THE MESSAGE NOW
Vol. 3, No. 39 – Monday, 24th September, 2018

(John 11)
WHY DID THE LORD HAVE TO WAIT FOR FIVE YEARS BEFORE GIVING HIM HIS DESIRED MIRACLE?

It was about the climax of the winter season (that is in the month of February) in 2014 when a pastor’s telephone call came through to me. This pastor had performed a contract for a tier of government against a multi-national oil corporation for which the sum of 78 Million was due to him and his business partner.

This was back in 2009. According to the pastor, he had prayed all sorts of prayers and visited a great Man of God on the matter. Yet the lingering continued until we met in 2014. Within a very short while, the delayed money for five years was released to him with effortless ease by the grace of God.

You wonder why God didn’t do it when the big Man of God had prayed for him. Was I or am I of a greater anointing than that big Man of God? The unequivocal answer is NO!!!. So why then did the Lord wait for five years before coming to his aid?

The best answer for such an important question is the answer derivable from the question why did the Lord have to wait until Lazarus had to die and did not even turn up until Lazarus was already four days in the grave?

Understand dearly beloved that special cases require special attention for special testimony to be born. Understand also that a testimony may linger from being born because Jacob has decided to answer the name Esau (Gen.27:24). And, until Jacob declares himself to be Jacob indeed (Gen.32:27), his testimony may never appear but continue to linger. How?

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THE MESSAGE NOW
Vol. 3, No. 38 – Monday, 17th September, 2018

(John 14:15-17, 15:26-27, 16:5-15; Acts 1:12-14, 2:1-4)

WAITING FOR THE FATHER’S PROMISE

Deducible from all of today’s texts (and indeed from the caption of this edition) is a word of great prominence. Of prominence because of its inherent two characteristics. The word in question is the word “waiting”.
It is a word comprising pain on the one hand and pleasure on the other. Pain because, the art and act of waiting is never a pleasant one. Sometimes, waiting can be physically absorbing and emotionally torturing.

However, the word “waiting’ has its positive/pleasurable end. So, in terms of its pleasure aspect, the art and act of waiting does not last forever: there is always an end. Consider the twelve Apostles who had been fed and given every necessary comfort for three years and half. And, now, their lives and future were abruptly summarized by a promise: the promise that another comforter will be sent to them.
It was a promise without date or time. How long the Apostles had to wait was equally out of the equation. Their experience must have been that of mockery and of the shame to face the Jewish public. Maybe that was one of the reasons they moved into the Upper Room to avoid embarrassment. For whilst their Master (our Lord and Saviour) was physically present, they were regarded as the privileged few. But a remarkable lesson was offered to us contemporary Christians by the Apostles. On arriving at the Upper Room, they prayed. They kept heaven continually informed about its promise. And for ten days, it was as though heaven was brass. The truth remains that should God give a word of promise, the matter for which that word was given was already a done deal.

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THE MESSAGE NOW
Vol. 3, No. 37 – Monday, 10th September, 2018

(John 2:1-10, 1 Kings 17:1-1, Gen.47:15)

WHY AND WHEN THE BROOK DRIES UP, THE WINE RUNS OUT AND MONEY FAILS

Understand that the Bible tells myriad of stories for different purposes. The stories told by the Bible are like sign posts pointing into a defined direction. A sign post is never an end in itself: it is rather a means to an end.

So then if the stories told by the Bible are not an end in themselves, judging from the surface like the sign post, it therefore means that those stories told by the Bible require deeper spiritual research in order to unravel the deeper message deeply intended by them.

Thus it cannot be any strange news that a wedding party ran out of wine. On the surface, it simply means that adequate preparations were not made for sufficient wine. It can equally mean that there was poor crowd control. Therefore, uninvited guests shot up the expected number of people for the wedding party. Of course, it can also mean that over-excess wine may have been consumed by some guests who have unrestrained appetite for wine consumption.

But in all of these, should wine run out at a wedding party where the Lord of the Entire universe Himself was present? And, again, why should a source of sustenance by the Lord just as the brook in the case of prophet Elijah run dry? The question is: couldn’t the Lord have instructed River Jordan to keep flooding that brook throughout the period of the draught and famine in Israel?

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THE MESSAGE NOW
Vol. 3, No. 35 – Monday, 27th August, 2018

(Exodus 22, Matt.5:23-24, Luke 19:1-8)
THE DOCTRINE OF RESTITUTION
(Part 2)

Welcome to the concluding part of the topic dealing with restitution which is one of the cardinal doctrines of the Bible.

In starting this concluding aspect of the topic, there is a need to understand certain facts:

• A church/ministry with the best message one can ever preach or listen to, but without sound doctrine or without adherence to the strict doctrines of the Bible, is a church/ministry which is not preparing its congregants for heaven.
• Restitution is a doctrine enshrined under the first part of the Bible being the Old Testament established by God for a purpose (see Exodus.22:28-30).
• Restitution has no separation from grace just as the Old Testament is indivisible from the New Testament. As a matter of spiritual fact, restitution is a function of grace. Why? It is by grace that we get to know and understand the will of God which includes God’s divinely-ordained doctrines enshrined in His word. Why Grace does what it does is the sole reason of making us become like Him who is grace-personified—to be holy onto Him. So then, so long as New Testament believers enjoy the benefits of grace, they must equally obey the dos and don’ts of grace which includes the doctrine of restitution.
• Does this then mean that there is no difference between law and grace? Are we still under the law and not under grace? These questions point us in the direction of the true character of grace. First, the availability of grace is never a panacea to disregard divinely-ordained doctrines, rules or even laws of any land or country so long as those rules and laws conform with the will of God. Second, the true character of grace is that grace is a remedy to the difficulties and challenges posed by any doctrine. As we shall soon see under the next set of facts, grace has not come to abolish the law but to alleviate the difficulties posed by them to man. How?
• There is no initial sign of surrenderedness to God after genuine salvation has been obtained than inner yieldedness which begins with the righteous intent to make right all wrongs known to that heart of that man and God but unknown to other people. Restitution therefore is the Christian act of making right all wrongs in order to have conscience void of offence towards God and towards man (Acts.24:16).

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