TE0907

Knowing Your Enemy

by Charlie Rogers

Have you ever looked into the night sky at the exact moment that a shooting star was crossing the sky? You happened to look at just the right time to catch its brilliance. If you had seen it a moment later you would not have seen its wonderful glory at all. A shooting star has a burst of light and beauty for a moment and is gone. To shine no more.

God never intended for us as believers to be like a shooting star. Serving God and letting His glory shine through us, and then in a twinkling of an eye, the light is gone. Unfortunately this is what is happening to many ministers and believers. There is a way to avoid this tragedy, and be salvaged from it. His name is the Holy Spirit.

When we talk about the Holy Spirit and His transforming power, we're talking about things that He can transform in your life before you ever get to that point as a minister or as a believer who is a threat to Satan, so that he can't wreck your marriage, wreck your family, wreck your ministry, wreck your call that God has called you to. All because you didn't stop long enough to pray, seek God, fast, meditate the Word, and use the Word to judge yourself. You didn't stop long enough to do those things and as a result you had to pay the price in the end. There is something about taking time! I tell young ministers you might as well start now taking the time. Take time out right now to let God change you and transform you because if you don't, you're going to have to do it down the road if the enemy doesn't kill you first. So it would be better to take time now!

It doesn't matter whether you're a minister behind the pulpit, or you're a believer with one of the believers call upon your life. Take time now to begin that change in your life so that when your evil day comes, and Satan comes to sift you as wheat to find out whether you have done enough to make a stand. Jesus told Peter, Luke 22:31-32 "Simeon, Simeon, Satan has come to sift you as wheat" meaning this, He didn't say maybe he will come, He just said he is going to come and sift you as wheat. He is going to come to check your ground. To see how solid you are. To see how sold out you are to Me. That is what He told them.

Every one of us will have our ground checked. Satan will come at some point in each stage of our walk to sift us as wheat. We might be just born again, a couple of days into Christ, Satan will still come to see if we want to fall back to alcohol, start running around with the world again, to see if he can steal the Word immediately out of our hearts that has been sown through salvation. You can be walking with the Lord five or ten years and he will still come to see if he can sift us in an area. To see if he can get us to move off of our ground, instead of concentrating all off our efforts in God's work.

He continually comes against pastors and preachers to see if they will move off of their ground. You know you see some of them seeking God with all their might and go back a few years later and all of a sudden they have moved over into an area of the soul realm, what we call an operation of the soul where all they are having is programs. One preacher after another not taking that accountability for themselves and getting with God to get food for the sheep. Depending on programs to do this. Programs to do that. Programs that do nothing towards seeking God in prayer and fasting. And these are preachers who initially used prayer and fasting to walk into their own ministry.

You say, "Well, how do you know?" Because I get the pressure myself all the time! The enemy comes at me with "What good are you doing here? Look at you, you walk in with the prayer message and you run off half the congregation. Why don't you just kind of simmer it buddy? Just simmer that message. Soften it a little bit. If you'll just soften it a little bit they won't leave." Well, if I softened it there is that possibility that along the way I might un-soften it, and Satan knows that. So it wouldn't do any good. But I am not going to do it anyhow because I recognize what he is up to.

I have seen preachers and pastors head a direction of prayer and fasting, going into God with what they know as principles in the Word of God. Moving that direction to get the power of God upon their lives and then because of the pressure that is heaped on by the enemy in different areas through other people, and the resistance that they meet, they don't know how to meet the resistance with the resistance. So the result is, they give into Satan's pressures, then all of a sudden they slide over into this soul operation of satisfying the people with watered down messages. I even know one in the faith camp that preaches to his people "some of us are just called to hold our job and pay our tithe." Now he preaches that! I don't think that you want to be looked upon as someone just called to sit on the pew and pay your tithe only. Is that really how you want to be viewed?

I try to see what God sees as potential. That you're a life changer with God flowing through you. You're not just there to pay your tithe. You're a vessel of blessings. Not just for finances to flow through, but the anointing of God to flow through. The presence of almighty God to flow through. To touch and change other people lives around you. That is how God looks at you. Even when you're not looking at yourself that way. That is how God looks at you.

But yet preachers will slide over into this operation what we call an operation of the soul when they come up with one program after the other. I just get blunt, right out honest, and open before people. I don't know anything about programs. I wasn't taught to know anything about programs. All I know about is what it takes if you want to change your situation, and your family's situation, and you want to walk into the power of God. Get the anointing of God upon your life to help others. Intentionally on purpose. Because you want to!! If you want to know about that, then we want the same thing.

If you want someone to pat your hand, and give you a program that will soothe your emotions, and make you feel good about your salvation just because you show up on Sunday morning once a week, and sometimes once a month, you have the wrong place. Because I am not going to let you feel good about it. See the problem is that I have to stand before the same Jesus as you have to stand before. I have to answer to "What did you do with, what I gave you to do with?" I have to give a full accounting good and bad.

You know we talk about and think about the good things laid up to our account. What about the bad things that weren't quite what God had in mind? Well, they will be burnt up. You're going to feel sadness, but they will be burnt up. You won't have to look at them to long. It will be long enough to make you wish that you had taken everything you could out of the Word of God and applied it to your own life. I have seen programs keep people in captivity for years. Their entire lives. They just go along with this program and they are OK where they are.

Now the devil, he would like to make us think we are OK the way we are. Some Christians and some preachers, they would like to make us think that we are OK where we are. Unfortunately, we have to live in this world that we live in, but yet we don't have to be a part of it because God gave us the tools. He gave us the principles in the Word of God that we don't have to accept things the way they are. We don't have to be defeated. We don't have to walk in sin. We don't have to walk in the lust of the flesh. We don't have to be led around by our emotions.

We don't have to let our emotions dictate whether we feel good or bad for the rest of our lives, to the point we are riding a roller coaster up one day and down the next. My emotions always call me when they are down. Usually right at bottom. Help! Well emotions, are you doing what I told you to do? No, I don't feel like it. That is the problem. You still do it even when you don't feel like it. If we let "when we feel like it" dictate when we are going to pray or worship God, then the devil will always make sure we don't feel good enough to do it.

So people will say "the other night I prayed 2 hours." Well bless your heart. That's a start. The thing is that most people are doing the most good when they pray not feeling like it. Praying when they feel like it, well anybody can do that. Then they ride this roller coaster up and down because they don't make a decision not to. Their feelings rule when they are going to pray, or whether they are going to worship God, or whether they are going to read the Word of God, or whether they are going to change their life according to the Word of God. They let their emotions dictate "am I going to do this, or am I going to do that?"

We must make a quality decision to change our life, to a life of prayer, fasting and worship. We must start to activate that decision to have a life of steadfastness in God.

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