Today I am going to be talking to you from the books of Habakkuk and Haggai. It is the Lord who gives someone Habakkuk. Why those books? Because you are living in the time of the Fulfillment of scripture.
In 1967, the Jewish people came back to Jerusalem and took possession of it. Jesus said that the Gentiles were going to have a shift in their Global status in the generation in which the Jews came back in possession of their land. Something in the Gentile Nations was shifting and history was going to start to move back to a focus on the Messiah and Israel at the center of world affairs. And here we are, the great Gentile Nation, the United States of America.
During 1967, we were the Great Global superpower. In fact, we were maybe until right about now. Now many of us are watching in horror. The decision after decision after decision seems to look like the dismantling of America and the world. And the dismantling of the culture. The dismantling, perhaps, of your own freedoms.
Love ya, Lance! This is a “lift up your eyes now and see” moment.
Today is the first time I’ve seen you.
Great show on Flash Point!
Love this teaching and lesson. Thank you
“Why Habakkuk Is The Word Of The Lord For Now”
God can only be with us to the extent that we embody His word, hence the original Commandment to Adam and Eve. For a Christian, the first step in the process of ‘embodying’ God’s Word is accepting Jesus, who himself is the ‘embodiment of the Word’ – “the word was made flesh”. Jn 1:14. This positions us inside a ‘new covenant’ and therefore relationship with God:
Rom 10:4 “For Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified”.
However, we must maintain and develop that relationship with the person Jesus by keeping and practising his word, just as Adam and Eve were to keep and obey God’s Commandment. You can believe in Jesus and God, but still disobey them as Adam and Eve did.
Even after they fell, they still spoke to God. However the quality and substance of their relationship had changed. Now the children were fearful in front of their Father, as they had violated heavenly law and their Father’s love and trust. They broke their relationship (covenant) with God to make the fallen Archangel their father and ‘ruler of this world’.
Similarly, Christians must maintain their relationship and covenant with God and their spiritual lives by keeping and practising His Word. Jesus is the embodiment of the word, therefore the purpose of believing in Jesus and obeying the Word is in order for us to become the embodiment of the Word also. That is to become Christ-like, which means ultimately to achieve perfection as Jesus ‘commanded’.
Mt 5:48 “You therefore must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect”.
A commandment which Christians haven’t take seriously. Included in “Seeking first God’s Kingdom” is seeking our own perfection by following Jesus’ example, not just passively believing in him but yet still acting contrary to his example and teachings. Not acting and doing anything is also a sin, the ‘sin of omission’.
We study for an exam, we practise a musical instrument, we train hard for some competition, why then do you think it is enough to just believe, and think you are saved without conscientiously ‘working out your salvation in fear and trembling’ and producing the fruits of that salvation. That just defies any kind of norm in life and God’s Creation. For any system and therefore person to function, means we have to keep continually investing, sacrificing, for existence, action and multiplication to take place, and therefore any concept or sense of ‘eternality’ to occur.
Otherwise that system or person will break down, and the tendency towards ‘entropy’ will take place; rust, decay, disorder, corruption. In light of what is happening in America, this may be a good way to describe the current state of Christianity. Christianity is in crisis, and a ‘gaping wound’ is being attempted to be fixed with band-aids. God wanted a nation to be discipled, where is it? Where are His stewards, and those God raised up to establish His House, His Kingdom? We are now after the fact, not in the time leading up to it. That time has gone!
Just as we feed our physical body in order for it to grow, to be healthy, strong and able to act in this physical world and to also fight off illness, so too our spiritual body also needs ‘food’ to grow, to be healthy and strong and fight off spiritual attacks that tempt us to go against God’s Word. That spiritual food comes from knowing God’s Word, but more importantly practising it and living it.
Jn 8:51 “Truly, truly, I say to you, if any one keeps my word, he will never see death.”
Jn 12:47 “If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. 48 He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the ‘word’ that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. 49 For I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak. 50 And I know that his ‘commandment is eternal life’.”
Jn 14:23 “Jesus answered him, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him”.
Deut 28 expresses the same meaning.
To accept Christ is just the beginning of our life of faith.
Therefore you must ‘act in faith’, and do something for God, and for your ‘neighbour’, centring on God’s Word. This is the ‘Two Great Commandments’, ‘that all the Law and the Prophets hang’.
Seeking signs, wonders, and miracles is for an ‘evil and adulterous generation’ who don’t have faith in God’s Word. They need some supernatural evidence to convince them to believe. Like children wanting a magic show. Don’t let the medicine that revived you become your drug of choice and you forget the ‘weightier matters’ of Jesus’ teachings, so that you can know Jesus’ heart, which you also want to embody.
Miracles are not important when God’s greatest miracle, creation and life itself, trumps everything else. The miracle of man and woman, whom God created their sexual organs, their ‘holy of holies’, where ‘two become one’. God’s masculinity and God’s Femininity joining together through a man and woman becoming one, initiating reproduction, the creation of life, just as God had created man and the universe, for us to then also follow that same ‘cause and effect, multiplying principle’, is God’s greatest miracle. Why would we be looking for anything else? Similarly:
Rom 1:20 “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse”.
Therefore we must understand the centrality of man in God’s Creation, and for this reason God gave us a Commandment as our portion of responsibility or assignment to fulfil in order that we would complete and consummate God’s Ideal of Creation. Therefore man must ‘act’ in faith to be justified, as Adam and Eve should have done. Let’s look at what James says:
James 1:22 “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if any one is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who observes his natural face in a mirror; 24 for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25 But he who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and ‘perseveres’, being no hearer that forgets but a ‘doer that acts’, he shall be blessed in his doing”.
‘Live’ by faith means, ‘act’ by faith. Live is a verb. Again James explains:
James 2:14 “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
18 But some one will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. 19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. 20 Do you want to be shown, you shallow man, that faith apart from works is barren? 21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? 22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works, 23 and the scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”; and he was called the friend of God. 24 You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25 And in the same way was not also Rahab the harlot justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way? 26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead”.
This is the greatest biblical explanation of the relationship and dynamic between ‘faith and works’. This is also a direct correlation of the relationship between mind and body. You can’t have one without the other.
Yes, and if we are connected to God then we will also ‘act’ to recover His Kingdom, as we should all be seeking first God’s Kingdom since the Fall when it was lost. Our salvation begins with an act of faith, accepting Christ, as Adam had faithlessly rejected God. However that is just the beginning of a life of faith when we are re-born. ‘Living’ by faith also means ‘acting’ by faith, it doesn’t negate ‘doing’. Live is a ‘doing’ word. Seeking, asking, and knocking is ‘doing’ also, as is evangelising and praying and serving and helping, being the good Samaritan, steward, watchmen, soldier.
If we say we have faith, does that mean we know God’s heart, and automatically love our brother or sister. Remember, the Jewish people also had to keep faith in the Word, the Mosaic Law just as much as we do. They were also encouraged to have faith in God and God’s Word. Jesus as the embodiment of the Word brought a higher expression of truth and God’s love, but the attitude and heart to practise a living faith still remains.
Why would Jesus ask, “Will he find faith on earth”? The faith that manifests in seeking and building God’s Kingdom, faith to protect God’s House and not let the atheistic left take it over, and have an unelected ‘president’ in office. Look how hard it was to get Christians on board with Trump, and how quickly Christians fall into faithlessness having previously ignored any sense of responsibility to build God’s House, that is the nation. Lk 12:42-49
Faith without works is dead or quickly becomes dead. Our actions are the substance of faith and things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen taking physical form in the natural world just as God created man and the Cosmos, both the physical world and the spiritual world. God also acted in faith, obedient to His own Word, His Logos and Blueprint for Creation. Why? To realise a world of true love with His children following His example by also having ‘absolute faith’ and keeping God’s Word. This is how we become co-creators and co-heirs with God and Christ, by keeping God’s Word, which means obeying the commandment, whom Jesus was the embodiment of. The object of our faith is God’s Word not faith itself. Hence the original Commandment to Adam and Eve.
Adam and Eve didn’t keep God’s Word and they died spiritually, just as Christians can also die spiritually when they don’t keep and practise God’s word. That is what has happened to America, because Christians were looking for just their own salvation along with their panelled homes and other creature comforts, but weren’t first ‘seeking God’s Kingdom’. Therefore by virtue of their attitude and thinking, Christians are not saved, just like Adam and Eve who too should have been ‘seeking first God’s Kingdom’ by obeying the Commandment. ‘He who seeks to gain his life will lose it, but he who seeks to lose his life for God’s sake and Jesus sake will gain it’. That is very clear. Seeking God’s Kingdom means you have to be prepared to lose your life to accomplish God’s Will
Christians have ‘fallen’ into the same trap as the Jewish people, and have just been playing around, lacking seriousness and sincerity when it came to embodying the Word and establishing a kingdom of true love, because you can’t pretend love. It requires absolute investment and sacrifice, or did we forget about what Jesus did and told us to do? I guess so, that is why Jesus said you will be judged by his word. Jn 12:47-50. The ‘gold standard’ he left on earth.
That is what we need to be concerned about, because until we become the embodiment of true love we are not saved, no matter how many times you profess Jesus as your lord and saviour. If that is so, then Jesus as your ‘teacher’ will ask you why you didn’t do what your lord and saviour told you to do. ‘Pick up your cross and follow him, lay down your life for others, seek to lose your life so you can gain it, and seek first God’s Kingdom which is a nation. That was the whole purpose of God giving the Israelites the nation of Israel to establish a kingdom to welcome Jesus, as God gave Christians America to also establish His kingdom and welcome the Second Coming of Christ, but we allowed God’s House to fall into enemy hands just as the Israelites did.
This is also why Jesus said:
Mt 7:21 “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.’
Why would Jesus say that? Many Christians have been focused on signs and miracles but not ‘Seeking first God’s Kingdom and His Righteousness’, which is a kingdom of truth, justice and true love. Many Christians have been doing exactly what the Jewish people did. They were focused on the ‘outside of the cup, not the inside’, and therefore what proceeds from the heart. Mt 15:10-20. ‘Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man’, nor makes him righteous as in taking communion. Does that purify you and make you righteous? No, only what you do centring on God’s will can do that. Mt 12:46-50.
You can eat and drink with your mouth, and so too you can repent with your mouth, and as Paul said, ‘if I don’t have love, I am nothing, I gain nothing’.
God loved His enemy, which is us, as Jesus does, how about us? Did we also love our enemy. Who is your enemy? Your mother, father, spouse, children, brothers and sisters, “those of your own household”. Until you have perfected love, everyone is your enemy as you are theirs. Due to our imperfection as fallen people, we must grow and develop like everything else in creation. We start off as ‘white belts’, and then we must do the hard yards to graduate and move up the ‘ladder of our spiritual life’. Phil 2:12
Yet with all the prophets; their exhortations, chastisements, warnings, plus the miracles and acts of great valour and faith by various individuals, at the end of the day, Israel rejected the Messiah, and ended up on a meaningless ‘non-providential’ Diaspora, a 2,000 year ‘wilderness course’, having no significance. Therefore due to their faithlessness and disobedience, Jesus himself prophesied that Israel and the Temple would be destroyed; Lk 19:41-44, Mt 24:1-2.Mt 21:33-46
Was that what God originally purposed and predestined? Of course not!
By 70 AD Rome had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. The chosen people had once again disobeyed God, rejected their own history and existence by rejecting the very person God had just spent 2000 years preparing them to receive, Jesus, and consequently because of that failure, Satan invaded and destroyed Israel, as is happening to America today. Mt 21:33-46
After Creation, Adam and Eve rejected the Commandment, then after a Providence of Re-creation, Israel then rejected the ‘commandment in the flesh’, Jesus. Rejecting the Word and disobeying God has dire consequences. Both these acts of disobedience and betrayal brought tragic realities to God and man alike, as history and the bible has clearly revealed. Gen 6:5-6, 1 Sam 15:10-24.
Christians have not understood about the centrality of man’s portion of responsibility in the fulfilment of God’s Will. God can not do it by Himself. He needs man’s response and collaboration. Hence the Commandment. God’s purpose of creation revolves around the parent child relationship. That is at the centre of God’s heart. Remember God is a Father, that says it all. Forget the Lord business, maybe for servants, but not sons and daughters.
When was any battle won by a limp-wristed godless people who did not obey God and stand up and take responsibility to fight for their land, their nation and their God as David did. We have to understand the season we are in, and what needs to be done in each and every season.
David is the personification of how we are meant to conduct ourselves in this current season, when today’s Philistines are mocking us, our God, and tearing down our culture and way of life, as the Romans sacked Jerusalem and the Temple and what are we doing? Jack! Biden the ‘demonic entity’ needs to be called out along with his coven and put to the ‘sword’. We are playing ‘pat-a-cake’ with the enemy.
Christians therefore don’t have God’s spirit, regardless of accepting Christ, when we don’t act and do what is necessary to give life to that ‘spiritual spark’ inside ourselves. We need to ‘blow’ on it so that it intensifies and then multiplies, catching the hearts and minds of the people, and multiplying God’s zeal inside ourselves, as Moses burnt hot with zeal for the Lord.
Meaningless rituals, remembrances, platitudes, cant, mammon and inaction will snuff out that spark. “You have the name of being alive but you are dead”. What were the warnings given to the end-time churches? If we don’t ‘act’, we will not receive ‘life elements’ from God or God’s love, as we will have broken the circuit for that to happen. Also note Heb 10:26-31
1 Jn 3:14 “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we ‘love the brethren’. He who does not love abides in death. 15 Any one who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. 16 By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. 17 But if any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? 18 Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth”.
If we do not love God and His Word nor our neighbour, we are already dead, regardless of what we believe or who we believe in, as “faith without works/love is dead”. James 2:12-26, 1 Cor 13
Enter ‘Persecution’ and the ‘Great Shake Up’, to wake us up, and get us back on the right track in order to behave in accordance with God’s Word as above, and concern ourselves with things that are truly important.
Gather your ‘generals’, your good governors, your law enforcement people and those who have the spirit of God in them and take back your land. Trump failed at the end, now the people must directly take charge and sanctify their nation, God’s House, and re-dedicate it to God centring on God’s Word and His Will.
Democracy has now become ‘détente and peace talks’, as with the Viet Cong and the USSR, so they could refuel, re-supply and re-arm their frontline soldiers becoming ‘twice the child of hell’ to deal with, as will the Democrats.
Evil doesn’t have an ‘off switch’, it just intensifies, multiplies and gets worse. Therefore goodness needs to intensify and multiply, subjugate evil, and make things ‘better’.
Learn from history or perish, being cleaved down the middle, and becoming an offering on Satan’s altar.
So the ‘halftime talk’ has to deal with reality. We are 30 points behind, and everyone is playing as individuals and not as a team, so the opposition who are less talented, less skilled, are however united, and they are whipping our butt.
Christian ‘individualism’ needs to be tempered with a sense of the whole, as we are part of a ‘flock’, a team. Jesus said to be united in Jn 17:21-24. We are and have been disobeying Jesus for 2000 years by not keeping God’s Word, and not loving our neighbour who is also in fact our enemy. That reality is now showing as our society is starting to disintegrate. We got away with it for a long time, but as with the Israelites, everything finally catches up with you as we are presented with the ‘bill’.
We have been weighed and found wanting, including the prophets, who didn’t prophesy any realistic game plan to move forward and defeat the enemy, operating only from a narrow field of vision or perspective. They too are also limited by the understanding they have. John the Baptist is a good example of that. Did he attend and serve Jesus, follow Jesus as should have been the obvious thing to do. No, he walked away, denying an obvious connection for Jesus with the high priests, John’s father being one. As a result, John was beheaded for his failure to unite with God’s Will, that being Jesus, as what eventually happened to Israel also. “Not one stone will be left upon another”.
God is ‘seeking first’ His people, and therefore only those who are truly ‘seeking first’ God’s Kingdom, not their ‘own salvation’, as He chose just the 300 men of Gideon to fight the Midianites. Those who lapped water from their hands as dogs lap water, remaining alert to what was happening around them, not those with their heads buried in the water unaware of their surroundings and who are comfortable and entrenched in their ‘religion’, their ‘faith’, like they have nothing else to do or ‘work’ for. God will pass them by as they too have ‘no oil in their lamps’.
They have no hunger nor zeal for God’s kingdom, just their own salvation. “Get ‘me’ into the life raft no matter what”!
We have to at least match Moses’ zeal. So if you want to be resurrected at any time, pray with a fervent heart for God’s Kingdom to come on earth as it is in Heaven, and then make it so! The fuse has been lit, and like water it always finds a way through. God’s Word must permeate this land and ‘Christians’ have the opportunity once again to be the ‘baton carriers’, God’s warriors and representatives. Currently you aren’t, you have failed your portion of responsibility to attend Jesus and ‘keep his word’ like John, and therefore are in fact the enemies of God. Things will only get worse until you realise this and repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, but the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life.
Mt 7:13 “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few”.
Christianity has failed its mission to disciple a nation and seek first God’s Kingdom, but now we are getting another chance to redeem ourselves. Take it. Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, our hands. We must build it with our own blood, sweat and tears, otherwise we will never be part of it, no matter how much we beg and plead with God.
God created us to be co-creators by ‘keeping and living’ His Word. If we don’t become the embodiment of that Word and therefore love, then of course we cant be in God’s Kingdom as much as the wedding guest was bound and kicked out for not making the effort to wear the correct attire. Are we making the effort to be in the presence of God and the Bridegroom? Perhaps not.
America must move ‘As One’ in the right direction to accomplish God’s Will to enter the promised land, especially in heart and spirit, not just physically. We have occupied the land, but have also been adulterated by the ‘Canaanite’ customs and culture of the day, so we have lost the true meaning of ‘Canaan’ and God’s Kingdom.
It is too simplistic to say that once a person becomes a Christian they have God’s ‘eternal spirit’ and are eternally saved given the actual reality of all believers, and what the bible teaches re Jesus’ words and Paul’s letters to the early Christians, which still guide us today, 2,000 years hence. If Christians are eternally saved and have God’s spirit in them, why do we need ministers and teachers to deliver sermons and give guidance. Just reading the bible should be enough for any believer. There has to be a consistency of logic and thought in our explanations.
Therefore the answer is, faith without action, without corresponding love is dead, and even that initial experience of receiving the Holy Spirit will die away if we don’t act and make God’s spirit substantial in our own heart and mind. John had a direct revelation about Jesus, but he betrayed Jesus by going off and doing his own thing. He paid the price.
“You have the name of being alive but you are dead”. “Leave the dead to bury their own dead”. “He who does not love the brethren is dead”.
2 Peter 2:20 “If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. 21 It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. 22 Of them the proverbs are true: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.”
We must attend the Word of God. That is why Adam and Eve fell. They didn’t keep/attend God’s Word by embodying it. The Jewish people didn’t attend Jesus by ‘keeping him’ and therefore his word. As a result, God nor Jesus could make their home with Israel, and Israel was rejected by God as His chosen nation. Mt 21:33-46.
cont’d in part 2
last paragraph starts with ‘We must attend the Word of God. ”
and ends with ‘cont’d in part 2’
Where can I find ‘part 2’ ?
Loy, I’m still working on it, so it will appear back here in this post of Lance’s, “Habakkuk is the Word…” Thank you.