READ: 2CORINTHIANS8:1-9
We need a
new paradigm shift. Gone at the days when we muse to equate poverty with
holiness. The general believe is that the poorer you are the more humble you
are likely to be. Many, hitherto, look down on anyone who is well dressed and
when they see somebody riding a limousine, they will look at the fellow and
conclude that the fellow is not going to heaven. Who told you? When I bought my
Toyota Crown car, all my friends were buying Volkswagen Beetle cars. Many of
them said, ‘Oh! What a pity. We thought God was going to use this brother, see
he has not started and he has backslidden. I
asked why they thought I had backslidden? They said, “Look at how long your car
is. You cannot be riding in this big and very beautiful car and get to heaven.”
I told them that I will get there before them. “I wish above all things”, that
is what God says. I am not the one who wrote the Bible. The first thing He
mentions, is that you will prosper and for you to have good health to enjoy the
money. It is not prosperity with sickness, but prosperity with good health!
Then He said my soul, of course, will prosper. Many of us will turn around and
say Jesus was poor and the Bible says, we must follow His foot steps, therefore,
since He was so poor, we too must be poor. This is not in the Bible. What is in
the Bible is in 2 Corinthians 8:9 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you
through His poverty might become rich.” I do not know if you ever read
this one before. I want you to pay attention to what it says here. In Heaven,
nobody canbe compared with Jesus Christ in wealth. The ground in His Father’s
Kingdom is of purest gold. However, He put aside all these wealth and came into
the world as a poor man. He did this so that we can be poor and He might now
lift them out of dust. The Bible did not say He was poor so that we can be
poor! He became poor so that we can be rich. Everything Jesus Christ suffered
was so that we might have the opposite. He died so that we can live. He was
beaten, so that we might be healed. The Bible says, “By whose stripes you were healed.”
(1 Peter 2:24). He went to hell that we may not go there. He thirsted, so that
we may not thirst. If you do not want the wealth that the poverty of Jesus has
purchased for you, then you must refuse His health that His stripes have
purchased for you. If you receive His salvation that His death bought for you,
it follows that you must receive His wealth that His poverty purchased for you.
MEMORIZE:
2 CORINTHIANS8:9–For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though
He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty
might become rich.
