I don’t believe that I will be surprising people when I say that the times we are living in today are tough. As a matter of fact, these are the days that I believe that the Apostle Paul spoke of when he was writing to his protégé Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:1 where he stated “BUT UNDERSTAND this, that in the last days will come (set in) perilous times of great stress and trouble [hard to deal with and hard to bear]” I believe that this is a great description of the world we are living in today. All of us at one time or another and probably most people even at the present time are going through things they would describe as hard to deal with and hard to bear. Stress levels are at unprecedented levels and over 85% of the hospital visits today are related to stress, fear, and worry. It seems that since all this is going on in the world and if we as believers in Jesus believe that God loves us and He cares for us, then how are we to handle the days and times we are living in? How are we to handle the pressures of everyday life? If God placed us here in the earth and He is all-knowing, meaning He knew all of what was going to be going on before it happened, then would He also not show us a way to deal with what we go through in our lives? I believe that the answer into how to handle the days and times we are living in right now have to come down to one word, fellowship.
So, what exactly does fellowship have to do with what we face in this earth? First, let’s define the word. Fellowship is defined as an association of two or more people who share common beliefs or activities. You see, our enemy, the devil wants us to think about our problems, he wants us to worry about our problems, talk about and try to reason out our problems. He wants us to join him so that we can share his beliefs about the situations that we are facing in life and not only that, but he also wants us to act out on those beliefs. How would we act out on the devil’s beliefs of what we are facing in life? Through worry, dread, and fear. But God is desiring that we spend time with Him and in His Word, that we come and talk to Him, commune with Him, fellowship with Him, and meditate and think about and talk about Him and His goodness, His faithfulness, and His Word. God wants us to share His beliefs and then act out on what we believe He has already said concerning our situation. If you are wondering if God has said anything about your situation, I dare you to take a study of the Word of God and search the scripture to see if there is anything that has to do with your problem. There is not one problem that we face on this earth that the answer is not in the Word of God. So let me ask you a serious question, and it is this, do you fellowship with your problems, your circumstances, or your situations or do you fellowship with the Lord? Do you spend more time of your day thinking and talking about God, or do you spend every waking moment rehearsing all the issues that you are facing and dealing with?
There are times when we tell God the problems, not that He doesn’t already know, but after we get it out of our system to Him, before we know it, we will be praising Him and worshiping Him for who He is. Many of the Psalms are just that way. They start off with the problem, but by the end of the Psalm, they are yet praising God for His attributes. Times are hard, there is no going around that. People are encountering problems everywhere and around every corner. It doesn’t matter who you talk to, everyone, whether they are born again or not, are going through rough times. This is not to be a surprise, for Jesus stated in John 16:33 that in the world you will have, not maybe, not a good possibility, but you WILL experience tribulation and trials and distress and frustration; but Jesus gave us words that should be of great comfort to us for He said “be of good cheer [take courage; be confident, certain, undaunted]! For I have overcome the world. [I have deprived it of power to harm you and have conquered it for you.]”. But yet, in spite of this and many other encouraging and uplifting promises like this one found in the Bible, a vast majority of believers, people who profess to have Jesus as their Lord and Savior, are going through the trials and tribulations of life without courage, without certainty and with absolutely no confidence whatsoever.
Romans 8:31,35-39 (KJV) 31 What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. 37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. 38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:31,35-39 (The Message) So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose?….Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture: They kill us in cold blood because they hate you. We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing-nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable-absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
In the above verses, we notice that first of all, if God is for us, then who or what can be against us and Paul here is relating that to the love that Christ has towards us. Now, if you are in love and have ever been in love, you know how protective you can be over that person. Now, I am not talking about people who are obsessed over other people, but people who are in love. The greatest example of this is the love of a mother and her child. If someone or something goes after that child, she will do whatever she can and whatever she has to do to make sure that the child remains safe. Now, if a human can do that to another human with limited capacities, imagine how much more God, the unlimited God, the creator of the universe, loves you and what He will do for you and Paul is telling us here that because of the love that God through Christ has for us, we cannot be defeated because God loves us. As we go a little further down in verse 37, he says that we are more than conquerors. Now people go around all the time saying this, and then when troubles hit, they wonder why. It’s because they did not read verse 36, “As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.” So, make sure you realize this, that if you are going to say that you are more than a conqueror, be prepared for a battle, because how you be a conqueror without something to conquer and overcome?
I believe that for many believers today, they are focusing on the issues and the problems and situations rather than focusing on Christ and the Christ in them, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). The word focus is defined as “to cause to converge on or toward a central point; the clear and sharply-defined condition of an image” and the word converge means “to be adjacent or come together; to move the eyes toward one another” Whatever you focus on, the bigger it becomes. So, if your focus is more on God and what His Word says about you, the bigger He will become in your life. But if your focus is on your unfortunate circumstances, then the bigger your circumstances are going to become. When you are in the middle of a temptation or a trial or test or a difficult situation or circumstance, when you are in the middle of all hell breaking loose in your life, you don’t see God for Who He is, but when you get into God’s presence, by getting into His Word, by praying to Him, by singing and praising Him, by just thinking about Him, you see God for who He is, Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, the Almighty, Omnipotent One, the All Powerful God. And when we experience the presence of God all of a sudden things change. God does not change, for He has said that He is God and He changes not (Malachi 3:6). He is not big one minute then small the next, but He is always big. It is when we get in His presence that our view and our perception of Him changes. That is why we must magnify Him. That is why we must focus on Him and not the problems and the circumstances of life. If I have a book and I look at a page with a magnifying glass, the words on the page didn’t get bigger, but the magnifying glass changed how I viewed the words, my perception of the words changed. And when I magnify God above my temptations, my tests, and trials, my pains, my hurts, my problems, that is when my perception of God changes. The devil doesn’t want us to see God as all powerful, he doesn’t want us to see God at all, he wants us to see our problems, but when you set your focus on God, He gets bigger and bigger, and His Word explodes in your life-instead of the problems exploding in your life. He can show you exactly what to do to have victory.
You see, God wants our thinking to come together with His thinking and He wants us to move our eyes towards Him, but the enemy wants our thinking to be about all of our problems, all about what is going wrong, all about self instead of the Savior and to move our eyes off of Jesus, off of His goodness, off of all of what He has done for us and onto the circumstances and situations. God wants the central part of our life to be all about Him, fellowship with Him, times of personal and corporate worship and praise and adoration to Him. The enemy wants the central part of our lives to be about what we are going through and how hard it is and how everything is going wrong, how we fall short every day, our imperfections and to have our own little pity parties with us as the only guests. Anything that has the ability to keep your attention has mastered you. So do not allow the problems of life to be the center of your attention until you become a slave to your situations.
Colossians 3:1-2 from the Message Translation says “So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ-that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective.” The word perspective means a particular way of considering something and you only have one of two choices on how you consider things that are going on in your life and God is telling us here in this verse that we must consider our situations and circumstances His way, not the way the devil wants us to consider them. When you see your problem and you compare yourself to it, how do you match up? If it seems that you are a grasshopper standing next to a giant, then your perspective is all wrong. In Numbers 13:30-33, we read of the twelve spies that went out to check out the promised land that God told the children of Israel to go and possess. But here we see ten of the spies seeing themselves as grasshoppers compared to the giants and two of the spies that said the giants were grasshoppers compared to them in their sight. We must come to the realization that the Greater One lives on the inside of us (1 John 4:4), and the Spirit of God that lives on the inside of us in bigger and stronger than anything you will ever face in this world. No matter how big and intimidating your obstacle maybe, no matter how difficult the problems and situations and circumstances you are facing right now, the Holy Spirit inside of you, if you are born again, is greater, mightier, and stronger than anything you will ever face. Now, some of the things that we are going through are very real and compared to your own natural strength, these problems and difficulties seem like giants to you. Make sure that what you are seeing are real giants, meaning real problems and not just shadows. Shadows twist objects to give them an improper perspective and can make us believe what isn’t truth at all. In the natural, shadows are caused by the sun or the moonlight and makes what we see with our eyes appear larger than what they really are, and the devil also likes to make our problems and our difficulties look bigger than what they appear to be. The enemy loves to twist situations and circumstances until we are not seeing them in the proper perspective, from God’s point of view.
Now let’s go back to Colossians 3:2, and the word I want to put emphasis on here is absorbed and one definition of this is “to take something in, especially gradually” What this verse is saying to us is not to be so absorbed, or don’t take in to you what’s going on around you. When you think of this word absorb, think of a sponge. When you place a sponge in a sink or a tub or in anything that contains a liquid substance, the sponge takes into itself the liquid that is around it. The sponge gets saturated with the liquid and the word saturate means “to cause a substance to unite with the greatest possible amount of another substance; to soak, or impregnate thoroughly or completely; to fill a thing or place completely so that no more can be added”.
Understand that the devil wants you to unite with your problems, to become one with your problems and situations and have your mind so filled with all of your problems, situations, circumstances, mistakes, failures that there is simply no room in your thinking for God or His Word. 2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us that we can cast down imaginations and every thought that comes into our mind. Now, God is telling us to take the words and the images that come to us from the enemy and cast them down and out of our thinking by using the Word of God, but this is a principle from the Word of God and it can work in the negative just as good as it can work in the positive, meaning this, instead of using God’s Word to take down the thoughts from the enemy out of your mind, you can also use the words of the devil to cast down the words and the images from the Word of God.
God is telling us here that no matter what the situations are that you are facing today, do not let it get into you, do not let the problems of life become a part of you, because just like a sponge, once it is full, it becomes heavy. Hebrews 12:1-3 (Amp) says “let us strip off and throw aside every encumbrance (unnecessary weight)….and let us run with patient endurance….the race that is set before us, Looking away [from all that will distract] to Jesus” That is the enemy’s tactic is for us to become so weighed down by our problems, our situations, or mistakes, that we are no longer focused on God. Another definition of the word absorb is “to cause to become one with”. The enemy wants you to so focus on your problems, your situations that you become one with them so than now, no longer do you have the problem, you are known as “the person who has that problem”. Your identity lies in Christ, not in what you are going through, so no matter what it is today you are going through, it maybe emotional, it maybe physical, it may be relational, it may be financial, no matter what it is, do not allow yourself to become one with your situation. Many times it looks as if there is no answer to a situation we face and our situations and circumstances looks absolutely impossible – no way out, no solution it looks like you are finished and are done. But the truth is, you can’t find a situation that God can’t handle. As you hold fast to Him and His Word and release your faith in His Word, you will find out that God does have an answer for you.
So, what is the breakthrough you are needing today? Is it a financial breakthrough, a breakthrough in a marriage or a relationship, a breaktrough in your health? if you really want a breakthrough in your health, in your marriage, in your family, in your finances, then spending time in the presence of the Holy Spirit and in the Word of God will be vital. He can speak to you and give you a vision for the future He has for you and you have to make your mind up in the beginning to refuse to let that vision go no matter what is going on all around you. What is vision? Well, vision can simply be defined as the ability to see things that is not seen by the natural eye. 2 Corinthians 4:18 says, “We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen” How? Through the eyes of faith, you must begin to see some good things coming your way. Through the eyes of faith, you must see that breakthrough. Through the eyes of faith, you must see that financial need being met. Through the eyes of faith, you must see that turnaround in your marriage you are believing God for. You can only receive what you can see yourself receiving. Right now, just close your eyes and visualize your breakthrough, visualize your financial needs being met, visualize your marriage not only restored but better than it ever has been, visualize your family the way that God always intended it to be and say, “I can see some good things coming my way.” Imagine your bills paid in full. Imagine the miracle you need for your family coming to pass. Imagine that healing you need for your body. This is how you get the manifestation of your breakthrough, of what you are believing for. You are not waiting on God, God is waiting on you to put into motion the measure of faith that He has given you to see these things come to pass.
It’s so easy for a lot of people to see bad things coming their way but why is it so hard for us to see good things? Because it’s the way we have been programmed, especially by other people and past experiences. We must reprogram our minds to see good coming into our lives if we ever want to see them manifest in our lives. We need to stretch our imagination. Albert Einstein once said, “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.” Your imagination is a gift from God. Without your imagination you can’t picture God’s promises coming to pass in your life and that is the reason that God gave you an imagination to begin with. You have to let it work for you, not against you. In the Book of Hebrews we see a man’s imagination working for him in a positive way. “By faith he [Moses] forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:27, KJV). Moses was able to endure the circumstances he was confronted with. Why? Because he saw something that could not be seen with the natural eye. The word “recompense” is the King James word for “payday.” Moses imagined a payday, so to speak. “Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward” (Heb. 10:35, KJV). Payday comes to those who refuse to give up. Refuse to be moved off of what you believe in spite of what is going on around you and fix your focus on Jesus and His promises, and I can promise you on the authority of the Word of God that the breakthrough you are believing God for will spring forth speedily.
The Gospel Of God's Grace 