Piece Over­size King

LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF POWER

Author: Dr. Daniel K. Olukoya

LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF POWER
Dr. D. K. Olukoya

A lot of Chris­tians are get­ting tired of weak Chris­tian­ity they have and as such they have been ask­ing ques­tions on how they could make progress from their present level. They ask how they could obtain power. There­fore, the focus of this mes­sage is to sup­ply answers to these ques­tions, which have been the con­cern of most believ­ers today, since almost every­one knows full well from the word of God, that Chris­tian­ity is a reli­gion of power. There is some­thing within the sub­con­scious minds of believ­ers chal­leng­ing them about whether they pos­sess this power in their lives now. That is why this mes­sage is enti­tled, “Lessons from the school of power” We will look at the lessons in seven per­spec­tives. There­fore I coun­sel you to read with max­i­mum con­cen­tra­tion so that you could get the best from this message.

The first les­son is in the form of ques­tion: what is power?
Truly, power is derived from spir­i­tual sources. Before any­thing could take place in the phys­i­cal, some actions must have been taken place in the spir­i­tual realm. When this occurs, nobody has any power to change the sit­u­a­tion. Some­times ago, when l was in Eng­land, I received a let­ter from the prison and I won­dered who could write to me from there. But when I opened the enve­lope I was shocked to dis­cover that some­body whom I expected to have been in Nige­ria by that time was the writer. In his let­ter, he said “Dear Daniel, I wish to inform you that I am now in prison. Please pay me a visit and when you are com­ing buy some apples, tooth­paste and other nec­es­sary things for me. It is now I know that I should have lis­tened to all the things you used to tell me instead of laugh­ing and mak­ing mock­ery of you” Truly, he used to laugh at me and call me names those days when I preached to him. So I went to see him at the prison. After pass­ing through a rig­or­ous prison pro­to­col, I got to where he was and when he saw me, he broke down in tears lament­ing that if he had lis­tened to my words at that time, he would not have been clamped into jail. But funny enough, he had become born again and started preach­ing to other inmates. What offence did he com­mit? He issues cheque for the money he did not have, but neme­sis caught up with him. I asked him if he was guilty and he said yes and asked the Lord to for­give him. He knelt down and asked for for­give­ness. There­after, we trans­ferred the case to heaven as he had repented. When he was charged to court, those of us who under­stood that the real power source is from the spir­i­tual just laughed. On the judge­ment day, the pre­sid­ing mag­is­trate said, “As an edu­cated and intel­li­gent per­son with dis­tinc­tion in Mas­ter degree to your credit, I can only come to one con­clu­sion about you, I think you are mad. There­fore, I hereby order that you should be deported”. That was exactly what we had decreed and prayed for. This is to tell you that true power does not belong here, it is from above.

At another instance, a six-year-old girl con­fessed in a revival pro­gramme that she was the one who bewitched her father’s hand. She said the rea­son he could not stretch the hand was they used it to cut fire­wood in their witch­craft meet­ings. Her father almost ran mad. If the six-year-old girl was asked to engage in a phys­i­cal com­bat with her father of about forty, he would prob­a­bly have bro­ken her bones into pieces but he girl was stronger spir­i­tu­ally because that is the power base.

In this light, we can say that power is the process of con­trol given by God through the spo­ken words that cause things to hap­pen. It is capa­ble of pro­duc­ing an effect that is the spir­i­tual abil­ity to accom­plish things. How­ever, one of the prob­lems of Chris­tian­ity today is that power is fad­ing out and this sad devel­op­ment first started from indi­vid­ual believers.

Lessons No 2 what are the sources of power?
Power emanates from three sources namely: God, Satan and man. The divine power of God is the pos­i­tive one, satanic power is neg­a­tive whilst the human power is neu­tral. It can either be con­trolled by God’s own divine power or satanic power. We are only able to bind the evil and spoil his works by the power of Christ; oth­er­wise we are no matches for the devil.

Lessons No 3 is the dif­fer­ence between author­ity and power.
Peo­ple mix these two things up whereas they are two dif­fer­ent things. As far as Chris­tians are con­cerned, their author­ity comes from the word of God whilst their power comes from the anoint­ing of the Holy Spirit. Many Chris­tians have given com­mands to evil spir­its by quot­ing scrip­tures but lack of good knowl­edge of where these scrip­tures are writ­ten have spelt defeat for them. This is the rea­son Bible study must be taken seri­ously. Many are still jok­ing with their Bibles. If they are asked to open to any book, they will begin to fum­ble with their Bibles, look­ing for index, pages, num­bers etc. You must be dili­gent with your Bible study.

Our author­ity as believ­ers is exer­cised in the name of Jesus and the anoint­ing of the Holy Spirit oper­ates power. That is why you see two dif­fer­ent lev­els of oper­a­tion between two Chris­tians. One can issue a com­mand to an evil spirit in a per­son and the evil spirit leaves imme­di­ately. Whereas another Chris­t­ian could use exactly the same words but the spirit would say, “You are not seri­ous” So the dif­fer­ence lies on the power back­ing up the com­mand. Author­ity is given to all Chris­t­ian with­out mea­sures, but power is given accord­ing to your level of self-crucifixion and faith. The moment a per­son gets born again, author­ity is auto­mat­i­cally con­ferred on him. For it to move, the power of God must back it up. In other words, author­ity is the legal right of Chris­t­ian, which you should claim and exer­cise. It is power that enforces your right as a Chris­t­ian. It is pos­si­ble to have author­ity with­out power and that can spell dis­as­ter. This is telling us the rea­son that the Holy Spirit is an indis­pens­able fac­tor in our Chris­t­ian life. It is cer­tain that no witch whether from the bot­tom of hell fire can kill you if you have the gen­uine bap­tism of the Holy Spirit.

Les­son no 4: What is our match­ing order from the Lord Jesus?
Know­ing full well that we are sol­diers of Christ John 14:12 “Ver­ily, ver­ily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father”.

Just like the armed forces, Chris­t­ian sol­diers have their own match­ing order too. Matthew 10:8 “Heal the sick, cleanse the lep­ers, raise the dead, cast out dev­ils: freely ye have received, freely give”.

Our march­ing order is clearly spelt out here. It says, “Heal the sick, cleanse the lep­ers, raise the dead and cast out the dev­ils. As you con­tinue to grow in your Chris­t­ian life, if you fail to carry out any of these before you go and meet the Lord, you would have lived a pow­er­less Chris­t­ian life. What does the Lord expect us to be doing prac­ti­cally? How does the Lord want us to carry out our march­ing order? Should we just be hid­ing from our ene­mies? No. The Lord expects us to be cre­at­ing headache for our ene­mies, but it is unfor­tu­nate to see that the ene­mies are oppress­ing believ­ers instead. I used to have some trou­ble­some friends in those days. I mean trou­ble­some as Chris­t­ian war­riors and not as hooli­gans. One day at a night vigil, they prayed the fol­low­ing prayer points, “ Let all satanic trans­port ser­vices grind to a halt in the name of Jesus.” As they were pray­ing vio­lently, all of a sud­den, a nicely dressed hand­some young man landed on the floor and was say­ing, “What brought me down, what am l doing here?” And they told him with­out minc­ing words that he had been brought down by the power of the Holy Spirit back­ing up their prayers. I know some believ­ers who dare not attend night vig­ils or pray fire prayer sim­ply because the Chris­t­ian march­ing order is not clear to them.

Another trou­ble­some friend of mine came across a magi­cian per­form­ing with live snakes in a mar­ket place. He stood at he back of the crowd watch­ing his mag­i­cal feats. As he rained his incan­ta­tions, expect­ing things to hap­pen in order to catch his prey amongst the spec­ta­tors, my Chris­t­ian friend who was stand­ing at the back nul­li­fied the effect of his incan­ta­tion by say­ing, “ I tram­ple upon every­thing you have said, in Jesus name” And noth­ing really worked for the magi­cian that day. By the time it dawned on him that he could not make any head­way, he left the place for another loca­tion. This is the kind of headache that God expects us to be caus­ing for the agents of dark­ness. You should not be cry­ing day and night that some­thing is scream­ing by your bed or that birds are perch­ing on your pil­low. Why should you be under the fear of a strange bird, Lizard and cock­roach when you already have a supe­rior power?

There was this other friend of mine who was posted to pas­tor a church sit­u­ated in a street where there was prac­ti­cally a herbal­ist on every house. This brother decided to make it a do or die affair. He made up his mind to wake up every­day at 2 a.m point to every house and say “ I soak this house in the fire of God and I desta­bi­lize every­thing demonic arrange­ment therein in Jesus name.” He also cou­pled it with speak­ing in tongues. After two months of this exer­cise the herbal­ist in the streets held an emer­gency meet­ings where they sent a del­e­gate to see his Gen­eral Over­seer and requested that he should be removed from their street. But he highly per­turbed gen­eral Over­seer told them that they were free to deal with him for he knew very well that they could not face him. That was how the herbal­ists lost their clients to the church of this brother and they began to wal­low in poverty. Some­times ago, a herbal­ist hus­band of one of the our con­verts traced his wife to our meet­ing with charms and threat­ened to deal with us if we did not release his wife. We asked him if he had come to fight us and he said no, but he would use his power on us. We told him that he could go ahead to use what­ever power he had on us. But alas he failed woe­fully. He was enraged because he had lost his wife to Jesus.

I am empha­siz­ing this for us to see that we are falling short of our march­ing order. Our shad­ows are sup­posed to chase demons. In fact, our spir­i­tual level should attain such a height that even an usher in the church ought to be able to attend to any case of demonic attack that is brought to the church. The effi­cacy of the power should be so real in us that we should be able to say, “Don’t bother to take this one to the Gen­eral Over­seer. Let me take care of it “ We should all be able to carry out the march­ing order as attested in Matthew 10:8, God wants you be filled with power to the extent that as you are pass­ing by witches will be run­ning away from you. A witch should not be seen admir­ing your per­fume and ask­ing who did your hair for you. The fact that they were able to move closer to you is evi­dent that you lack power. Even your saliva should carry fire and if an evil per­son is fol­low­ing you about in bed to col­lect the sand from under­neath your feet, he will be electrocuted.

In a fel­low­ship we attended long time ago, our prayer was so aggres­sive that unbe­liev­ers could not dare pass by the church build­ing. They knew that if they attempted to cross our bridge, they would be shocked. But why is it that evil peo­ple who are sup­posed to be run­ning about seek­ing for our help are the very peo­ple giv­ing us prob­lems? Are they not the ones who ought to be run­ning helter-skelter? Did not our Lord and Mas­ter, Jesus say, “Greater works than these shall ye do” Our lives should be a ter­ror to evil peo­ple. If they lock up Chris­tians, we expect the angels of God to come and open door. The rea­son we don’t see angels is that a lot of con­se­cra­tion is required, which many peo­ple can­not cope with. Every believer is meant to be a power gen­er­a­tor. It is not for Pas­tors, apos­tles or evan­ge­lists and min­is­ters alone.

The fifth les­son to learn is anoint­ing.
Like I said ear­lier on all Chris­tians should be power gen­er­a­tors. But then, this can­not be pos­si­ble with­out the anoint­ing. As you read through the New Tes­ta­ment, you will under­stand that anoint­ing means the power that will enable you to func­tion super­nat­u­rally. It is super­nat­ural power for super­nat­ural assign­ment. The ques­tion then is, how could you be anointed? How could you be spir­i­tu­ally equipped so that instead of run­ning away from your march­ing order, you will stay and cause power to change hands. The anoint­ing is a kind of power that comes upon you to enable you to oper­ate as Chris­t­ian. With­out it there is lit­tle you can achieve for God. Some­thing would def­i­nitely hap­pen when the anoint­ing comes upon you. It is the anoint­ing that breaks the yoke of poverty, sick­nesses and prob­lems. Isa­iah 10:27 Con­firms this “And it shall come to pass in that day, that his bur­den shall be taken away from off thy shoul­der, and his yoke from off thy neck, and the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing”.

The anoint­ing can crush all attacks launched against you. No mat­ter the resis­tance force of your attack­ers, the anoint­ing would scat­ter their strong­holds. It is the anoint­ing that stands between the believ­ers and the power of dark­ness. It is what makes the believer to shine. Even if the enemy has locked up your poten­tials when the anoint­ing comes upon you, they would be released. This anoint­ing makes you to oper­ate in the super­nat­ural and increases your level of understanding.

Your first con­tact with the anoint­ing is when you become born again because nobody can get born again except by the spirit of God. The book of John3:3 tells us that except a man is born of water and spirit he can­not enter into the king­dom of God. But believ­ers need to be anointed from heaven to exhibit power Acts 1:8 “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be wit­nesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the utter­most part of the earth”. It means that with­out the power of the Holy Spirit, there can­not be anoint­ing. Jesus was care­ful enough to warn His dis­ci­ples not to ven­ture to preach with­out this power. He charged them to wait at Jerusalem until they were endued with power from on high. Of a truth, when they received the power, they were accused of turn­ing Jerusalem upside down. The man­i­fes­ta­tion of the power made them VIPs in Jerusalem. When they locked them up in prison, the angel of God went there and got them out and charged them to go forth to min­is­ter the word. They went back to inform the chief priests and scribes that the men they put in cus­tody were found preach­ing the tem­ples and mar­ket places.

When the power of God comes upon you, you will know. If I ask you whether you have been bap­tized in the Holy Spirit or not, and your answer is “l am not sure” then what you are say­ing in effect is no because when the power of God comes upon a per­son, he will know. Because many things will hap­pen. You will pray in tongues, your prayer life will be changed, strange dreams will dis­ap­pear and it will be as if heaven has come down. Also, it is one thing to receive the bap­tism of the Holy Spirit and it is another thing to be con­tin­u­ally filled with the Holy Spirit. If the apos­tles needed more of the in-filling of the Holy Spirit, then we need it much more in this dis­pen­sa­tion. We should realise that the last days are here. One blind man was brought to Jesus for heal­ing. Jesus held his hands and took him out­side the town where He touched him. Then He asked him, if he could see and the man said that he could see men walk­ing like trees. Jesus touched him a sec­ond time before he could see clearly. In the same way, most of the mod­ern believ­ers need the sec­ond touch of God. It is when the power of God comes upon your life that things will begin to hap­pen in your life.

Many believ­ers have never seen any vision or divine rev­e­la­tion or proph­e­sied before. All they do is just to come to fel­low­ship to allow oth­ers to do things in the fel­low­ship. When the Lord comes and brings out the record of our ser­vices, what will you tell Him?

Les­son 6 is “The dou­ble por­tion anoint­ing.
In 2kings 2, we see an impor­tant thing. We know that the Old Tes­ta­ment is a shadow of he New Tes­ta­ment. And what­so­ever has been laid down for us in the old tes­ta­ment, has its sub­stance in the New Tes­ta­ment. There we read about two men, one is known as Eli­jah. His name means God is God. And we have Elisha, who had dou­ble por­tion and his name means God is sal­va­tion. These two peo­ple were men of God who gave us a pat­tern on how we might move if we really want power. Elisha was a very impor­tant and won­der­ful prophet in the Old Tes­ta­ment. He was very impor­tant for sev­eral rea­sons. For exam­ple, we don’t know any­thing about the par­ents of Eli­jah, mean­ing that, your par­ents do not have to be impor­tant for God to use you. In fact, in some places in the Bible, some par­ents were down­right demonic but their chil­dren were men of God. For exam­ple; Jehoshaphat, the king of Israel. His father was demon-possessed and the Bible did not hide it at all. We don’t know any­thing about Elijah’s par­ents but he was the first prophet to announce pun­ish­ment against God’s ene­mies. He decreed that there would be nei­ther rain nor dew except by his word. And for three and half years he closed the win­dows of heaven and put the key in his pocket. That was in the old Tes­ta­ment, and the Bible says that we have to do bet­ter than that. That is why the book of James says that Eli­jah was a man of like pas­sion as us. He was the first prophet to mul­ti­ply food. Although our Lord Jesus Christ did a lot of it later He was the first prophet to raise the dead, he was the first prophet to call down fire. Before Eli­jah, nobody ever did. Now, Eli­jah was going away and a replace­ment had to be made.

So, the first qual­i­fi­ca­tion for some­body who wants the dou­ble por­tion of God’s power is that he must receive a call. The rea­son you are a child of God now is because God has called you. You did not become that by your own design. In fact, many peo­ple would not have come to the Lord at all if not for the fact that He drew them with a pow­er­ful hand. Some would have still been danc­ing away at the par­ties of the world. Bu the Lord orga­nized sit­u­a­tions for them to drag them to the gospel and now they are there and that see that there is no life bet­ter than that. The church as a whole is a con­sti­tu­tion of peo­ple who were called out from the world. The Bible says, “Come out of hem and be ye sep­a­rate” God called you out by unseen ordi­na­tion, not by anybody’s brain. God calls out His peo­ple. You don’t become a mem­ber of the church by some­body writ­ing your name in his or her reg­is­ter. You don’t become the mem­ber of the church just because on your for­ti­eth day, you were taken to the church. No. It is some­thing only God can do.

Elisha now received his call, it was unex­pected. He did not ques­tion the call. He just accepted it. He did not strug­gle with God 1 Kings 19:16–21 “And Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel: and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room. [17] And it shall come to pass, that him that escapeth the sword of Haz­ael shall Jehu slay: and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay. [18] Yet I have left me seven thou­sand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. [19] So he departed thence, and found Elisha the son of Shaphat, who was plow­ing with twelve yoke of oxen before him, (nor­mally a per­son ploughs with just one but he was plough­ing with twelve yoke of oxen) and he with the twelfth: and Eli­jah passed by him, and cast his man­tle upon him.(he did not say any­thing to him, he just cast his man­tle upon him) [20] And he left the oxen, and ran after Eli­jah, and said, Let me, I pray thee, kiss my father and my mother, and then I will fol­low thee. And he said unto him, Go back again: for what have I done to thee?( I did not say any­thing to you now) [21] And he returned back from him, and took a yoke of oxen, and slew them, and boiled their flesh with the instru­ments of the oxen, and gave unto the peo­ple,( and gave them bye-bye party) and they did eat. Then he arose, and went after Eli­jah, and min­is­tered unto him”.

The call was unex­pected but he man under­stood it. He did not ques­tion it. They did not force it upon him. It was uncon­di­tion­ally accepted. The Bible says that many are called but few cho­sen. God has called you and that is the rea­son you are a Chris­t­ian. Elisha was already a war­rior. These days, some peo­ple just come and they say, “I am not doing my work again. God ahs called me” The per­son that says God ahs called him has done noth­ing for two years. He is just sleep­ing and wak­ing up. Occa­sion­ally, he would go to the busi­ness to make some noise in the name of Preach­ing. He tried car­pen­try, it did not work. He tried brick­lay­ing, it did not work, he tried to be a bus con­duc­tor and that did not work, so he stayed at home now and said that God has called him. It is a big lie. Those that God called in the scrip­tures begin­ning from Abra­ham to the last per­son were busy doing their thing and God called them for what they were. They were busy men work­ing. We still have to pray for a lot of peo­ple to be deliv­ered from the spirit of lazi­ness. Elisha was not lazy. He was busy work­ing when God took him. We have another man in the bible called Amos who was preach­ing his mes­sage and the chief priest came unto him say­ing, “O seer, don’t prophecy here, we don’t want that kind of mes­sage here. How could you be say­ing that Israel shall go into cap­tiv­ity. Go back to Judah and eat the bread there” So, the work of God was described as eat­ing of bread. But Amos said, “Once I was a herds­man and a keeper of sycamore trees and the Lord took me from doing that work say­ing go unto my peo­ple tell them about the tran­si­tion, but you high priest because you said don’t preach here, don’t say what God wants you to say, hear the word of the Lord”, then he issued curses on him. He knew who called him and what he was doing. So think about it. Some peo­ple who say they want to work for God wake up by 2.00 a.m. Cer­tainly, God has not called them.
To be continued.

Prayer points

1. Holy Ghost, ignite my fire, in Jesus name.
2. Let the flood of God’s power soak me, in the name of Jesus.
3. O Lord, make this week a week of power for me in the Name of Jesus.
4. I refused to fail, in the name of Jesus.
5. Every stranger in my life, depart by fire in Jesus name.

About the Author:

Dr D. K. Olukoya is the Gen­eral Over­seer and founder of the Moun­tain of Fire and Mir­a­cles Min­istries world­wide. The min­istry is devoted to min­is­tra­tions of Holi­ness as a major pre­req­ui­site into Heaven and Deliv­er­ance as a major weapon against the forces of Darkness

Arti­cle Source: ArticlesBase.com — LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF POWER