BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

before the Fall. You've been authorized to speak God's WORD by faith and expect it to come to pass for you, just as the Gospels reveal that it did for Jesus. Once you get hold of this, you'll never be the same! When you realize where you came from and what your words of faith can do, it will absolutely make a tiger out of you. It certainly did me! People who hear me preach now might think that I was always a faith man, but I wasn't. There was a time in my life when fear crawled up and down my spine and successfully robbed me of the BLESSINGS of God. There was a time when I just accepted the lies the devil told me. "You're nothing but a lousy, no-good worm," he'd say. "You'll never amount to anything. You'd better not set your goals too high. You're sure to fall short of them. You'll end up being a failure and looking like a fool." If I had kept listening to the devil and saying what he says, I would have spent my whole life in anxiety, speaking fear-filled words and watching them come to pass. I never would have experienced the peace that passes understanding that causes others to look and me and think, That poor dummy hasn't got sense enough to worry. I never would have known the joy of just relaxing and rolling the care of things over onto my heavenly Father. But, praise God, I have experienced that joy. I have experienced that peace. Because I found out what The WORD says about me, I no longer have to live in fear of failure, thinking and talking like I'm an unworthy worm. Instead, I can boldly say about myself what Psalm 118 says: "The LORD is on my side; I will not fear…. Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise The LORD" (verses 6, 19). Sadly, many Christians would never dream of saying the gates of righteousness are open to them. They've been taught to say things like, "I'm not worthy to go through those gates. I'm just an old sinner saved by grace." They think they're just being humble. They have no idea that by taking that attitude, they're agreeing with the devil. But they are. They're flatly contradicting God's WORD! His WORD says in Colossians 3:10 that when 8 : B V O V YOU CAME FROM THE SAME PLACE ADAM DID. HE CAME OUT OF GOD, AND SO DID YOU!" we were born again, the old sinner we used to be died, and we "put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him." Second Corinthians 5 says that in Christ we are new creatures and have been "made the righteousness of God in him" (verses 17, 21). As believers, we're to think in line with the New Testament. We're to say what it says about us instead of repeating man-made religious traditions. We are to practice following the example of the Apostle Paul. He not only penned those verses I just cited from Colossians and 2 Corinthians; he personally saw himself in the light of them. Before he was saved, he persecuted Christians and put them in jail. Before he was saved, he participated in the stoning of Stephen by holding the men's coats while Stephen was being killed. But after Paul was born again, he said this about himself: We have wronged no man, we have corrupted no man, we have defrauded no man (2 Corinthians 7:2). I remember the moment the seeming irony of that statement first dawned on me. I jumped up from the desk where I'd been reading my Bible and said, "I caught that man telling a lie! I know from his own testimony that he harmed and defrauded men." Immediately, the Spirit of The LORD spoke up on the inside of me. His tone of voice was so stern and loud, it froze me right where I stood. You watch who you call a liar! He said. The man you're talking about died on the road to Damascus! The moment He said it, I realized it was true. In Christ Jesus, the Apostle Paul had become a new man—a new creature in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). What's more, he knew it. He believed it. He had meditated on it until he thought and spoke like a man who had gone through the gates of righteousness. That's what all of us, as believers, are to do. We're to think and talk about ourselves the way God does. We're to keep looking in the Bible at all the doors Jesus has opened for us and saying by faith, "That's my door, and I'm going through it."

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