Joshua 6 1-10; 20
Instruction is one of the most powerful tools that God uses to change the lives of His people. Whenever God wants to change your life, He gives you instruction. Whenever God wants to change your family, He gives an instruction. “Abraham, come out of your father’s house to a land that I will show you.” It seems to me that every time God wants to do something extraordinary, He always begins with an instruction. Whatever situation you are going through, you are an instruction away from the solution.
Your next season of change is tied to an instruction that you are yet to receive or an instruction given to you that you are yet to obey. One word from God can change your life forever.
Almost all testimonies can be tied to an instruction received. The wife I married was an instruction. Relocating to Abuja was an instruction, including the course I studied. My children were instructions.
We are talking about obedience because it is the golden key that opens your life to a world of signs, wonders, miracles and breakthroughs. What you struggle to get, instruction will bring it your way if you can act on it. One of the major problems we have with instruction is that it doesn’t always make sense to us. ‘A virgin shall conceive’ does not make sense. ‘Pour water into vessels and bring out wine’, ‘walk on water’, doesn’t make sense. What we don’t often realise is that His ways are not our ways. (Isaiah 55:9). The way you want to get money is not the way God wants you to get money. When you follow the ways God does not want you to follow, struggle will always follow. The conflict we are having today is the conflict between the ways of man and the ways of God.
In 1 Cor 1:25 (NLT)- “This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength.” It means you can never out-plan God. I want you to rest on the fact that the plans of God are superior to your plans; yours can never be superior to God’s plan. I want you to subscribe to the plans of God. Your plans may look smart at the beginning, but they will fail in the end, but the plans of God guarantees an end. The Israelites had come a mighty, long way and now that they are right at the edge of entering the promised land, they realised that what God has promised them had been shut against them. They had travelled 40 years, fought several battles to arrive at the promised land only to realise the place is shut against them. For instance, God told me to come to Abuja and by the third day, the money I came with was exhausted, how do I continue? But the Lord made a statement to the effect that He wanted to empty me of everything I came with so that I would not say I made myself in this city. That means from that moment onward, it has been God that has taken care of me. How is it that the city is shut against the one that the Lord has promised the city?
To have the names of your children revealed to you but you can’t have them? The question is, how do I go from the contradiction that I am seeing with the promise God has made?
The bridge between our reality and our destiny is instruction. When we got the church land given to us by a woman based on instruction, we had not even cleared it when the Lord instructed me to move my office to the site. I moved from a luxurious office to a place under a tree. Before we could clear the road that led to the church, all our money had finished. We went back to God in prayer and the instruction God gave us was to stop looking for money to complete the entire project, the Lord simply told us to pray ‘give us this day, our daily bread’. That our engineers should decide what is needed to be done per time and as we knew day by day, God kept providing. When we lost the first building and we brough forensic engineers who gave us direction on how to build, the Lord told us not to raise any fund, call any member, rich or poor, not to preach on money, He said, “I will build the house.” I called the chairman of the building committee, Pastor Isaiah (our Executive Pastor at the city centre now) and relayed these instructions to him. He looked at me as if to say I had lost my mind. I called my mentor, Apostle Goodheart and he said, “If that is what God told you, He has got you covered.”
The Lord has an answer to every closed door. When the children of Israel stood before the walls of Jericho, He instructed them to go round the walls of Jericho, making no sound everyday for seven days. The instruction were so detailed. One of it was to keep quiet and make no sound. It means to be quiet about the problem. When you are yet to deal with an obstacle, keep quiet. Don’t use your mouth to affirm the difficulty because when you speak, you establish it. This was why Zechariah was struck dumb in Luke 1:19 so his mouth does not interfere with the process. Is it possible that you are speaking negatively at the beginning of the conception of something God wants to do in your life? Are you the one aborting what God wants to do in your life? He said you will go around seven days and at the 7th day, you will shout. Note that your shout can’t bring it down; it is the proof of obedience to God’s instruction and when your obedience is complete, God’s intervention shall be revealed.