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House On The Rock Church
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House On The Rock Church
Continue exploring
Connected by scripture or shared themes.
Last week on "Something Is About To Happen," we learned that the revelation of God in the midst of your hellish situation is precisely why you must never quit. Satan is allowed to turn up the heat on you because he knows that if he keeps turning up the fire, you are likely to quit. But God wants the enemy to find out that the power of divine revelation constantly coming to your ears and your heart is strong enough to give you faith to hang on. You won't quit.
God's pattern is to reveal Himself in the midst of the impossible. He is always distinctly different from your situation. When He arrives and announces His promise to you, it often sounds preposterous—like He is mocking you.
Consider Abraham. God promised a man who has no life except what a respirator sustains that he would leave that machine. That is preposterous. God promises a job to someone without qualifications, because the qualifications God needs are not credentials from a university. God calls for a delivery of something 20 years overdue—preposterous. He calls teenagers and young adults to do the impossible—preposterous. He calls a 16-year-old boy to salvage a nation—ridiculous.
God moves you into a situation so that when He makes His proposition, it sounds ridiculous to you. It is only a ridiculous blessing that makes you laugh eternally and sustainably. Those of you who have endured trial, deferral, and delay for a long time: understand that the nature of the duration determines the equivalent duration of your laughter for the rest of your life. You will become like those who dream.
If God made the promise in the high and great moments of your life, it would sound possible. But no—He makes His propositions when your situation is most impossible, and He promises you the impossible.
God "calleth those things which be not as though they are." Abraham means "father of many nations," yet God gave him this name while he was childless for 24 years. You ask yourself: did God make it worse by changing my name to father of many nations with no child?
Here is the challenge: Do I walk by sight? Do I walk by situation? Or do I walk by revelation? Do I walk by faith?
If you walk by sight, you will quit. Your situation will only tell you to quit—that it's not worth it. But if you walk by revelation, a debate begins in your head: Should I quit or should I believe? Should I quit or should I keep moving with God? Should I quit or should I keep trusting God?
Eventually, if you keep hearing from God, you must remember: the promise is His responsibility, not yours. It is His prerogative to keep talking to you, keep speaking to you. He will run to you and make sure you hear Him. God doesn't want you to be without arms when your situation takes things to the next level. It is His job to make you a believer.
Because of the protracted nature of your trouble, when you keep looking at the situation, you are likely to resign yourself to fate. Sarah did this. After years of waiting, she said, "I am happy to remain childless. I wanted the child. You said it; I got excited about it. I did things with my husband, but no child. At 11 years, I couldn't take it anymore."
So Sarah gave her maidservant to Abraham. The woman became pregnant and began to despise Sarah. Sarah had stress on top of her near menopause, which made the menopause come faster. The devil doesn't attack you at a good time—he turns on the attack at an opportune time.
More time passed. Abraham kept saying the woman was his sister, not his wife, and he gave her to other kings. Clearly, he was not yet ready for the promise. His character was not ready for him to be a nation builder and father of nations. God had to take him through more trouble.
Sustained trouble teaches you how to behave yourself. Even Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered. Sarah moved to the place where she agreed with her situation: it is impossible for me to have a child. She thought, "God, you have been talking to my husband personally. I won't say it out loud, but you are a liar."
God had reached the appointed time. Less than a year remained. He called a couple of His bodies—I believe they were angels—and He walked among them. He did not go to Abraham's house directly; He walked as if He were passing by. This is God's typical nature: He wants you to want Him. What He wants to do in your life requires your desire. He will not give you something beyond your will.
Abraham felt an atmosphere that was not normal to the terrain. He had felt it many times before whenever God visited him. He ran to meet them: "Please, come into my house. There is something different about you. You are different from my situation."
Abraham gave them food. God said, "Where is Sarah your wife?" They said she was in the tent. God said, "Concerning this thing that I promised you a while ago: by this time next year, Sarah will bear you a son."
Sarah heard this from inside the tent. She was stricken with age, and she laughed within herself. She said, "Will I have pleasure with my lord, being old also?" She didn't say it out loud, but her thinking was wrong. She thought, "This man caused me problem in my life. If I didn't have high expectations, I would not have this disappointment. I could have managed being barren, but you have been saying it every day, calling me mother of nations, calling my husband father of nations for 25 years. Now it's a joke. It's no longer serious."
But God picked up on her thinking. This is what He wants to fix: your thinking. "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." If your life is going to change to a life of laughter, it will take a renewal of your mind.
You cannot count yourself out of God's promises by your wrong thinking. You have got to straighten out your thinking until it properly aligns with how God thinks. This is the great challenge of your transformation. If transformation is going to happen in your finances, your accommodation, your transportation, your matrimonial possibilities, your relationships, and every aspect of your life, it will start in your thinking.
"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Do you get it? This is what God wanted to deal with.
God said, "Why did Sarah laugh?" and Sarah said, "I didn't laugh." God said, "You did laugh." If God said it, it settles it. Sarah accepted that she would not live with impossibility thinking any longer. The things that are impossible by her reckoning—if God says it, she chooses to believe it.
I believe conception took place within three months of that visitation. Conception is as important as delivering the baby, because without conception, there can be no baby.
To conceive means that in the moment of the pleasure of God's intercourse, in the insemination of His seed-word in you, you must accept that it has been conceived. God is recruiting you for a purpose. The need you feel is the tip of the iceberg. Into that crucible of your need, God is going to recruit you for a higher purpose.
God's greatness is never invested in you; it is invested in the purpose. You are only important because you carry divine purpose. If you do not connect properly with the purpose, you will not enjoy the divine investment. That is why He pushes you into situations so that you have a need and you come to Him, crying to meet that need. You think you are recruiting God for your little baby, whereas God is recruiting you for His mighty nation that is hidden in the baby you are about to birth. Do you get it?
Many people don't understand this. They feed wrongly, and as a result, they miscarry. God has been building you for the future from the beginning. Other people don't go through what you go through because they are not being built for anything. But you—you are being built deliberately for something enormous.
There is nothing more transformational than a changed mind. God is consistently throughout the entire span of your life going to be in the process of training you. Training sometimes requires painful correction. If you yield to the corrective measure, it causes later in life the wonderful experience of godly character and a life that is pleasing to you and to God.
If you don't reset—a hard reset different from your own setting—you are always going to go back. You have got to go back and fix those settings. What God gives you pain for is a psychological u-turn that makes a difference. No matter what comes for you, it cannot take you, because as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
The only way to get off any addiction—whether drugs, sex, or anything else—is to change your heart setting. But you must allow Him to get hold of the hard drive of your mind and give you a new factory reset. Not the devil's original setting, but God's new setting. Even though you fall into trouble, fail in a process, or fault in a scenario, faith from your default setting will rise up and tell you to say no to depression, no to fear, no to sin.
Bring it all together. Fix your whole life. Get your walk right. Get your work right. Get your worship right. A real decision is stronger than emotions.
Isaiah tells Israel: as a people, you are going to go into captivity, but you are also going to come out of captivity. So that when they go into captivity, they can laugh, knowing that this trouble is not going to last always. This trial that you are going through now, as hot and hairy as it is, it has an expiry date.
You must not let the devil see you cry. Make sure he sees you live. You don't have to wait until God turns your captivity for you to fill your mouth with laughter. Start laughing now. It will shorten the time. Weeping endures for the night—the season of your darkness—but laughter is coming in your new dawn. You will laugh because God will take you out of this trouble and turn your captivity until you become like those who laugh. He will put a new song in your heart.
This thing is not a matter of law. If it were of law, you would have to work for it, and your wages would pay for the blessing. But this is not of works—because it is a promise, and because it is a promise, it has to be by grace.
What is grace? One writer said: "G for God, R for riches, A for at, C for Christ, E for expense: God's riches at Christ's expense." In other words, you have no expenditure in the matter. God says, "I am doing this all by Myself. I will bring the promise. I will set up its fulfillment. I will work on your faith. You won't have to manufacture faith—I will give you faith. I will sustain your faith. I will also give you patience by giving you greater faith in the ongoing of your trial.
"So that, friend, I will prove to your enemy that you are not just a wanter—you are a believer. Against all the odds, you believed in Me and you believed My word even when your situation said otherwise. It was My job to keep you in faith so that even when you couldn't keep the faith, I made it so that you could keep the faith.
"When I bless you, I will only bless you when your situation is ripe enough and you are dead enough and you are in unbelief enough for you to recognize that it was not of you, all your works. So you have no right to boast—but it was by faith, by grace through faith, that I made it happen for you."
Abraham got to 11 years. His wife said, "I am going to make this happen," and she brought her maidservant. They birthed the trouble of the world for the next two millennia—his name is Ishmael. Abraham continued to mistreat her because he was not yet ready. He even sold her off as a woman in another man's harem.
Eventually, when Abraham was so dead—at 99 or 100 years—it became clear to him and everybody that this was not Abraham. Abraham could have children, but Sarah could have no children. Abraham had to get to the place where he was no longer productive. When it has been established by subsequent years that it is over as far as mankind is concerned, it is then that God comes visiting. He knows it is over. But when God says it is not over, friend, it is not over.
God showed up with a visitation, and with the visitation came not just a promise—there was now a promise for the first time that had a set time.
Most people by now would have quit. One person in the family had not quit. That is why Abraham ran to the gate to call on God. Another person in the family had quit. But God said, "I need agreement. I need the one man who believes. I am going to strengthen his faith. And the woman who does not believe—I am going to make of her a believer. So I have two in the house. So that any two that agree and are touched by what I prophesy to them, I will do it for them from heaven."
God who said it—He will make it good. God who spoke it—He will bring it to pass. The hell you are going through, it will pass. But what My word says—it is really going to happen.
God said to Sarah, "Is anything too hard for God?" It was a question. In other words, "Sarah, I want you to think. Look at all the impossible things I have done for you in your past. Will this child-bearing issue be one of these things, or will it not be? Is it too hard?"
God navigated this whole thing and puts you in a ridiculous place with a problem antithetical to the thesis of His promise. So when He makes the proposition to you, the concept seems completely preposterous and stupendously ridiculous. But it is a ridiculous blessing that makes you laugh.
Somebody here, your laughter begins tomorrow morning. Somebody under the sound of my voice, by Friday you are going to hear a word that comes to you over the telephone or through your email that is going to change your life forever. Somebody else, you are going to conceive something that will irremovably graft itself to your womb—your womb of faith—and your life from here forward is going to be different.
I told you a few Sundays ago that the power of a promise, especially when it comes on the back of an agreement and it is now the announcement of a set time, it puts a blocker between who you were—barren—and who you are about to be: mother of many.
Your last days as who you used to be are now over. Your days of unfruitfulness are over. Your days of barrenness are over. Your days of being laughed at by haters are over. You are now the productive one. You are now the enterprise. You are now the enterprising.
Your whole world is about to change. It has happened to me many times. It is called rebirth, because even that which is born gets old, so it has to be reborn. Yes, the first rebirth is salvation, but in salvation God bursts new levels, new dimensions, and new spectrums of blessing in your life.
I am standing behind Abraham, but I have eyes all around my head so I can see in all directions. My name is God.
This is Abraham's past, and Abraham's past is trying to get to Abraham to pull him back. But I put my foot where? At the cross. On Satan's head. Why? So that Satan would not be able to jump out of the past through Adam and get to Abraham. So that Abraham could be free to go into his promise. The only thing that would stop Abraham is Abraham's unbelief.
Having put Satan down at the cross, made an open spectacle of him, God keeps talking to Abraham while he is walking. So when things try to stop him, God's revelation of Himself and of Abraham's promise keeps him going. Abraham knows he can get through every fire, every den of lions, every Red Sea, and every trouble that comes to him. Ultimately, he comes through the Red Sea and goes to God's chair and sits down in God's chair, far above principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness who militate in his circumstances—spirits of wickedness.
God picks up Satan, says, "You sit down here," and ties him with chains that are about 10 meters long. God always keeps you at 11 meters.
By now there should be laughter welling up in your spirit. I want you to tell three people. Text five and tell them: I am going to laugh again. Tell another person: I am going to laugh my way all the way to the bank.
Last week on "Something Is About To Happen," we learned that the revelation of God in the midst of your hellish situation is precisely why you must never quit. Satan is allowed to turn up the heat on you because he knows that if he keeps turning up the fire, you are likely to quit. But God wants the enemy to find out that the power of divine revelation constantly coming to your ears and your heart is strong enough to give you faith to hang on. You won't quit.
God's pattern is to reveal Himself in the midst of the impossible. He is always distinctly different from your situation. When He arrives and announces His promise to you, it often sounds preposterous—like He is mocking you.
Consider Abraham. God promised a man who has no life except what a respirator sustains that he would leave that machine. That is preposterous. God promises a job to someone without qualifications, because the qualifications God needs are not credentials from a university. God calls for a delivery of something 20 years overdue—preposterous. He calls teenagers and young adults to do the impossible—preposterous. He calls a 16-year-old boy to salvage a nation—ridiculous.
God moves you into a situation so that when He makes His proposition, it sounds ridiculous to you. It is only a ridiculous blessing that makes you laugh eternally and sustainably. Those of you who have endured trial, deferral, and delay for a long time: understand that the nature of the duration determines the equivalent duration of your laughter for the rest of your life. You will become like those who dream.
If God made the promise in the high and great moments of your life, it would sound possible. But no—He makes His propositions when your situation is most impossible, and He promises you the impossible.
God "calleth those things which be not as though they are." Abraham means "father of many nations," yet God gave him this name while he was childless for 24 years. You ask yourself: did God make it worse by changing my name to father of many nations with no child?
Here is the challenge: Do I walk by sight? Do I walk by situation? Or do I walk by revelation? Do I walk by faith?
If you walk by sight, you will quit. Your situation will only tell you to quit—that it's not worth it. But if you walk by revelation, a debate begins in your head: Should I quit or should I believe? Should I quit or should I keep moving with God? Should I quit or should I keep trusting God?
Eventually, if you keep hearing from God, you must remember: the promise is His responsibility, not yours. It is His prerogative to keep talking to you, keep speaking to you. He will run to you and make sure you hear Him. God doesn't want you to be without arms when your situation takes things to the next level. It is His job to make you a believer.
Because of the protracted nature of your trouble, when you keep looking at the situation, you are likely to resign yourself to fate. Sarah did this. After years of waiting, she said, "I am happy to remain childless. I wanted the child. You said it; I got excited about it. I did things with my husband, but no child. At 11 years, I couldn't take it anymore."
So Sarah gave her maidservant to Abraham. The woman became pregnant and began to despise Sarah. Sarah had stress on top of her near menopause, which made the menopause come faster. The devil doesn't attack you at a good time—he turns on the attack at an opportune time.
More time passed. Abraham kept saying the woman was his sister, not his wife, and he gave her to other kings. Clearly, he was not yet ready for the promise. His character was not ready for him to be a nation builder and father of nations. God had to take him through more trouble.
Sustained trouble teaches you how to behave yourself. Even Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered. Sarah moved to the place where she agreed with her situation: it is impossible for me to have a child. She thought, "God, you have been talking to my husband personally. I won't say it out loud, but you are a liar."
God had reached the appointed time. Less than a year remained. He called a couple of His bodies—I believe they were angels—and He walked among them. He did not go to Abraham's house directly; He walked as if He were passing by. This is God's typical nature: He wants you to want Him. What He wants to do in your life requires your desire. He will not give you something beyond your will.
Abraham felt an atmosphere that was not normal to the terrain. He had felt it many times before whenever God visited him. He ran to meet them: "Please, come into my house. There is something different about you. You are different from my situation."
Abraham gave them food. God said, "Where is Sarah your wife?" They said she was in the tent. God said, "Concerning this thing that I promised you a while ago: by this time next year, Sarah will bear you a son."
Sarah heard this from inside the tent. She was stricken with age, and she laughed within herself. She said, "Will I have pleasure with my lord, being old also?" She didn't say it out loud, but her thinking was wrong. She thought, "This man caused me problem in my life. If I didn't have high expectations, I would not have this disappointment. I could have managed being barren, but you have been saying it every day, calling me mother of nations, calling my husband father of nations for 25 years. Now it's a joke. It's no longer serious."
But God picked up on her thinking. This is what He wants to fix: your thinking. "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." If your life is going to change to a life of laughter, it will take a renewal of your mind.
You cannot count yourself out of God's promises by your wrong thinking. You have got to straighten out your thinking until it properly aligns with how God thinks. This is the great challenge of your transformation. If transformation is going to happen in your finances, your accommodation, your transportation, your matrimonial possibilities, your relationships, and every aspect of your life, it will start in your thinking.
"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Do you get it? This is what God wanted to deal with.
God said, "Why did Sarah laugh?" and Sarah said, "I didn't laugh." God said, "You did laugh." If God said it, it settles it. Sarah accepted that she would not live with impossibility thinking any longer. The things that are impossible by her reckoning—if God says it, she chooses to believe it.
I believe conception took place within three months of that visitation. Conception is as important as delivering the baby, because without conception, there can be no baby.
To conceive means that in the moment of the pleasure of God's intercourse, in the insemination of His seed-word in you, you must accept that it has been conceived. God is recruiting you for a purpose. The need you feel is the tip of the iceberg. Into that crucible of your need, God is going to recruit you for a higher purpose.
God's greatness is never invested in you; it is invested in the purpose. You are only important because you carry divine purpose. If you do not connect properly with the purpose, you will not enjoy the divine investment. That is why He pushes you into situations so that you have a need and you come to Him, crying to meet that need. You think you are recruiting God for your little baby, whereas God is recruiting you for His mighty nation that is hidden in the baby you are about to birth. Do you get it?
Many people don't understand this. They feed wrongly, and as a result, they miscarry. God has been building you for the future from the beginning. Other people don't go through what you go through because they are not being built for anything. But you—you are being built deliberately for something enormous.
There is nothing more transformational than a changed mind. God is consistently throughout the entire span of your life going to be in the process of training you. Training sometimes requires painful correction. If you yield to the corrective measure, it causes later in life the wonderful experience of godly character and a life that is pleasing to you and to God.
If you don't reset—a hard reset different from your own setting—you are always going to go back. You have got to go back and fix those settings. What God gives you pain for is a psychological u-turn that makes a difference. No matter what comes for you, it cannot take you, because as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
The only way to get off any addiction—whether drugs, sex, or anything else—is to change your heart setting. But you must allow Him to get hold of the hard drive of your mind and give you a new factory reset. Not the devil's original setting, but God's new setting. Even though you fall into trouble, fail in a process, or fault in a scenario, faith from your default setting will rise up and tell you to say no to depression, no to fear, no to sin.
Bring it all together. Fix your whole life. Get your walk right. Get your work right. Get your worship right. A real decision is stronger than emotions.
Isaiah tells Israel: as a people, you are going to go into captivity, but you are also going to come out of captivity. So that when they go into captivity, they can laugh, knowing that this trouble is not going to last always. This trial that you are going through now, as hot and hairy as it is, it has an expiry date.
You must not let the devil see you cry. Make sure he sees you live. You don't have to wait until God turns your captivity for you to fill your mouth with laughter. Start laughing now. It will shorten the time. Weeping endures for the night—the season of your darkness—but laughter is coming in your new dawn. You will laugh because God will take you out of this trouble and turn your captivity until you become like those who laugh. He will put a new song in your heart.
This thing is not a matter of law. If it were of law, you would have to work for it, and your wages would pay for the blessing. But this is not of works—because it is a promise, and because it is a promise, it has to be by grace.
What is grace? One writer said: "G for God, R for riches, A for at, C for Christ, E for expense: God's riches at Christ's expense." In other words, you have no expenditure in the matter. God says, "I am doing this all by Myself. I will bring the promise. I will set up its fulfillment. I will work on your faith. You won't have to manufacture faith—I will give you faith. I will sustain your faith. I will also give you patience by giving you greater faith in the ongoing of your trial.
"So that, friend, I will prove to your enemy that you are not just a wanter—you are a believer. Against all the odds, you believed in Me and you believed My word even when your situation said otherwise. It was My job to keep you in faith so that even when you couldn't keep the faith, I made it so that you could keep the faith.
"When I bless you, I will only bless you when your situation is ripe enough and you are dead enough and you are in unbelief enough for you to recognize that it was not of you, all your works. So you have no right to boast—but it was by faith, by grace through faith, that I made it happen for you."
Abraham got to 11 years. His wife said, "I am going to make this happen," and she brought her maidservant. They birthed the trouble of the world for the next two millennia—his name is Ishmael. Abraham continued to mistreat her because he was not yet ready. He even sold her off as a woman in another man's harem.
Eventually, when Abraham was so dead—at 99 or 100 years—it became clear to him and everybody that this was not Abraham. Abraham could have children, but Sarah could have no children. Abraham had to get to the place where he was no longer productive. When it has been established by subsequent years that it is over as far as mankind is concerned, it is then that God comes visiting. He knows it is over. But when God says it is not over, friend, it is not over.
God showed up with a visitation, and with the visitation came not just a promise—there was now a promise for the first time that had a set time.
Most people by now would have quit. One person in the family had not quit. That is why Abraham ran to the gate to call on God. Another person in the family had quit. But God said, "I need agreement. I need the one man who believes. I am going to strengthen his faith. And the woman who does not believe—I am going to make of her a believer. So I have two in the house. So that any two that agree and are touched by what I prophesy to them, I will do it for them from heaven."
God who said it—He will make it good. God who spoke it—He will bring it to pass. The hell you are going through, it will pass. But what My word says—it is really going to happen.
God said to Sarah, "Is anything too hard for God?" It was a question. In other words, "Sarah, I want you to think. Look at all the impossible things I have done for you in your past. Will this child-bearing issue be one of these things, or will it not be? Is it too hard?"
God navigated this whole thing and puts you in a ridiculous place with a problem antithetical to the thesis of His promise. So when He makes the proposition to you, the concept seems completely preposterous and stupendously ridiculous. But it is a ridiculous blessing that makes you laugh.
Somebody here, your laughter begins tomorrow morning. Somebody under the sound of my voice, by Friday you are going to hear a word that comes to you over the telephone or through your email that is going to change your life forever. Somebody else, you are going to conceive something that will irremovably graft itself to your womb—your womb of faith—and your life from here forward is going to be different.
I told you a few Sundays ago that the power of a promise, especially when it comes on the back of an agreement and it is now the announcement of a set time, it puts a blocker between who you were—barren—and who you are about to be: mother of many.
Your last days as who you used to be are now over. Your days of unfruitfulness are over. Your days of barrenness are over. Your days of being laughed at by haters are over. You are now the productive one. You are now the enterprise. You are now the enterprising.
Your whole world is about to change. It has happened to me many times. It is called rebirth, because even that which is born gets old, so it has to be reborn. Yes, the first rebirth is salvation, but in salvation God bursts new levels, new dimensions, and new spectrums of blessing in your life.
I am standing behind Abraham, but I have eyes all around my head so I can see in all directions. My name is God.
This is Abraham's past, and Abraham's past is trying to get to Abraham to pull him back. But I put my foot where? At the cross. On Satan's head. Why? So that Satan would not be able to jump out of the past through Adam and get to Abraham. So that Abraham could be free to go into his promise. The only thing that would stop Abraham is Abraham's unbelief.
Having put Satan down at the cross, made an open spectacle of him, God keeps talking to Abraham while he is walking. So when things try to stop him, God's revelation of Himself and of Abraham's promise keeps him going. Abraham knows he can get through every fire, every den of lions, every Red Sea, and every trouble that comes to him. Ultimately, he comes through the Red Sea and goes to God's chair and sits down in God's chair, far above principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness who militate in his circumstances—spirits of wickedness.
God picks up Satan, says, "You sit down here," and ties him with chains that are about 10 meters long. God always keeps you at 11 meters.
By now there should be laughter welling up in your spirit. I want you to tell three people. Text five and tell them: I am going to laugh again. Tell another person: I am going to laugh my way all the way to the bank.
