory and the lifter of your head! He is not asking you to pretend that the facts are not there. When they were in your hands, the weight and burden of your problems may have crushed you. But when you involve Jesus, the once-monumental problems become microscopic in His hands! Just think, would you call upon the help of a relative or friend in your time of need if you were not confident that the person would respond to your call?
Jesus cares for you. Do not fear therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. I love and care for my sweet daughter, Jessica. But as much as I adore her and care for her well-being, I have never, not once, counted the number of strands of hair on her head!
She does not know how great a blessing she has been to me. I love to kiss her, smell her hair and hug her tightly. Yet, in all my great love for her, I have never taken the time to count the number of strands of hair on her head in all these years! But do you know that your Heavenly Father numbers the very hairs on your head?
I really hope that you are beginning to catch the heart of Jesus and not generalize His love for you. His love for you is all-encompassing.
If He cares enough to keep track of the hairs on your head, is there anything too small for Him that you cannot talk to Him about? Are you not of more value than a sparrow? Is God a God who winds the clock and leaves it alone to tick until Jesus comes back? Is He only involved with major events in the world? Is He only involved in significant events in our lives like our salvation, or is He vitally and intensely involved in the day-to-day minute details of your life?
What do you think? The Bible says that He calls His own sheep by name. My friend, His love for you is personal, detailed and in-depth. That is how I read the Word. I come to the Word to drink of the living waters from Jesus.
I am conscious that Jesus is by my side, teaching me, speaking to my heart, and I can tell you that we have the best conversations during these times and I always come away from such times feeling refreshed and energized. Reading His Word has become a great personal time of intimacy between Jesus and me.
I get completely lost and absorbed in His presence until I lose track of time. Once you are conscious that Jesus is with you, reading the Bible no longer feels like a chore or duty. Bible study divorced from His presence is a dead work. But when it is like catching up with your best friend, there never seems to be enough time!
So see the Lord in the midst of everything that you do and learn to bring Him into the picture. He makes everything beautiful in your life. When you look at your past, the scars of yesterday may still be throbbing in your memories. Perhaps you were sexually abused as a child or you were emotionally hurt by someone you trusted.
As you look back now, you may still feel angry, frustrated and disappointed all at the same time, and the hurt. But in the midst of your pain, I want to challenge you to start involving Jesus. See the Lord holding you, gently healing your wounds. Jesus is right there restoring you, putting courage into your heart and taking away all the sense of shame and guilt. Beloved, He wants you to know that your past will not determine the future that He has for you.
Once you involve the Lord and put Him into your bitter waters, He will turn the bitterness into sweetness. That is what the Lord did for the children of Israel. When they came to a place called Marah, they could not drink its waters because they were bitter. Moses cried out to the Lord and the Lord showed him a tree, which Moses cast into the waters. Why did the foul-tasting, undrinkable waters become refreshing and sweet?
The answer lies in the tree that was cast in. The tree is a picture of the cross on which our Lord Jesus hung, bearing every broken heart and every sting of betrayal. When you bring Jesus into your situation, He can cause every bitter experience to become sweet! Talk to Him and allow His presence to restore you today!
In 1 Samuel 16, the Bible records that King Saul was very unsettled, and his servants told him that he was being troubled by a distressing spirit. They then advised him to bring David before him to play the harp for him, saying that evil spirits departed when David played the harp.
Do you know why David could have such accolades heaped upon him? A few years after Wendy and I got married, an incident happened that I will never forget. I was on my way home one day and I had stepped into a cramped elevator. A group. I know that fragrance. I am sure that you have experienced something similar before.
Have you ever walked through a restaurant or some other place that is filled with smoke? You may not smoke, but your hair and clothes become infused with the smell of smoke by the time you get through the place. In the same way, you cannot be in the presence of the Lord without His glory, His majesty, His beauty, His power, His love and His peace rubbing off on you.
And they realized that they had been with Jesus. When I started working in my early twenties, I kept on practicing the presence of Jesus and in a short time, I became the top salesperson in my company. I not only closed the biggest deals for my company, but I also secured the greatest frequency of sales transactions.
I started as one of the lowest-paid employees in the company, but the Lord consistently promoted me, and gave me different income streams from within the same company until I became one of the highest-paid employees in that organization. Please understand that I am not sharing this with you to put a feather in my cap. I shared with you about my professional career before I entered full-time ministry so that you will not walk away thinking that I have personally experienced good success from the Lord only because I am a pastor.
Like I mentioned earlier, whatever vocation. God is on your side to bless and make you a success. Of course, you understand that I am referring to only morally upright professions. If you are involved in a morally corrupt industry or a job that expects you to lie, cheat or deceive, my advice to you is to get out!
You do not have to depend on a job that puts you in a morally compromising position for your income. God loves you intimately and He has something so much better in store for you.
Trust Him. Start living out the dreams that God has birthed in your heart today! Click here to get Unmerited Favor in other languages. You May Also Like August 04, I like this book because it's uplifting and teaches many things about the Grace unmerited favor of God. Very encouraging. I totally recommend it. Thank you! Make a Recommendation Let us know how this resource has blessed you!
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