July 7, 2013

Whewww!!!! Four days of temperatures reaching 111 degrees and our AC quitting on the first day with no repairman available until the fifth day makes sitting in the office and writing these Coffee Breaks just a tad difficult. Hence the delay in getting this week's post out.

 

By the time many of you get to read this post, the first stage of the Global Currency Reset will likely have taken place, and what seems almost like madness will prevail at many of the nation's banks as folks try to cash in on their newly-received wealth. Even before the first stages of the attending protocols kicked in as far as the public was aware, security has been tightened, thousands of new security personnel either hired or requested to work extended hours and banks across the country have been prepared for an onrush of new clients.

 

Wealth Management groups, such as Abbott-Downing, have known about and have been preparing for months to deal with huge investment requirements for tens -- and perhaps hundreds -- of thousands of new (and very uneducated) investors needing assistance in diversification.

 

Few if any of the wealth managers have had any concept of investing in the Kingdom of God, and their focus is almost exclusively Money, Money, Money, More, More, More -- for their clients, to be sure, but more so for their banking firms! Herein lies a double-edged sword for God's people.

 

Before I continue, let me build a fence around some of my commentary. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making money, and lots of it; and in fact, the power to get rich is a gift from God -- a covenant gift for those walking in covenant with Him.

 

For people who understand the covenant of wealth, there is a clear understanding that with great wealth comes great responsibility and answerability to the Lord. There are Kingdom priorities that are well established throughout God's Word -- the first and most important priority being to demonstrate to an onlooking world just what it means to walk in covenant with the Lord Jesus Christ; the second priority to allow Holy Spirit to work through you using that wealth so that "that he may establish (**qum) his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers."

 

This Hebrew word, qum, translated "establish," is pretty strong and it amplifies our understanding of what is required of God's people when this wealth is given. This word means: to cause to abide, to accomplish, to continue, to decree and to perform.

 

Now, let's continue. The double-edged sword for believers comes in the fact that we live in a "me-first" society which demands and encourages self-gratification on just about every level. The ease with which we are able to gratify the whims and desires (the Scripture calls it "the lusts") of our flesh makes it so easy to fall prey to something that Jeremiah, prophesying to Israel, describes like this, "Those who eat delicacies are desolate in the streets." (Lamentations 4:5 NASB)

 

Jeremiah 51 refers to the trap laid by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, when he writes that "he has filled his stomach with my delicacies." In case you think I'm kind of getting too oblique here, let's get down to the brass tacks.

The danger to believers is falling prey to the ease of self-gratification once they've been given great wealth, and not realizing that the enemy also uses money against God's people. Wealth is God's province! He is the enabler, the giver, the One who gives the power to gain wealth and to be rich.

 

Satan has gotten away with a lie for generation after generation after generation by promoting the idea that "to be rich is sinful. After all, money is the root of all evil. God wants people to be humble, and one can't be humble and have lots of money." Bah Humbug! It results in a poverty mindset that has beset the body of Christ and kept the wicked in power, ruling over the righteous.

 

One more time: "But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is He that giveth thee power to get wealth, that He may establish his covenant which He sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day.^" (Deuteronomy 8:18)

I know many of you are wondering if I'm ever going to get to the point, so let's revisit a piece of John's prophecy against the spirit of Babylon.

 

"For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of [Babylon's] fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies."

 

Virtually all of the OT prophets lamented Israel's fornication. What God was addressing through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc., was the spiritual fornication that had taken place among His people -- a people whom He had "betrothed" to Himself. They had gone chasing after other gods. They had co-mingled their families with the families of the accursed nations and contaminated the worship of God with the worship of false gods -- demons who had first sold them the bill of goods that wealth and riches were not a part of God's promise to His people, and then enticed them with "easy money" and "the abundance of Babylon's delicacies."

 

John, in the Revelation that the Lord Jesus Christ gives to him, identifies that same kind of fornication and adultery within the corporate body known worldwide as "Christians." Consider the way he begins his letter to the Ekklesia in Sardis (see Chapter 3): "I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead."

 

Paul, on the other hand in writing to Timothy, describes a people "Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof." (See II Timothy 3:5)

 

Both are describing the same contamination in the body of Christ. There are many folks who call themselves "Christian" who profess to know the Lord, and in reality they are as dead as doornails when it comes to spiritual things. They couldn't lay hands on the sick and see them recover if their lives depended on it. They couldn't cast out demons without being attacked by those demons in the same way the seven sons of Sceva experienced. (Acts 19:14)

Then you have that group of people who by all outward appearances are real believers. They have all of the right words, they say the right phrases, they even claim to believe and walk by faith, but when it comes right down to it, they deny the power. Start talking to them about being "baptized in the Holy Spirit" or "being filled with the Spirit" and they get really defensive. The most common excuse is "Well, I'm willing to do it. If God wants me to have it, then He'll give it to me." It's a cheap cop-out to avoid the necessary yielding of their most contrary vessel -- the tongue -- to the complete control of Holy Spirit.

 

I don't want to just dwell on the negative, and that's not what this series is for. My objective is to sound a clarion call throughout the body of Christ to a people whose lives have been co-opted either consciously or unconsciously by the lusts of their flesh, by the attraction to the "delicacies" offered by Satan. Let's be clear. Satan offers these niceties and seemingly delicious things in such a way that people's eyes are blinded to the truth of the destruction that follows.

Because of the spirit of poverty that has so wound its way through the teachings and doctrines that pervade Christianity today, it has created a huge class of people who hate the poverty and will do almost anything to get ahead in life. As a result, they are ripe for schemes that will solve their money problems. It has resulted in a glaring contrast between the so-called "prosperity preachers" and those who preach tithing, giving, sowing of seed out of their own poverty mindset because of their own needs.

 

Let me pause here momentarily to give credit to folks like Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Jesse Duplantis, Creflo Dollar, Bill Winston and other brethren who have taken it on the chin for years while trying to lift the body of Christ out of its centuries-old mindset of poverty and false humility. They have suffered, and continue to suffer, attacks and slander, being defamed and reviled by false brethren whose eyes have been blinded by the god of this world.

 

Unfortunately, the body of Christ is filled with a lot of wanna-be prosperity preachers and teachers who have not yet been delivered from a spirit of poverty and wind up preaching and teaching a warped version of God's blessing while using the enticements of Babylon and the Babylonian system in order to seduce folks into giving, tithing, etc. This is -- again -- that double-edged sword that faces God's people today.

 

One edge is the blessing of the Lord in the form of the "power to get wealth" and with it, the recognition that with great wealth from the Lord comes great responsibility.

 

The opposite edge of the sword is the tendency to see money as "power" and to wind up in effect worshiping money.

Let's put it another way. Jesus said, "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." (Matthew 6:24)

 

If your Master is the Lord Jesus Christ, then you treat wealth as the empowerment from the Lord "that he may establish his covenant." If your Master is Mammon then you worship money, you put it first, you make it your priority in life, and you subject yourself to Babylon, its spirit, its psychology, its mindset and its mode of operation.

 

Babylon and its way of life, its system of operating, its enticements and seductions are not just the province of the world; Babylon -- the feminine spirit of Babylon we more frequently refer to as "the spirit of Jezebel" -- has so infiltrated the body of Christ with what we commonly and generically call "the church" that the two are almost indistinguishable from one another.

 

"And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities."

 

THAT is the call of Holy Spirit in the body of Christ today to a people who will hear and respond. Twenty years ago while we were gathering at Trails End in Post Falls, Idaho with a fair number of folks in the midst of spontaneous prophetic praise and worship, Holy Spirit began to pour into us the prophetic call for God's people to come out of Babylon.

 

The music and the prophetic singing took on many forms -- some very sober and explicit in describing the spirit of Babylon, some a gentle call to those who would hear, and some of the music was rather humorous. One piece in particular had no words but drew a pretty good picture of folks "shuffling" out of Babylon. We called it, The Babylon Shuffle. Funny or not, it gave a good understanding that the Lord is using many avenues and types of prophetic messaging to convey the critical importance for people to get out of Babylon, and be delivered from its system of operating, its mindset and its enticements.

 

We've been talking about the Basel III Protocols, the Global Currency Reset and the Babylon II software created and put in motion to deal with the world's economic crises. Here's the problem. These are all man-made efforts to deal with Babylon's problems. The thinking and mindset of those who've labored so hard to effect these "repairs" to the world's rapidly dissolving economies is still contaminated by the spirit of Babylon.

 

The Lord has so orchestrated things in the midst of this that His people, His Bride, will be blessed in the midst and face of the fall of Babylon. This is a short window of opportunity for all of us to participate in one of the greatest Kingdom advancing events in all of history.

 

Here's the thing that God's people need to watch. First it is patently obvious that the governing power of this nation is going to undergo radical change -- at least in the short term. Let me explain.

 

It is a tragic commentary on the state of evangelical Christianity in America when we realize that 57% of so-called evangelical Christians (according to statisticians) voted to keep our current administration in power -- an administration quite possibly the most corrupt and evil administration in America's history. How could that be? Here's how the apostle Paul put it when writing to the Corinthians:

 

"The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." (II Corinthians 4:4)

 

When people's minds, their thought patterns, and their supposed relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ get contaminated with the spirit of Babylon -- Jezebel -- who usurps and exalts herself above God and the things of God, they become blinded to the truth, insensitive to the Spirit of the Lord, and incapable of responding to spiritual crises in their lives and their surroundings.

 

Let's wrap up this Coffee Break with the prophetic word from Revelation 18:6-8:

 

Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her."

 

We're probably a couple weeks away from finishing this series, so stay with me. See you next week!

 

Blessings on you!