BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

The Bible also puts the gold and the glory together in describing Solomon’s Temple. It says in 2 Chronicles 3:7 that the walls were overlaid with pure gold and the priests couldn’t stand up to minister because of the glory of the Lord (2 Chronicles 5:14). Revelation 21 describes the heavenly Jerusalem much the same way. It says the buildings there, and even the streets, are made of pure gold and the city is lit by the glory of God. The pattern is unmistakable! “But Gloria,” you might say, “Jesus walked in the glory of God and He wasn’t rich. He was poor.” No, He wasn’t. Jesus had so much money coming into His ministry He had to appoint a treasurer. Poor men don’t need treasurers. Poor men can’t support a traveling ministry plus an entire staff of disciples, while at the same time being notorious for giving to the poor at all hours of the day and night. (See John 13:29.) Jesus couldn’t have been poor! It would have been impossible. Not only would it have hindered His ministry, but it would have been a breach of spiritual law. In His covenant, God promised His people that if they listened to His voice and obeyed His commands, He would give them the “power to get wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:18). He said their storehouses would be blessed. They’d be plenteous in goods. They’d be the head and not the tail (see Deuteronomy 28:8, 11, 13). Did Jesus listen to God’s voice and obey His commands? Certainly! He always did, and He only did what pleased the Father. So, God must have prospered Him financially. To do otherwise He would have had to break His Word. A Commission To Fulfill What’s more, Jesus was commissioned by God to preach all over Israel and in Samaria. He had an assignment from the Father to go from town to town preaching the gospel to the poor, healing the brokenhearted, preaching deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, setting at liberty them that are bruised, and preaching the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18-19). God wouldn’t have given Jesus that assignment without providing the financial resources He needed to fulfill it. That would be unthinkable. Given that He’s a God of abundance, He would surely have supplied Jesus with more than enough. As believers, we can expect Him to do the same for us! Why? Because we’re carrying on Jesus’ mission. Just as the Father sent Jesus, now He has commissioned us to go “into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). Preaching the gospel to the whole world takes money! If you don’t have any money, all you can do is witness to people individually within walking distance of home. One-on-one evangelism is good, but if we’re going to bring in the great end-time harvest of souls from the uttermost parts of the earth before Jesus comes back, then we must do more than that. We must do everything it takes to get the gospel out quickly to people all over the globe. That means sending out missionaries by the multiplied thousands. Holding gospel meetings in every nation. Preaching the Word on radio and television, by satellite, on cable networks, through the internet and every other available voice. It means buying airplanes and building churches that seat great numbers of people. Doing those things is expensive! Ken and I can testify to it from experience. But we can also testify to the fact that when it comes to getting people born again, healed, delivered and taught the Word, God doesn’t care about cost. He just cares about reaching people. I remember when He first told us to take the gospel to Eastern Europe. Talk about expensive! When we put our broadcasts on TV there, we not only had to pay for the airtime, in some of the countries where it was still illegal to preach, we had to pay extra to get the stations to keep us on the air. In addition, we had to go to great lengths to deliver the videotapes to them. Back in those days, we didn’t have the digital capabilities we have today, so we had to physically deliver broadcasts to every station. We couldn’t use the postal service or FedEx® to get them there either. Those services were either undependable or unavailable. So, instead we sent the tapes to Rick and Denise Renner, our friends and Partners in ministry, to be hand-delivered by pastors who worked as couriers for their ministry. 28 : BVOV

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