“And judgement is turned away backward and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey. And the Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no judgement (Is 59:14-15).
out on things. You can be in an office and try to depart from evil but then your colleagues’ gang up against you.
It is possible to know the truth, practice it and yet it still might not work out like you planned. You can depart from evil and still lose Daniel departed from evil and yet his punishment was death. If Daniel didn’t have on the breastplate of righteousness he would have been killed. If people in church have a better understand of the power of prayer and begin to pray, it is unimaginable what they can accomplish. The problem with Christians is that they take off the amour which is prayer and then they join the world in the way they do things.
Isaiah 59:16-17 says, “And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore His arm brought salvation unto him; and his righteousness, it sustained him. For he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon his head; and he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal as a cloak.”
When you pray, you put something in the realm of the spirit that creates a kind of response upon the earth and this makes people on the earth respond to you in a favourable way. If you are going to see the salvation of God within your life you have got to overcome in the place of prayer. What is going on predominantly among Christians is that they are seeing result they ought not to see because they have not been taught to pray effectively within their lives.
In prayer you start out with the helmet of salvation which the scripture refers to as hope. Hope is a very powerful thing in the life of a believer. The bible says “Faith is the substance of things hoped for…” which means first of all you have got to have hope which is the anchor to your soul; which is both sure and steadfast and can make you enter within the veil. So what does hope mean? To a Christian it means you can never be in a hopeless situation. It means when darkness sets in, you know that God is taking you to an unknown place in your life. You know He wants to open up a new dimension of life unto you. You know He wants to increase you (vision.). A good example is the story of Ruth in the bible. There was absolutely no way Ruth could have ever walked her way into where God took her after finding herself in a dark place. In the mist of all her troubles, Ruth was wearing on her head the helmet of salvation which is the hope of salvation. This hope gave her the ability to look into emptiness or into thick darkness without having a plan ‘B’ or vision for the future and without knowing what was going to happen but knowing deep down in her heart that all things would work together for her good.
Likewise in this present day, when the evil day has taken away all the opportunities or certain structure away from your life or people you might have depended on disappointed you or you lost jobs or whatever might have been thrown at you remember as a believer you must rise up in hope and declare out of your lips that it will turn around for your salvation. When Joseph was in prison, Joseph had hope, which means deep down in his heart while in the cell he knew in whom he believed. So he patiently waited for the Lord who was the hope of his salvation. Therefore, no matter what you are faced with or going through, rejoice in the tribulation, lift up your hands and thank God for such a time because you know it is the end of an era and the beginning of an unknown era with great opportunities opened up to you. Remember this is not something you can calculate or analyse rather it’s something you know on the inside and keeps you going till it manifests on the earth.
‘Pastor Poju Oyemade