BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You Read the Bible and you’ll see this is true: God has never been able to fulfill His highest will in the lives of disobedient or ignorant people. He’s never been able to fully BLESS those who are too busy or too lazy to learn to walk in His ways. On the contrary! He said in Hosea 4:6, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Lack of knowledge can be a major problem for us as believers. It’s the reason so many Christians are struggling along in defeat. They don’t have enough knowledge to appropriate the victory Jesus has provided for them. Because I teach on healing, sometimes people will say to me, “I’ve done everything I know to do to get healed and I’m still sick.” Do you know what that tells me? They don’t know enough yet. If they knew enough and acted on what they knew, they’d be healed. The same could be said about all of us in one area or another. None of us knows everything we need to know about the ways of God. That’s why it’s so important for us to continue to study the Word and obey Romans 12:2: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” We’ve all been brought up in the world’s fleshly ways of thinking, and the world’s ways are in opposition to the ways of God. There’s no agreement between what He thinks and the way natural man thinks. “For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Romans 8:5-7). Those verses make things very simple don’t they? They tell us we can think one of two ways. We can either think carnally, or we can think spiritually. Since being spiritually minded is the key to life and peace, the more spiritually minded we become, the more successful we’ll be. The more healed we’ll be. The more prosperous and victorious we’ll be. The reverse is also true. The more carnally minded we are, the less victorious we’ll be. The more defeated we’ll be. The Bible is very blunt about this. It says to be carnally minded is death (Romans 8:6). So if things aren’t working in some area of our lives, we need to check our thinking. We need to find out where we’re being carnally minded and operating like the world instead of like God. When we do things the world’s way we get the world’s results, and that’s no fun because the world is in a mess. It’s being ruled by the devil. It’s operating under condemnation and the law of sin and death. As believers, we’re not supposed to be living under the law of sin and death! We’ve been redeemed from that law. As Romans 8:1-2 says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” Why aren’t more believers living in that kind of freedom? Because to experience it, we have to do more than just be born again. We have to walk after the spirit. If we keep on walking after the flesh, if we neglect to renew our minds with God’s Word and learn to walk in agreement with His will, the devil will go right on imposing his will on us. He’ll keep us thinking on a natural level. He’ll deceive us into accepting the world’s sicknesses and economic woes and talk us out of the divine health and abundance that belong to us in Jesus. Personally, I’ve decided it’s easier to be diligent in the Word and become spiritually minded than it is to stay carnally minded and let the devil keep me sick and broke. I know what it’s like to be broke and I don’t enjoy it. Ken and I were broke during the first few years of our marriage. When I married him, I married him and his bank notes. It almost seemed back then like we were supernaturally in debt. We kept borrowing more money and yet we didn’t have anything to show for it. I don’t know how such a thing is possible, but we did it. How did we get delivered from that miserable cycle of debt? We stopped doing things our way and started doing them God’s way. We found out what He says about prosperity in His Word. We believed it and then we acted on it. It Pays to Sell Out to God From the moment Ken and I started agreeing with God and walking according to the spirit instead of the flesh, our lives got better. We didn’t step overnight into the level of BLESSING we enjoy today, but everything we learned from God’s Word did a little more to shut down Satan’s operations in our lives. Every scriptural truth we discovered and acted on made us a little freer. The same thing will happen for you. The more you activate the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, the more freedom and victory you’ll enjoy—spiritually, physically, financially and in every other area. The more you sell out to God and to His Word, the better and more peaceful your life will be. 6 : BVOV

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