BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

He'd just finished his second trip in it and was walking across the tarmac to the airport when the joy of the Lord hit him. He got so thrilled about God’s goodness he began to laugh. Later he was telling some other ministers about it when Jesus spoke to his spirit: 'That is the only new airplane I have,' He said. At that, Ken began to weep. He realized that the reluctance of God’s people to believe Him for financial blessing had not only cost us, as believers, but it had cost God! He’d had to do without valuable resources He could have used to further advance His kingdom on earth. God created everything! Ken thought. He gave us His best. He gave us His Son to redeem us and prepared a table before us in the presence of our enemies. Yet for the most part, He hasn’t been able to get His children to come to the table. I’ve made up my mind: I’m coming to the table! I’m going to believe God in a way that gives Him pleasure—and what gives Him pleasure is the prosperity of His servants (Psalm 35:27). “But doesn’t God also warn us about the dangers of prosperity?” you might ask. “Doesn’t the Bible say that it destroys people and is the root of all evil?” No. It says, “The prosperity of fools shall destroy them,” (Proverbs 1:32), and “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). It’s not prosperity but behaving like a fool and falling in love with money that will cause you trouble. So don’t do those things. Instead, walk in God’s wisdom and love Him. Then He can bless you materially without it messing you up. He can provide you with plenty to give to every good work, and because your desire for things is subject to Him, He can safely give you all good things. This is the difference between prospering God’s way and prospering the world’s way: In God’s kingdom, you don’t get things by being carried away with things. You get things by being carried away with God! By putting Him first place, loving Him and serving Him. You seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, as Jesus said in Matthew 6:33, and then “all these things shall be added unto you.” When Ken and I first made the commitment to put God and His Word first, in the natural we couldn’t see any way God could add “all things” to us. We had very little income and a lot of debt. We’d been living on borrowed money for years. So when we saw in the Word that God said to keep out of debt and “owe no one anything except to love one another” (Romans 13:8, "New King James Version"), it looked to me like we were doomed. How can we ever buy a house? I wondered. How can we have a worldwide ministry without going into debt? We didn’t know. But we’d made the commitment to obey God and live according to His Word so, even though we couldn’t see how it could be to our advantage financially, we made the quality decision to never borrow money again. Shortly thereafter, Ken found out that in Christ we’d inherited THE BLESSING of Abraham! He saw in the Scriptures the financial promises that BLESSING carries with it and got excited. He shared with me the verses he’d found and said, “Girl, we’re rich!” So, right away, we went to look at a new house. When we told the realtor we were interested in buying it, she asked how we planned to finance it. “My Father will take care of it,” Ken said. Assuming his father must be a wealthy businessman, she asked what he did for a living. “He owns a lot of cattle and property,” Ken replied. He was telling the truth. Our heavenly Father does own the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10). But at that point in our faith walk we didn’t yet have enough Word in our hearts to be able to believe God to pay cash for a house. As we kept walking with God and developing our faith, though, over time He kept increasing us. He enabled us to buy one house, then upgrade to another. Eventually I was able to build my dream home and pay cash for it. BVOV : 29

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