ABRAHAM’S CHILDREN IN TROUBLE PART 2
Dr. D. K. Olukoya
Beloved, this week, we are looking at the concluding part of the message entitled, “Abraham’s children in trouble.” Last week, we looked at various reasons a person could be a child of God and yet be in trouble and why Abraham’s children sometimes suffer. The reasons we saw were living in sin, ignorance and breaking the laws of faith. We started looking at the laws of faith so that we could know when we were breaking them. We stopped at law number 15. In this edition we are starting with law number 16.
16. Faith does not work for those who want to operate with other people’s timetable: Your faith cannot work when you are comparing yourself with others, because what you are basing your faith on is not the plan of God for you. We have to be very careful about this. In Psalm 73, we see a man that wanted to make a comparison and found out that he was making a great mistake.
17. Faith is never envious of other people: If somebody is doing very well, you don’t have to envy him. Rather you have to support him in prayers. The more you do that, the more God will bless you. The spirit of envy is from the pit of hell fire and it destroys very quickly. Also, when you take advice from envious people, you get into trouble. A sister had problem with her husband and went to a friend of hers for counsel. The friend told her that she must not take nonsense from her husband. She advised: “If the man talks nonsense you give it back to him raw.” And the sister said, “If I do that, there will be quarrel.” Her friend replied, “Ah! That is the only way you can deliver yourself from somebody that wants to be controlling you any how.” Sadly, the person giving this counsel to this sister was practically a slave to her own husband. She would not say one word when her husband began to talk and here she was, counseling somebody else to be rebellious to her husband because she was envious of that woman. The funny sister actually took the advice and trouble started in her home. When she ran to this counsellor one night to tell her that she had been thrown out, she said, “I am sorry, I don’t want my husband to meet you here, it will cause trouble. Take your things and go.” The shocked sister shot back: “But you are the one that advised me.” The evil counselor countered; “Anybody can advise anybody. Sometimes, it works and at other times it does not. So, it is not my fault.”
18. Faith focuses on God alone: It does not start looking for alternatives but God alone. The moment Peter removed his eyes from Jesus, he began to sink; another law took over him, the law of doubt. So faith focuses on God alone and it does not look for alternatives. This is the blind Bartimeaus kind of faith. He cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me,” and he was not ready to stop until Jesus showed up.
19. Faith rejoices in the Lord always: No matter what the situation is, faith rejoices in the Lord always. Sometimes what a person sees as a setback could be a divinely appointed staircase to climb into a higher realm. But if you look at it as a setback and get depressed, faith jumps out.
20. Faith is buried by worry and anxiety: When you are worried and anxious it will seem as if you had never prayed. Worry and anxiety nullify prayers. A white man friend of mine would always say, “Why pray, when you can worry?” He used to say so because praying and worrying do not go together. If you worry don’t bother to pray or you drop the worry and pray.
21. Faith knows no impossibility: Somebody who moves by faith must not work by sight. If you must move by sight you will never praise God.
22. Faith must start in the heart: Romans 10:8-10: “But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith, which we preach. That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” Faith must start in the heart and not in the head.”
23. Faith must be expressed by words and actions: Once you believe God; begin to confess that what you are asking from Him is so. Once you believe God, begin to act on it.
Once a person breaks the law of faith, even if he is a child of Abraham, he will suffer. So the first reason Abraham’s children suffer is because of sin.
The second reason is ignorance; the third is breaking the laws of faith. The fourth reason is being caged by past memories. There are many people who are bound by their past bad memories. A person who is 42 years old and has given his life to Jesus may still be haunted by what he did or what happened to him 21 years ago. Whenever something bad happened to him he would trace it to that incident that happened 21 years ago. And the person keeps asking God for forgiveness for the same thing all the time even after God had forgiven him. If you are in this kind of situation you must decide to get out of it. You must not allow any bad past ignorant memories to ruin your present life. Some people who probably were the ones that first introduced their younger sisters to sex and now found out that, that younger sister is living a worldly life, have these memories tormenting them. Some did abortion a long time ago, and when they gave their lives to Christ they confessed and God has forgiven them. Yet they are still harassed by what we call the spirit of abortion because they have not forgiven them selves. The spirit of abortion, which generally leads to frustration and backwardness will harass anybody that has ever done any form of abortion before. Until you go for deliverance, and clear yourself from that spirit, frustration will trail you like a police detective. Once you have done deliverance and cut it off, you have to put the past where it belongs.
Sometime ago, a man who came to see me told me that somebody who was a member of a Pentecostal church offended him that is why he does not like Pentecostal churches and their members, I said, “Okay, where is the person?” He said he died fifteen years ago. “So what do you want us to do now? Do you want us to bring him up from the grave so that he can apologise to you?” He said no. He was being limited by past memories. We have cases of fathers who have slept with their own daughters, men and women who were unfaithful to their partners and people who have experienced serious tragedies and the enemy makes these memories to linger on so that these people continue to live in bondage. If you live in the past, you miss out of the blessings of Abraham. Some people even try to remove imaginary demons out of themselves instead of jumping out from the past.
There are some people, who each time they remember certain things that had happened in the past, their spirits go down and they suddenly even become sad if they were rejoicing before. If you are like that, you cannot have Abraham’s blessings. There are some people who are going about with heavy burden of things they cannot share with others in their spirits. Although they refuse to share them, they still stubbornly hang them in their memories. They have to get out of that or Abraham’s blessings would be difficult to get.
Many of us need to forgive ourselves since God has forgiven us and claim our liberty.
I want you to lay your hand on your chest and pray like this:
“Lord Jesus, walk back into my past and erase every destructive memory, in the name of Jesus.”
The next reason Abraham’s children suffer, is that they permit the operation of satanic weapons against their lives. The devil has a lot of weapons in his armory that he uses against Christians day and night. These satanic weapons are:
i. Continuous feeling of unworthiness.
ii. Anxiety.
iii. Fear, which leads to lack of confidence. Many people have become like that servant in the Bible who because of fear of failure, fear of being compared to others and fear of taking risks buried his talent. He refused to do anything because he was under the bondage of fear.
iv. Doubt.
v. Anger.
vi. Guilt.
Many have allowed the weapons of the enemy to prosper in their lives. You need to identify these things and loose yourself from them. When some people come to God, they do not believe that their lot is improving. Some actually say that things are getting worse. All their dreams are negative because they lack faith and cannot see with their spiritual eyes. We have a lot of wicked satanic agents surrounding us. The first problem is that, they themselves hate one another so they cannot love others. The law says, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” You have to love yourself before you can love others. So if you don’t hate yourself, you will not submit your life to the enemy. Jesus is here today to set people free.
The Bible says we should be as wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove. It also says, “I send you forth as sheep among wolves.” The Bible calls those we are living with wolves. Now, for a sheep to operate among wolves, certain things must enter the life of the sheep that will paralyze the wolves no matter how tough the wolves are.
Let us consider the following activity of a knowing wolf: Two sisters who live in England heard about Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries and came. The first was 39 years old. Their problem was that no man had ever proposed marriage to them. I counseled them to go for deliverance and they asked, “What does that mean?” I explained, feeling sorry for them, because immediately I saw them I knew that their own father was in charge of their case. As they were about going out, I asked them where they were going. They said, “We bought some things for daddy and we want to go and give them to him.” I told them to go but they should not let him embrace them. They asked why I said so and I told them that if they allowed him to embrace them, their marriage would be postponed again. They could not understand that, so I simply urged them to do as I had told them. They went home and gave their daddy the present. Predictably, the man did not want to touch the present, he only wanted to embrace them and they said, “No, daddy, just take the present,” and the man declared, “You have been to that church.” They asked him: “How did you know that?” He answered, “Don’t worry, you are small girls.” They asked which church? And he described it. At that level, they started to shiver. They were now genuinely afraid and ran back to me and narrated their experience. Beloved, how can a man enter a covenant with powers of darkness to renew his own prosperity at the expense of his daughters’ goodness? We have such agents surrounding us. Therefore, it is the duty of Abraham’s children, though they look like sheep, to strike at them like thunder.
Somebody once wrote me a letter from here and said, “Dr. Olukoya, thank you very much for what God is doing here and what He is doing in your life.” He continued, “But I have a question The question is this: suppose somebody who is a believer, is being attacked by a witch and the believer came for deliverance and prayed fire prayers that every arrow of witchcraft in his life should go back to sender and the arrows went back to sender giving rise to problems and afflictions in the life of the witch. If the witch found out she was about to die, and quickly ran to Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries and submitted herself for deliverance while also prayerfully sending back the arrows to the sender. Would the arrows go back to the believer that originally sent it? That was question number 1. Question 2: In all these back to sender issues, who carries the arrows? Is it angels or demons? He wanted to know the transport vessels that take arrows from one spot to the other. Question 3: Why do you people pray that every spirit working against their progress should fall down and die, can a spirit die?
Lets take it one after the other. When the person carrying the witchcraft spirit decides to repent, the arrow will not harm him and the evil spirit of the witchcraft, which can never repent leaves his body and enters another person who makes himself or herself available. When the person who repented of witchcraft, sends the arrows back, they will not go back to the believer but the arrows will gather themselves and go back to Mr. Devil who originally manufactured them. That is the original sender.
WHAT DOES FALL DOWN AND DIE MEAN?
We call death, separation from God. If somebody is eternally separated from God, he goes to the bottomless pit; the place where evil spirits don’t want to go. So when you say fall down and die, what you are saying is this: go to the bottomless pit and be locked up there forever. That is the meaning.
WHO CARRIES SATANIC ARROWS ABOUT?
Nobody has to carry them. They fly about by themselves. They don’t need wings because they can move by themselves. Angels don’t need to carry them. In fact, what angels sometimes do is to deflect them from us. We are going to pray now, but if you are reading this message and you are not born again, you have not given your life to Jesus Christ, the first thing you have to do to enjoy God’s blessings is to give your life to Jesus. If you don’t do that, you cannot be called Abraham’s child let alone enjoy the benefits of Abraham. So, if you are not born again though you have been going to church, make the following confession: Father, in the name of Jesus, I surrender my life to you. I confess my sins and forsake them. I say bye-bye to the devil. Lord Jesus, come into my life and be my Lord and Saviour. I enter the kingdom of heaven. Thank you heavenly Father, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I congratulate you. You have become Abraham’s child and you are entitled to his blessings. For Christ has redeemed us from thse curse of the law so that the blessings of Abraham can come upon us. We have the right now to the blessings of Abraham which is spiritual prosperity, material prosperity and good health as well.
Pray these prayer points with holy aggression and holy madness and with the spirit of somebody that means business.
PRAYER POINTS
1. Every satanic inspiration targeted against me, be paralyzed, in the name of Jesus.
2. (Place one hand on your head and the other one on your stomach very close to the belly button as you take the following prayer point. Please, if as you are praying this prayer point you begin to feel dizzy, please, sit down and continue with it. It is very important): Every seed of sorrow planted in my life, fall down and die, in the name of Jesus.
3. Please, still retain your hand on your head and the other one on your belly button: Any power that does not want to see me around, fall down and die, in the name of Jesus.
4. Every evil sun and evil moon, be disgraced, in the name of Jesus.
5. Begin to thank God for what He has done.
