The message of your cross

When Jesus started his ministry on earth, He started by stating his purpose for coming, saying that He had come to bring a message, which is to proclaim and teach about the Kingdom of God (Luke 4:43). He did this through words and actions throughout his 3 years of ministry. He performed many miracles, and He said to those who didn’t believe his message, to believe the works that He did (John 10:38). Satan deceived and blinded mankind which necessitated the Father to send Jesus to come down to help us see the truth again (of course the Father had decided this before the foundation of the world, because satan had already rebelled and God knew that mankind would be vulnerable to satan’s deception). Therefore Jesus was hated by those who were deceived by satan, and they were responsible for his death, which God the Father allowed for the purposes that He had determined beforehand. Before He went to the cross, Jesus prayed and stated that He had completed the work that the Father gave Him to do (John 17:4), and He mentioned what it was, “I have revealed Your name to the people whom you gave Me out of the world… the words that You gave to Me I have given to them and they accepted it … and they believed that You sent Me” (John 17:6-8). Jesus’ purpose for coming was to reveal to people who the Father was through the message that was delivered in words and actions. Before the ascension Jesus delegated this work and gave the great command to his disciples to continue the work that He had started, to preach the gospel of the Kingdom (to deliver the same message) and to make disciples as He did (Matt.28:18-20). The message that Jesus came to bring to mankind was that of a Creator God who loves like no other, and who has mercy on sinful man, a message of forgiveness, healing, freedom and restoration, and of eternal life with an eternal God. 

Most of you reading here will know about the trial I have been through concerning my left knee. After two failed operations I am in need of a miracle. I believe that God could’ve given success at the first operation, but He didn’t, even though we prayed for success. He then allowed the second operation, also without success, because based on everything He has been telling me, I believe that He wanted me to come completely to the end of my rope, so that there was nothing I or anyone else could do for my knee. I could ask for a financial miracle so that I could go for a third operation, but I don’t believe that it is his will (my medical aid will only allow another operation in 9 months). If He wanted to heal me through the hands of man, He could’ve done it at the first opportunity. So I trusted, waited, prayed, fasted, and many people from all over the world laid hands on me and prayed (I fellowship in Iris Revival Church where we receive many missionaries from all over the world). 

During the last couple of months especially, I have been receiving messages from God, directly or through other people that it is time to rest and that I should delight myself in the Lord; I have to be full of joy. But I thought and prayed, “God, don’t You know how full of joy I will be if you will just heal my knee and also fulfil the promises You’ve made to me, if You will only do this and that and the other…?” I didn’t understand the messages of joy and rest while my healing wasn’t taking place. 

A few weeks ago I had a great expectation for his supernatural healing on a very specific day. I was prayed for by pastor Surprise and Edi and some others, and the Holy Spirit was obviously present and something must’ve happened in the spirit, but my kneecap from heaven wasn’t delivered. I felt very disappointed. I had done and prayed everything I could think of and even felt led by the Holy Spirit to do, but with no success. 

Over the next few days I started feeling that the only thing left to do, was to surrender completely to God, not as another thing I could do to get Him to heal me, but just to surrender whatever may come, healing or no healing. I was inspired by the song “I raise a Hallelujah” from Bethel. All that was left to do was to surrender and praise God, come what may. So that is what I did. I basically said, “Father, I don’t understand, but I trust, and I surrender”. After that surrender I was so surprised at how clearly He started speaking to me and revealed this message I am sharing here. I heard Him say: “I set up the privileges and responsibilities in your life…. And I even set up the disappointments, because how will you be relevant in this world if you don’t go through the same disappointments as other people do?” I was a bit taken aback by these words, but He continued to speak and I realised that He was delivering a powerful message to me. 

Jesus did not only deliver his message to us through his words and miracles. But while Jesus was being tortured and dying, I believe the Father continued to deliver the message through his dying Son. Everything He said on the cross, and the way He handled his suffering, was part of the message about who the Father his. The first three things He said revealed that while being in the greatest amount of pain one could think of, He wasn’t consumed by his own need, but the needs of others. He told John to take care of his mom, Mary. He told the sinner next to him that he would enter paradise that day, and He prayed to the Father to forgive his murderers, because of their ignorance. His next two statements showed his humanity: He was thirsty, completely emptied out physically and spiritually, and He felt even separated from the Father. His last two statements wrapped things up. Tetelestai. It was done. Everything that the Father had to allow to happen was completed. And then Jesus surrendered his Spirit to the Father. He trusted his Spirit into the very hands of the One who allowed all of this to happen to Him. Complete surrender. Complete obedience. Complete submission to the will of the Father. If Jesus was a mere human being and didn’t understand what was going on, He could’ve said “Father, I don’t understand, but I trust, and I surrender”. But Jesus did understand what it was all about, and He knew that the resurrection awaited Him, as John explains when Jesus said “destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19-21). Jesus was the real Temple. 

Jesus suffered in such a way that the Roman Centurion exclaimed “Truly this was the Son of God!” (Matt.27:54). He had seen nobody else die in the way that Jesus died, in a Godly way, without sinning. Not one vile word came from his mouth. He didn’t curse man and He didn’t curse God. Jesus said “When I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all to Myself” (John 12:32-33). I believe that what He referred to is the fact that we see the nature of God so clearly in the Godly way in which Jesus suffered and when people’s spiritual eyes open up to see God through the suffering of Jesus, then we are attracted by what we see about Him. Because Jesus was the perfect man, the second Adam, He also suffered perfectly, without ever sinning, and that’s why people could see God in Him.

And this was my great revelation: The cross and resurrection of Christ is a pattern for our own suffering and our breakthroughs. Jesus, when He had finished delivering his message, the very purpose for which He came to earth, and when He had fully surrendered and been fully obedient, He was ready for his Resurrection. Jesus came to deliver the greatest message of all time, a message that pointed mankind to the real God, the eternal God who created us for fellowship and unity with Him. All of us who now belong to Christ, are “little Christs”, which is the meaning of the word “Christians”, and each one of us also carry a message to the world. If Christ was a big letter written by God the Father to the world, then all of us are smaller letters being delivered. Sometimes we will deliver our message through the words and the works that the Holy Spirit do through us. Other times He will deliver his message through our suffering or trials - first to us, until we surrender, and secondly through us, to the world. No wonder that Jesus said “if someone wants to come after Me, let him disregard himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me”(Luke 9:23-24). If you have picked up your cross, where are you going with that cross? To be crucified of course. We must allow our sinful flesh to be crucified in the fire of our trial that God has to allow.

Jesus didn’t need any character development while He suffered, because He was already perfect and sinless. But we the seed of the first Adam, still sin, and so God may allow our suffering for a time, because in and through the fire, our desperation causes us to draw closer to God in intimacy. He allows the suffering to gain our full attention, because He wants us to go deeper in relationship with Him. It is like a Father who has something in his hands that we need or want, but He will not give it until we look at his face long enough to hear what He has in his heart for us. Sometimes we want what is in his hands, but what is more important to acquire is that which is in his heart, his message to us and which He wants to send through us to the world.When we are closer to Him, He changes us more into the image of Christ, so that we will shine brighter for others to see His light shining through us, so that they will be drawn to Him.  He is more concerned with our character than our comfort, for our character is the only thing that we can take with us into eternity (Rick Joyner’s revelation). When we shine bright in the midst of our suffering, people who don’t know God, sees that, and they are drawn to the light, which gives us an opportunity to testify about the God that enables us, whose grace is sufficient for us amidst our trial. 

What Holy Spirit also revealed to me, is that when I have this eternal perspective, that my trial have the higher purpose of being a channel for a message from heaven, then my joy, my peace and my rest must not be determined by my circumstances. In Psalm 16:11 it says that in the presence of God is fullness of joy. Not in my circumstances, but in his presence. It became clear to me that because I have relationship with an eternal God, I can always have an eternal perspective, and a joy and peace that are eternally sourced. I don’t have to and must not wait for my circumstances to change to experience fullness of joy! In fact, my circumstances may never change until I have learnt and experienced fullness of joy only because I am in his presence! What if He waits for us to get this revelation before He changes our circumstances?! 

But I believe God is faithful, and if we are determined to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, to be fully obedient and fully submissive, and if we will endure to the end, and when we start looking like Jesus, not only when it’s going well with us, but while we are in a trial, and when He has delivered a message to us and through us, then we will experience a kind of resurrection, like Job did, where God will restore us to a state that is better than we were before. So let us be encouraged by the ultimate example of this, that of Jesus Christ, our Messiah, the very Son of God! 

Our suffering can be as a result of sin, but it can also be just that God allowed it for his purposes in and through us. When we have sickness or injury in our body, God can heal us instantly like Jesus healed so many people just because God loves us and because He is good. When God doesn’t heal us instantly, it might be the trial that He has chosen to allow for the purposes I have mentioned. We should never assume that someone is sick or injured because of sin in their life, and we should never accuse them of not having enough faith for healing. We need to ask God how we are supposed to support that person and love that person through their trial. There is a saying in the world: “when times are hard, friends are few”. It should NOT and must not be the case in the church. We need to be aware of each other’s trials and we need to support each other more through our trials, because this also sends out a message to the world. Jesus said, “by this everyone will know that you are My disciples – if you have love for one another (John 13:35).” There is a good chance that some divine message is being downloaded into every person who is going through a trial with the help of the Holy Spirit, so make sure to spend time with them for you will be the one walking away blessed and enriched. 

Imagine, if we as the body of Christ can really grasp this message, there is absolutely nothing that the enemy can throw at us that is able to stop us or silence us. This is the enemy’s aim. He always tries to get us into a state of depression. He hopes that we will be discouraged, that we will be silenced, that we will draw away from God, and that we will become ineffective because of the attacks. But if we can imagine how much God the Father loved Jesus while He was hanging on the cross, even while Jesus felt as if the Father had forsaken Him: the Father was right there, having nothing but love in his heart for his Son. God the Father LOVES us and is drawing us close to Him through our trials. If we as the body of Christ can learn that we can always have joy despite our trials and circumstances, if we can always keep an eternal perspective, and can always trust that God knows what He is doing, and if we will endure to the end, He will be faithful to the end, and we will be a force in the world to be reckoned with! We CAN be victorious just as Jesus was victorious, especially since we already have his resurrection power working inside of us. Jesus is going with us through our cross. He said “I am with you all the days up to the end of the age.” (Matt.28:20)

Someone might argue that this approach means to say that what Jesus “did on the cross” was not enough, was not “finished”, and that there is something more that we need to do. The exact opposite is true. What I am trying to communicate is not a message of having to do something in order to be victorious, but of deciding to cease from all our self-effort and striving, everything we think we need to do to try and earn the breakthrough, and a message of entering the place of rest, the place of full surrender, full submission, fullness of joy, of complete peace and of praising and worshipping while enduring all the way, despite our feelings and circumstances, for when we have reached that place, I believe God will “raise us up” at exactly the right time. 

A few days ago I was again tested and challenged by this message. I had an expectation of another kind (not healing), and I was disappointed. But I knew better than to allow the enemy to distract me with a disappointment. God wants us to know that the enemy will always try to distract us from what He wants us to be in this world, and he will always try to steal our joy and dim our light. And so God needs us to learn how to never allow a personal disappointment to succeed in getting us to a place of depression and ineffectiveness. So I chose to “raise a hallelujah”, to say to God, with tears running down my face, that “that thing will not matter in eternity, so I will not allow it to matter now. Thank You for the fullness of joy in Your presence. Fill me up with Your peace and Your joy.” I can testify that my feelings of disappointment ended there and I did not enter a state of depression, and the rest of that day and thereafter was wonderful! If God sometimes sets us up for disappointments, it is only to allow us the opportunity to learn to press into his presence, so that we can become a focussed army that will remain full of joy and victorious no matter what the enemy throws at us. We can come against the attacks of the enemy in the powerful Name of Jesus, and we must seek his face always to hear from Him if there are open doors in our lives (sin, either personal or generational) which gives legal ground and makes it easy for the enemy to steal from us, but when we always keep an eternal perspective, and if our peace and joy is always eternally sourced, we will always, always be victorious, no matter why we are attacked, whether because of sin or just because God allowed it for his kingdom purposes in our lives. Everything the enemy throws at us with the intention to destroy us, God will turn and work for our good, so the only one that will be left feeling frustrated will be the enemy himself. The presence of troubles in our lives does not mean the absence of God. Every trouble and every trial is only an opportunity to grow victorious muscles. So let us learn to praise and worship God especially in hard times, because, when we access that eternally sourced joy, that joy will be our strength that we need during these times!

In the meantime, my suggestion is to do like Jesus: look away from yourself and find someone whom you can bless with your words or prayer or in any other way. Sow into the area where you want to reap a harvest. If you need healing, sow prayers of healing. If you need a financial breakthrough, give something away to someone in need. If you want a family, sow into family life in another way, perhaps by inviting spiritual family over for dinner. If you want to be successful in business, or ministry, serve in someone else’s business or ministry. 

When we have surrendered, when we have changed, when we have received and delivered the message, the breakthrough will come! 

Have you heard of people who had illnesses or injuries that healed as they were preaching? I have heard of at least three such instances, Heidi Baker being one of them. I believe the reason why God does that is based on this revelation: sometimes God delivers the message through our suffering or trial, which is when people are most receptive of the message. I therefore don’t believe it is wrong of me to expect my miracle on a day and in a moment while I will be sharing this message. 

Please pray with me that everything that needs to be accomplished will be accomplished in my life. I am looking forward to my “resurrection”. For the joy set before me, I endure this “cross”. 

It doesn't make sense to the rational mind to pray this, but "Thank You Lord for the privilege of getting to go through disappointments and trials, so that we can become more like Jesus, and so that the world can relate to us, and we get the opportunity to communicate your messages to them through the way we handle our trials and disappointments."

God is keeping us in the palm of his hand. Everything that happens to us in life is firstly only temporary. The way we handle them, determines if and what its eternal value will be!