Charge Your Batteries

CHARGE YOUR BATTERIES

Dr. D. K. Olukoya

Father Lord, we lift up your name for you are a great God. You are the keeper of Israel who neither slumbers nor sleeps. If it was not the Lord that was with us, what would our Israel now say? Thank you heavenly Father. Accept our thanks, in Jesus’ name. Speak to us through this message. Put your fire in our spirits we bind every spirit of tragedy, in the mighty name of Jesus. Thank You heavenly Father, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

No matter how intelligent a person is, it would be very difficult for the person to switch on his torchlight in the dark and it will come on when the batteries are dead. If the batteries inside your torchlight have rusted and grown old, although you may have a new bulb, you would still have a problem because you need power, which comes from the batteries to run the bulb. Matthew 5: 6: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” Notice the strong phrase: ‘they shall be filled.’ That is, without fail, it must happen. In that passage we can see that the condition for being filled is to hunger and thirst after righteousness. The Bible says that those who fulfill this condition shall be filled. Jeremiah 29: 13: “And ye shall seek me, and find me, (under what condition?) when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” (it didn’t say with a part of your heart.) That is, God is asking for 100 per cent of your heart. In Luke 6: 21, our Lord also says, “Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.” This is repeating what we read in Matthew 5: 6. In John 7: 37, a spectacular thing happened. Normally, Jesus does not raise His voice but in this verse, He did. Wherever you read about Jesus raising His voice in the Scriptures, know that it must be a very serious matter. John 7: 37 says, “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, if any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” Please raise your voice and pray like this: “I drink now from the well of salvation, in Jesus’ name.

From the four Scriptures we have read, we can see the key to charging our spiritual batteries. The Bible says that in the last days men shall become lovers of money, lovers of themselves and that they would love pleasures more than God. It also says that there would be a lot of uproar and evil men shall wax stronger and stronger. So, we, as believers, cannot afford to sit down and be rejoicing about what happened yesterday, or what happened last year, or about how we prophesied the other time. We must continually charge our batteries. Our spiritual batteries have to be on fire. Any serious Christian must have at least one or two days in the week for fasting and praying. The reasons you need to do this one is to charge your batteries and get your cup filled over and over. Somebody asked a great preacher called D. L. Moody the following question: “Mr. Moody, why are you always talking about being filled and filled with the Holy Spirit?” Mr. Moody answered thus: “I always talk about us being filled and filled because we all leak and have to be re-filling and re-filling.” The power of God will manifest in your life all the time and the enemy cannot catch you unawares when you keep charging your batteries.

The devil is catching many Christians unawares because they are not charging their batteries. It is commonly said that when fire has gone from the cooking place, all kinds of insects and reptiles would have the confidence to go there. But when you have red-hot fire at the cooking place, it would be very difficult for a lizard to come near it. It is not possible.

INGREDIENTS FOR CHARGING OUR BATTERIES

God wants us to charge our batteries and the ingredients that will keep our batteries charged are known as spiritual hunger and thirst. So, two things that you must never lack in your spiritual life are hunger and thirst. Immediately they are gone from your life, forget it. It is a nice thing when you feel hungry to pray, read the word of God, or hear the word of God and it is a feeling of demotion, when you lose interest in these things. Wanting fire to remain in your life without this hunger and thirst, is like players gathering in a football pitch without a ball. The players cannot play any game. Hunger is the football in the football pitch, without it, there is no game. “Blessed are those that thirst and hunger after righteousness for they shall be filled.” It is time for many of us to pray that the snail anointing should get out of our spiritual lives. Sometime ago, in England, I preached the gospel and ministered to an English boy. I spoke to him on a Tuesday, and by the time we met again the following Tuesday for another meeting, this boy of about 17, had read through the whole Bible for the first time. He sat down and read the Bible through in one week. There are many people who have been born again for many years but are yet to read through the New Testament. Some people start, only to give up half way. Some have been saying, “Well, I will make sure that on weekends I’d keep my programme low so that I can be alone with God, pray, fast and read the word of God.” They boasted and started off only to give up by the third week. Such people cannot hope to charge their batteries. Do you want to receive great power from God? Then this hunger is a must; there is no two ways about it. Hunger for God is one of the greatest signs of spiritual people. Why is it that some people can pray for three or four hours non stop? It is because there is something inside their lives. When a person can read the whole of the book of Matthew at a sitting, there is something special inside the life of such a person. It is not possible to climb a spiritual mountain without any discipline. It is not possible for you to receive power without doing any consecration. Out of all the spiritual gifts in the Bible, the one that you see easily in people’s lives is prophecy. There are very few people in other areas because not many people are ready to consecrate themselves and drop a few things so that they can gain the power of God. It is very sad that true and powerful men of God are reducing in number. Women are even a lot lower in number and this is very sad. Unless we as an end-time church, decides to pick up the mantle and determine that we must affect our own generation positively, God will blame us for allowing so many evil things to happen. Do you want this great power? Hunger is a must. Thousands of people come to the house of God, listen to the word of God, pray the prayers, come to all the services and join the groups but they remain unchanged. Some have already made up their minds on what to do before coming to church. They pick and choose from the messages. When you come to God like that, He would turn His face away. God does not want people who have made up their minds. He wants people He can mould into what He wants. Have you ever decided on your own to fast and pray for days just to be with God and for His power to fall upon your life not because of problems? A certain man said that when somebody is hungry he would not find any fault with the food. He would forget whether there is salt or none in the food. It is only when a person is not hungry that he begins to complain that the food is not okay. When you are hungry for God like that, the hunger drives you closer to God. A hungry man would learn something no matter who is preaching. It can be so sad for people to come before God and leave the same way they came. I pray that the Lord would open up our understanding, in Jesus’ name. Proverbs 8: 17: “I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me.” Many start to seek the Lord at old age. Many always think that there is time and a lot of people don’t bother about God until they go to the cemetery. The above Scripture is saying that the time to seek God is now. Now is the time to be hungry for God not when you are older; not when you can no longer stand and pray for two hours. Some people feel that they have sufficient time to play around a little bit and be serious later. There is no time to be serious later, the time is now because you do not know when your time here would be up. All the excuses of “I am so busy in the office; my schedule is so tight, etc” would be useless. How sad it would be for you to tell the Lord that you spent all your life working in one office or reading Physics on the day of reckoning. A certain little boy who was hungry after God asked his father, “Daddy, what would I do to be on fire for God continually?” His father asked if he really meant what he was saying and the boy said yes. His father then took him to a small pond. Immediately they got there, his father bounced on him and pushed his head underneath the water. The boy began to struggle for air and as he was doing that, he was gulping water. At the third gulp, his father then released him and asked: “What did you desire most when I dipped your head inside the water?” The boy said, “Fresh air,” and the father said, “When you are hungry and thirsty after God like the way you thirsted for air now, fire will fall upon your life.” Beloved, that is it. Our aim should be for God to use us to cause a supernatural revival of apostolic signs and wonders. The apostles moved in the supernatural. They cast down strongholds, uprooted demonic trees, trampled upon satanic powers, worked earth-shaking miracles, turned cities upside down for Jesus, burned demonic materials and God used them to lay the foundation for what we are enjoying now.