Eternal Glorious Fountain Ministry (EGFM)
Programme: Lekki Soul Centre (LSC)
Date: Wednesday, 19th October 2022
“(For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.) For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ…” (Phi. 3:18-20). ‘Walk’ in this scripture refers to ‘conversation’ or ‘lifestyle’. This scripture speaks of people whose lives contradict what they say. It is not about having the mental assent of all these speakings but the need for wisdom to translate them into a walk. The reason for the conversation that ends in destruction is a result of what they mind. It is difficult to walk against what you mind. What one minds informs his walk.
What we mind is very important. Oftentimes, what we mind is usually not what we see as in the case of sins like fornication and other works of the flesh. There is the smartness and wisdom of Satan in arranging things that seem legitimate, to draw our attention around them because they have a form of righteousness. But it really is not about these things; rather it is about distracting you from that which you ought to mind. This is also seen in ministry. Satan can arrange the goal of ministry such that a minister is convinced that he is working for the kingdom; but from what he places around that ministry, there are no heavenly things to mind.
“Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name? and in Thy name have cast out devils? and in Thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work iniquity.” (Mathew 7:22-23).What makes God know us is our understanding of His life and the conversation we have here on earth. Conversation is communion and fellowship.
“If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth” (1 John 1:6). If we claim to have fellowship with the Lord and we converse with darkness, then the wisdom of our living is from another light that is not that of the Father whom we claim to have fellowship with, making us lie. Fellowship is justified by walk. Our fellowship with the Father is marked by our conversation.
Conversation begins to open when truth is being communicated to us. This does not mean God will not communicate things to us in the language we understand as babies. But a father playing with his one-year-old child does not mean they are having fellowship. To have fellowship is to have a common ground to relate and reason together (Isa. 1:18). You cannot reason with someone that cannot understand your language, regardless of him being your child. Sometimes parents come low just to appeal to the emotions of their children. Parents have this understanding from God.
God created fatherhood. So, the Holy Ghost can come down to interact with you at your level but it does not mean that you are having communion with Him. In the days of our ignorance, there are things that have been winked at. There are things we might do that seem carnal to Them but we feel some sort of endorsement. This is because of some kind of presence which the Holy Ghost will allow within that experience. God is saying it is time to come up. It is time to come up to the real conversation—communion. This communion is not one that we receive at once but by journeying to a particular land. God has seen the extent of our qualification by reason of our previous obedience, making us worthy to receive another conversation.
“Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb.” (Exodus 3:1). In the previous seasons, Moses must have passed through Horeb but he never realized it was the mountain of God. God did not bother to call his attention to this mountain because he had not grown in judgement and discernment to interact with the activities around that mountain.
“And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.” (Exodus 3:2-3). As Christians, we ought always to come to the point wherein we need to inquire about an interference with our normal states. In the case of the burning bush, the Lord was watching to see if Moses would turn aside to ask. The real show was not the burning bush but what God demanded from Moses. What God demanded was for Moses to change conversation because of the next mission.
“And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.” (Exodus 3:4). In this journey, God, through the Holy Ghost is teaching us not to be assuming. What we received in previous seasons of our lives as a judgement on how to live is not an almighty formula to every season of God. At times like these, we are overtaken by the counsel of the enemy who insists that it should be the same every time. We cannot define God by the limitation of our judgement. To say this about God is to say there is a limit to God. Even in this season of everlasting, we have not seen all of God.
“And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” (Exodus 3:5). There are places in God that a man cannot walk into recklessly. This is not because God does not love that man but because he does not possess the capacity of judgement to draw nigh. There is a need for a change of conversation for such a one to make such progress. There are different stages of holy ground. Every stage of God’s leading arrives you at a particular holy ground but the consecrations are not the same. We had a consecration in the season of Christ which may have been well done in some. In the face of a higher conversation, we ask questions about the heightened demand. For instance, there is a magnitude of meekness demanded in fulfilling Christ law and just when some are about perfecting it, God then brings higher commandments for us to measure up to.
At every season of our lives, God has something good to say about each of us which could cause us to question if God really knows us. We wonder why He comes to us with such graceful words. However, many might take these testimonies or prophecies to mean that God is at home with their weaknesses. He is not looking at our weakness; rather, He has hope concerning us. When He sees us, He has an end to our yesterday and today. What He sees is our end and not our present. So, He calls those things that are not as though they are (Rom. 4:17).
In this season of everlasting life, God is not only showing us grace to see conversations, but He is also teaching us how He walks with the brethren. He always has something good to say about the brethren, not minding their faults. If God does not look at us like this, He would not be kind and gracious to us.
It is difficult for us to do good to our brethren because of their faults, which we retain in our memory and this taints our understanding of them. Oftentimes when we find it difficult to forgive our brethren for their wrongs, it is because we are still holding tightly to those wrongs. However, God is calling us to minister that grace of forgiveness because of the future He is seeing ahead of them. If our eye of understanding has not been changed, we would not be consecrated better. There is a relationship between how we see and our consecration. Consecration here also means conversation. You cannot be consecrated or separated if you have not changed your former conversation. This is holiness.
If you are to journey on the path of ever-increasing holiness, your conversation has to be changing. If your conversation remains the same, you have not added to your grace of holiness. If you still operate the same level of righteousness that was had in the past, it is because you have not shifted your perception of holiness, and you have not increased in height. God told Moses, “You have come to a holy place.” (Exo. 3:5). That place is holy because there is something there that God wanted to tell him. It was a season when God began to change Moses' perception of what He was doing around him. God was telling Moses that He had a conversation that could bring His life closer to him than what he sees in the natural.
When God is giving us instructions, it means that God has found us worthy of where He is bringing us to. But in this new land, we cannot dwell until we change conversation -- taking off what we paid attention to before and attending to what God would have us pay attention to now.
"If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God." (Col. 3:1). One of the things that Satan is doing is to increase activities on the earth greatly so that our minds will not shift from the earth. The greatest assault on the soul is to trap the soul to mind things that are earthly. However, God is saying we should not tie ourselves to what is seen because what is seen will fade away. When God brings heavenly conversation, He is bringing what will make us immovable. When things fade away, those that live by the light of those things will also fade away. The Lord says we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be moved (Heb. 12:28). In other words, for you to remain, you need to live heavenly.
Heaven is not a geographic location. It is an understanding. Every heaven over us is a mystery. The upward movement towards God is from one phase of mystery to another phase of mystery. In that mystery, for you to access that heaven, the conversation of that realm must be opened to you. To become a citizen of heaven, you need to do the laws thereof because the materiality of every heaven is in its conversation. It cannot be claimed; it has to be done (obeyed). In every heavenly terrain, there are citizens there. What brings you to their awareness is when you obey the common laws of their interaction. They know you when your obedience is in consonance with the obedience of that location.
For any realm of heaven that you are a citizen of, you are open to benefit from the provisions of that heaven. This implies that the authority of that domain is yours. This implies that you are not empowered because you were anointed. What makes you a man of authority is the conversation of the realm you are consistent with and the kind of mysteries you receive. For some of us, the solution to issues in our family is in us minding the conversation that God is bringing to us.
Faith is a conversation. All that is in the doctrine of Christ (faith, hope and charity) are all conversations. Everlasting life is a conversation. The kind of conversation you are holding tells us the kind of authority that you are using.
"But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped Him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of the most high God? I adjure Thee by God, that Thou torment me not. For He said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit." (Mark 5:6-8). We are beautified by the result of the conversation that we keep. There is a beauty of God’s life that you trap based on the kind of life that you live. Satan before the fall had his own form of beauty (Ezek. 28:12). There is always perfection in every realm. A perfect man in Christ is one who has done the full measure of the conversation in that realm. However, that man only just finished one level of perfection in Christ. Satan’s perfectness in beauty was just in a region of the domain of the cherub. There is another perfection that they do not know about.
"Being made so much better than the angels, as He hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." (Heb. 1:4). God brought to Jesus the beauty of holiness that transcends the highest level of beauty in this present arrangement. Angels in heaven know the highest levels of beauty in this present realm but the beauty of God is still a mystery to them. Once they saw the appearance of a man more beautiful than their realm, they knew that this must be of God. So, when you are going through some kind of pressure and you have prayed and it seems there is no answer; what God requests of you is to raise a conversation; because the conversation that you engage with will determine the kind of spirit that will be around you. Some of the disobedience in our family are at different levels, with different spirits masterminding them. So, you do not quote scriptures to them, for what they will respond to is light (John 1:5).
"And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as My Father hath appointed unto Me…" (Luke 22:29). One of the things that encourages one in obedience is to know that one is bringing down an authority. What we call a kingdom is an authority. Authority is conversation. Until Jesus Christ, no one was able to declare that the kingdom of God was here. Jesus could say it because of the obedience of His conversation. He brought the kingdom by lifestyle. A Man pulled down the kingdom of God by conversation, even though He had no place to lay His head. This tells us true riches are not by the much one is able to amass here on earth. Jesus did this by the conversation that the Father was giving unto Him (John 5:22). Another word for conversation is judgement.
"Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for Him hath God the Father sealed." (John 6:27). Labour is conversation. It is possible to engage in the conversation of vanity and acquire so much earthly wealth that it becomes a distraction to our souls. When those things pass away, you will discover that you have suffered loss. God is saying there is a life that is Him which is His will for man.
"And He said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." (Luke 12:15). When we come to labour for everlasting life, Satan tries to distract us by material additions. These additions are simply extras. They are the things that the Gentiles labour for. It is a curse to labour for extras. Sometimes God is the one to bring those extras and He may choose to bring them at a different season from when He is bringing them to your brother. This is all for the salvation of our souls. The church recognises that natural blessings are extras. However, we pray for these extras with more tenacity than we pray for the kingdom. We do not ask or seek for the kingdom as we do for extras. When we seek the kingdom, the reward is Eternal Life. This is what we should labour for, not extras because extras are made of things that pass away. They cannot sustain our lives because they do not have life in them.
“(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt. 6:32-33). The work of Satan is to magnify these extras so that we will lose sight of the real reward. Satan manipulates our lives through our chase of extras. He makes us live at his mercy as if he is the one who cares for us. God gives extras at His discretion. He does not give it at the expense of real wages. He has allowances for us all. It is a curse to seek extras. It is not the duty of man to seek extras. The primary duty of a man is to seek God because God is the life of a man. Any other thing less than that is not the life of man.
What makes a person earthly is what such holds. Satan is coming with wrath against the inhabitants of the earth. When he is displaced from our heaven, he will be very angry and come to the earth. So, woe unto them that are inhabitants of the earth (Rev. 12:12). But he will not be able to do us any harm because we will be above him. His wrath is that he will bring forth destructive conversations that they will have neither the strength nor the judgement to refuse (Phil. 3:18-19). That is his destruction and his reigning. We will see people who are caught up with the mindset of doing things that are of the earth. They will be unable to decipher that that which they glory in should be a shame to them because they would be trapped on earth.
“Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample. (For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.)” (Phil. 3:17-19). Paul warned that we should be careful not to follow this conversation. Our service should not only be the reward of our belly. We must now give more earnest heed to what is being spoken from the world that God wants to bring to us (Heb. 2:1). This present world is no longer safe because of the judgements that Satan is handing to men. Satan does not use weapons to pursue anybody. What he does is in the realm of wisdom. Many are unable to recognise what they do by his wisdom. People will think that they are not under the influence of his wisdom. They will be confident that what they are doing is right. This is where we need the mercy of the Lord.
This is a season when we need to look into this matter of discourse carefully. We must ensure that we are not just hearers alone, but also doers (Jam. 1:22). Hearing is very good. It is only in hearing that we can see; and it is only in seeing that we understand what to do. The first entrance is through hearing; but we should not stop there. We should pray that God will open the conversation to us.
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour…” (1 Peter 5:8). In this season, if we are not vigilant, we will miss many opportunities before we realise it. If we are not watching, we will miss when the enemy comes. The coming of the enemy is not limited to sickness in the body. It can be in interactions with our brothers. The devourer devours the understanding of life from us. That is what he wants to take away. When he does so, we will be deficient in the wisdom of life which we ought to use as a response.
We need to be watchful. In our daily activities, Satan goes around to administer thoughts that will oppose what is being said to us. He always seeks for the weak places to creep in. We should make it our responsibility to be at peace with all men (Rom. 12:18). Even while we are sleeping, we should be on the watch. Oftentimes, we allow our peace to be dependent on what our brother says or does. If we do so, then we will have no control over when we will be happy or joyful. But when we take it as our responsibility, we will be able to determine our response. It means we have the keys to the kingdom of God and with it, we will stay unoffended. Some of us have expectations of how temptations will come and whom they will come from. But they will not come that way.
Every given opportunity to converse is an opportunity to gain life. Life in the spirit is our riches. We should always look forward to the opportunity to gain life. The same opportunity for gaining life could also be the one that will cause us to lose life if we are not watchful. God is working on our sight. A blind man cannot walk. We need to see in order to walk and live. The judgement that God is giving is an eye.
“And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me.” (Matt. 11:6). We can be offended by a preacher that brings salvation to us because it contradicts the arrangement of understanding that we already have. Satan does not want to lose relevance in our lives. His relevance in our lives is what he has given us as gifts to keep. And what we keep is what keeps us. For the kingdom of God to keep us, God has to deliver the kingdom to us. It is a no-brainer to always know to be vigilant because Satan is not coming with physical weapons but with ideas, suggestions and thoughts. In a higher realm, the things that are being spoken to us are battle armouries.
“Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (Eph. 6:11). The armour of God is wisdom, judgement and understanding. Principalities, powers and dominions are also armouries of the enemy because they are different categories of wisdom (Eph. 6:12). If we are not armed, we will not be able to resist Satan. It is always wisdom against wisdom, conversation against conversation. When we are able to turn from the conversations of the enemy as a result of a new conversation given by God, we have become victorious. This is how we know that we are victorious Christians; not by the testimonies of extras.
It is a season of wisdom and understanding, and knowing what conversation that God is giving to us. God is giving us authority and power through the light and understanding of what He is instructing us to do. No matter the difficulty of God’s instructions to us, we should see them as His way of giving us power and authority. Love can conquer anything (1 Cor. 13:7). It is the most powerful thing that can conquer any conversation of hate.
Blessings!
Summary
-
What makes God know us is our understanding of His life and the conversation we have here on earth. Conversation is communion and fellowship. Conversation begins to open when truth is being communicated to us.
-
There is a relationship between how we see and our consecration. You cannot be consecrated or separated if you have not changed your former conversation. This is holiness. If you are to journey on the path of ever-increasing holiness, your conversation has to be changing.
-
(Col. 3:1) One of the things that Satan is doing is to increase activities on the earth greatly so that our minds will not shift from the earth. The greatest assault on the soul is to trap the soul to mind things that are earthly.
-
Faith is a conversation. All that is in the doctrine of Christ (faith, hope and charity) are all conversations. Everlasting life is a conversation. The kind of conversation you are holding tells us the kind of authority that you are using.
-
(Luke 22:29) One of the things that encourages one in obedience is to know that one is bringing down an authority. A kingdom is an authority. Authority is conversation. Jesus pulled down the kingdom of God by conversation.
-
(Luke 12:15) When we labour for everlasting life, Satan tries to distract us by material additions. These additions are simply extras. They are the things that the Gentiles labour for. It is a curse to labour for extras.
-
(Matt. 6:32-33) When we seek the kingdom, the reward is Eternal Life. This is what we should labour for, not extras because extras are made of things that pass away. They cannot sustain our lives because they do not have life in them.
-
The armour of God is wisdom, judgement and understanding. Principalities, powers and dominions are also armouries of the enemy because they are different categories of wisdom (Eph. 6:12). If we are not armed, we will not be able to resist Satan. It is always wisdom against wisdom, conversation against conversation.