SOME PARENTS TELL THEIR CHILDREN, ‘JUST FOCUS ON YOUR BOOKS. FORGET THIS CHURCH THING’
LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING, YOU DON’T WANT A BRILLIANT PERSON WHO DOESN’T HAVE GOD. IT IS THE BRILLIANCY THAT WILL DESTROY HIM.
THE PRESENCE OF GOD IN A MAN’S LIFE IS WHAT SETS HIM APART
– Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo at COZA Sunday
Jeremiah 51: 20-24
You are God’s battle axe. He sent you here on a purpose, for a purpose but you have not really done it.
You are important to God, no matter who you are, no matter where you’re coming from, no matter your limitations, you are important in God’s agenda.
This is the reason why the devil is after your life. Sometimes, you are limited because you don’t really know what God could use you to do.
The axe is useless until the lumberman carries it. This is why the devil is trying to talk you out of the lumber man who made you for His purpose.
Please, allow me to take this message to another level by telling you that God never starts a war He cannot finish.
The fact that you started makes me know that God has calculated what He placed on your inside by your journey, by your destiny, by the purpose He called you to fulfil, God already budgeted that you are going to finish strong.
God wants to work with you. If you know how important you are, you would guard yourself jealously.
Judges 6: 1-6, 11-18. The Lord is with you. Gideon said, ‘If God is with us, why are all these things happening to us?’ but the Lord said unto him, ‘Go in this might. What might?
That the Lord is with you. What makes you mighty?
Not your appearance, not where you’re coming from but God’s presence .
The Lord is with you; you must jealously guard that phrase in your life.
Do everything to get the Lord on your side.
Let me tell you something, never evaluate yourself with the family you were born into. If you do that, then you don’t know God.
You would have expected that when Jesus Christ was born, he would have been born on a street of gold and they would be throwing flowers on the floor like Akeem in ‘Coming to America’ but do you know where he was born? A smelly place. Do you know what was around him when he was born?
Animals.
That is the way God operates, He will hide you in a way that even you will not see yourself coming so that at the end of the day He will get the glory.
It is from a very black pot that white pap comes out; it doesn’t matter what your past looks like, your future does not look like your past so, don’t let your past hold you down.
The presence of God in your life is what sets you apart.
I had some neighbours while growing up. I was still talking to my mom and I asked her about the neighbours.
All of them had first-class but I’m telling you the truth, I don’t know where they are.
They are so brilliant that they talk slowly, their brain over functions. I’m not talking them down but they are not where I am right now, because your real examiners are on the streets. They are not saved.
They are so brilliant that some of them even believe that there is no God. Some parents think, ‘Just face your books. Forget about church’.
Let me tell you something, you don’t want a brilliant person who doesn’t have God, it is the brilliancy that will destroy him.
I used to have a friend in secondary school, he was so brilliant, I used to ask him, ‘How does your brain function?’.
He got to the University and by the second level, he began to smoke marijuana because he had a deformation in his body and he was feeling out of place.
He has gone to be with the Lord now. If he had God, God would have told him he was wonderfully and fearfully made, the Holy Ghost would have convinced him about who he was. I was not this bold until I met Jesus.
The Bible says Peter who denied Jesus in front of a little girl became bold on the day of Pentecost.
The presence of God is beyond anything you could have achieved by your wings and caprice. When I say the Lord is with you, it means the presence of God is with you and it can produce everything.
Don’t let any person or anything affect the presence of God in your life. The difference upon Gideon was the presence of the Lord.
The Bible says when the oil was poured upon Saul of Kish, he turned into another man.
The Lord is turning you into another man. Where you used to fail, you will begin to succeed. When God’s finger of validation is upon you, that finger takes you from the back and brings you forward.
If the Lord be for you, nothing can be against you and survive. Before I gave my life to Jesus Christ, you remember that I was a gangster.
The clique I belonged to was such that for you to leave them, you must be dead. Not even the position I had taken, you must die, that is how you ‘de-axe’, the person must die.
I had not read the constitution that you could not leave, it was after I gave my life to Christ that one of my friends said, ‘Are you sure of what you want to do?
They kill here.
This is the eastern part of Nigeria; they will kill you’.
So, I began to talk to God about it, God gave me a strategy, God said the way to do it was to preach to them. When you preach to them, they will be convinced that you are real because what makes them do that is because they think you are slacking.
So, I dedicated Fridays.
I would go to the Student Union Buttery where normal people could not enter because you see different cliques and I started preaching to them one after the other.
There was a particular guy God brought to me, he was rusticated from school. He was so troublesome that they begged him not to come to school again.
About the time I gave my life to Christ, the guy also gave his life to Christ and God told him to come to school to evangelize.
We were worlds apart; he lived in a village with his parents and he was rugged. God brought him to me.
He was born-again but he was not established in the present truth, he came to me and said, ‘How are you?
They told me you are saved, so let us be friends.’
You know what I did?
I brought him to my house and we were sleeping on the same bed, we prayed almost every night.
He told me that God had told him to start a ministry, I asked him for the name of the ministry and he said, ‘Violent Outreach Ministry’.
I said, so how are we going to be doing this thing.
He answered, ‘You know Pastor Biodun, I’m here with passion not the way you are doing your own like butter. I preach to you, you don’t take it, I will brush you, you must be born-again’.
He is a pastor now in Edo State.
With that guy in my life, nobody could move near me.
We went to their meeting, stopped the process of the meeting and preached Christ.
People knelt down and gave their life to Jesus Christ.
So, people started running away from me, when they see I and that guy together, they start running.
God will take care of you.
Young man, young lady, when I tell you the presence of the Lord is with you, it is the greatest thing that can happen to you. Joseph was sold by his brothers and was brought to the house of Potiphar but the Lord was with him.
They took his coat of many colours, took his sandals and ripped him of his esteem. Do you know the only thing they couldn’t touch?
The Lord. Everything he did prospered because the Lord was with him.
The devil stirred up Potiphar’s wife to take off the presence of God from him but Joseph said, ‘I can’t do this evil; I can’t let anything stand between me and my God.
Joseph became so influential in the prison and there was no record that he was depressed for one day in the prison.
When Samson was about to be born, his parents were given a manual; instructions on how he was to live.
He was not to take alcohol and he was not to cut his hair.
Delilah was given charms to catch Samson, all the questions she was asking him were through jazz.
After a lot of pestering, Samson began to tell Delilah his secret.
He answered that the presence of the Lord was his secret, when the presence comes upon him, he could do anything. He told her the instructions and all.
What is that thing?
Who is hailing you?
Samson thought that he was having fun but he didn’t know that Delilah was after the presence of God on him.
Yours may not be the opposite sex, yours may be money, yours may be pride, yours may be accolades, yours may be social media, yours may be soap operas.
What is that thing that the enemy has dangled before you that is making you not to study your bible, not to pray, not to make you be in line with God’s word.
Those are the things we do to maintain the presence. They didn’t kill Samson.
When they caught him, they screwed out his two eyes.
Let me tell you what the enemy wants to take from you.
It is not your life, it is your vision. Who are the friends you keep that have bounced you off your vision?
You used to love God, you used to sing but now you don’t have that vision anymore, you don’t see correctly anymore.
Child of God, don’t mortgage this, don’t let friends interfere with this, don’t let accolades interfere with this. You must guard this jealously, you must maintain the presence of God.
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