Poverty Must Die This week, we are considering a message entitled, “Poverty must die.” The Bible says that you can pursue and overtake your enemies and recover what they have stolen from you. It is a standing order in the word of God. The Bible being a very straightforward book gives you the two sides of the coin. It also tells us that curses can pursue a person and overtake the person. The same Bible also makes us to understand that blessings can pursue a person and overtake the person. I must point out to you that the spirit of poverty is a very stubborn spirit and it has to be dealt with, with full force by the hammer of the Almighty. Deuteronomy 28:2 says, “And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.” So, blessings can also pursue and overtake a person. Psalm 23:6 says, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life...” When you combine Deuteronomy 28:2 and Psalm 23: 6, you get an amazing information. We have always been taught that we should pursue blessings, pursue money, be very aggressive and work ourselves to the bones. Then when we get the money, we hoard it. But now the Bible is saying something completely different. It is saying that those things that you are busy worrying your brain about can pursue and overtake you. Remember that God knows no barrier or impossibility. Most of the wealth in the world is in the wrong hands. Why are they in the wrong hands? We, Christians allowed it. Many of the things that are happening are so because Christians allow them. When we stand as a church of God and say that we disallow a particular thing, it would not happen. Our word cannot be challenged because it is by eternal decree. We are sons of the living God by adoption. We were not voted into it, so nobody can vote us out. Men love the supernatural and they like to see the miraculous. It is because of that you always find people crowding around street magicians putting big snakes round their necks. The Bible says that signs and wonders shall follow believers. It did not say we should be following the signs. Miracles can pursue and overtake you that is the truth. Beloved, I have a word for you from the Lord as you are reading this message: God says that He has just started His work in your life and He has not finished yet. At the end of the day, the only true fire and power is God. People may say all kinds of things but the only person who has the final say is not the doctor, or the banker, or the lawyer, or the judge. It is not the president, but the Almighty God. And when God says to your enemy, “Let go,” they have no option but to let go. God can overturn the tables any day. May be you are looking at your situation now and every way seems to be blocked and you come to a conclusion that there is no way. I have news for you. When you get to that level, it is then that God has just started to warm up. Another truth you must know is that no one can cheat a Christian and go scot-free. If they take your one kobo, the Almighty will use it to claim one million for you. Haman was pursuing Mordecai but the wife of Haman told Haman the blunt truth. Esther 6:13 says, “And Haman told Zeresh his wife and all his friends everything that had befallen him. Then said his wise men and Zeresh his wife unto him, if Mordecai be of the seed of the Jews, before whom thou hast begun to fail, thou shalt not prevail against him, but shalt surely fall before him.” That is the stance of the Bible concerning the children of God. It is a known fact today that many believers are financially poor, and that is part of the reason the gospel is sometimes very slow. God does not want the situation to be so. Meaning that Christians are not supposed to be poor. All Christians must at least be comfortable. You may ask where that can be found in the Bible. Psalm 34:10 says, “The young lions do lack and suffer hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.” Psalm 37:19 says, “They shall not be ashamed in the evil time, and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied.” That is what the Bible says and verse 25 says, “I have been young and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.” This is why we are saying that poverty must die. WHY MUST POVERTY DIE? 1. Because the Bible says that poverty is not good. Proverbs 10:15 says, “The rich man’s wealth is his strong city, the destruction of the poor is their poverty.” So, the poverty of the poor man can kill him. Proverbs 20:13 says, “Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty, open thine eyes and thou shalt be satisfied with bread.” These are important scriptures. 2. Poverty will make people run away from a believer. When a man of God has visited somebody at home and he has prayed and he has said the grace, the next thing for him to do is to carry his Bible and go. If after the grace, he still sits down, it means that he is looking for something. And if he is going to be begging for money everyday, he would make people to avoid him. 3. Poverty will make people to look down on our God. 4. Poverty is not one of the promises of God for His people. This must be clear to us. Some people turn the Bible upside down. The Bible says that it is harder for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God than for the camel to enter the eye of a needle. Now, when you look into the eye of a needle, and try to imagine a camel passing through it, you may begin to conclude that all rich people would go to hell fire. But it is not so. The eye of the needle in that illustration is the name given to a small hole in the wall of Jerusalem where visitors who came late at night passed their luggage, after the big gate had been closed. The camels had to crawl through the hole to the other side. If it were the kind of visitor that the people did not want, they would say, “Sorry, you can’t pass through the eye of the needle. Sleep outside the gate. But people turn it the other way round. A person can be very poor and be very greedy and a person can be rich and be greedy too. 5. Poverty will make doing the will of God difficult for many people. Any time Jesus wanted food, He got it. If He was fasting, then He was fasting. 6. Poverty, most times, delays the growth of a believer when the person cannot even buy Christian books and materials to help himself. 7. Poverty hinders evangelism. A lot of people cry day and night wishing they could contribute to the work of God but they cannot because they do not have the money. Beloved, I want you to take this message seriously because as you read and meditate on it, wealth would be released to you even without you doing anything or your money could become too hot for anybody sitting on it and the person would have no choice but to release it, in the name of Jesus. 8. Sometime ago, I was trying to settle a quarrel between a couple. They both said their own sides of the case and at the end of the day, I came to a conclusion that the problem was poverty. How could Madam tell her husband not to touch her sugar. She used to count the cubes of sugar left in the box and one-day she got there, and found out that three cubes were missing, and her husband was drinking tea. She rushed at the tea to fish out the cubes of sugar. How can that kind of family have a family altar? 9. Poverty opens room for sicknesses and diseases. A lot of sicknesses and diseases would have been prevented if poverty was not in place. When God blesses you and you build your own house or have your own apartment and have your toilet the way you want it, then you don’t have to share toilet seats with twenty- five tenants that could give you all kinds of infection. 10. Poverty can be a source of serious temptation. There was a certain girl who came from a very poor family where she was given ten naira to take to school. One day, she found a man in a big Mercedes Benz car who gave her five thousand naira. She was shocked and could not believe it. But the man thinking that the money was not enough offered to give her more (temptation). Beloved, by now, I am sure you must agree with me that poverty must die.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 09:14:58 +0000