Missions Emphasis

To Genesis chapter twelve, and I'm gonna read to you this morning from verse one to verse three.

The church is a church of destiny.

God's people have a destiny.

And what's more important is I believe that our hour of destiny has arrived.

I believe this is the time that God wants to fulfill the promises that He has given to His people.

Somehow, when the uh millennium changed, I was in uh Norway at that time.

We were just standing outside in the snow, there were fireworks going, they had a celebration at this conference that I was ministering in.

But as I stood there, I was somehow oblivious to everything that was going on around me.

And there was such a strong feeling and sense inside of me that our hour had dawned, our time had come as God's people.

This was our millennium.

This was the time when God would fulfill the promise and his inheritance in his people.

And that began to grow in me, and God just began to show me things and reveal things to me.

And I want to share just a few of those things with you this morning.

I really want to challenge you and encourage you in the word of God this morning so that you yourself can rise up in your hour of destiny.

I want to tell you something about destiny.

The moment that you grasp what God wants you to be, don't think that everybody's gonna necessarily agree with you.

In fact, I found just the opposite.

I found when I truly understood what God wanted for my life, everybody tried to tell me it wasn't such a great idea.

I had six children, how would I support those children?

How are you gonna raise a mission ministry in Africa?

That's near impossible.

How will you educate your children?

Everybody had hundreds and hundreds of questions, but I want to tell you something this morning that if you know your destiny in God, if you know your calling in God, if you know what God really wants to do in your life, the Bible suddenly jumps up and says, I am true.

Amen.

And every part of that Bible starts to witness with your understanding and every fiber that is within you.

Suddenly, verses like, with God, all things are possible, become the thing that begins to drive you.

Our pastor said this morning that God's word will reprogram your mind.

It'll do that, but it'll do more.

It'll transform you out of the natural kingdom into the supernatural kingdom of God.

It will take you from being bound by what you are naturally and what you can achieve naturally, and it will literally transport you and transform you into the supernatural potential of God Himself.

And that is why the Bible declares that with God all things are possible.

I want to tell you something this morning.

If the Church of Jesus Christ would know who they are in God and who God really is, we would have taken this world long ago.

But I believe with all my heart that our time has come.

We are beginning to see, we are beginning to realize.

We're tucking away those denominational nonsenses that have kept us apart, that has allowed the enemy to break us up in little ineffectual groups and circles.

But today, God is changing that.

There's a new mood in the church.

I don't know if you've noticed that.

People want to work together, people of all denominations.

I have just signed an alliance with a South African Council of Churches for us and them to work together in an alliance to solve the emergency relief problems that we have in our own nation.

Ten years ago, that would have been a total impossibility, but the season has changed.

Hallelujah.

God is raising us up in a new spirit, a spirit that understands we are one body, we are baptized into one church.

We have one God, one Christ who died for us all, and that we can actually rise up together and fulfill our potential as the nation of God.

Amen.

Now the Lord had said to Abraham, get out of your country from your family and from your father's house.

Check out your tradition, my friend.

You know, throw it away.

See, I want to tell you tradition is the greatest enemy of God.

And I'm not saying traditions don't have value, I'm just telling you they're an enemy of God.

Because traditions, whether they be religious or anything else, they can so form our understanding and build strongholds in our minds that it limits what God can actually do in us as a people.

And God says to Abraham, I want you out of that.

I want you in a new thinking.

Amen.

I want you in a new mode.

He goes on, he says in verse 2, I will make you a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you.

And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Whose promise is this?

It's a promise that's being made to Abraham, but was it to Abraham only?

Was this promise for that moment or for that time?

The New Testament teaches us that that is definitely not the case.

And I want to build that foundation just before I come back again to this promise and look at it in more detail.

Come with me to Galatians chapter 3, and I want to read to you verse 29.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

And it's important that you see what it says here.

I think it's so exciting.

It says, and if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise.

Isn't that amazing?

Who are the seed of Abraham?

The Bible says the true sons of Abraham are those who are of the faith.

The apostle Paul says here, if you are Christ, if you are in Christ, if you have given your life to Christ, then you are the seed of Abraham, and you are heir to the promise.

What promise?

The promises which God made to Abraham, of which the one we have just read is probably the most profound promise.

Look what it says.

Let's go back there.

Because there's five important points there that that promise makes.

Firstly, he says, I will make you a great nation.

He's not talking about the nation of America or of Germany or of any other European nation, African nation.

He's not talking about a nation that has geographical boundaries.

He's talking about a nation under God.

He's talking about a nation who calls Christ their king.

He's talking about a nation who is filled with the Spirit of Christ who knows the power of God.

He says, I will make you a great nation.

And I want to tell you, for me, it's so exciting today that we're beginning to learn that.

We're not any longer beginning to uphold our little tribe within the kingdom of God.

You know, man has this tribe mentality.

You see it from the beginning of time.

When you go to a continent like I live in and come from where it's still a very undeveloped continent, every place has tribes.

Every country in the African continent is full of tribes.

Why?

Because it's man's nature to have tribes.

We want to relate to groups.

We have this group mentality, it's something that is born into our very being.

And we've done it in the church.

We have the tribe of the Baptists, and we have the tribe of the assemblies of God, and we have every other kind of tribe, and we've defended these tribes, and we've had our chiefs in these tribes, but at last, these tribes are beginning to come together and say, We are one nation.

Hallelujah.

We are one nation under Christ.

You see, it is so important to understand what it means to be great in God.

It's not the same as being great in man's kingdom.

But not only in our lives, in those lives who don't have Christ.

You see, if you read the Bible, we are the literal keepers of creation.

It is a calling of ours to protect our nations, to protect our people by the authority of God.

When Jesus sent out to church, one of the first things he said is, Those who believe on me in my name, they shall cast out demons.

Amen.

Why does it say that?

Because we are given the authority.

We are given that authority in Christ so that we can set people free.

There are thousands and tens of thousands of people in this nation who are bound.

Bound demonized, bound drugs, bound alcohol, bound lust.

Who's gonna set them free?

The psychologists are not gonna set them free.

They try to help them, but you know what?

Their success rate is minimal.

And it's not their job, people.

They've taken that job because the church has not walked in its authority.

God has made us a great nation, a nation who can take dominion on this earth and begin to establish the kingdom of God as it should be established in his power and in his glory.

Because you see, the second point he makes is he says, I will bless you.

Amen.

To be blessed by God himself.

It is so much more than money.

You see, so often we in our modern lifestyle and careers and everything else, we have begun to look at blessing as money.

We begun to look at blessing as material things.

And of course there's a part of it that is.

Why should you worry about what you eat and what you wear?

He says, Don't you know that God knows you have need of these things?

But if you will seek the kingdom of God, these things will be added to you.

So God doesn't leave that from the blessing.

God looks at that as a necessity for our lives.

But I want to say to you this morning that the blessing from God, if it's God's blessings, is so much more than money.

Number one, it's the authority of God.

Because that is the first thing He's gonna bless you with is his authority and his power.

It's the compassion of God.

He'll give you his heart.

You see, when you look at the Bible and you look at the gifts of the Spirit, and you look at the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the fruit is God's nature, it's God's heart.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit is God's power, it's his ability.

And those two things together reflect who God is and what God can do and what God will do in you and I through the Holy Spirit.

That's why the Bible says that where the Spirit of God is, there's freedom, and that God is busy with us, transforming us step by glorious step into the image of Jesus.

He wants us to be like him, he wants us to walk like him.

I have an ability to destroy stages.

That's why I don't like those little appel mics because they fall off, they rub up and down on my jacket, and they just restrict me.

I can't stand a microphone with a cord.

That's like being in bondage.

Amen.

He says, I will bless you.

I was three weeks old in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I came from a non-church background, a non-Christian background, and God wasn't on my agenda.

Retirement was on my agenda.

I was gonna retire by the time I was 40.

And everything was on track, it wasn't looking good.

And then my dad had a double heart attack, and I'm not gonna take time to go through that this morning.

But God supernaturally healed.

I was as far from God as you can imagine, and so was my father, and God supernaturally healed, and it amazed me.

I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't believe that God would do this for me, and I never done anything for God.

It led to my salvation a month later in my house.

Both Anne and I got saved in that very same night.

We didn't even have a Bible in our home.

I went out the next day and bought Bibles for our whole family, and I began to read the Word of God for the first time in my entire life, and I was 35 years old.

I was amazing.

I couldn't get enough.

In the first six weeks, I had already read up to the end of the Gospel of Mark.

But let me not turn ahead of what I want to tell you.

After three weeks, I couldn't handle the fact anymore that the 142 people who worked for me on my tobacco farm because I was a tobacco farmer when I got saved.

I produced 65,000 kilograms.

That's probably about 140,000 pounds of first-grade Virginian tobacco on that farm, probably enough to kill a big party of city.

I smoked 70 cigarettes a day myself.

And my claim to fame was that I could drink a half a bottle of whiskey and walk out as if I was sober.

And then I got saved.

Three weeks later, I looked at the labor on my farm and I thought, these people have got to know about this Jesus who's come into my life.

So I told them this Sunday we have church, and we moved some bales on the side in our tobacco barn.

And that Sunday I went to church.

I listened to exactly what the pastor preached.

I wrote down all his scriptures, I went straight back to the farm and I preached the very same message.

I was so stupid that I didn't even realize that the Sunday morning message in an assemblies of God church was not a gospel message.

But you know what?

In three weeks we had 40 people saved on a secondhand message by a three-week-old baby.

You see, I want to tell you something, and I'm only sharing this with you because I want you to understand the principle here.

When God begins to bless you, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what inadequacies you have, it doesn't matter that you lack experience, it doesn't even matter that you lack knowledge.

If God begins to truly put his hand upon you, you are gonna be amazed to begin to see the results that God can actually bring through you.

It is the most amazing thing to experience the full supernatural blessing of God on your life.

In the sixth week, I told the people in that little church of ours that I wanted to pray for them for healing because I've got to the 16th chapter of Mark, and it said, if you lay hands on the sick, they will recover.

And I read the whole chapter about three times.

I read chapter 15, chapter 14.

I was looking for something.

I wanted to know what qualified me for this.

What did I have to do?

How long did I have to be a Christian?

What were the qualifications?

Who was this actually for?

I couldn't find anything.

All it said was, it's those who believe in my name.

And I decided I believed.

So that Sunday I told the people, if you're sick, come forward, yeah.

I'm gonna lay my hands on you, and God's gonna heal you.

And they came forward, and the first person I went to pray for was an old man.

And I laid my hands on his shoulders because the Bible doesn't say where you should lay your hands.

And I'd never seen people being prayed for like that for the sick.

So I just laid my hands on his shoulders and I went to pray, and I'd been rehearsing my prayer the whole week.

So I went to pray in Jesus' name because it said in Jesus' name you will lay hands on the sick.

So I said in Jesus' name, and as I touched this old man, he fell down as though he'd been struck by lightning.

Well, it frightened us off to death.

We picked him up, we ran outside with him, I took my jacket off, I began to fan him.

I thought he died.

I was praying, saying, Lord, I prayed for this man to be healed.

Please don't let him die.

My wife had been a nursing sister.

She was there feeling his pulse.

She was encouraging me.

He's not dead, he still has a pulse.

Finally, he came around.

He wanted to go back inside.

I wouldn't let him back inside for three weeks.

I said, no, you're an old man.

It's hot inside that shed.

You must have fainted from heat exhaustion.

I didn't pray for anybody for three weeks because quite honestly I was scared.

But after three weeks, this thing that was inside of me wouldn't leave me alone.

So I told them again, and they came up and I decided that day I'm not gonna stop for anything.

The first five people, God did exactly the same thing.

They were all struck by God's power.

But then I realized in my heart, this is only God who is doing this.

And we saw miracles that Sunday, and we were nine weeks old in the Lord.

And hold on for this because if you got any religion in you, it's I was still smoking 70 cigarettes a day, and God just supernatural memory comes through me.

I want you to understand something.

God didn't leave me.

It was in fact only three weeks after that that God spoke to me audibly and told me to stop smoking and to get baptized.

And I want to tell you about the fright of my life.

My wife was so kind of, you know, excited about the fact that God speaks in our kitchen.

She went in trouble the whole church.

God actually spoke to Peter in the kitchen.

It didn't have had an effect on me.

I want to tell you my knees were literally shaking.

I had a cigarette in my mouth when God spoke to me.

I just took it out like this, crumpled it up and dropped it behind me.

I didn't know if I thought God couldn't see me, but that's the reaction that it had on me.

Man, if God begins to speak to you audibly, you're gonna stand up and you're gonna say yes.

If God begins to put his full hand of blessing upon us as a church, it is gonna have ramifications across this earth that will change this earth forever.

My friends, I want to tell you something this morning.

This is a great nation.

Come on, the devil make him a money of the one he achieved on the 11th of September.

Because maybe he did somehow in the big shot, and I want to tell you how this bigger, and we have this big environment, and the reason God wants to make us a great nation, a heavenly a devilish behavior that has come to steal and to kill and to destroy.

I will bless you, the Lord says, Hallelujah! He says, I will make your name great, he said he'd make us a great nation, but he says, I will make your name great, not great for five bodyguards, not great for limousines, not great for five-star hotels.

You stay wherever you like, that's your business.

But I'm telling you, that's not the greatness God is talking about.

Great because you can tell the devil to go to hell, great because you can speak to the blind and they see, great because you can tell a crippled person in the name of Jesus, rise up and walk and they walk.

Great because you will have the wisdom of God and you will have winds of knowledge that will save your nation in future.

Great because every single aspect of God is operating in your life.

I kind of feel at the moment like I'm preaching a science fiction message here the way you're looking at me.

But I guess what it means is I'm challenging you.

I'm challenging you to say today I want to be the Christian that God has raised me to be.

I'm not gonna take anything less.

In my life, that's my commitment.

I'm not gonna go to heaven having lived in this earth my whole life, and get to heaven and find out my God, I didn't even live in one third of what God had for me.

God has such an incredible potential for me, and I miss it.

I don't want that.

I'd rather get to heaven and Jesus said to me, Man, you just said that ran past me.

I want everything that God's got for me.

I want every little ounce of authority that God's got for me.

I want every ounce of power that God's got for me.

I want God's heart.

Because you see, what comes next is God's heart.

The fourth thing it says there is, and you shall be a blessing.

Amen.

Yes, you will be a great nation.

Yes, I will bless you.

Yes, I will make your name great, but I need you to understand something.

You will be a blessing.

That's why I'm doing these things.

Amen.

Not so you can be king of the castle so that you can be a blessing.

Because you see, in the kingdom of God, the greatest who are in the kingdom of God, they are servants.

That's what Jesus told his disciple.

He said, if you want to be the greatest yet, then you better be the biggest servant of all.

Because that's how works in the kingdom of God.

So he's not talking about great in my ivory tower.

He's talking about great in the compassionate heart of God.

He says, In you shall be a blessing.

You know, sometimes when you live in your kind of society, you lose sight of the fact of how important it is to be a blessing.

Or let me put it the other way around, how very important it is to have someone who can bless you.

I live in a continent where that is unfortunately so very, very true.

Where there are hundreds of thousands, millions of children who are literally crying out for someone to bless them.

Not to bless them with a 27th toy, but to bless them with food so that they won't die this week.

So they won't know what it is to suffer those pangs of hunger until finally they die.

No, in 1984, I experienced a change in my whole life.

Up until then, I was serving God in my calling.

He called me to evangelize.

I bought a tent.

We're crusading ten crusades a year, two weeks at a time.

We were working like beavers.

And I tell you, it was a joy.

We were seeing people saved, the tent was always full.

But that's what I was doing, and that's all I was doing.

In 1984, I went into Mozambique wanting to preach the gospel.

But that was impossible because at that time they were following a Marxist doctrine.

And I asked them what I could do to help them.

God told me to do that.

And they said our people are starving.

We were their neighbors.

We lived right next door to them.

And for most South Africans, we didn't even have a clue that in the first three months of 1984, 400,000 people starved to death.

And I was told to come back in two weeks, and the government aircraft would take me to go and have a look at the situation.

They flew me up to a place called Pambara, and they were gonna take me up in the morning.

It was a Sunday, they were gonna take me up in the morning, bring me back in the afternoon.

And when the aircraft dropped me, he said he just had to go refuel in another city, and he would be back in the afternoon.

And you know, as he left, I had this funny feeling.

I guess it was just fear that he wouldn't come back, I don't know.

But he didn't.

He didn't come back for ten days.

I didn't have any food.

I didn't have a change of clothing, I didn't even have any toiletries.

I worked in that camp for ten days.

There were over thirty thousand people there, and they were all starving to death.

It's it's hard to understand what that's really like.

I can tell you, but it's very hard to understand.

Because when you got that kind of situation and you got people like that dying every day, I was helping bury more than 30 people a day.

These people were all starving, they were weak.

I was helping them dig the graves.

We were just digging these long, little shallow trench graves in the sand, and I was helping bury more than 30 people a day.

It wasn't a normal funeral service.

These people were in a condition to be able to do that.

And the children.

I mean, it was just I didn't know I was an emotional person.

I thought I was a very practical person.

I thought my wife was the emotional one.

But I want to tell you, after a few days, my emotions were putting every trick in the book.

And then on the Thursday, there came an old man across the clearing and he was stumbling, he was so weak.

I went to help him.

I half carried him and sat him against a tree, and I told him I'll go and get you some water.

And I came back not even five minutes later, and he seemed to be sleeping.

And I went and shook him on his shoulder to wake him up, to give him the water and try and encourage him, and his head just fell to one side.

He wasn't sleeping, he died while I was gone.

Something inside me just snapped, and I began to shout out to God at the very top of my voice.

And I said, God, I don't know why I'm here.

You called me to be a preacher.

I can't preach to these people.

They don't need preaching, they need food, they're dying.

I said, I don't know what your heart is, I only know that my heart is broken.

And God spoke to me and He said to me, son, He said, My heart is like your heart, only a hundred times more.

He said, That's why I sent you here.

I want you to help these people.

I said, But Lord, you send the wrong person.

I don't have any money.

You know, I'm at you every month to try and pay the bills in the gospel ministry.

If anybody knows, I got no money, it's you.

You need money to feed people.

And God said to me, You just do what you can do, I'll be with you.

And I want to tell you, we couldn't even feed the 30,000 people that were in that camp.

We came back with 18 tons of food.

And when we took the 18 tons to those people, I mean it was such an effort to get it together.

When I got it to the 30,000 people, it didn't even go amongst everybody, it wasn't enough.

You know what?

We didn't stay there.

Within seven years, we receive 8,000 tons of food in one year to do work amongst the poor in the country of Angola.

And it's just kept growing.

See, I want to tell you something this morning, church.

Never make decisions by what's in your pocket and what's your ability.

You make decisions on what God has promised you.

You make decisions on what God is doing in your heart.

And God will bless you and fulfill those promises in you.

Because yes, yes, what I really want to talk about this morning is that very last part of verse 3 there.

Firstly, he says, I will bless those who bless you, and he does.

He blesses those who bless us.

And he says, I will curse those who curse you.

You know, it's the most wonderful thing.

We don't have to fight our battles in the kingdom.

Someone comes against us, God's gonna sort them out.

We just gotta walk in the authority of God.

Amen.

He says, I will curse them.

But now look what he says in verse 3.

He says, And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

In you, in the church, amen.

In the church of Jesus Christ, in you all all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Amen.

I want to close by going to Acts chapter three and verse twenty-five.

It says in verse twenty-five, You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying to Abraham, In your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Amen.

God has put a calling upon his church, has put a promise upon his church.

He has said that in his church all the families in the earth shall be blessed.

It is our mission to bless the world.

Amen.

It is our mission to bless the poor.

It is our mission to bless every family.

If you look around your neighborhood and you look at every family in your neighborhood, let me tell you, it's your promise, it's your heritage, it's your mission to bless those families.

But not just in your neighborhood.

You read there, it says, Every family in the earth.

Amen.

It's like the mission, go into all the world, preach the gospel to every living creature.

Amen.

We preach it at home first, but we preach it everywhere.

Collectively, we do that too.

It's the same here.

In you, every family in the earth shall be blessed.

You know, I heard my wife sharing with our team just the other day, and we've played this game as a family for many, many years because it helped us teach our children values.

And it was also interesting for them growing up, you know, for us to see where they were at and so on.

But we would play this game.

If you were to m win ten million, what would you do with it?

I mean, what would you do tomorrow?

It's a very interesting question.

And my wife said that to the team.

You know, if you were suddenly to win ten million, what would it do to your calling?

What would it do to your life tomorrow?

It's actually uh an amazing exercise just doing your own mind.

It kind of also helps you understand where your values really are.

And one of the team uh, you know, spoke out because we do a lot of that in our chapel anyway.

And sometimes I think in a church we should have question time.

I think interaction is great.

And one of the team said back, why, what would you do?

And I mean in an instant she said, I would build three biscuit factories and three food factories, and we'd be able to launch this million child thrust that we're doing in two years instead of four or five.

But you know what?

That's just become the motivation of our hearts.

And I'm not saying there to want to make you think that you know we are actually a good model of anything.

I'm just telling you that the compassion of Jesus has come to live in our hearts and we don't want to see children suffering anymore.

I was in Shemoya in 1986 or 87 and we'd been fighting for children at a hospital where we'd set up a little uh feeding thing with a pediatrics ward because they were bringing in so many malnourished children to the hospital, and because they were so weak they were catching every disease inside the pediatric ward.

So we set up a little tent outside, and we were treating these children outside.

The hospital didn't have any IV uh intravenous treatment so we used a formula where you you boil milk and oil and sugar and stuff together, and then you feed the child ten times a day, just three little spoons at a time.

And it's remarkable you end up with a success rate of about ninety-five percent saving those children's lives.

But this one little child we'd really been battling with, and it wasn't somehow reacting well.

And I sat with that child for over an hour and just prayed for that child and finally the baby just died in my arms.

It was one of the saddest things that I think I ever been through.

But you know, it didn't say to me where was God?

I knew where God was.

What it said to me was, God help us that we can catch these children before this point.

There was no reason this child had to die.

If this child just had food just a little while, a week ago before this, this little child could have lived to become an adult.

And you see, when you really see these things, you begin to understand what's in the heart of God, and he says, I will bless my church.

My God, I'll bless my church and they will be a blessing.

They will bless these poor people, they will look after them, they'll take care of the widows and orphans.

They'll know what my heart is.

I'm really pleased to have been with you this morning and to have just been able to share what I believe is so vital in our time.

Shall we bow our heads this morning?

Thank you, Lord.

Thank you, Lord.

We sang a song during our worship this morning that said, Thank you for saving me, thank you for healing me.

God has been so good to us.

Perhaps there's someone here this morning who doesn't know that goodness of God, you've not experienced true salvation, you've not known the full true forgiveness of God in your life, and the joy and the peace that it brings, and the sure knowledge that God is with you.

You've never experienced maybe you've been a church for many years, but you've never come to that place where you actually invited Christ into your life.

You became born of this spirit, with the sure knowledge that you are forgiven and that he is with you.

If that is you this morning, maybe you want to save I really want to know Jesus.

I really want him in my life.

I won't even know.