Speaker: Pastor Brian Naidoo
Series: July 2015
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 10:1-6; 2 Peter 1:1
We need to put the Lord Jesus Christ at the centre of our life, whether it be at work, home, relationships etc. For God does not give things which prevent the believer from worshipping Him, like a job which does not create time for the Christian to attend all services. With Christ at the centre of everything in our lives, we are able to bring all thoughts under captivity. God has made a way for all the things we love on this earth to be part of us in the world to come. The Prophet loved his Morris chair which was later repossessed by the furniture shop but he found it in heaven waiting for him. He lost his little daughter Sharon Rose at 8 months but found her later as a young girl of around 18 years in that land beyond the curtain of time. He lost his dog Fritz when he was shot by a neighbour but later recovered him in heaven, just the same as his horse which he found there waiting for him. As the Prophet says, all that ever loved him and all whom he ever loved, God gave all of them to him. This teaches us a good principle of love. Even our loved ones can be saved by simply loving us. They may not understand the Thunders, Seals, Trumpets and other mysteries but by loving the saints who believe these mystery truths, the unsaved ones are actually indirectly partaking of the mystery truths and believing the same. We have the power to create a new world in which we can live. We can create a stress free atmosphere and live in it. We can indeed speak to our mountain and it can move. But we only need to know what mountain it is. Our mountain is that stature of a perfect man which appears in a pyramid shape. That is what Caleb fought for when he asked Joshua for his mountain. He fought for faith to get the sons on Anak out of that land. He proceeded to climb up to virtue as he conquered the challenges around him. He passed knowledge, patience, temperance, godliness, brotherly kindness and reached the summit of the pyramid waiting for the headstone to cap him. He confronted the sons of Anak who sat at the mountain peak and fought them all three. He fought and defeated the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life right there at the peak of the pyramid mountain. Having conquered the sons of Anak, Caleb was able to give land even to his daughters as a father who exercised his faith to overcome. We need that kind of faith. The type of faith that in the revealed Word which is able to save us, that kind of faith which Father Abraham had, which is actually Grace, that faith which turns the hearts of the children to the fathers, that faith for the rapture which is rapturing grace – for faith and grace go together and are both tied to election – it is grace which loved us when we were yet sinners, it is grace which chose us and it is grace which elected us. Let us behave like royalty, let us behave like children from noble families, like Prince Edward who will not appear in public taking a puff of cigarette smoke. Royal children are only exposed to nobility and those things which emphasise their separation from the rest of the world, their unique bloodstream which they are taught in genealogy where they trace it to generations and generations before their time. They are taught of their great-grandfathers like King James, who instructed the translation of the King James Bible as he took inspiration and instruction from the greater king of the universe Himself. They are taught these exploits of their bloodline. There is a murmuring spirit today which actually showed itself in the time of the Lord Jesus Christ. There we see it in the Pharisees who criticised the Lord Jesus Christ for eating with sinners and today we see it as the people who always complain about decisions taken by the leadership of the church concerning other believers on whom God’s grace has been bestowed. But Christ did not entertain them, apparently. He went on to speak in parables, as seen from Luke 15: 1. The Lord Jesus Christ talks of the parable of the lost sheep, where the shepherd would leave 99 sheep and go for the missing one, and the Pharisees simply wonder at the ratio of 99:1. Then He tells the parable of the lost coin which the church has to find before the coming of the Lord or else it gets divorced for infidelity. Then He tells of the parable of the Prodigal Son who leaves his father and joins himself, in a time of famine, with a citizen of a far-off country. By joining himself to another citizen, the prodigal son is showing what will happen in the squeeze, where people will join in with the beast system just for them to earn their living; yes, people will join the system for the sake of survival. But the prodigal son has pride, and will not go to his father’s house right away. He chooses to find his own way out first by joining up with citizens of the country, and has even more pride to beg for food and therefore prefers the left-overs from swine. The reason he is hungry is because he has wasted his father’s living, which he requested as the portion of inheritance that falleth to him. His father’s living is actually his body, where the spirit of the father desires to live in as the temple of the Lord. Therefore the prodigal son puts his body to improper uses with riotous living. The prodigal son leaves without character, and the father allows him to go and find character in the far country before coming back. If the prodigal son had character, he would not have asked for his inheritance to go and waste it away. When all the wealth is finished, then starts the build-up of character according to the stature of a perfect man. The foundation of character in the pyramid of the stature of a perfect man is faith, and the son comes to himself by having a revelation that his father’s house has enough food, even without seeing the storehouses. After laying the foundation of faith, he gathers virtue in the form of the courage needed to go and face the father after such a bad report. But the son is determined to go to the father anyhow. He is prepared to take the position of a servant and not a son, showing that he is now ready to live for others. Therefore he adds to his faith, virtue, and to virtue he adds knowledge, then patience, temperance, godliness, brotherly kindness until he reaches the capstone. Whereas before that he was unthankful like swine, which explains why he joins up with natural swine in the field showing fellowship of kindred spirits, the prodigal son now learns to appreciate privilege. How does the prodigal son decide to go to the father? The Bible says that he comes to himself. In other words, his theophany came near, which means the real son came to the prodigal son, it was a son coming to a son. It also means that before he came to himself, he was not himself, meaning he was actually out of his mind – he was crazy, so to speak. Yet this son was in the father’s house at one time. He was in the Message of the Hour all along. As the son walks back home with a different walk, the father sees him in that pitiful condition. He is not as confident as before. He is not walking straight as before. But the father goes to the son all the same. The father had a longing for fellowship with his estranged son. It was him who came down to the son, like the song we sing about how God came down to us and reached down for us. And the father kisses the son while he is in that pathetic condition. He hugs him while he smelled like swine. Later he is clothed with a second-handed robe, having lost the first one which he had before. This second-handed robe speaks of the Holy Ghost and how it was transmitted from Elijah to Elisha as a second-handed robe. He is given a ring, which is a token, and it signifies eternal life which the father bestows on the believer. As the elder son hears the music and dancing in the house, he does not go into the feast. Now the same father has to come out also and reach down to this elder son. Just as the father went down to the younger prodigal son, he has to be fair also to go out for the elder son. But the elder son is a Pharisee. He is a murmurer. This occasion of the restoration of the prodigal son exposes the evil in his heart. He is not happy that someone has been saved. He complains at God’s grace. He talks of how his younger brother wasted the father’s living with harlots. He actually knows the full story of what happened to the younger brother. Whereas the Bible only says he indulged in riotous living, the elder son actually knows that he spent the wealth with harlots. It proves that he had a spy network in operation, which fed him information about the backslidden state of his brother. This is like some people in the church today. They complain why people are given a second chance. They complain that people waste the energy of their youth while serving the devil, only to give the frailty of old age in service to God. These are self-righteous people sitting in the church with a wrong heart. The Bible does not record that the elder son ever agreed to go in to the feast. The Pharisee spirit upon him is unrepentant in its self-righteousness. It actually wants the father to give it its portion to rejoice with its friends also. It has those of its own. It has its own clicks and clans that have the same inclination. Yet the prodigal son actually portrays Christ even when accused of going out with harlots. For Christ actually has had seven different woman from Ephesus that He has gone to. When He arrives at Ephesus, Christ finds out that she has lost the first love. The church has been deceived. Then he goes for the next church age of Smyrna, where he find bitterness in the church. A woman who has been handled by another man is a bitter woman. Then he goes to Pergamos and finds the church thoroughly married with the state. Then He goes to Thyatira, and finds out that the church is a dominating female. This dominating female cannot soothe his nerves. As the prodigal son hops from one harlot to another according to the elder brother’s version of events, he is showing Christ moving among the candlesticks in the Churches according to the Patmos vision in the book of Revelation. The fact that the prodigal son does not bring any of the women home to his father reveals the fact that all the women were unclean. If he had found a chaste woman with a good testimony, no doubt he would have brought her to his father’s house. Let us avoid being in the kingdom, like the elder brother, but living with bitterness against the other brother. Let us not have the elder brother’s spirit, which hates singing and dancing. That Pharisee spirit does not rejoice in the movement of the spirit in the body of believers. It gets upset at the restoration in the church.
